Spot the difference. In Manchester, a 14-year-old girl begging on the street is rewarded with a few coins from Ed Miliband.

In London, a seven-year-old street urchin sits destitute on a pavement, desperate for charity.

Both images appeared in yesterday’s Daily Mail. What separates them is over 100 years.

The picture of the beggar in Manchester was taken a few days ago. The grainy black-and-white photo of a young girl and her one-year-old sister in Spitalfields dates from 1913.

Spot the difference: Photographs of the Spitalfield Nippers were taken in London 100 years ago. This image, of Labour leader Ed Miliband awkwardly averting the gaze of a 14-year-old street beggar, was taken this week

Rebeca State, seen rattling her cup at the Labour leader, hails from Romania. (Perhaps she’s got a brother called Welfare.) She tells reporters that she is forced to live on the £5 a day she ‘earns’ as a beggar. She came here with her parents two years ago, but they have since returned home to care for a sick relative.

Rebeca lives with her aunt, mother-of-nine Livia Stoica, in the Levenshulme area of Manchester. She doesn’t attend school. A visibly embarrassed Miliband dropped ‘60p or 70p’ into her cup, but couldn’t look her in the eye.

No wonder. The story behind this photograph sums up the grotesque farce which underpins modern Britain’s welfare and immigration policies, foisted upon us by bien pensant politicians like Miliband.

Before World War I, the ‘Spitalfields Nippers’ had no option other than to scavenge on the streets. They endured grinding poverty, unimaginable today. It was what the welfare state was designed to eradicate.

There is no need for anyone to beg in Britain in 2014. Yet our city centres teem with beggars, many of them seemingly from Eastern Europe. It is a direct consequence of Labour opening our borders to millions of migrants from former Communist states.

While most people come here to work in low-paid jobs, there is also a hard-core criminal element.

Last year, Home Secretary Theresa May told EU ministers that migrants were travelling to Britain to ‘beg and steal’ on the streets.

Her words, not mine.

Roma gypsies are the worst offenders. Begging is what they do for a living. Who says beggars can’t be choosers?

We’ve seen them in Central London, camped out in shop doorways and using Hyde Park as a latrine. It’s their culture, innit. All part of celebrating diversity.

Manchester has been plagued by Romanian beggars for years. Some of them don’t even bother with a begging bowl, they simply invite passers-by to throw money into a suitcase.

Point this out, however, and you’ll be howled down as a ‘racist’ by assorted Guardianistas and their allies at the BBC. They simply refuse to face up to the disastrous consequences of their devotion to welfarism and mass immigration.

Sealed away in their cosy metropolitan bubble, they rarely, if ever, come into contact with reality. That’s why Miliband was so uncomfortable.

He looked as if he wanted the pavement to open up and swallow him.

You could almost hear the cogs in his head revolving in competing directions at breakneck speed. What should he do?

Begging is a criminal offence. But if he didn’t give this poor girl some money, he could appear heartless. And as she was so obviously a member of a ‘vulnerable’ ethnic minority he couldn’t ignore her.

I don’t suppose it occurred to him for a moment to wonder what she was doing there in the first place.

Where were her parents? Why wasn’t she at school? To ask any of these awkward questions would probably have constituted a breach of her ‘human rights’. So Miliband averted his gaze and lobbed a few coins in her direction.

Fortunately, journalists aren’t quite so cowed. Awkward questions are what we ask for a living.

As a result we know that Rebeca says she doesn’t go to school because her parents don’t have a fixed address in Britain. Yet she lives with an aunt who sells the Big Issue and receives £550 a week in welfare benefits.

Miliband looked so uncomfortable when he came into contact with the teenager, it was as if he wanted the pavement to open up and swallow him

She’s a 14-year-old girl begging on the streets. So why hasn’t she come to the attention of the police or social services?

If Rebeca was British, she’d have been taken into care by now and her parents or guardian would have been prosecuted for child neglect.

We’ve got middle-class mums and dads being fined for taking their kids out of school for a few days in term-time to beat the half-term holiday air fares rip-off.

Why hasn’t Rebeca’s aunt had a knock on the door from the authorities? Why is she sending out her niece to beg?

