WHEN I went for a tour of a local food bank and found it housed in a former library, I realised that the social landscape of Britain had changed forever. Where once the front door stood open, access is now gained via a back entrance behind a security fence. There’s no sign outside.

“No one wants anyone to know they’re coming in,” says the organiser. We squeeze along a narrow back corridor to the main space, once a cheerful ’70s rotunda. Food in boxes is stacked on shelves where once there were books.

The organiser passes me a sheet of paper – a tick-sheet filled in by the person in need of food. “Reason for referral,” it asks. The heart-breaking list of options includes: homelessness, illness, marital breakdown, delay in receipt of benefits, and in-work poverty (which is not a “life choice”, as was once said).

The reasons are recorded in the interests of statistics. “We don’t want to encourage the state to depend on voluntary operations to subsidise the DWP’s decisions,” explains the local minister, who’s a founding trustee of this Trussell Trust foodbank.

His temporary stopgap is in danger of becoming permanent, built into the welfare picture for society’s most desperate people. However, there is money in the social pot of the UK. Britain is the seventh richest country in the world, but its spending priorities need to be re-examined. Welfare reform isn’t working.

The local authority has a remit to provide nourishment for the mind, but no such responsibility extends to nourishing the body. It’s still seen as a government role, and those referred to foodbanks have fallen through the holes in the social security system.

Benefit sanctions can last for three weeks, and, if not challenged, can be extended for up to three years. Three years, when a referral to the foodbank is often only for a single, three-day food parcel, although it can be longer by special arrangement, but this is rare.

The ex-soldier running the foodbank shows me a three-day supply for a single person. Three plastic bags are covered, ironically, in the names of supermarkets the beneficiary can’t afford to shop in.

There are a greater number of bags for a family, but as parents often can’t afford the bus fares to collect the food, especially in this rural area, volunteer drivers deliver to them. “They never claim their petrol allowance,” says the ex-soldier. And so local people subsidise Government policy, and Greggs bakery hands in bread at the end of each day.

Once upon a time, tax and National Insurance contributed to the communal pot to help those who, for whatever reason, are unable to cope – temporarily or permanently – due to illness, redundancy, addiction, relationship breakdown, bad luck.

It was an insurance policy for us all because it doesn’t take much to bring down someone’s house of cards. I cared for my husband when he had brain cancer. After two years he died and I had two young children, £400 in the bank and no job.

Mortgage repayments, relationships, work: they are a juggling act and sometimes people drop the ball. It could happen to anyone. It’s not a crime, but a descent into poverty and its attendant diseases is a disaster that pulls everyone down.

Halfway through my visit, volunteers arrive to sort the donations by sell-by dates. Nothing is wasted, but it’s labour intensive. There is a rogue’s gallery of the most out-of-date donations – the current champion is a 25-year-old packet of sauce mix.

Before I leave I am shown the bean cupboard. It is lined with tins and tins of legumes preserved in sugary tomato syrup. There’s also a mountain of biscuits – one of their most frequent donations, kindly meant as a treat.

“Nutrition is of concern,” says the ex-soldier. “We need more donations of nutritious food like sweetcorn and tuna.” He doesn’t mention compassion. It is being demonstrated locally, but at a national level it’s in short supply, and the Government claims the cupboard is bare.

Now, as David Cameron scrambles with other European leaders to accommodate the refugee crisis and the Government sends smokescreens of repealing the hunting laws while releasing Reaper drones on Syria, the need for the organisation of a safety net is painfully apparent.

As survivors stumble along railway tracks to be fire-hosed at border crossing points, and women give birth on the concourse of Budapest international railway station, we have to ask what kind of world we are bringing new citizens into. Where is the love? The homeless food crisis has gone global.

On the world stage, internationally displaced people are emerging from the ruins of war, while the displaced at home remain hidden. Invisibility allows the authorities not to act, but when the problem is highlighted the mettle of our leaders is tested at home and on the international stage.

If we are one human family, as the Dalai Lama reminds us in his book Widening the Circle of Love, then the wellbeing of us all relies on the support we offer each other. If there is money for war, then there is money for food.

In 1869, in The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain described the Syrians as good-natured and intelligent. They asked him when the world was going to send them help to release them from the high taxation of the Ottoman Empire. In an irony attributable to karma perhaps, Turkey is now feeding them, but the world can’t rely on charity long term.

It’s a question of communal organisation: absorbing the vulnerable at the point of need is to the long-term benefit of the whole.

And, for the record, it’s not a crime to be an economic migrant. Just ask Andrew Carnegie, the turn-of-the-century Scottish-American industrialist who was one of the most famous – he was a telegraph boy, a steel baron and, ultimately, philanthropist. Like him, who is in the crowd now who might not return the kindness they receive a thousand times over?

As Carnegie said, “Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community.” He built 2,509 libraries worldwide between 1883 and 1929.

Politicians, please take note, as you turn a blind eye to non-doms and tax havens, and close doors on the poor and migrant.