They are austerity’s children, born after 2010, perhaps now at secondary school – and they account for 3.4 million of Britain’s 4.3 million children in poverty. Most have never known what it is like to be free of poverty. And yet in almost every single year of the past decade, even as their need has been mounting, the government’s support for children has been spiralling downwards, each year more difficult than the year before as, with almost surgical precision, the government has made the already poor even poorer and propelled the number of poor children up by 100,000 a year.