I was struck looking at The Mirror's now famous crying, hungry child front page, not only by the poignancy of the image, but its contrast to another headline a few days earlier. A smiling woman looked out from The Daily Mail; a holiday snap of a "benefit cheat", the headline a gleeful breakdown of the thousands she had falsely claimed in disability allowance.

I wonder how bad things must get before a disabled face makes it to the front pages as a symbol, not of the handful of dishonest people, but of the hundreds of thousands who are now malnourished, cold and unable to pay their rent.

Disabled people in this country are twice as likely to live in poverty. The reality of having vast extra living costs or being too ill to work is not an excuse for government, but a damning indictment of its failure. The coalition government has compounded disadvantage. Policies such as the bedroom tax and council tax cuts have, almost wilfully, increased inequality. Each policy change imposed on disabled or chronically ill people has been a cut – a slash to support, or punitive, flawed hoops to jump through – dressed up as reform.

The work capability assessment (WCA), originally brought in by Labour, exemplifies this: 45% of appeals have been successful; people have died after being found "fit for work". The assessments are part of a wider, systemic disease: the Work Programme fails over 93% of the disabled people for whom it is charged to help find work, and the sanction system punishes them, stopping their benefits when they are too ill to get to a job appointment. A Freedom of Information request last month showed six out of 10 people on employment and support allowance who have been hit with a sanction, have a learning disability or mental-health problem. "Support" under this system is practically sadistic.

The Labour party, often all too ready to spread popular social-security propaganda, says it is ready to talk alternatives. Last year it charged Sir Bert Massie, a distinguished disability campaigner, to look at ways of breaking the links between disability and poverty and, last week, the party picked out reforming WCA as key.

It is right to choose that focus. How a society deals with disability and employment, both helping people into work and protecting those unable to work, reflects its moral core – whether it opts for evidence, fairness and support, or the current methods of inaccuracy, targets and abandonment. None of this exists in a vacuum. It is in a system that tells job-seekers to "make an effort"; where the politician responsible for work and disability is disappointed he can't, legally, make it harder for disabled and ill people to get benefits. This is a culture of suspicion and cruelty. It doesn't see health problems or people, but an underclass, feral and lazy. Why would you deserve help if you are barely human?

Poverty is different now. It's been rebranded as personal failure. We can hardly forget that as political decisions are absolved and individual choices rebuked. What did you do to get yourself into this state? What are you failing to do to get yourself out of it? The phantom work-shy now includes people too sick to get out of bed in the morning.

When the healthy are lining the streets for food parcels, what on earth becomes of the rest? The answer isn't on front pages, it is hidden behind closed doors. Poverty and disability isolate individually, yet we are in a disability poverty crisis. That our own government is entrenching it, is something that should make each of us shudder.