This person, who lectures his entire country and beyond about responsibility and taking personal hits for a greater cause, is sending millions into destitution, poverty and even death for the sake of a gamble to maybe boost his personal neurotic ambitions.

Well - it's more about the destitution, poverty and death of millions being irrelevant to the profit of the small minority of rich lunatics who put Osborne into the job.

The critical mistake is to assume that Osborne has any interest in the welfare of most of the population.

Like most of the Tories, he doesn't. He sees the poor - which includes most of us - as powerless failures who can be lied to with impunity, abused for cynical enjoyment, and exploited for profit and self-aggrandisement.

The democratic problem is making Western populations understand that this is how their governments work.

It's difficult, because it's hard for most people to imagine that anyone can be this cynical, and even harder to imagine that our former flawed but functional social democracies have become Hobbesian nightmares.