Child poverty has risen to its highest level yet and – due to Labour’s attack on benefit recipients – may reach five million in a very short time.

Figures from the government’s own Department for Work and Pensions suggest that by April 2024, there were 4.45 million children living in a household of relative low income after housing costs are deducted – the government’s own standard measure for poverty.

That is an increase of 100,000 children from the previous year – and equates to 31 per cent of children in the UK.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s decision to halve incapacity benefits for new claimants and introduce tighter criteria around the Personal Independence Payment for those with long term physical or mental health conditions, means an extra 250,000 people, including 50,000 children, will be pushed into relative poverty by these changes, according to the government’s own impact assessment.

The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) has already predicted that 4.8 million children will be in poverty by the end of this Parliament in 2029-30. Labour’s attack on society’s poorest people may accelerate that increase beyond five million.

Wow. Five million children in poverty under a government going under the ‘Labour’ banner. I wonder what Tony Blair, who reduced the number of children in poverty (after housing costs – the same measure as above) by half a million during his time as a Labour prime minister, would think of it.

Under Blair, the number of children in relative poverty after housing costs were deducted fell from 4.3 million in 1997 to 3.8 million in 2002, and stayed at that level until Labour was voted out of office in 2010.

But consider this: child poverty has risen sharply since 2021 – the time of the Covid-19 crisis when people like Gary Stevenson say wealth inequality increased sharply.

Isn’t this new statistic evidence that he is right to say that the UK’s wealth needs to be re-balanced away from the super-rich – otherwise prospects for current and succeeding generations can only worsen?

Isn’t that what the figures show?

Gary argues that a wealth tax would make a huge difference. He was on the BBC’s Question Time calling for it, only to be poo-pooed by the likes of Camilla Tominey, who said it had been tried in around 12 countries, all of whom had abandoned it apart from Switzerland.

She was wrong about that. Switzerland has the most successful wealth tax, bringing in the equivalent of £25 billion per year. But wealth taxes are also levied in Norway (£37 billion), Spain (£1.2 billion) and France (although it has been modified into a property wealth tax there).

These taxes have been abandoned in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Ireland and Finland for various reasons – most commonly administrative costs and avoidance.

It occurs to This Writer that part of the problem in those places might have been asking wealthy people to devise a tax on wealth.

Perhaps it would be better to send working- or middle-class people off to Switzerland to find out how to levy a successful wealth tax, and then act on the result without attempting to modify it?

Or would that be too straightforward?