A RECENT report showing a surge in child destitution was shocking in two respects.

First was the scale of misery that is being inflicted on young people in this country, one which is easily rich enough to end poverty for good.

But the second shock was the widespread indifference to the report in both media and political circles.

Those who simply want to cover up and excuse this dreadful government are effectively now being joined by those who claim things are so bad that nothing can be done to improve them. We should never accept such a state of affairs, or the complacent indifference to them.

The report reckons from its survey evidence that there are now 120,000 children in this country experiencing “destitution.”

Destitution is an extreme form of poverty defined as regularly having to go without food, clothing, heating, hot running water or possessions.

The Buttle charity survey reports that it has risen to 60 per cent of the children they work with, up from 36 per cent just two years ago.

The charity cannot say so, but this extreme rise in the worst levels of poverty is a direct function of government policy. Unlike many other countries that introduced some form of price controls, this government simply allowed oligopolies in energy, in food distribution, in banking and in housing to charge whatever they could get away with.

At the same time, they increased taxes on ordinary people by freezing the income tax thresholds. They also campaigned relentlessly against any pay rises trying to keep up with inflation.

This has reached extremes in the rail industry, as, rather than settle the dispute, at far greater cost, the government has been subsidising the rail companies with taxpayers’ money to allow them to continue the dispute.

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the government has also cut benefits in seven of the last 10 years, even freezing them as prices were rising.

The rise in poverty and even extreme poverty was not only predictable as a result, but the government was also warned it would happen.

The labour movement should be clear — this has always been a part of Tory ideology and now it is widespread and dominant. It is the ideology which claims that boardroom and City fat cats must be “incentivised” to work through huge pay, workers and the poor must be made poorer to force them into work. Poverty is a policy, not an accident.

Impoverishment is also affecting very broad layers of the population. It is widely known now that real average earnings (after taking inflation into account) have been falling for well over 18 months.

But they also fell sharply, almost without interruption for the six years after the global financial crisis in 2008. This is one of the principal effects of the austerity policy which has never really gone away.

Yet this average also conceals a significant disparity between rich and poor. According to the Office for National Statistics last year alone, the real income of the top-earning 20 per cent of households rose by 1.6 per cent. But in the same year, the real income of the bottom 20 per cent by earnings fell by 3.8 per cent.

The spread of poverty is having widespread and detrimental effects on society. Shelter reports that millions of people are on a financial cliff edge, with one-third of all renters in work having less than one month’s rent in savings, and over a million more having just that one month.

The implications for relationship breakdowns, mental health, anxiety and job precariousness are dramatic. People in that position simply cannot afford to go on strike, a real factor which has hampered some disputes.

On a separate front, the government’s strangulation of the NHS by underfunding has forced some who can afford it to reluctantly take up private medicine options. The Centre for Health and Public Interest reports the surreptitious growth in the privatisation of social care and health services.

The report shows that over 30 years the numbers of people forced to make contributions to their own care have almost doubled. The biggest increases have been in the most recent years.

The same is true in dentistry and the number of people paying for elective surgery such as knee and hip replacements is surging, even paying for them on credit.

There is also a hue and cry now about the rise in shoplifting. Of course, this can provide real difficulties for small shopkeepers. But it is a direct product of the rise in poverty itself. Tower Hamlets council has shown that the most shoplifted item is Calpol, which is heartbreaking.

It is no use for anyone on the front benches to talk about a clampdown on shoplifting if there are millions of potential defendants. The jails would quickly overflow.

Instead of a war on the poor — cutting benefits, raising taxes, refusing pay rises and demonising them — there should instead be a war on poverty. There is money left. It just needs to be redirected.

In 2010 when austerity was first implemented, real GDP per head was £7,398 in this country. Now it is £8,220. We can draw two important conclusions from these basic facts.

The first is that there is money left; the economic pie is a little bit bigger. Yet we have growth in both mass poverty and extreme destitution. The pie has grown but the mass of the population is getting a far smaller slice.

Redistribution must be part of our agenda, starting with the wealth and incomes of those who have taken a far greater share — big business and the rich.

But the second conclusion is that austerity has completely failed to revive the economy, contrary to the claims of its supporters. Average per capita GDP growth has been well below 1 per cent a year for the last 13 years. This is far lower than the pre-austerity average growth rates.

It is completely ridiculous and hopelessly defeatist to argue that “things are so bad that nothing can be done,” yet this seems to be an official political consensus.

A little humility is needed. Every poor country which has developed significantly over the last 50 years began much poorer than this country is now. None of them achieved improvement by attacking their own poor.

Instead, development means what it says: developing skills, infrastructure, education, public services, housing and transport — and taxing big business and borrowing for as much investment as we can to fund it.

Diane Abbott is MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.