George Osborne has announced that as a result of ‘storm clouds’ over the global economy, he will have to initiate a new bout of austerity – the first cut to be made, presumably, in the production of new metaphors for impending doom. At this stage, Osborne is so obviously enamoured with austerity that any encouragement to carry out more of it feels a little superfluous. Never mind that reductions in public debt are simply translated into an increase in private debt at much higher rates of interest. What is more interesting than the economic thought (or lack of it) underlying these decisions is the new cultural current flowing through them, a kind of crude utilitarianism that prioritises ‘public good’ over the wellbeing of the individual, and one bearing unwelcome echoes of history’s despots.

Evidently, it would be a risible hyperbole to compare Osborne to Robespierre or Stalin, and something of an insult (you may decide to whom). But the principle which legitimated the actions of each is identical. To Robespierre, public terror, mass surveillance and mass executions were justified to entrench the values of the French Revolution.

To Osborne and this government at large, the achievement of the rather less lofty aim of eliminating the budget deficit justifies widespread suffering and thousands of deaths resulting from cost-cutting measures in the welfare system.

This still sounds like an exaggeration, but it should not. Over the summer, the Department for Work and Pensions, which has implemented some of the most controversial of Osborne’s cuts, was compelled to release the statistics recording deaths of people on their programmes, and it makes for grim reading. Between December 2011 and February 2014, 2,380 people died shortly after being declared ‘fit for work’, which deprived them of the Employment and Support Allowance that is meant to keep severely disabled people alive. 7,200 died after receiving that allowance, but on the condition that they ‘prepare’ for imminent work. Overall, this constitutes 80 deaths a month in that time. Thousands suffer under the burden of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)’s increasingly sanctions-happy approach to welfare payments, which has spawned a system that seamlessly blends Kafka and Dickens.

It is a system in which one man lost his lifeline for a month and a half because he had been required to attend an employment course which was subsequently deemed invalid, one in which a comatose woman was informed that she needed to begin “intensive work-focused activity”. A man named Mark Wood starved to death under this regime, and suicides are sufficiently common that the DWP has been compelled to hire workers to ring claimants and check if they are contemplating taking their own lives.

Yet beyond the sporadic surfacing of a desperately poignant individual story, there has been almost no media coverage of the DWP’s operations. Even what reporting there has been was met largely with indifference. The lack of regard for these people’s lives is demonstrated in the dehumanising language of the DWP, which refers to claimants’ families as ‘benefit units’, and to deaths under their charge as ‘completions’ (thereby, almost unbelievably, adopting the same term used in Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go to describe the demise of a compulsory organ donor). I pointed out to a friend that more than 90 people are recorded as having died as a result of sanctions. He just replied that 90 is not that many. These are chilling insights into a mind-set that has enveloped our political thinking. Blameless people can suffer, and even die, for the sake of cost-cutting.

At the risk of making myself risible once again, I shall cite the Chairman of Ukraine’s Central Executive Committee Grigory Petrovsky, who in 1932 told American trade unionist Fred Beal: “We know millions are dying. That is unfortunate but the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify it.” This was the approach that legitimated the Stalinist Terror. The same approach defines the government’s welfare policy.

This perspective has wormed its way into a much broader array of issues, among them the government’s recent embrace of drone warfare. The American drone programme, which Britain is now eagerly seeking to imitate with its own, is riddled with the same relentless utilitarianism. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, of the 2,300 people killed by US drones in Pakistan, only four per cent have been named as Al-Qaeda operatives. It is estimated that in the first three years of Barack Obama’s term in office, American drone strikes killed between 297 and 569 civilians, of whom 64 were children. Evidently, we are more than willing to murder civilians in our pursuit of military targets.

If some claim that these killings are sadly necessary to prevent more deaths at the hands of terrorists, then I argue that that is a flawed premise. Perhaps one could argue with a sound conscience that balancing the budget warrants even such sacrifices as the above. But if this is to be our attitude then it warrants genuine discussion, rather than the silence with which we currently treat the issue.