There is only one cure for poverty and that is social mobility. The problem is that school life and home life for many of our young people means they will never get out of poverty.

Cultural poverty is bred into them. And much of it flows from all the concessions and supports that the well-intentioned social engineers, government ministers and educators have foisted upon some of our poorest.

The worst thing for social mobility is social security. It puts a glass ceiling over the abilities and aspirational skills of the parents, which can only affect the ability of their children to get out of poverty.

The second worst must be the watering-down of education into almost a warm, insipid soup – where education in some ways tries to make up for the social limitations that the children live under. School teachers become social workers in microcosm.

Schools become last-ditch refuges where some sense can be made for our troubled children. The education of our poorest children suffers, then, because teachers are too tied up with just keeping children in line.

But the third and most difficult cause to address is the destruction of social cohesion in families. The ever-greater encroachment of consumerism is a pallid replacement for the real needs of growing children. Children are reduced to appetites. Even among the poorest families, their desires and ambitions are corrupted through TV and other media by the constant entreatries and blandishments of the marketplace.

Even the poorest must aspire to a cell phone and designer trainers. Even the poorest must wish themselves into a haven of commodity plenty. They have no role to play other than to consume.

The end result is the destruction of children as part of society; they are broken off into a separate part of the community. From birth until they leave home, they are reduced to being mouths, forever demanding attention, rather than allowed to grow up and have a real role in family life. They are turned into a gap between birth and work, and nothing can be more damaging to their sense of wellbeing.

Why is it that the US and the UK are so bad at creating social opportunity and mobility for their poorest? Largely because of the interface between welfare and consumerism.

Welfare has been so distorted in these two economies into a badge of dishonour. It is not the hopeful thing it was invented to be. Instead of supporting, it impedes.

The usual rightwing response is to damn and condemn the poor for their inability to rise. The usual liberal response is to place impediments in the way of the poor growing into independent people, and thereby condemning their children to social impoverishment.

If we wish to break the shackles that keep our poor poor, then we need to liberate them from dependency. And that cannot be done with welfare that breaks their spirit and imprisons their children.

We need a new welfare: a welfare that enables our children to fare well so they can say farewell to welfare. And we need to keep the abusive marketplace of unchecked consumerism out of our children's lives as much as possible.

We owe it to the poorest in society to give them the encouragement of becoming independent, so that they can choose to live their lives the way they wish – rather than the way it has been foisted upon them.