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Of all the arguments the history of slavery and racism has provoked, the spats about the comedy shows of the 2000s appear the least significant. Given the severity of the crisis that is upon us, surely its a distraction to worry away about the decision by the BBC and Netflix to pull Little Britain because its stars blacked up. Yet as we enter a global depression that the World Bank predicts will push 100 million people into extreme poverty, as unemployment in our corner of the globe heads towards 4 million, as food banks creak and charities collapse, the petty censorship raises a question of the utmost urgency: how will western societies respond to mass poverty?

After the crash of 2008, they punished the victims. Britain under David Cameron and Nick Clegg slashed benefits, targeting children who had shown their unworthiness when they failed to find rich parents who could raise them in comfort. The northern states of the EU justified leaving Spaniards, Italians and Greeks to suffer by characterising them as lazy southerners who had to learn that hard work comes before the siesta.

Even third-rate art can anticipate the future. In Little Britain and shows like it, you could sense the coming vindictiveness. They werent encouraging racial hatred but class hatred. What was meant to titillate viewers about Desiree DeVere, played by David Walliams with blackface and a fat suit, wasnt just that she was black, but that she was obese and as common as muck.

Television was reflecting the belief of millions that their money was going to scroungers

The idea that this grotesque figure thought herself a beauty was laughable. Another character pretended to be disabled to get sympathy, but jumped out of his wheelchair when no one was looking. A third ran a fat-fighters group while showing no awareness of how ugly her own greed was. After years of a Labour government redistributing wealth, television was reflecting the belief of millions that their money was going to scroungers, who faked disabilities and grabbed benefits so they could buy junk food and stuff it into their foul, fat faces.

Critics said as much at the time, thus passing a test that everyone caught up in our culture wars ought to set themselves. The cry from the right that were judging the past by the standards of the present can be as historically illiterate as the cry from the left that Britains history is irredeemably racist. Contemporaries we can admire and learn from contested the East India Company, slavery and empire. And in its small way the punitive turn in comedy of the 2000s was contested as it happened too.

Whereas wealthy media executives once sought to investigate poverty or arouse anger against it in documentaries and dramas such as Cathy Come Home or Boys from the Blackstuff, I wrote in 2008, now they commission programmes that laugh at it.

Thats not to excuse todays censorship. Comedians, like everyone else, have the right to punch up, punch down or punch themselves in the face (an option a few of them should exercise more often). Broadcasters are hiding an uncomfortable truth about Britain as they purge their archives. They and the talent they commissioned didnt mock the grasping poor because they were lying to viewers there are benefits cheats, after all, and, from Falstaff on, the fit have always found the fat risible. Nor were they trying to brainwash the audience with rightwing propaganda. The broadcasters of the day were merely operating in the entertainment market and giving a large section of the audience what it wanted. The BBC and Netflix now think that expunging the past will please the market of the 2020s. Puritans are only happy when someone is being silenced and doubtless they will be pleased. I suspect serious people will not be as happy. They will understand that the censorship of light entertainment trivialises their cause and allows their opponents to paint them as enemies of freedom.

The worst of it is that we ought to be thinking about why the response to the 2008 crash turned into a catastrophe. Sweetening history, tidying it up as if broadcasters are schoolteachers and we are vulnerable children, is not only repellent in itself, it stops us understanding the folly that led to a disaster.

Any account of what needs to be done to avoid the destitution of large parts of society must begin with confronting the prejudice that poverty is the fault of the undeserving poor. The young need to go to and stay in universities and further education colleges until the storm passes or find work on local authority job creation schemes. Higher education and councils will need to be seen as deserving of public money, if they are to help them. The Resolution Foundation and other leftish thinktanks are telling the government that the private sector on its own will not be able to revive the economy fast enough. They are proposing that the state should bail out depressed regions in their entirety and that the emergency increases in universal credit benefits, introduced in April, should become permanent. Readers who believe the Tories are evil disaster capitalists will be surprised to hear that they are getting a fair hearing, although whether this government has the competence to act on what ministers are hearing is another matter. Meanwhile, readers who believe the electorate will not cheer on a government if it turns on the victims forget the lessons of the recent past and the unshakable prejudices the 2000s displayed.

In Europe, recessions have been mean times. Voters have elected leaders who have held the poor responsible for their poverty and encouraged the hatred of foreigners for stealing jobs and sponging off welfare states. I dont think it will happen this time, but I wont pretend to be certain. If the idea of blaming a slump caused by a virus on its victims sounds absurd, it was equally absurd to blame a slump caused by the financial system on benefit claimants. But the right managed it after 2008 and can manage it again.

Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist

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Blacking up was of a piece with 'comedy' that dealt in contempt - The Guardian