Edwina Currie's poverty claims are a chilling blast from the past

Currie's claim that no one in the UK goes hungry reflects a wider return to the attitudes of the 1980s – as child poverty soars
Edwina Currie
Edwina Currie told Radio 5 live she did not believe people in the UK were going hungry. Photograph: Dave M. Benett/Getty Images

"Are you telling me people in this country are going hungry? Seriously? Seriously?" Edwina Currie's refusal to entertain the idea that some people in poverty are going hungry isn't the only reason in recent days to think the poverty debate is regressing to the 1980s.

The latest inflation figures underscore just how tough it is out there for low-income families. Caught between the spiralling cost of essentials and a fall in the real value of benefits, it is low-income families who are truly feeling the squeeze.

Despite what Currie says, and said in the 1980s, these families have little scope to trim their spending habits when necessities such as food, fuel and clothes consume the vast majority of their limited incomes. As the price of essentials rise sharply, poorer families have to make tough choices, not between luxuries and necessities, but between one basic good and another.

Child Poverty Action Group's own research shows just how inadequate benefits are and why Currie's claim that people are struggling because they're wasting their money on lottery tickets and cigarettes is absurd. A family of two adults and one child on out-of-work benefits can expect to receive £186 a week (after housing costs). That's only 65% of the official breadline.

That's why there's emerging evidence of desperate families having to turn to food banks. In the summer, one food bank in the West Midlands reported a 45% rise in demand since last year. A few weeks ago, one father told the BBC: "If we didn't use the food bank, there was no way I could have fed my family for the week."

Most parents do everything they can to shield their children from going hungry (often by going hungry themselves) but they don't always succeed and, even when they do, they cannot fully protect them from the impact of poverty. Children in the poorest fifth of families are significantly less likely to be able to have friends round for tea or a snack once a fortnight: 18% of the poorest fifth of children say they would like to but can't afford it, compared with only 4% in the middle fifth of the income distribution who say the same.

Currie's attitude, that no one's going hungry, no one's starving and it's an insult to suggest otherwise, echoes the attitude of successive governments in the 1980s, exemplified in 1989 by the DHSS secretary of state John Moore in his famous "end of the line for poverty" speech. Moore argued that no one was in absolute poverty any more and that those looking at "relative poverty" were politically motivated. A charge that Currie also made against those who disagreed with her.

Moore's dismissal of the idea that poverty should be measured relative to the rising living standards of the overall population was itself rejected by David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith.

They recognised that the hard lesson we learned from the 1980s and early 1990s is that relative poverty matters. That children in poverty have worse health and education outcomes, unhappier childhoods and poorer life chances than other children. And that we all pay a price for this. Undoing the damage of child poverty through our schools and hospitals, paying out more in welfare but receiving less in tax and wasting economic potential all contribute to a huge poverty price tab – £25bn a year according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Unfortunately, as we know, this recognition by the prime minister on child poverty has been overwhelmed by policy after policy, cut after cut, which will increase child poverty.

Last week's devastating report from the IFS shows that under current policies, this government – which claimed to have learned the lessons from the past – is going to throw 800,000 more children into poverty. In other words, the next decade threatens to see the longest sustained rise in child poverty since the 1980s.

The rhetoric on poverty from Currie may be a scary reminder of the 1980s, but the threat to children's childhoods and life chances of poverty increasing year after year is the truly frightening throwback to the past.