What a budget! A sugar rush of spend, spend, spend. Ed Balls on steroids! The Tory press and even the toughest of fiscal hard-nuts on the Conservative benches whooped it up. How they would have excoriated a Labour chancellor splurging a fraction of those sums. But that’s politics. Labour looked on grim-faced as its Keynesian message of the last decade had finally persuaded the benches opposite.

Every platitude says children are our future, yet four in 10 growing up poor will blight future generations

However, the one-day-wonder ker-ching of Treasury tills ringing will mean little if it’s not seen and felt. By and large it won’t be. The underlying economic forecast of the Office for Budget Responsibility is “incredibly grim” says the Resolution Foundation, “the worst on record”. Even without counting in the impact of Covid-19, the lack of growth will hit the average household by £300 this year, £600 by mid-parliament.

The billions promised in capital investment? It merely returns to spending levels of 10 years ago – but without repairing the lasting damage of that lost decade. Besides,few people will see the effects any time soon: it takes an average of 14 years to plan and build a bypass, says Torsten Bell, the foundation’s chief executive.

As the Rishi Sunak stardust settles, Labour will not lack for strong critiques of this government’s bad choices. The past decade will not vanish down a memory hole: its effects remain in every public service. Austerity is far from over: this spending will reverse only a quarter of the decade’s cuts in every department (except NHS, defence and foreign aid, always more protected). Transport remains cut by half since 2010, local councils on their knees after 30% losses.

But look what this budget has done to people, to ordinary families. While firms were rightly protected from Covid-19 bankruptcy with £5bn, households get just £1bn to help them through this crisis. No statutory sick pay for two million low earners, leaving them to the un-tender mercy of universal credit, with its five-week wait and means testing. While Ireland raised sick-pay rates, Britain’s stays at a miserly £94.25 a week, so typical employees lose two-thirds of their pay – hardly an inducement to breadwinners to stay in self-isolation.

The charm of Sunak’s largesse may not strike all those who have been deliberately disregarded: all low-earners who draw any benefits. The 20% poorest households have already lost an average £2,900 from George Osborne’s 2015 cuts. They may not know it yet, but they are about to be hit with another £900 in cuts from his miserable legacy, still to come.

Without a change of heart, under Sunak and Johnson the proportion of children in poverty will, shamefully, reach 40%, despite most of their parents working. Raising the minimum wage will barely help them as they lose 63p in credits for every extra £1 they earn. Imagine the outrage if the top rate of tax was lifted to that same 63%.

Who cares? The Tories have won four elections without most voters giving a damn. But here’s one reason for the prime minister to think again: the main losers among families still due to move on to universal credit are clustered in the north, the Midlands and Wales – many more than London and the south-east. (Perversely, it hits those with lower housing costs harder.) The problems with universal credit multiply: remember, this brainchild of Iain Duncan Smith was due to be rolled out, done and dusted by 2013. This embarrassing tilt against the north and Wales may cause the government to think again. If the Department for Work and Pensions ploughs on regardless, that blue wall may shift red again.

An end to austerity? It’s a nice line – but one budget can’t undo the damage | Simon Wren-Lewis Read more

But the unpleasant conundrum remains: why don’t British voters care about children? Every platitude says they are our future, yet four in 10 growing up poor will blight future generations. These are not “other” – they are far too many to dismiss as some convenient notion of an “underclass”. They have lost out in school funding, with 16-to-18 education especially severely cut, and in many other aspects of their lives. Further education only gets lip service: a little spending spread over five years, but nothing to raise up the half not heading for university, nothing to solve the productivity crisis largely due to a cripplingly underskilled nation.

This government’s vision of the future embraces only a few of the hyper-brained in the research and development crowd. Forget all the rest of our children, dismissed by No 10 chief adviser Dominic Cummings as genetically intellectually inferior.

For Labour, here’s the question: can a new leader turn the government’s neglect of the nation’s children into successful electoral politics? New Labour managed it, with the “Education, education, education” battle cry: with 3,500 Sure Starts, with benefits that cut child poverty by a million and services to lift their prospects. If a spirit of optimism in the future is what wins elections, start here, with the Tories’ abandoned children.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist