YOU would think it would be easy for the Labour Party to lead an inspiring election campaign after 14 years of Tory cuts to social security and public services, a cost of living crisis and rising child poverty rates.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think of ways to improve on this, just a bit of decency.

But when you already believe you’re going to win, maybe you don’t need to be inspiring, or particularly decent – which is lucky for Keir Starmer, because his party seems oddly silent on some of the worst effects of a decade-and-a-half under the Conservatives.

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A video from last August has recently been circulating of Starmer speaking to a group of residents in Worthing, West Sussex, when a little girl tells him she has to zip herself into a onesie and sleep under blankets because the cost of heating is so high.

The Labour leader responded by joking that his son used to wear a onesie but now he’s too tall, before swiftly turning away to ask an adult another question without any acknowledgement of the serious point the girl was making.

He could not even spare a moment to look a child, or her mother, in the eye and say: “That isn’t right.”

This wasn’t just one awkward moment – it encapsulates Labour’s approach to child poverty. Smile, nod and then look away.

Children’s charity Aberlour, which held an election hustings on poverty with young people and party representatives on Monday, said child poverty had “barely registered as an issue worth discussing by the main political parties and that is deeply disappointing”.

It’s right. But how could child poverty be an election priority when the sitting UK Government barely recognises it and the leading opposition party has no intention of changing most of the policies that are driving it up?

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This is Labour’s problem – unless the party U-turns on its position that it cannot commit to any additional spending on social security, anything it says now on child poverty will amount to either hypocrisy or complicity. It can’t defend the indefensible but nor does it have plans to do anything about it.

Poverty was not even alluded to in Labour’s much-promoted six “first steps for change” – a glaring omission in light of the dire circumstances so many have been left in by the current government.

And while the manifesto does commit to an “ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty”, there is perhaps more to be gleaned from what it doesn’t say than what it does regarding the party’s plans to achieve that.

There is no mention of the two-child benefits limit which, according to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), will have plunged 500,000 children into poverty by the time it’s fully rolled out. That’s one in 25 children in the UK doomed to poverty and its lifelong impacts by a political decision to punish the poor for reproducing.

There is no reference to the cap, which limits the total amount of benefit payments a person or family can receive, and leaves those most at risk of poverty worse off because of an arbitrary, one-size-fits-all approach to saving money.

There are no words included on the age discrimination in benefits which leaves under-25s with 20% less in Universal Credit’s standard allowance than over-25s – or the fact that, before the Tories overhauled the system, young parents used to be exempt from this inequality.

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All of these unjust and demonstrably harmful Conservative policies are, it seems, just part of a “new normal”, with little hope of a Labour government setting things right.

The Labour manifesto’s one reference to Universal Credit is a commitment to review it “so that it makes work pay and tackles poverty”, a pledge which sits within the context of the party’s claim that “good work will be the foundation of our approach to tackling poverty”.

This is all well and good but the quiet part within this is the implication that the current social security system does not do enough to make work an attractive option.

This is the same old Tory line that the benefits system is too generous – a position which sounds increasingly sadistic after the safety net has already been slashed wide open.

And this is where the contradiction lies. It is not possible to continue down the same road as the Tories on social security and tackle poverty at the same time. From think tanks such as the IFS and the Resolution Foundation to the charities and academic researchers behind End Child Poverty, the evidence of this fact is mountainous.

Seeing the warnings and eulogies of the harms of austerity ignored by the Conservatives has become par for the course. But to watch Labour embrace the same see-no-evil approach before they even take the keys to Number 10 is gut-wrenching.

On support for people with disabilities, Labour say they will help more of them into jobs and give them the “confidence” to work “without the fear of an immediate benefit reassessment if it does not work out”.

In light of the wider context of Labour’s new approach to social security, it’s understandable that many disabled people are uneasy about what this all might mean in practice. How much it will differ from the promises (or, more aptly, threats) the Tories have been making to crack down on people – supposedly – skiving off work on the sick remains to be seen.

It's telling that the single, solitary mention of the words “social security” in Labour’s manifesto is in relation to the hardline stance the party will take on “fraud or waste”.

Yet for all the concern about wasting money on the social security system, where is the attention to the huge costs that come from failing to invest in preventing and alleviating poverty?

Child Poverty Action Group estimated that in 2023 child poverty in the UK was costing a minimum of £39 billion a year to the economy and the taxpayer.

These costs come from the higher risks of unemployment and the need for social security support among adults who grew up in poverty, and the spending on public services needed throughout a person’s life as a result of poverty in their formative years.

Viewed from that perspective, the £3.4bn per year it would cost to end the two-child limit doesn’t seem too great a price to pay to ensure that all children have a chance at the childhood they deserve.

There is no excuse for Labour to sit back and watch as more children are subjected to the hardship that has become the shameful legacy of the outgoing Conservative government.

Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you we should vote for Labour so that Scotland has a voice within the UK Government.

If those voices are not willing to speak up for the most vulnerable in our society, they won’t be worth the train fare it takes to send them there.