She then listed hunger, scurvy and the thousands of workers killed in the factories without attracting the attention of the statisticians. "Quiet conditions" is a key phrase – she is referring to the skill with which capital cloaks its crimes.

In January 2019, Conservative ministers in the UK recommended that grant allocations to local authorities no longer be weighted to reflect the higher costs of deprivation and poverty, with the result that money could be redirected to the more affluent Tory shires (a move variously described as a "brutal political stitch-up" and "an act of war"). These moments of violence move silently, as do the women today who are so often the most affected: threatened by Brexit with the loss of equality and human rights protection, including employment rights and funding for women's services (notably in relation to sexual violence, where the number of rapes reported to police in England and Wales doubled between 2013 and 2018, while prosecutions fell), or forced into sex work as a result of the universal credit system, part of a Conservative overhaul of benefits for people on low household income that is now acknowledged as catastrophic for the most socially vulnerable.

When Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of the policy, was knighted in the 2020 new year honours list, 237,000 people signed a petition objecting to the award for a man "responsible for some of the cruellest, most extreme welfare reforms this country has ever seen". The Department for Work and Pensions denies any link between the new credit system and survival sex, dismissing the tales of women as anecdotal.

It is generally recognised that the spending "free-for-all" inaugurated by Boris Johnson after his 2019 election victory was intended to secure a further electoral term, but will have no effect on the basic gulf between the rich and the dispossessed (the moneys released for the NHS are a fraction of what is needed). Nor is there any confidence that the flurry of NHS spending brought on a year later by the pandemic will be significantly sustained. To general outcry, the promised NHS pay rise for nurses has turned out to be a derisory 1%.

Male violence is the standout feature of the day, but it is also central to my argument that the masculinity enjoined on all men, and paraded by so many, is a fraud. On this, I take my distance from radical feminism, notably that of the influential school of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, which sees violence as the unadulterated and never-failing expression of male sexuality and power – a self-defeating argument if ever there was one (if true, then men will rule the world for ever). Instead, it is crucial for me that, even while calling out masculinity in its worst guise, we allow to individual men the potential gap between maleness and the infinite complexity of the human mind.