Tory Education Secretary Damian Hinds is lamenting the fact that four and five-year-olds are entering school unable to speak in full sentences, unable to understand the language of the classroom, and not fully toilet trained.

The whole underlying unspoken trajectory of his speech is “blame the parents.”

But it’s poverty, Minister. In poverty you will find your root cause and in poverty your government is the cause. You simply cannot inflict eight years of the most severe cuts on the heads of the poorest in society without then seeing the culminating effect of those cuts on the weakest — children.

I have seen a mainly middle-class right-wing media debate until they are Tory blue in the face about “feckless parents, wasting money on flat-screen TVs” — yes, that old chestnut has been wheeled out again — “poor parents making poor lifestyle choices, poor parents not feeding their kids correctly” without even a hint of beginning to understand the lives of the poor, and indeed working poor, in Tory austerity Britain.

There are an estimated 128,000 children registered as living in bed and breakfast accommodation. This figure does not include children living in temporary accommodation or children forced to move house every six to 12 months under private landlords and insecure private tenancies. 

When my house was repossessed under Thatcher’s Britain in 1991, I lived in a B&B with two kids for three years. 

Each day is one of endless grinding poverty — queueing in housing departments to see housing officers, walking the streets to while away the time as you are only allowed inside your accommodation at certain times, having to eat all kinds of rubbish food as you do not have cooking facilities and spending money you don’t have on takeaways, going to the local swimming pool, as you know you can get a shower to yourself in peace and bathe the kids as the one in your B&B is shared with perhaps 20 other people. 

Thinking on your feet every day about your next move to secure a permanent home is draining. You worry about your child’s lack of space to play, so you make as much use of the local parks as you can.

To be frank, the cosy bedtime stories to your kids simply don’t enter your head as you are struggling to simply get through the next day.

Sure Start centres used to be a lifeline, as were libraries. Hinds needs to understand in his elite middle-class lifestyle that shutting Sure Start and closing libraries means poor children have the ladder cruelly pulled away from birth. 

I will always be eternally grateful to Sure Start and their staff when I was seriously ill for eight months after the birth of my youngest son.

They stepped in and secured a free nursery place for my third son who was only a year older than my newborn. 

They arranged for a community nurse to come in every day and attend to me, a home help for household chores, and they contacted my older sons’ school to get a local parent willing to collect them from primary school as my husband had to go back to work to support us. All notion of having time to educate my kids and do the things I usually did were out of the window while I recovered. Sure Start was my lifeline.

These life incidents happen to the poor, Mr Hinds. I am also the parent of a disabled child. Full-time carers of disabled children are not feckless. We are exhausted unappreciated slaves to the state which thinks £64 a week for a 35-hour working week minimum is adequate reward. If the minister would like to care for a disabled child for a month to see the realities, he is welcome.

The working poor parent or parents are working round the clock on unstable zero-hours contracts, wondering how to pay their rent and put food on the table. 

Coming home exhausted after a hard working day leaves little time to spend with your children. Your government, minister, is the architect of making poor working-class lives as unstable as possible. 

There was a time in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s when it was enough for one parent to work and pay bills while the other parent stayed at home for a child’s early, important and formative years. 

Your government has helped eradicate the choice to be able to do that. Is it any wonder therefore that four-year-olds’ attainment levels are not what they should be on school entry?

Councils having no choice but to close libraries due to severe slashing of funds under the David Cameron and Theresa May’s Tory regimes is an abomination. You may as well stand in front of poor children and their parents and rip up books. 

When parents are worrying over where the next meal is coming from, turning up at foodbanks in tears as they never thought life would come to this, buying books for their children doesn’t even figure on their list. 

Survival is uppermost in their minds. This is where libraries came into their own. They also teach children the basics of sitting down quietly in a children’s corner with a book in hand, even looking at pictures rather than reading. 

Now these libraries are closing down and teachers report that children cannot sit quietly and listen to a story being read as they have never been taught to be still and listen. 

In this technological age, the games console is the babysitter so not having something in their hands causes young children to be restless and fidget. Books are becoming relics of a past that young children were not part of, which is a sad indictment on society and on any government.

Soundbites from Hinds and his Tory brethren on “doing something” to get parents more involved with their child’s education and wellbeing only play to the gallery of right-wing media hysteria. 

How about a change of Tory policy to seriously improve the lives of the poor before complaining about how low children’s attainment on school entry is?

Treat the cause of the problem first, Mr Hinds, and then you will see the results you profess to be concerned about.