A recent UNICEF report into the condition of children and young people in the 22 most "advanced" economies in the world has ranked Britain at the bottom, just below the
Children in this country suffer more deprivation, worse relationships, more risk from drugs alcohol and unprotected sex than in any of the other rich nations.
16.2% of children are in poverty despite the fact that nine northern European countries have brought child poverty below 10%. In Britain 35.8% have been bullied in the past two months, and 35.3% of 15 years olds aspire to low skilled work.
Deprivation, in particular, has a series of knock-on effects. The report emphasised that "evidence from many countries persistently shows that children who grow up in poverty are more vulnerable ... more likely to be in poor health, have learning and behavioural difficulties, underachieve at become pregnant at too early an age, have low skills and aspirations, be low paid, unemployed and welfare dependent".
This tells us just about all we need to know about life in Blair's Britain. Labour staked its reputation on tacking child poverty, crime and education - the solutions to the last two are closely linked to the first.
This report also shames all those, including supposedly "left" union leaders, who place their faith in Brown's succession as Prime Minister. His decade-long, muchvaunted stewardship of the economy is, by definition, 100% responsible for this situation.
One might hope that in the face of this catastrophic failure described by Aynsford-Green, the government-appointed Children's Commissioner, as "a crisis at the heart of our society" there would at least be some attempt to address root causes.
This may be too much to expect from a Labour top brass that routinely faces down any responsibility for the slaughter of half a million Iraqis. But where's the rank and file revolt?
The underlying cause lies in the government's militant commitment to neo-liberal macro-economics.
Its stream of piffling initiatives, "policy units" and the like are a virtual irrelevance against the sledgehammer effect of ratcheting up inequality, entrenching class division and stripping away the welfare state.
Tragically the party has overwhelmingly allowed itself to be tied hook line and sinker to a cross-party and crossmedia consensus behind this economic trajectory. A radical break might pose a socialist alternative that places people before profit.
So the government was free to set the tone with its criminally complacent response -claiming the Unicef report was out of date, that huge numbers have been taken out of poverty and that it's all OK now since the passing of the Children's Act.
What is the argument? That in the last couple of years Britain has moved up and is now level pegging with the USA? The Children's Act may well be helping to highlight some of the important Life for the young can be great - as long as they are not British! issues. But like the Human Rights Act it has simply raised expectations that have then been crushed by the grinding inequality and authoritarianism of by government policy.
To suggest that things have moved on is a joke. In recent months Professor Rod Morgan walked out of his job heading the Youth Justice Board because he was disgusted at the continued imprisonment of thousands of children; major report ranked Britain top of the European child obesity league; there's an ongoing public debate about Britain's stubborn presence at the top of the European teenage pregnancy tables; and mediahyped anxiety about gang culture among urban youth has followed a spate of shootings in south London.
The main parties have vied with each other to blame single mums, errant dads, unmarried couples, unvetted child carers - anything that avoids the real issues at stake.
Blair's plaintive refrain has been to ask, "why some families fall through the net?" -blaming "dysfunctionality" and promoting pre-emptive intervention at birth into famflies that fall within stereotypical socially predictive factors.
The report paints a depressing picture of alienated young people struggling to find a way through a brutal social order.