Homes without heating, tables without food. Grinding child poverty in Britain calls for anger – and a plan | Gordon Brown

There are things ministers must do but also actions we can take to help fellow citizens. Both are now essential

Even if the government issued newspaper editors with D-notices banning any public mention of the word poverty", it could hardly do more to create a wall of silence around Britain's biggest social crisis. By eliminating any ministerial admission of our deepening poverty epidemic from public discourse, it has left Britain with a hidden emergency whose forgotten and voiceless victims are the hundreds of thousands of children behind closed doors, in bedrooms without beds, homes without heating and kitchen tables without food, and whose suffering is worsening by the day.

Since the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, people across Britain have been asking why it took so long for the government to exonerate innocent post office operators who faced such appalling treatment. In years to come, I believe, people will be asking how it was that government walked by on the other side when thousands of children were suffering abject deprivation, and failed to support them in their hours of need.