The Tories had a cheek last week when they gloated over Labour's failure to meet its target to take a million children out of poverty, as the first phase of its pledge to end child poverty by 2020.
No-one doubts that the Tories contributed to Britain's ugly inequalities.
No-one doubts that the Tories' weird claim - that the failure to fulfil the first, and easiest, phase shows the limits of the state - was just propaganda.
By pledging to end child poverty Labour was invoking the power of the state - even though 'the state' and 'equality' and 'redistribution' are purged from its vocabulary, they are the key to ending child poverty.
What does David Cameron's shadow cabinet mean when it invokes business and the voluntary sector as the best means to sort out child poverty? That means Victorian values - values that are as cold as charity.
The problem with this Government and its targets is that Downing Street is simultaneously grandiose and timid. It proclaims joined-up government but doesn't do joined-up government. Its noblest intentions are undermined by its ignoble aversions: Blair doesn't believe in consensus, he doesn't believe in redistribution of wealth and equality, he doesn't believe that the state can be our shared instrument for social solidarity.
That leaves the Government weak when a tipping point should tilt it in a more progressive direction. The reaction to the failure to meet the target implies that everyone wants it to succeed.
Child poverty is the fulcrum where so many inequalities meet: housing disadvantage, inaccessible and costly childcare, a minimum wage too low, the gender pay gap, mothers working part-time getting 40 per cent an hour less than full-timers, a low-wage, low-skill, low-investment labour market, and poor people who attract blame but no champions.
The next phase in the child poverty targets will be tougher than the first, which is why the Government needs more than a target, it needs a strategy.
Even if the prime minister doesn't read the papers or listen to his party, his Government should take heart: there is a consensus supporting the elimination of child poverty as a function of Government. So, the Government should mobilise that consensus to make it so.