Livia Stoica ‘works’ as a Big Issue seller, a racket which allows immigrants to obtain a National Insurance number and thus qualify for benefits. When John Bird launched the Big Issue two decades ago it was a commendable initiative to encourage the homeless to break out of a cycle of dependency. Now it’s being exploited by migrants as a gateway to welfare.

This one photograph goes to the very heart of the current debate about open borders in Europe and entitlement to benefits.

Belatedly, under pressure from Ukip, David Cameron is facing up to the problem. But the smug political class would rather it wasn’t discussed at all.

Politicians from the three main parties have lied and dissembled about immigration for years. And until Iain Duncan Smith courageously grasped the nettle, they were content to carry on shovelling unlimited amounts of free money to claimants from all over the world, regardless of merit.

Please don’t misinterpret this as a cruel attack on a helpless 14-year-old girl. Rebeca State is as much a product of her background and contemporary society as the Spitalfields Nippers street urchins a century ago.

She shouldn’t be there. She should be in school. In Romania.

The blame for her plight lies squarely with British politicians such as Miliband and the last Labour government, of which he was a member.

There can be no more damning indictment of seven decades of welfarism than the fact that 100 years since the abject poverty of the Spitalfields Nippers was captured on camera, we still have children begging on our streets as a direct consequence of policies deliberately pursued by our own government.

Miliband isn’t the only politician who should hang his head in shame.

Former Labour Treasury Minister Joel Barnett has died aged 91

Former Labour Treasury Minister Joel Barnett has died aged 91 after enjoying a brief return to the limelight during the Scottish independence referendum.

He was the man who invented the Barnett Formula, which allocates a disproportionate amount of taxpayers’ money to Scotland.

He always insisted that it was only supposed to get Labour through the 1979 general election. But it persists to this day.

The Barnett Formula is often spoken of in the same breath as the West Lothian Question, the unfairness of Scottish MPs being allowed to vote on purely English affairs.

Both of these issues were allegedly going to be addressed in the wake of the ‘No’ vote, with even more powers being devolved to Edinburgh.

But the collapse of Labour north of the border has led to a resurgence of SNP fortunes. And now Alex Salmond is suggesting — only partly mischievously, I suspect — that a future Labour government at Westminster, without a majority in England, could be propped up in coalition by the nationalists.

So after Devo Max for Scotland we could end up with West Lothian Max ruling England.

What on earth would Joel Barnett have made of it?

To prevent any more MPs being prosecuted for fraud, all their expenses claims over three years old have been shredded for ‘data protection reasons’.

That’s right up there with ‘the dog ate my homework’. But it also means that some MPs who fiddled thousands of pounds will escape justice.

Who came up with the three-year cut off? The Inland Revenue insists that taxpayers keep records going back seven years.

Yet another example of one rule for politicians and another for the rest of us.

Russia Today, a Kremlin-backed rolling ‘news’ channel, has launched in Britain. Lead presenter is someone called Bill Dod (me neither) who apparently once worked for Anglia TV and has since carved out a career in ‘corporate television’, whatever that is.

Somehow, I don’t think Dod is the big name they were hoping to hire.

If you look at the way the Russians throw money around (think Roman Abramovich at Chelsea) you would have expected them to aim higher.

Imagine President Putin’s orders: ‘Now then, comrades, we need a star name for the launch of our new TV station in Britain. Money no object.’

It's a pity something got lost in translation - Doddy reading the news on Russia Today would have been a hoot

‘There’s a popular television personality called Dodd, tovarich. The British people love him. He can go on for hours without a break.’

‘He sounds perfect!’

Unfortunately, something must have got lost in translation and they ended up with Bill Dod, not Ken Dodd.

Which is a pity, since Doddy reading the news on Russia Today would have been a hoot.

‘Good evening, everybody. Doddski here! I’d like to say how tickled I am, missus. We’ve got a tattifilarious programme for you tonight. First, the headlines.

‘In Knottyashgrad, Siberia, Diddy Men loyal to President Putin have met record production targets in the chip butty mines . . .’

Britain’s first national sperm bank has opened for business in Birmingham. Let’s hope it’s better run than the other banks and doesn’t have to be bailed out by taxpayers.