Top 100 HSBC account holders with Indian addresses

By: Express News Service | Posted: February 9, 2015 2:00 am | Updated: February 9, 2015 11:49 am

Here is the full #swissleaks list

1. UTTAMCHANDANI GOPALDAS WADHUMAL/family $54,573,535

2. MEHTA RIHAN HARSHAD/ family $53,631,788

3. THARANI MAHESH THIKAMDAS $40,615,288

4. GUPTA SHRAVAN $32,398,796

5. KOTHARI BHADRASHYAM HARSHAD/ family $31,555,874

6. SHAUNAK JITENDRA PARIKH/family $30,137,608

7. TANDON SANDEEP $26,838,488

8. AMBANI MUKESH DHIRUBHAI $26,654,991

9. AMBANI ANIL $26,654,991

10. KRISHNA BHAGWAN RAMCHAND $23,853,117

11. DOST PARIMAL PAL SINGH $21,110,345

12. GOYAL NARESH KUMAR $18,716,015

13. MEHTA RAVICHANDRA VADILAL $18,250,253

14. PATEL KANUBHAI ASHABHAI $16,059,129

15. SACHIV RAJESH MEHTA $12,341,074

16. ANURAG DALMIA/family $9,609,371

17. RAVICHANDRAN MEHTA BALKRISHNA $8,757,113

18. KUMUDCHANDRA SHANTILAL MEHTA/family $8,450,703

19. PATEL RAJESHKUMAR GOVINDLAL/family $6,908,661

20. HEMANT DHIRAJ $6,237,932

21. ANUP MEHTA/family $5,976,998

22. TANDON ANNU $5,728,042

23. SIDHARTH BURMAN $5,401,579

24. SALGOACAR DIPTI DATTARAJ $5,178,668

25. DABRIWALA SURBHIT/family $5,000,000

26. VAGHELA BALWANTKUMAR DULLABHAI $4,405,465

27. DILIPKUMAR DALPATLAL MEHTA $4,255,230

28. KULDIP & GURBACHAN SINGH DHINGRA $4,144,256

29. LAKHANI JAMNA THAKURDAS $4,123,673

30. RAJIV GUPTA $4,113,705

31. SAWHNEY ARMINDER SINGH $3,965,881

32. ISRANI LOVEEN GURUMUKHDAS $3,824,104

33. NATVARLAL BHIMBHAI DESAI/family $3,746,078

34. TULSIANI JAWAHARLAL GULABRAI/family $3,730,145

35. GUPTA RAJIV $3,545,416

36. JAISWAL LADLI PERSHAD $3,496,063

37. CARVAHLO ALOYSIUS JOSEPH $3,313,788

38. PRADIP BURMAN $3,199,875

39. TULSIANI SHAM GULABRAI/family $3,066,991

40. VITHALDAS JANAKI KISHORE $3,031,220

41. KUMAR VENU RAMAN $3,063,064

42. THAKKAR DILIP JAYANTILAL $2,989,534

43. TULSIANI PARTAB GULABRAI $2,901,435

44. ADENWALLA DHUN DORAB/family $2,863,271

45. BURMAN PRADIP $2,831,238

46. TULSIANI NARAINDAS GULBARI $2,818,300

47. DASOT PRAVEEN $2,801,634

48. PATEL LALITABEN CHIMANBHAI $2,741,488

49. CHATHA JOGINDER SINGH $2,732,838

50. SHYAM PRASAD MURARKA $2,546,516

51. DHURVENDRA PRAKASH GOEL $2,488,239

52. NANDA SURESH/family $2,303,713

53. GIDWANI ANAN NELUM $2,228,582

54. PRATAP CHHAGANLAL JOISHER/family $2,209,346

55. MEHTA DEVAUNSHI ANOOP $2,136,830

56. SHAW MOHAMMAD HASEEB/family $2,133,581

57. AHMED rizwan syed/family $2,125,644

58. VINITA SUNIL CHUGANI $2,085,158

59. SAWNEY BHUSHAN LAL $2,043,474

60. PARMINDER SINGH KALRA $2,042,180

61. CHOWDHURY RATAN SINGH $1,987,504

62. DHIRANI VIKRAM $1,915,148

63. NANDA SARDARILAL MATHRADAS $1,824,849

64. WILKINSON MARTHA $1,824,717

65. SAHNEY DEVINDER SINGH $1,763,835

66. TANEJA DHARAM VIR $1,748,541

67. DHINDSA KOMAL $1,597,425

68. CHATWANI TRIKAMJI/family $1,594,114

69. PITTIE MADHUSUDANLAL NARAYANLAL $1,462,594

70. BHARDWAJ ANIL $1,435,781

71. DIPENDU BAPALAL SHAH $1,362,441

72. BHARTIA ALOK $1,349,044

