If Britain were to best Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania and Malta in the European soccer whatever it’s called and be hammered by the mighty Norway, Iceland, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Poland, Portugal, Hungary, and Greece it would probably dominate the press for weeks. There would be demands for resignations, reflections on the decline of moral fibre and articles about kebab consumption.

You have to search fairly hard on the BBC’s site to find the details of a report from the Child Poverty Action Group which, after twelve year of New Labour, ranks Britain 24th out of 29 European states in a child wellbeing league table. This is an improvement. Britain was last in the previous league table but it’s no big achievement to make your kids happier than those in Romania.

The areas looked at were health, subjective wellbeing, children’s relationships, material resources, behaviour and risk, education, housing and environment and in four of them Britain was in the lower third of the league.

The report, Ending child poverty: a manifesto for success, is a great deal more radical and concrete than most of what will be on offer at either the European elections or next year’s general election. You could almost say it’s a bit of a transitional programme for working class families and it puts forward ten demands. The charity is regrettably unskilled in the nuances of lefty propaganda and opts to confuse us by calling them “steps to reduce inequality and put children first”.

They are:

• Protect jobs
• Mend the safety net
• Move away from means tests
• Remove barriers to work
• Stop in-work poverty
• Put in place a child-first strategy for childcare
• End the classroom divide
• Provide fair public services for those who need them most
• End poverty premiums in taxes and services
• Ensure a decent home for every family

Whatever CPAG’s intentions were in commissioning the research they have produced an indictment of neo-liberalism. Among the explanations offered for the gap the authors write:

“A relationship exists between lower inequality and higher wellbeing. More equal societies, such in Scandinavian countries, tend to do better on child wellbeing than less equal societies such as in Eastern Europe or the UK.”

Another bewildering revelation is that “countries that devote more resources to families tend to have less child poverty.” Who’d have thought? Eh.

Actually the authors do draw a straight line between neo-liberalism and the impact on the lives of children in the first line of their preface.

“The fall of Lehman Brothers seems likely to prove to be one of history’s tipping points: no one can be left in serious doubt of the folly of letting the market rip” and if you don’t agree with their assertion that “The extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of an often unaccountable few is a measure of social failure, not success” you are not welcome on this site.

It’s astonishing in a depressing sort of way that virtually all of the hard graft of investigating the lives of working class children and offering a measurable critique of what the state does is left to charities. Anyone who was at the Put People First demonstration will have noticed that the charities and NGOs have everything left organisations dream of. They know how to organise; they produce informative inventive publicity; they attract people with good social skills and dress sense who are angry with the world’s injustices. Now of course we can blame the conjuncture and everything else but the work that CPAG has done with this report should be a reminder that the left it just not rising to meet the challenge of this economic situation.