Scrap the cap

Terri White's mini-documentary on child poverty for the Guardian is alarming and eye-opening, not least because of the staggering, shameful statistics that it spells out: 37 per cent of children in Greater Manchester live in poverty, and 75 per cent of kids living in poverty nationally are in working households.

Drawing on her own personal experience, White speaks to an assortment of people, including mums and staff at charities, in a film that underlines the devastating impact of the two-child benefit cap in particular.

The cap is a policy that was introduced by the Tories but that Labour seem reluctant to scrap; indeed, six MPs were suspended for calling for exactly that last summer. In White's film, Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, brands the cap "abhorrent", and to his credit he's since backed that up by putting pressure on Keir Starmer to ditch it, as a measure that has "no moral basis".

As White emphasises, child poverty is both preventable and a political choice. The prospect of pleas to remove the cap being heeded seems unlikely, though, given the current state of the party under Starmer's leadership - and I'd strongly advise that you avoid looking at the YouTube comments section if you don't want to despair at the views of your fellow citizens.