Soon more British children will be poor than since records began, back in 1961. In four years, progress will be reversed and all the good that was done undone. Over a million more will be plunged below the decency threshold.

For 37% of children to be brought up poor is a national humiliation. Any politician boasting pride in “British tolerance” should include our remarkable tolerance of poverty, which exceeds all similar European countries. This is who we are and what we expect, so today’s chilling report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies didn’t make it into this morning’s BBC news bulletins. Sex and Brexit obsess us, while poverty is just normal Britishness.

Osborne and Duncan Smith targeted the poorest, and the same families were struck down by cuts time and again

It doesn’t have to be this way. This is a political decision, supported by enough voters. Since George Osborne’s 2010 budget, virtually every hammer-blow of austerity has fallen on those with least. To be sure, by sleight of hand, flat inequality figures have until now disguised what was happening. But as benefit cuts cleave through to the marrow, another 7% of children will be deliberately made poor. More people are in work than for many a year – but never in modern times have so many been paid so relatively little, with families still poor and reliant on benefits even when both parents work.

Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith, given cover by the Liberal Democrats, targeted the poorest, and the same families were struck down by benefit cuts and freezes time and again. Housing benefit cuts and the bedroom tax drive many from their homes, continually moving schools, moving further from family and friends as rents rise above benefits. With the loss of education maintenance allowance for teenagers, shrinking child benefit, the two-child limit, the tax credit freeze, thousands of mobility cars taken from families with a disabled child and monstrous work capability tests harrying the sick and mentally ill, the same families are hit again and again.

Services offering help are vanishing: more than a thousand children’s centres are gone, and closures are accelerating. The youth service has all but disappeared. Social workers can only cover extreme crises. Citizens advice bureaus lose funding everywhere, with councils, cut by over 40%, unable to pay for them. Health visitors are spread more thinly than ever, with school nurses lucky to serve no more than 10 large schools each. Without help for families, there was a shocking 24% increase in multiple tooth extractions under anaesthetic for children under four last year, to 84,086. The only flourishing service is food banks.

The Financial Times reports that the chancellor will stick to his spending cap. With NHS, social care, police, prisons, councils, schools and more at breaking point, who expects poor children to be his surprise priority? This is who we are, the country we choose to be, dominated by foghorns of the right for ever telling of benefit cheats and welfare fraud (minuscule compared with tax evaders). Perhaps there is no national “we”, just a deep split between the mean-minded and those horrified to live in a country with a widening chasm between the haves and have-nots.

At last British Social Attitudes research shows some softening of hearts, more willingness to pay tax, less suspicion of benefit cheating. We are less generous and empathic than our EU neighbours – but after all these harsh years, there are signs attitudes are thawing. But no sign of shame from this government.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist