They are austerity’s children, born after 2010, perhaps now at secondary school – and they account for 3.4 million of Britain’s 4.3 million children in poverty. Most have never known what it is like to be free of poverty. And yet in almost every single year of the past decade, even as their need has been mounting, the government’s support for children has been spiralling downwards, each year more difficult than the year before as, with almost surgical precision, the government has made the already poor even poorer and propelled the number of poor children up by 100,000 a year.
For the past 40 years we have talked of Thatcher’s children – the generation of children brought up in the 1980s at a time of mass unemployment and social security cuts, which I witnessed at first hand as an MP in a mining constituency. Study after study has charted her government’s impact in educational underachievement, broken families and the crushed aspirations of millions of young people unable to find decent work.
