Bob Dylan painted a picture of economic despair in his heartbreaking tale of a farmer driven to familicide, The Ballad Of Hollis Brown.

Here’s a devastating song about the consequences of extreme poverty. I’d like to think of Jeremy Hunt, on a desert island, being forced to listen to it for eternity. (Or at least until one of his yacht-owning chums comes to the rescue).

I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before, having come to Dylan late in the day and never quite getting back to his folky beginnings. It appeared on his third album The Times They Are A-Changing in 1964.

Hollis Brown is a farmer living in a tumbledown shack with his wife and five children, just struggling to survive before (spoiler!) taking the worst-case option of shooting them all – and himself – to save his starving family from further unbearable misery.

What’s so striking is not just the way Dylan tells what is effectively a short story, but paints pictures with his words over a one-chord blues that has its roots in an old English folk song called Pretty Polly.

In a stroke of poetic genius that enhances the already powerful emotional heft of the song, after setting the scene he suddenly switches from the third person to the second – “Your children are so hungry that they don’t know how to smile” (what an image!).

It puts you right there in that “broken down” cabin and makes you feel that South Dakota farmer could be you. And, thanks to Hunt’s heartless new budget yesterday – making the richest 20% better off while (further) demonising the disabled and out of work – one day it might.

The language is vivid – “the rats have got the flour”, “the babies’ eyes are crying”, “your wife’s screams are stabbin’ you like the dirty drivin’ rain” – and over the course of its 11 verses the story becomes increasingly bleak as life becomes increasingly unbearable for Hollis and his kin.

He even prays to God for deliverance; and receives no answer.

Then finally the resonance of the pay-off line: when the deed is done and there are “seven people dead on a South Dakota farm”, Dylan reminds us that “Somewhere in the distance there’s seven more people born.”

The cycle of despair is never-ending