The new strategy lays out Britain’s social disgrace in painful detail. But it also offers hope and a clear way forward that is worthy of a leftwing party

O

nce Labour set up a child poverty taskforce, it was predestined that the two-child benefit limit would be abolished. Every authority consulted confirmed it as the fastest way to rescue the most children from a life of direst poverty. Every authority, that is, except the general public, who oppose removing the cap by 56% to 31%, YouGov finds. This was an unpopular act knowingly taken for good reasons. Not many will read the taskforce’s findings, but if they did, even the meanest mind might soften: the dismal facts of a child’s life in poverty are, as ever, shocking.

All the many measures in this far-reaching policy will lift 550,000 children above the poverty line by 2030 – the most achieved within one parliament. But that leaves behind about 4 million poor children living without the basics. That still makes us among the most unequal and most poverty-stricken of similar European countries. This is a major factor in why British five-year-olds have now become up to 7cms shorter than children of the same age in Europe.

Streams of reports emerge from thinktanks and charities describing the plight of desperate people. It’s a story so familiar that it’s easy to be numbed into accepting that a third of the children around us are poor, often without adequate food or heating, many without a home, with no internet connection for homework and no joining in what classmates take for granted: “my holiday”. Labour governments don’t hide these brutish facts of British life. The government’s new strategy lays bare our social disgrace in painful detail, promising annual updates on all the causes, effects and remedies. In 1999, Tony Blair stunned experts with his promise to eliminate child poverty within 20 years: by the halfway mark in 2010 good progress had been made, but the country was not quite there. There’s never time to get enough done, before the right takes over to reverse and vandalise everything. Think of the 3,500 Sure Starts mostly closed or left without the people and services to provide families with the support that changed lives.