“We can make British poverty history, and we will make British poverty history,” said David Cameron back in 2007 – and he’s done it, just like that. Wave a magic wand, he and Iain Duncan Smith are abolishing child poverty as we know it. As an issue, poverty is to vanish, no longer a target or a word in the Conservative lexicon.

Other things will be targeted instead – worklessness, family breakdown, addictions, debt and educational success. In doublespeak, the very meaning of the word poverty disappears when to be poor no longer means to lack money. To be poor will from now on mean to fail, to be poor apologies for human beings, people in error, in need of correction not cash. That means 64% of children formerly known as poor will now vanish from the government’s reckoning because their families are not failing, but “hardworking” – just earning too little to keep afloat. Morally they are just fine, so they are no longer poor even if they queue at food banks at the end of the week.

No surprise at Duncan Smith deploying Jesuitical corkscrew arguments to duck the international measure of poverty. He and Cameron have spent the week softening up opinion for huge benefit cuts in next week’s budget, due to focus on tax credits, largely paid to in-work, ”hardworking” families, victims of Britain’s swelling ranks of the under-paid. Tax credits are a mechanism for redressing the fall in wages as a share of GDP over the last 15 years. With bogus indignation Cameron inveighed against the “merry-go-round” of tax credits – and indeed the state shouldn’t need to subsidise misery wages.

He may make a gesture by raising the minimum wage faster than inflation and call on kindly employers to offer a living wage. But remember this in next week’s budget: even if a living wage were imposed universally, tax credits would still be needed to keep those “living wage” families above poverty. The current living wage – £7.85 outside London – is calculated assuming current levels of tax credits. So when tax credits are cut, the living wage rate will need to rise by the same amount: 5.2 million people live below that level at the last count.

Cameron chooses a clever time to scorn the international poverty measure – people living at below 60% of a nation’s median income. That measure means that during recessions when the median falls, the number in poverty may fall too, without the poor being a penny better off. The latest poverty figures, for 2013/14, show that effect as poverty didn’t rise on that measure, with middling wages still depressed. But over any length of time, measuring how many people fall how far below a nation’s normal standard of living, the middle point, is essential to judge a society’s progress. What else is there? Measuring a British child against a Somalian?

64% of children formerly known as poor will vanish from the reckoning – their families aren't failing, but 'hardworking'

The Child Poverty Act, to be abolished, has four different ways to measure poverty. A more imaginatively graphic measure comes from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, using an annual opinion poll to ask the public what they regard as minimum necessities. The public regards two pairs of shoes, a winter coat, a one-week self-catering UK holiday and a birthday present costing £50 as essentials for children: fewer people reach this decency threshold than before the recession.

That’s what relative poverty means – not a dry statistic, but whether people have what are seen as essentials in an ever-changing society. The poor child is the one whose nose is pressed up against the window of what her classmates have – no holiday to talk about; no internet connection for homework; refusing invitations to parties because her family can’t afford a present; not going on school trips; tatty uniform that stands out from the rest; not affording a swim in the leisure centre, let alone a movie. Extensive reviews of the research show that, correcting for everything else, poverty itself – lack of money – harms the life chances of children, into adult life, as much as a bad education.

Once, David Cameron pretended to get it. In 2006 he said: “I want this message to go out loud and clear: the Conservative party recognises, will measure and will act on relative poverty. Poverty is relative – and those who pretend otherwise are wrong.” But now he too pretends otherwise. I was on a radio programme with him around that time, and he said he understood “a rising tide doesn’t raise all boats” and he said trickle down didn’t work. He even borrowed my name and imagery I used in my book Hard Work. In the long history of political fakery and mendacity, Cameron is the most effortlessly shameless practitioner – “no ifs and no buts”.

The bigger question is how far has his government succeeded in hardening public opinion against the poor and against any attempt to pull the bottom pulled upwards? Its campaign of vilification and deliberate misrepresentation of benefit spending has been effective, blaming the poor, not pay structures. Ed Miliband’s failure to make inequality an electoral winner may see Labour shy away from redistribution. But in the budget George Osborne may overreach himself by imposing such savage cuts on hardworkers that the public is repelled by such social injustice.