This is no country for children. Pious politicians pretend “children are our future”. But the UK seems to prefer its past. In rights and priorities, children are standing at the counter waiting to be served, as adults shove them out of the way, with a cascade of reports revealing our collective neglect of children.

The National Audit Office on Thursday reports on the crippled finances of local government, funding cut by half, despite skyrocketing demand for social services, especially for children. Vanishing early prevention with overstretched social workers causes an alarming rise in children in care reaching an unprecedented 72,670 last year. Every study shows why: poverty, lack of housing, neglected parental mental health.

Even the assumption that every child goes to school turns out to be wrong, as Ofsted warns today. It has no power to protect growing numbers of “home educated” children, who are sometimes either put into unregistered religious schools or simply abandoned. The government puts parents’ rights to “home school” before children’s rights, without protection from parents who may be psychotic, obsessive, cultish or religious sect-driven.

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But some of these disappeared children are simply dumped, says the Office of the Schools Adjudicator, finding schools “off-rolling” inconvenient children, telling their parents to home school under-achievers to keep up their league table results. One council area has “off-rolled” almost 2,000 children – inevitable, when the schools have become torture chambers for results, not places where children’s happiness comes first.

Wouldn’t you expect children’s mental health to be the top priority, catching problems early to escape a lifetime of suffering? Instead, they are waiting as long as 18 months for treatment: a promised guarantee of fast help won’t apply until 2021, if then. This is while self-harming rises and only 25% of children and young people in England who need treatment for their mental health are able to access it.

Benefits for 11 million families take yet another hit from April. The Resolution Foundation reports on Thursday that a couple with two children will lose £315, cuts far outweighing minimum wage rises. The Institute for Fiscal Studies finds that benefit cuts, freezes and the two-child limit will seeing child poverty hit a record 37% by 2022, life-chances diminished. That will reverse all the gains made in the last 20 years.

That’s the point. Children’s wellbeing is reversing, wherever you look. When the chancellor gloats next week that the budget is balanced, the deficit target hit, remember children contributed most.

Apologies for this long list of woe – but there is more: the vanished youth service and children’s centres, dwindling health visitors and school nurses. Ofsted hasn’t even visited 1,000 children’s centres for more than five years, so no one knows what’s left.

Here’s the big question: have we become a country that really, really doesn’t like children? That unwelcoming grudge is often reflected in punitive political attitudes: people shouldn’t have any children if they can’t afford them, the state shouldn’t have to support them. No wonder the entire social mobility commission resigned, exasperated by pious nonsense about “opportunity” from a government pulling the rug from under children’s chances.

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The great political divide is best reflected in approaches to children. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown directed all their redistribution towards children, in tax credits, Sure Start, free nurseries, schools, education maintenance allowances and the child trust fund to welcome every baby. They assumed that’s how voters’ hearts would be touched to make redistribution politically acceptable.

But the lack of indignation at how children have been treated since 2010 suggests that might be wrong. People would rather punish poor parents, even if it harms children. Widespread ignorant rejection of poverty statistics allows people to shrug off rising deprivation: “They’ve all got flatscreen TVs. Let them eat porridge.”

A Gradgrind exam factory school curriculum is what Tory voters want, so there’s political mileage in announcing yet tougher times-tables testing, to add to suffocating testing mania. This government senses a deep well of political support for being nasty to children. Are they right? It would take a great culture shift to put children first – but a country that did that, as the Nordics do, would feel better for everyone.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist