Once 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

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