73. SINGH SHUBHA SUNIL $1,348,983

74. DANSINGHANI SHEWAK JIVATSING/family $1,267,743

75. KUMAR DAVINDER/family $1,231,088

76. JASDANWALLA ARSHAD HUSAIN ADAMSI/family $1,229,723

77. JHAVERI HARISH SHANTICHAND/ family $1,191,144

78. SINGHVI GANPAT $1,194,388

79. MILAN MEHTA/family $1,153,957

80. TUKSIANI ASHOK GULABRAI $1,140,890

81. MODI KRISHAN KUMAR $1,139,967

82. GARODIA BISHWANATH $1,071,858

83. JAGASIA ANURADHA ANIL $1,039,648

84. VITHALDAS KISHORE/family $1,020,028

85. CHANDRASHEKAR KADIRVELU BABU/family $1,007,357

86. GALANI DIPAK VARANDMA/family $940,191

87. SAWHNEY ARUN RAVINDRANATH $914,698

88. MERWAH CHANDER MOHAN $909,309

89. PATEL ATUL THAKORBHAI $813,295

90. NATHANI KUMAR SATURGUN $751,747

91. SATHE SUBHASH/family $749,370

92. SHAH ANIL PANNALAL/family $742,187

93. MADHIOK ROMESH $719,559

94. BHAVEN PREMATLAL JHAVERI $717,654

95. KINARIWALA KALPESH HARSHAD $713,340

96. GOKAL BHAVESH RAVINDRA $699,184

97. LAMBA SANJIV $644,923

98. SHOBHA BHARAT KUMAR ASHER $641,387

99. KATHORIA RAKESH KUMAR $589,753

100. BHANSALI ALKESH PRATAP CHANDRA $579,609

Victory in Greece

Tariq Ali on Syriza's victory in the Greek elections

The strange new world of evidence-free government

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

I remember, just about, when select committee meetings were the morgues of political process, the place debates went to die. Things are different now: wonks observe that we’ve got lucky with the chairs – Margaret Hodge on the public accounts committee (PAC), Rory Stewart on defence, Sarah Wollaston on health – but committee work is flattered mainly by comparison with everything else. Most established interrogative processes have become so adversarial that they’re all theatre. Prime minister’s questions is about watching shouted wordplay that worked better on the page, then forcing out a mirthless laugh for the team. In broadcast interviews, ministers carefully dodge the delivery of any information at all; they would rather sound imbecilic, as if they understood very little and knew even less, than run the risk of having said anything of import. Over time, the dry meetings of the committee rooms have become remarkable: a Dame Something will ask systematic questions, in a transparent setting, about government or business policy, in the expectation of a mature and plausible response; and of course she won’t get one, but it is fascinatingly unusual to watch her try.

Most recently, Dame Anne Begg had some questions for the employment minister, Esther McVey, on the Welfare Reform Act of 2012. She wanted to know about cuts to benefits, having carefully gathered evidence from charities and food banks in advance. “Minimum JSA [jobseeker’s allowance] sanction,” she began, “went from two weeks to four weeks and the maximum went from six months to three years. These are quite sizeable lengths of time, so what evidence did you have on the likely impact on claimants that these extended sanction periods would have?”

Benefit sanctions are effective, employment minister says

 

Read more

Later on, the conversation would turn to the actual matter of deprivation: what was the pathway between being sanctioned and getting hardship funds? What was the link between sanctions and suicides? (The lack of ministerial interest here is pretty chilling.) But first, there was this knotty question: were there any reasonable grounds that could be shared with any reasonable person to think this policy would be effective – any attempt to visualise how it would look?

There were not. There was a lot of faffing, and some broad and extraneous evidence about sanctions in general. “I take it from your failure to answer the question that you did not do any research,” the chair finally concluded, having grilled McVey and the DWP’s Chris Hayes, for long enough.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation as good as predicted this in 2010, when it wrote of benefit sanctions as a whole: “In countries where policy objectives are more closely connected to taxpayer buy-in irrespective of empirical evidence, one could argue that even the best specified impact results are of little, or at least secondary, importance to the political impetus for reform.” Or, in simpler – though inevitably more “politicised” language – governments that aren’t bothered what happens to people and are just trying to curry favour with what they think of as a vindictive electorate don’t tend to care much about data. And so it came to pass. People have died as a result of these sanctions: they have taken their own lives, citing destitution as the final straw, and they have died of starvation. This makes it particularly hard to countenance that the legislation might have been made entirely on a whim.

Heroes of 2014: Margaret Hodge

Polly Toynbee

 

Read more

Committee after committee comes to this conclusion: in December, the PAC asked Ursula Brennan, permanent secretary to the Ministry of Justice, what research had been done into the changes to legal aid. “It was not possible to do research about the current regime,” she replied. “The government was explicit it needed to make these changes swiftly.” Surprise was expressed – in PAC language (“This is quite surprising”) rather than the terms heard on the floor of the Commons (“I am absolutely staggered”) – that such far-reaching changes could be undertaken without first asking some rudimentary questions of the professionals involved, gathering some slight evidence about the possible impact. “The piece of evidence that was overwhelming was the level of spending,” Brennan replied. “The evidence required was that government said ‘We wish to cut the legal aid bill.’” That’s not, plainly, what Hodge meant by the word – she was seeking out that pesky empirical evidence again. Why can’t she just remember that it’s secondary to the “political impetus for reform”?

From the point of view of governing – which includes, though unfortunately for Brennan, McVey et al is not limited to, budgeting – it is illogical to make significant changes without research. All (almost all) the people whose benefits were cut will still exist, at the end of this parliament. Their children will still exist. Their health problems will still exist, doubtless having been worsened by malnutrition and desperation. All the conflict for which legal aid was sought will still exist. The pressures on the legal system still exist, worsened by a surge in litigants in person (there has been a 30% rise in cases at the family courts in which both parties have to represent themselves). If you are taking even a medium-term view, it makes no sense to change systems without evidence. 

Cut indiscriminately, costs are likely to bob up elsewhere, where they will cost more and last longer.

I begin to wonder whether the real radicalism we observe here is not political as much as formal: government with only the shallowest roots and no eye on the future, whose only interest is near-term PR wins. Is it a feature of coalition or of the new Conservatism to have no interest in an action’s consequences? Hard to say. But it is the antithesis of conservatism.

The Modi Index

Depression, suicide and the fragility of the strong, silent male

Yvonne Roberts in The Guardian

On Thursday, the bruised and tearful face of former footballer and chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Clarke Carlisle, 35, appeared on the front page of the Sun. He was released from psychiatric hospital two weeks ago. In a clip on the paper’s website, he appears so raw and vulnerable that to watch it provokes thoughts of a modern-day version of Bedlam with us as Hogarthian gawpers treating the mentally fragile as entertainment.

The paper’s headline read: “I leapt in front of a lorry hoping to die.” Carlisle, a father of three, has suffered from depression for 18 months. He explained that the end of his career, the curtailment of his contract as a TV sports pundit and a struggle with alcohol led to financial problems. He felt the lack of “a sense of worth and value in life”.

He said strangers would comment: “Didn’t you used to be Clarke Carlisle?”, as if, once off the television screen and football pitch, he had passed into no-man’s-land. Throwing himself in front of a lorry became the “perfect answer”. Carlisle survived, unlike 12 men who will kill themselves today, as 12 do every day, in England and Wales.

