Child poverty is the “new normal” in parts of Britain. That’s according to findings released today by the End Child Poverty coalition, a group of more than 70 leading charities and organisations, who have tracked the huge rise in child poverty since 2010. More than half of children are now living in poverty in some constituencies in the country, with the fastest rises hitting the poorest areas. The London borough of Tower Hamlets, for example, even has the majority of its infants in hardship (56.7%).

This is as shameful as it gets. Children scavenging in bins to eat discarded apple cores for breakfast. Headteachers finding their primary school pupils sleeping rough on a mattress with their parents after being evicted. Forget a few extreme cases, in many areas growing up in poverty is not the exception – it’s the rule.

The government’s own analysis shows the scale of this: since austerity was rolled out at the start of the decade, half a million more children in this country are living lives blighted by poverty.

And yet despite copious evidence of increasing hardship, the Conservatives have made an art out of spinning it. Talk about the disgraceful rise in food banks in recent years and a former “welfare” minister will say it’s because there will always be “demand for free goods”.

Ministers quote record employment figures as the default response to any news of struggling parents, knowing full well that two-thirds of children in poverty are from working families. Meanwhile, the Treasury puts any suffering of the poorest down to “tough economic choices”, despite managing to find money for generous tax cuts for the most affluent families.

This denial and distortion is rarely more blatant than when it comes to growing child poverty. It often resorts to technicalities – say, disputing the methods researchers use. Well, this latest study uses one of the most sophisticated methods for estimating child poverty, employing a statistical technique favoured by the Office for National Statistics and the World Bank. Charities aren’t measuring “the right” sort of poverty, some then say – for example, relative rather than absolute. There is good reason to believe relative poverty matters: it compares a household’s income with the current incomes of other households, thereby arguably giving a more accurate picture of what life is like now (even if your weekly income hasn’t gone down since 2010, it may no longer meet today’s living costs). But ministers can no longer cling to this distinction: as well as vast increases in relative terms, the number of children in absolute poverty increased by 200,000 in 2017-18.

Caught even on their own preferred measure, no amount of obfuscation can hide the fact more and more children are now without the basics for living. Similarly, how we got here is just as indisputable. Between 1997 and 2010, it’s estimated the Labour government’s targeted investment lifted 900,000 children out of poverty. In contrast, a decade of spending cuts by the coalition onwards has seen deep retrenchment of support for children, from the hollowing out of benefits, the child social care system, to youth services – all at a time when wages went through their biggest squeeze in modern times and a housing crisis saw private rents soar. Just as we know the good that comes from redistributing funding towards low-income families, we know the misery that comes from abandoning them.

As cabinet Brexiteers talk up global Britain, the reality is a nation in decline, in which one of the richest societies that has ever existed seemingly cannot even feed its own children. The spread of child poverty is the particularly cruel face of an ever struggling society; the Nobel prize-winning economist, Angus Deaton, warned this week that rising inequality risks Britain becoming one of the most unequal nations on earth. Hope is going to be integral to turning this around – the belief that change is entirely possible, that mass poverty in a wealthy developed country is not somehow inevitable.

But that must go hand in hand with being unflinching about what we’re up against.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that 37% of children will be living in relative poverty by 2022 if current policies continue, more than reversing all the progress made over the past 20 years. The Conservatives, for their part, risk nose-diving the nation into further austerity, with any forthcoming leadership battle likely to be dominated by the ideological small state zealotry of the party’s hard right.

Unless we change course, the lasting impact is clear – greater inequality, poorer health and outcomes, and successive generations of children scarred by poverty. If this is the “new normal”, Britain should be ashamed.

• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist