The National:

IF you had to choose which of your children you like the least, who would it be?

Seriously though: imagine you’re short on cash and you have to stop feeding one of them – there’s got to be one you’re willing to watch wither away. Survival of the fittest and all that.

Oh, you think all your children are worth keeping around? All of them deserve to be treated the same? If you say so. I mean, it sounds pretty reasonable, but according to the Tory Government, only the first two children in any family are worth supporting if their parents are low on income and need to claim benefits.

This is the practical and rhetorical effect of the two-child limit in Child Tax Credit and Universal Credit. As the fourth anniversary of this pernicious and callous policy passes, it would be all too easy to put our heads down in quiet resignation that this is “just the way things are” now.

But as a new report from Child Poverty Action Group reveals, the hard proof is that the policy is driving up poverty in larger families. We should be more furious and more disgusted than ever that this is the message the UK Government chooses to send about the value of children in our society.

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At least 350,000 families and 1.25 million children have now been impacted by the policy. And, while the numbers of children in poverty in families with one or two children have fallen in the time since its introduction, in households with three or more children there were 176,000 more children living below the poverty line by 2019-20.

Roughly half of all children in larger families in the UK are now living in poverty.

That is a shocking statistic but it is not a surprising one. The government was well warned that this would be the policy’s shameful outcome, and carried on regardless.

They carried on, not by accident or ignorance to the implications, but because, by their own account, they believe that parents should simply not have a third child if they don’t know if they can afford it. A very easy view to take if you have never lived a minute of your life knowing that your future is uncertain, that a job loss, illness, death, or relationship breakdown could pull the rug out from under you at any moment.

This is reality for the vast majority of people, who do not have endless amounts of savings or the ability to plan for every eventuality. It’s for this precise reason that the social security system exists. But by now it should be apparent that the series of welfare reforms introduced under successive Conservative governments have been designed with a very different set of principles in mind.

The National: Iain Duncan-Smith first outlined Universal Credit in 2010Iain Duncan-Smith first outlined Universal Credit in 2010

A new campaign led by charity One Parent Families Scotland to end the “young parent penalty” underlines a common thread. This particular policy change came in with the introduction of Universal Credit, removing a longstanding exemption which allowed under-25s who were single parents to be paid the same rate of benefits as over-25s.

In 2019, the Resolution Foundation described the impact of this change as the “young parent penalty” because it meant young single parents were going to lose out more under Universal Credit than any other group. A group of people already more vulnerable, more financially insecure, more likely to face stigma and negative stereotypes – and yet, instead of offering extra support, the government decided the support they had should be cut?

It defies all logic and basic human empathy, but it makes perfect sense when you understand that, just like the two-child limit, this is part of a deliberate strategy of treating social security as a means of behavioural manipulation. Make life hard enough for people who need benefits and they’ll simply pull up their bootstraps and manifest an improvement in their circumstances through positive thinking.

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This is misguided and harmful enough as a general approach, but it’s particularly malign when applied to support for families with children. In effect, this is the state deploying financial disincentives to coerce a particular class of women into not having children.

A report from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service published last December found that the two-child policy had impacted on the decision to have an abortion of nearly three in five women who were aware of it and likely to be affected by it. And official statistics show that the number of abortions has risen at a much higher rate among women with two children since the policy was introduced.

If normalising the idea that people with less money don’t deserve to procreate was the aim, then the government can duly celebrate its roaring success. What’s a few hundred thousand hungry children in the face of these kinds of results, eh?

Personally, I feel ashamed to live in a country which tells its children that some of them are simply worth less than others. My question to any Tories I happen to have among my captive audience is: don’t you?