Just before his death, the psychiatrist Anthony Clare wrote a thoughtful book, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis. He concluded with a plea to men to place “a greater value on love, family and personal relationships and less on power, possessions and achievement… to find meaning and fulfilment”.

Except that redefining what it means to be a man in contemporary society isn’t a job for men alone. It’s a dynamic process of cultural and social change that repeatedly judders to a halt. And it will continue to be impeded for a variety of reasons (better the stereotype you know) and as long as some women hold fast to a hierarchy of need.

This is the kind of thinking that says: if male fragility is addressed, women’s requirements are marginalised. Men can hog resources, but the two requirements are interlocked. Until male violence can be defused, for instance, the refugees will continue to overflow.

In the main, support for Carlisle’s honesty has been strong, as it has been for Nick Baber, 48, chief operating officer at KPMG, who last week said he would pretend he had flu during severe depression. He has called for more senior executives to speak out. But then what? As Dr Margaret McCartney explains in The Patient Paradox, the severely depressed are too ill to make plans to end their life. When a patient is beginning to recover, suicide becomes an option, particularly if they are male. Thoreau wrote: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Talk to parents from Papyrus, the charity that campaigns to prevent young suicide, and again and again they say they had no idea that their sons were depressed, let alone suicidal. Their sons, they felt, had so much to live for.

According to the charity, Campaign Against Living Miserably (Calm), men account for more than three-quarters of all suicides in England and Wales, 4,590 deaths – the single biggest cause of death among males under 50. Three out of four had no contact with mental health professionals. As the Men’s Health Forum constantly points out, men are reluctant to go their GP and fail to identify their own symptoms of depression. When Carlisle’s wife, Gemma, was diagnosed with postnatal depression, he advised her to “get a grip”; then he took Goldberg’s depression test and recognised his own symptoms. They include lack of energy, sadness, negativity and self-destructiveness. A survey by Calm revealed that 69% of men said they preferred to deal with problems themselves, 56% didn’t want to burden others. “The traditional strong silent response to adversity is increasingly failing to protect men from themselves,” said Jane Powell, Calm’s chief executive.

Last year, the charity issued a much-needed four-point charter to encourage change for the better. It includes a shift in thinking about the needs of males in schools, work and public services and a fuller range of expression of masculinity in the media and advertising. Too often, still, while depression in women is wrongly viewed as an inevitable part of being female, it’s precisely this alleged association with female fragility that underscores the notion that the male sufferer is less of a man; he has a weakness, not an illness best kept secret. So, as the suicide rate has risen, the taboos and social “norms” stay in place.

Change, however, is possible. Last month, a new policy on suicide prevention was launched, the Stop Suicide pledge. It is based on the work of Dr Ed Coffey in Detroit that enrols as many members of the public as possible with the aim of ending the stigma and the secrecy. In four years, the suicide rate dropped 75%.

The UK “zero suicide” pilots ask the whole community to look out for each other, recognise warning signs and offer help, not exclusion. The pledge, with a badge, is, “I’d ask”. (Although what you ask is trickier. “Is everything OK?” is bound to get a positive response in a well-trained man.)

The New Economics Foundation says the five foundation stones of wellbeing are: connect, be active, take notice, keep learning and give. The female sphere, even when it involves working 10 hours a day as well as mothering and acting as a carer, has all those aspects woven into it (and paradoxically at extremes can be the cause of female depression and breakdown). The male stereotypes of protector, provider, toughie and top dog shoves wellbeing well down the list.

Kurt Cobain, desperately in need of help for years, in his poignant suicide note to Boddah, his imaginary childhood friend, quoted a Neil Young song: “… better to burn out than fade away…” The tragedy for too many men is that society doesn’t yet allow them to let down their guard so they can value and enjoy the infinity of choices that lie between those two extremes.

The white man who pretended to be black

John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me Photo: Don Rutledge



By Tim Stanley in The Telegraph

6:58PM GMT 05 Feb 2015

With the release of the movie Selma, a lot of Americans are asking how far race relations have really come in the United States. On the one hand, the movie depicts the success of the Sixties civil rights crusade – its victory confirmed by Barack Obama’s election in 2008.

On the other hand, the recent deaths of young black men at the hands of white cops and vigilantes, and the resulting race riots, suggest that a lot of things haven’t changed at all. Whites may ask, “Why are working-class blacks angry? They have the right to vote and an African-American president – everything Martin Luther King Jr fought for.”

But some of the apparent triumph of black civil rights is a veneer. Racism isn’t just about law but about attitudes. Attitudes that are hard to change because of the gulf of understanding between different communities.

Can a white person ever really understand how a black person sees the world? Back in 1959, six years before Martin Luther King marched for civil rights in Selma, one man tried. A white Texan writer called John Howard Griffin walked into a doctor’s office in New Orleans and asked him to turn his skin colour black. Griffin took oral medication and was bombarded with ultraviolet rays; he cut off his hair to hide an absence of curls and shaved the back of his hands. Then he went on a tour of the Deep South.

The result was a bestselling book called Black Like Me, which is still regarded as an American classic. Griffin wanted to test the claim that although the southern United States was segregated it was essentially peaceful and just – that the two races were separate but equal.

What he discovered tells us a lot about the subtleties of racism. In 1959, unlike today, it was legally instituted. But, like today, it also flourished at the personal level – in hostility, suspicion, fear and even self-loathing.

Griffin was an extraordinary man. Born in Dallas in 1920, he went to school in France and joined the French Resistance after Hitler invaded. Griffin helped Jewish children escape to England before fleeing to America. While serving in the US army, he was blinded by shrapnel.

Griffin took it all in his stride – he married, had children and converted to Catholicism. Griffin’s strong personal faith reminds us that much of the civil rights movement was in fact a Christian mission – made possible, in this instance, by what seemed like a miracle.



The orginal cover of Black Like Me

Walking around his yard one afternoon, Griffin suddenly saw red swirls where hitherto there was only darkness. Within months his sight had returned. And it was a man determined to make the most of his second chance who hit upon the novel idea of crossing the colour line.

Those reading the book today might regard Griffin’s attempt to change his colour as akin to blacking up. Certainly, the transformation was awkward. Griffin may well have had dark skin but he retained his classically Caucasian features, and one suspects that the awkwardness of his encounters with some black people was down to them wondering if he was one of them or just horribly sunburnt.

Griffin did not become black per se but – more accurately – a white man suddenly disassociated from himself and his society. Looking into a mirror for the first time, he wrote, “The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship ... The Griffin that was had become invisible.”

But by very dint of not being white – even if he wasn’t exactly black – Griffin experienced genuine alienation. He was chased down a street by a bored white thug shouting racial epithets. He was told that he was sitting in the “wrong” waiting room and had to move to the “blacks only” one. On buses Griffin boarded via the backdoor, and when he chivalrously tried to offer his seat to a white woman was accused of being “sassy”. Many whites were polite; a few were aggressively rude.

Often it was suggested that black people were dumb or up to no good; Griffin often got what he called “the hate stare”. Some of his encounters with Caucasians were heartbreaking. Griffin sat on a park bench and a white man on a seat opposite got up, walked over and politely advised him that he should leave. Griffin went away saying, “thank you” because he assumed that the park was segregated and the man was being helpful. Later he discovered that it wasn’t segregated at all. The fellow was a well-mannered bigot.

There was a great deal of eroticisation of African-Americans. When hitchhiking, Griffin found that white male drivers ignored him in the daylight yet picked him up in the dark. They asked questions that disturbed him greatly: “all show a morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the Negro, and all had, at base, the same stereotyped image of the Negro as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied.”

When working as a shoeshine boy, Griffin noticed that the friendlier a white customer was then the more likely he was to ask if there are any prostitutes working in the area. Every black man was seen as a potential source of sexual transgression.



And Griffin discovered that the victims of abuse can start to regard themselves as deserving of abuse. Riding on a bus, he encountered a young man who, because he was comparatively light skinned, thought he was superior to his darker kin: “He walked towards the rear, giving whites a fawning, almost tender look.

His expression twisted to a sneer when he reached the back and surveyed the Negroes. He sat sideways in an empty seat across the aisle from me and began to harangue two brothers behind him. ‘This place stinks …. Look at all of them – bunch of dirty punks – don’t know how to dress. You don’t deserve anything better.’” Later, this man said to Griffin of his race: “I hate us.”

The story indicates that one of the successes of segregation was to make black Americans feel inferior, to encourage them to think that all they deserved was a seat at the back of the bus. If there is a single reason why the incidence of crime or illegitimacy is unusually high among African-Americans today, it might be that racism can be so pervasive and oppressive that it eventually makes its prejudices come true.

That, at least, offers one explanation for the behaviour of the young black men killed apparently resisting arrest in 2014. Another is anger at constantly being the source of suspicion. Of course, it also doesn’t help that American cops are over-militarised and trained to regard every mild confrontation as another conflagration at the OK Corral.

Griffin published his findings in book format in 1961 and became an overnight sensation. The New York Times hailed the text as an “essential document of contemporary American life”, and in 1964 it was made into a somewhat cringeworthy film starring James Whitmore.

But the residents of Griffin’s hometown in Texas were not impressed; they hanged him in effigy. Black Like Me helped to raise awareness of the evils of segregation and with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Right acts in the mid-Sixties, it seemed for a while as if America was ready to confront that evil.

Griffin died in 1980 after suffering complications from diabetes - not, as rumour had it, as a result of the treatments he'd used to prepare for Black Like Me. In the years leading up to his death, Griffin’s writing had taken on a despairing tone. He had recognised the falseness of his own experiment.

A white man disguised as black could not understand the insecurities and resentments that came with hundreds of years of inherited slavery – nor did he have the right to lecture black people on the need for love and reconciliation. White people had a role to play in civil rights, but it had to be as allies rather than leaders. The movement needed to be for black people, by black people.

This issue is at the heart of a debate about the movie Selma, too. Some critics have complained that it fails to depict white civil rights activists prominently and that it inaccurately suggests that President Lyndon Johnson, a progressive Democrat, wanted Martin Luther King Jr to shrink his ambitions.



The struggle continues: Oprah Winfrey in Selma

Both criticisms miss the point of the movie, which is to tell a black story from the perspective of its subject. It is typical and natural for middle-class white liberals to want to see uplifting the oppressed as a common endeavour.

But the truth is that discrimination is too ingrained in society to imagine that the benign efforts of white leaders can eradicate it entirely, while it is only by establishing their dignity through independent political action that black Americans could ever hope to assert themselves in a society that regarded them as the lowest of the low. For those reasons, Black Like Me is a well-intentioned book but also a hopelessly anachronistic one.

History has shown that the only people who can liberate African-Americans are African-Americans. And that in the course of their efforts, they should expect resentment among their white enemies and some bruised feelings among their white allies.

Britain’s epidemic of private despair makes this an economic crisis like no other

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian


Looking back, you can boil down the story of the financial crash to a sentence: the bankers ran off with the profits, we got stuck with their losses. Short and snappy, and also true. Summing up what happened next, though, has so far proved trickier. But at the halfway point in Britain’s angry lost decade, enough evidence is now in to say this: after socialising the bankers’ debts, we privatised despair.

The past five years have not been about the big public calamities that usually make up economic crisis. No industries have gone bust nor, thankfully, have millions been slung on the dole. Instead, it is becoming clear that the teens of this century will be marked by tens of millions of instances of private financial misery, all borne behind closed doors.

This will be the decade of workers on wages so low they are priced out of the lifestyle they once thought was safely theirs; of tenants struggling with soaring rents and crappy landlords; of severely disabled people kept awake by the prospect of their benefits being cut, while others on jobseeker’s allowance jump though hoop after hoop to avoid being sanctioned.

None of this everyday wretchedness fits what we have come to think of as a slump; yet this is the shape of the one we are grinding our way through. Defying the spectacular predictions that were made after 2008, this crisis is private, unequal and internalised.

