“Paint over Mickey Mouse
Burn Where the Wild Things Are
Pulverise the Lego
Set fire to the Christmas tree star.
Seize all the teddies.
Bury every skipping rope
Paint the walls dark brown
Abolish all hope.”
That’s a poem just written by that wise and beloved children’s champion, Michael Rosen, in response to the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick. It’s a “Stop all the clocks” for children, and a retort to Jenrick’s order to staff at an asylum seeker reception centre for children to black out Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh murals.
Staff at the Kent intake unit resisted, but Jenrick was reportedly adamant, to make clear, he said, that this was a “law enforcement environment” and “not a welcome centre”, doggedly mimicking his boss, Suella Braverman.
Here was performative politics for imagined rightwing voters, but even they may have blenched, like many of his own MPs. There was little danger of this unit becoming a welcome centre, since its last inspection report found the toilets “unacceptably dirty” with a “too limited” range of toys for young children and “little reading material”.
A Tory minister going to war with Mickey Mouse is pitch-perfect political imagery for the ending of their era. May he be greeted forever by people wearing Mickey Mouse ears. Philip Pullman tweeted: “Cold, cruel, the act of a soul that’s shrivelled and mean to its core.” Stephen Kinnock, the shadow migration minister, said: “All they have left is tough talk and cruel and callous policies,” as the story flew around the world to shame us all yet again.
So Jenrick enters the firmament of infamy reserved for politicians who occasionally leap out of the ranks of obscurity into the history books as the perfect emblem of their political times. Ann Widdecombe was one, when she sprang to notoriety as prisons minister for shackling female prisoners to iron bedsteads with handcuffs and chains as they gave birth: the image resonated because it so perfectly captured her party’s punitive politics.
Jenrick’s vileness reverberates because he is not some maverick child-cruncher, but an emblem of a government that has, for utterly bewildering reasons, deliberately focused its austerity on families and children. They have borne the brunt, not by accident, but with intent. Naturally, migrant children are the top target (unless they die in the sea when ministers shed a waterfall of crocodile tears). The sinister disappearance of asylum children, probably stolen, from hotels where they were dumped would normally see any civilised government set off a hue and cry to find their fate. But since British-born children receive similar negligence, it’s no surprise that didn’t happen: rising numbers of children in care are being dumped far away into profiteering homes in cheap and deprived areas.
Let’s riffle through government priorities of these past 13 years, to show this is not hyperbole. However hard the times, you might expect any civilised society to put children first, yet time and again they come last.
Within a stricken NHS, maternity services have suffered especially badly; a third of health visitors are gone; and even in mental health, child and adolescent services have the longest waits.
They might call this austerity’s accidental collateral damage, but benefits policy deliberately impoverishes children. George Osborne led the charge with benefit cuts that stripped £37bn mostly from families. His two-child limit on benefits deprived parents of £2,800 for a third child, and pushed 1.1 million more children into poverty, making a total of 4.2 million last year. His benefit cap crushes those in high-rent areas. The acid tone was set by David Cameron in 2012, saying: “Quite simply, we have been encouraging working-age people to have children and not work.”
Labour lifted 800,000 children out of relative poverty, but if the Tories are still in power by 2027 they will wipe out the last of that gain, says the Resolution Foundation. One totemic result will last: British children have shrunk in height in relation to those in similar countries.
Here’s another effect: the birth rate rose in Labour years, when babies were welcomed with a child trust fund at birth and with 3,500 Sure Start centres, now mostly gone or radically reduced. But since 2012, births have plummeted by an alarming and economically harmful 12.2%. Children have become unaffordable to a generation that is worse off than their parents at baby-producing age, now spending a third of their wages on nurseries, with lower incomes, higher rents and heavy debt.
Look what else children have lost since 2010. Places to play are degraded by £330m cuts to parks’ upkeep, often leaving wrecked playgrounds. More than 700 community football pitches have gone, along with 200 school playing fields sold off and 400 swimming pools closed. Nearly 800 libraries have gone, those havens for children on winter days. In culturally depleted schools, cuts in arts teachers has left a 40% fall in students taking any GCSE arts.
All this had already happened when the pandemic struck: children paid the Covid price, locked in and shut out of school, not to save themselves but the lives of older people. Where’s the gratitude for all they lost? Families had £20 ripped off their universal credit as soon as it was over; today’s Resolution Foundation report shows that that helped to tip another 100,000 people into absolute poverty. My triple-locked generation just got a 10% pension rise, while children’s overworked and under-staffed teachers are offered 4.3%. This is the political background to Jenrickism, the anti-child core of his government, ingrained deep in their nature.
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
