What is it that drove, on Tuesday night, seven Labour MPs to vote for an amendment tabled in parliament by another party, with the virtual certainty of losing the party whip as a consequence? The answer is that some issues are so important, so pressing and so at the core of one’s beliefs that the seriousness of the risk demonstrates the seriousness of the issue at stake.

The revulsion at witnessing large-scale child poverty in our society was one of the key motivating factors for the early socialists who came together to found the Labour party. Establishing a system to end poverty and provide security to all families was at the heart of the postwar Attlee government’s welfare state.

After child poverty soared under the Thatcher administration, Gordon Brown railed against it and dedicated the incoming New Labour government to eradicating child poverty once and for all. In office, he worked hard to be true to his word and his policies lifted about a million children out of relative poverty.

All that progress was halted and reversed by the brutality of the austerity programme of the David Cameron and George Osborne government,........

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