Cameron used to talk about “Broken Britain”, now he’s created it

Five years ago David Cameron said he wouldn’t balance the books on the backs of the poor. What a joke that now seems.

By the end of this Parliament, on any measure you choose, at least half a million more children will have been pushed into poverty, the number of people hospitalised with malnutrition has reached a seven year high and over a quarter of a million people now rely on charity to feed and clothe themselves and their children.

Cameron used to talk about Broken Britain. Now he has created it. His plan is failing families. In Parliament this week I told Ministers about the human cost of their choices. Two constituents, refused permission to attend family funerals when they were supposed to sign on. A family who gave up a zero hours job that didn’t even cover the bus fare to work, sanctioned for three months, leaving their two year old twins surviving on a tin of beans and some potatoes a day.

This isn’t an accident of the system. This is the system.

The DWP website says people can be sanctioned for giving up a zero hours contract but the Minister, Esther McVey, wrote to me to say they can’t. It doesn’t make any difference to my constituents. They were sanctioned anyway. Listening to McVey yesterday, it seems that’s the point.

Those most unable to cope are hit hardest, like the man with learning difficulties sanctioned for being 4 minutes late to the Jobcentre even though he doesn’t know how to tell the time. Tory MPs, one of whom was 45 minutes late to the debate, had the nerve to tell me timekeeping is important.

Despite all of the offensive rhetoric about strivers and workers, so many of those affected are in work or trying to find it. Last week research from Oxford University found only a fifth of people kicked off benefits have gone into work. The rest, like one of my constituents, are surviving on a bowl of porridge and glasses of water a day to stave off the hunger.

It’s so entirely avoidable. Germany, Poland, Canada and Australia have seen child poverty fall in recent years. As Unicef said “it is possible to make better choices than this”. The UK has one of the highest structural rates of poverty caused by a toxic mix of low pay, underemployment, insecure jobs and high living cots. As a result we have to spend more on tax credits and benefits just to help people survive. Over the last five years Ministers have refused to do anything about the root causes, and compounded the problem by taking unfair decisions. In the 2012 budget alone they pushed through real terms cuts to in and out of work benefits while handing millionaires a tax cut worth £200 a week. No wonder the UK is one of only four countries where material deprivation has increased dramatically.

Bobby Kennedy once said “there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men…This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.”

That will be the Government’s legacy: an attempt to loosen the bonds that bind us, through indifference, inaction and slow decay. In the end they will fail, because the solidarity that bound communities like mine together in the 1930s and 1980s is making itself felt once again. Charities, church groups, trade unions and ordinary people are speaking out, appalled at this attack on our common decency as a society.

The Tories’ plan is failing families because their priority has been to help a few at the top. Labour has a better plan. We’ll raise the minimum wage, improve living standards, stamp out exploitative zero hours contracts and restore compassion and humanity to the safety net. We know that Britain can be so much better than this.