I have been tracking these issues for years – but what they look like added together came into painful clarity a couple of weeks ago in Liverpool. Norris Green falls among the most deprived places in England but, with greenery, wide roads and new houses going up, it doesn’t look bad at all. Gazing out of his windscreen, Barry Kushner, a local councillor, set me straight: around half these households were now in temporary work, he reckoned; the launch of the bedroom tax had caused mayhem for residents; there was a two-month wait for appointments at the local Citizens Advice bureau. Along this neat terraced street was a row of front rooms where parents were fretting over how to pay off the Christmas they’d just given their kids.

Norris Green doesn’t fit the traditional narrative arc of economic crisis. As in much of Britain, there’s no rerun of the Great Depression; it’s more a whole string of mini-depressions. You see it in the growth of foodbanks, or in last autumn’s warning from Citizens Advice of a surge of people in trouble over their rented homes – a 15% rise in reports of harassment by landlords, a 20% spike in evictions. More prosaically, you see it when the poverty researchers Stewart Lansley and Joanna Mack report in their book Breadline Britain that over one in four households can’t afford to repair or replace broken electrical goods – a proportion that has more than doubled since 1999.

Apart from the odd high-street name such as Woolies or Comet, there have been no great business bankruptcies – partly because Britain has so few big industrial employers left after the Thatcher and Major recessions. Another reason is the hundreds of billions the state has pumped into the financial system, keeping afloat households and businesses that would otherwise sink.

This explains the lack of public spectacle. But our privatised despair is shaped by three main factors: huge inequality that leaves the poorest stranded; the mushrooming of precarious jobs; and George Osborne’s habit of picking off sections of the population to pay the biggest bills for the bankers’ losses.

The first factor is most thoroughly itemised by my Guardian colleague Tom Clark. In his book Hard Times, he catalogues how this meltdown has slapped the poorest in ways that don’t make it into public discussion. Clark turns up YouGov polls showing how Britons hit by the recession are more than twice as likely as their slump-proof compatriots to report that they row more. Citizenship surveys indicate that the sharpest fall in volunteering in 2010 took place in precisely those worst-off areas that most desperately needed them. David Cameron’s “big society” was always a luxury item for those with money, time and assertiveness to spare.

If privatised despair reaches into your home, it does not let up at the workplace. While employment has hit records under the coalition, the new work is more insecure and lonelier than we usually imagine. The characteristic jobs of this slump are the Uber driver, or the outsourced care worker going from door to door for 15 minutes a time. The new work is in perma-temping, shuttling from workplace to workplace, or in enforced freelance or fake self-employment. Forget about collective organisation or trade unions: these are often low-paid areas of work where regular contact with a roster of people who know your name cannot be guaranteed.

Inequality and insecure jobs aren’t new; they have simply been heightened since Cameron and Osborne moved into Downing Street. The chancellor who promised we were all in it together has specialised in fiscal divide and rule; the Conservative who hates picking winners in industrial strategy has been expert at picking losers in his budgetary strategy. So it is that the Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that “lower-income groups will fare considerably worse over the post-recession period”. Or that Simon Duffy at the Centre for Welfare Reform calculates that people with disabilities have been hit nine times harder than the rest of the population by austerity; those with severe disabilities 19 times harder.

Add these three factors together, and add in: the almost complete erosion of social institutions; the growing redundancy of the church in a secular country; the toothlessness of trade unions; and the way in which social security has gone from being a helping hand at times of need to being an instrument of surveillance and punishment. What you end up with is working poor turning on those without jobs; and those right at the bottom cut adrift entirely. I call it privatised despair, but writing about interwar Europe, Hannah Arendt talked of “radical isolation”, in which men and women were turned against each other.

And sometimes turned against themselves. In his book, Clark writes about a couple in Luton: the wife is severely disabled, the husband is extremely ill. “Stephanie” lives in fear of her disability living allowance being stopped and thus losing the car in which she ferries “Martin” to his oncologist. They mention how they dread the postman delivering a “brown letter” containing bad news from the Department for Work and Pensions. I can think of no better metaphor for privatised despair: living in fear of the daily post. Then Stephanie says something no blameless person in a civilised society should ever say: “I feel that I am scum, really.”