A sign pinned to the door of my local food bank marked “Urgent!”, appealing for more food than normal, alerted me to the fact that the school holidays had started this week. For many parents, the summer holidays bring fresh challenges for meagre budgets. The Trussell Trust has just announced that during July and August last year, it handed out 4,412 more three-day emergency food parcels for children than during the previous two months. Close on half go to primary school pupils, and 27% to children, including babies, under the age of four. The long school holidays financially stretch families who are struggling to get by. Without free school meals, and with extra childcare costs, families who are just about staying afloat can barely keep from going under.

Holiday hunger has long been an issue, yet is worsening as austerity’s effects deepen. The all-party parliamentary group on hunger released a report earlier this year that was as devastating as it was damning. Many teachers reported children returning to school in September sluggish and visibly thinner. According to the report, a children’s football team in Lambeth, south London, who were taking part in a holiday football tournament had to drop out of the latter stages of the competition, as they had not eaten a meal in the days leading up to it. “Their bodies simply gave up on them,” it says, and they couldn’t make it through a game – many hadn’t eaten breakfast or a meal the day before, and some had only had an energy drink for breakfast.

Parents, too, are forced to take extreme measures. At food banks, I’ve met mothers who regularly skip meals, who have worked out the smallest number of calories they can get by on, or only eat what is left on their children’s plates. Trying to provide nutritious meals that also leave their children feeling full is also an issue: the MPs and peers’ report notes that many parents opt for cheaper, stodgy food simply to ameliorate their kids’ hunger and ensure they can play and sleep without gnawing hunger. The kind of junk food and sugary drinks found in takeaways that research this week shows are increasingly overrunning high streets in the poorest neighbourhoods.

The long-term prospects of children are being damaged through callousness and deep cuts to a welfare system

Lack of free school meals in the holidays are only part of the issue: while one million children receive free school meals, twice as many children in poverty are disqualified from free school meals as their parents are in work. More children in poverty now live in a working family than do not – 30% of children are now classified as poor, the highest level since 2010, with two-thirds of these in working families.While many families are struggling to provide extra meals, many more are struggling to provide extra childcare. When rent, bills and childcare costs are totted up, food is often the only place where margins can be cut.

The effect on children isn’t negligible. As a child in a single-parent family, I remember the stress of school holidays – the hunger, the feeling of being of a burden, the constant awareness of money and the sheer lack of it. Returning to school in September, the focus on new pencil cases and uniform, and then the class discussions of how you’d spent the holidays felt oppressive, even at the age of five. Some people had been on holiday, even abroad. What could you say, what could you write in your exercise book? That you’d dreaded each day and looked forward to the comforting routine of school and regular meals again, because you felt it would give your mother a break?

Austerity is often compared to a household budget by the economically illiterate: akin to belt-tightening in the short term, or even dieting for a planned holiday. But both analogies suggest an end in sight: growing up in poverty has no end goal, it’s simply ceaseless misery for children and adults alike. Going hungry affects children’s education, life chances, and even physical development: that alone should be an impetus to stamp it outin a purportedly developed country.

But hunger is greater than that, and will have a huge long-term effect on a generation. Poverty is psychological violence, and it is being inflicted on children on a mass scale, and will be forged in the memory of millions of citizens. Growing up poor robs people of their childhoods, damages confidence and self-worth, and has an irreparable effect on families. Teachers have told me of six-year-old children fainting in classrooms from hunger, and being forced to provide breakfast and even supper clubs because parents are hit by sanctions, the bedroom tax, and exorbitant rents.

Three-quarters of teachers report seeing children come to school unfed, and one in four have brought in food themselves for pupils. Yet a government manifesto pledge to give free breakfasts to all primary school children has been cancelled. The long-term educational prospects of children are being damaged through callousness and deep cuts to a welfare system that is designed to support those in need.

History will not be kind to either David Cameron or Theresa May when the social aspects of this era are scrutinised. Engineering asystem that adopts studied indifference to the suffering of millions of children, purely to maintain an ideological toughness on welfare is cruel, and shows not just a lack of empathy but a lack of basic humanity. No one should go hungry in one of the richest economies in the world, but the fact that as a country we cannot feed our children should spark a national outcry.

For those children going hungry this summer, and beyond, the memory will linger and it will alter their perceptions of themselves and the nation. In our bold Brexit future, Britain looks likely to be seen not as a country that nurtures its young, but one that starves them.