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Everything Britain stands for - hard work, independence of spirit, savings and compassion for children - is about to be undermined by George Osborne’s tax credit cuts that will plunge almost another million families into poverty.

When the number of British girls and boys in poverty is now projected to rocket from 2.3million two years ago to 3.9million by 2020 and reach a level far in excess of any other time during the past 50 years, you could be forgiven for asking: Why take it out on the children?

Children are not to blame for their hardship if they are born into a poor family.

They are our future - the scientists, engineers, computer whizz-kids and carers of the coming generation - and every child should have the best start in life. That’s only fair.

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These figures are as staggering as they are frightening – and more than most of today’s poor are in working families where even after labouring all hours they cannot make ends meet.

They are the breadwinners on breadcrumbs. So seriously Mr Osborne, don’t take it out on the family.

Poverty used to have an old face.

But tax credits gave a big boost to poor pensioner incomes in the past 20 years, and lifted two million out of poverty before 2010.

Since the New Deal, around the turn of the century, unemployment in Britain has been much lower than the rest of Europe.

So the majority of the poor are no longer in families where the father or mother is out of work.

The new and biggest group of poor families are in the traditional working family, single-earner couples where the father or mother is working and the other stays at home devoting all their time to care for the kids but they cannot make ends meet on the weekly wages the head of the household brings in.

(Image: Getty Images)

And perhaps even more frightening: a new phenomenon is developing, hitting hard the group called the millennials, men and women now in their 20s, born around 1990, when the Cold War ended.

Because their wages are low and stagnant and their rents or mortgage costs are high, they are officially the new poor.

Exactly 30 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women employees in their 20s have incomes below the living wage and the minute they have their first child they are plunged deep into poverty.

READ MORE:George Osborne under pressure to reveal how tax credit cuts will affect hard working families

Now Britain is about to have one of the biggest poverty problems in the western world and it is government-induced poverty stemming from the Conservatives .

Child Benefit – frozen for three years after 2010 and now frozen yet again is projected to lose a quarter of its value by 2020.

(Image: TIM ANDERSON)

According to a Child Poverty Action Group survey child benefit for your first boy or girl covered 14 per cent of the cost of raising a child.

By 2020 when child benefit will be only 1.6 per cent higher than in 2010, child benefit will cover less than 10 per cent.

Quite simply child benefit cannot contribute enough to the costs of a child and is probably now worth only half of what was originally intended.

And on top of this the Osborne tax credit cuts hurt low income families with children.

They also penalise second earners, make it more difficult for single parents to go to work and overall destroy work incentives.

(Image: PA)

I am not alone in my fears about this work penalty.

For example the right-wing Adam Smith Institute states: “Working tax credits are the best form of welfare we have and cutting them would be a huge mistake.”

And look across the Atlantic to the USA. Are the right wing trying to rid themselves of tax credits? Like hell they are.

Their tax credit was introduced by a Republican president, championed by Ronald Reagan, and the current Republican candidates in the USA - from Donald Trump to Jeb Bush - are vying with each other to praise what they call their ‘earned income tax credit’.

And no phasing in, no temporary halt or slower pacing of the implementation of the Osborne tax credit proposals will make a fundamental attack on the working poor and on children much fairer.

(Image: Getty)

Why? Because the reforms arise from wrong assumptions – that we have a Britain divided between strivers and skivers.

They are founded on wrong claims – that the majority of our poor are work-shy and live in chaotic families.

They are based on the wrong prescription – that you make Britain more prosperous on the backs of hurting the working poor.

Indeed they come out in the wrong century – more akin to Victorian times.

The real problem George Osborne should be dealing with is the lack of well-paid paying jobs in advanced economies such as ours.

Because of changes in technology, traditional jobs have gone – everything from clerks, secretaries, typists, and bank tellers to boilermakers.

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There are far more low skilled jobs that command less earning power (half the low paid are in retail, social care and hospitality) and insufficient opportunities to progress into better jobs.

And for many low-paid workers who would do longer hours to boost their take-home pay, the extra hours are simply not on offer.

I have looked at all ways of making it possible for families with children to make ends meet in the jobs they are in.

I find that introducing a living wage , while cutting tax credits, will still leave millions in poverty.

The Tories propose £9 an hour for over 25s but only by 2020 and only if the Low Pay Commission agrees.

(Image: REUTERS/Neil Hall)

It would need a minimum wage 30% higher at £12 an hour in 2020 for families with two children, in the absence of tax credits, to keep them out of poverty.

And it would take a £14 an hour minimum wage for families with three children.

That’s why the only way to tackle family poverty is combining a high living wage with child benefit and tax credits.

Three alternatives are mooted to tax credits - a negative income tax, citizens’ income and raising personal tax allowances - but each of them are far more costly than keeping child tax credits which are better targeted on helping poor children in working families.

And so if the current or pending proposals penalise work and penalise families – and are against everything Britain stands for – it’s not enough to massage them with a few amendments.

They are a mistake, root and branch, and in the interests of Britain’s hard working families and their children the Autumn Statement on November 25 has to see them abandoned once and for all.