Here is cuddly, caring Dave Cameron lambasting Labour at the last Tory Party Conference before the 2010 General Election: "Don't you dare lecture us about poverty.

You have failed and it falls to us, the modern Conservative Party, to fight for the poorest who you have let down."

Today's Government poverty figures will tell a very different story, which is why ministers have been frantically spinning all week. The problem? These stats for 2010, based on internationally-accepted definitions of child poverty, provide a verdict on Labour's record before the Coalition cuts started to bite and they're pretty impressive. Despite a hiatus in 2008 during the banking crisis, the number of children taken out of poverty under Labour was around 900,000. A similar number were prevented from falling below the poverty line, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Though Labour missed its own 2010 interim target, it brought down child poverty further and faster than any other developed country and was on course to eliminate it altogether by around 2027.

Much of their achievement rested on introducing child tax credits and maintaining the value of other benefits, especially child benefit: redistribution on the quiet. The other big story was the number of poor parents, especially lone mothers, who joined the labour market. In 1997 only around 45% of single parents went out to work. By the time Labour left office it was 58%. Admittedly, Labour had the following wind of a growing economy.

Prepare to hear a lot of nonsense about today's figures. To attack poverty it is necessary to move the bottom of the income scale towards the middle. It is complicated by the fact that the middle also moves, so you have to improve the incomes of the poorest faster than "median" incomes. (That is the household in the middle of the row if you line up every UK family from the poorest to the biggest billionaire. Currently median family income is about £26,000. It's not the same as the average, which is easily distorted by rises in top pay.) Families are judged to be in poverty if their income is less than 60% of median income.

Those, like Iain Duncan Smith's so-called Centre for Social Justice who say basically that the poor will always be with us, are deliberately conflating average (mean) with median. The examples of Sweden and Norway, where child poverty has been virtually eliminated, prove them wrong.

What's happening now? Try looking up the Child Poverty Action Group's new report, Ending Child Poverty by 2020: Progress Made and Lessons Learned, out this week. It summarises the current situation and makes some depressing projections, using mainly IFS figures. These suggest that child poverty is rising steeply once more as benefit cuts kick in, wages stall and underemployment (those working part-time because they can't get full-time work) spirals. The best estimate is that even after some children benefit from the introduction of Universal Credit, child poverty will have risen by 500,000 by 2016 and, without drastic policy changes, 800,000 by 2020. In other words, the Coalition will have wiped out virtually all Labour's heavy lifting in this area, despite legislation legally obliging government to tackle it.

The Coalition's response has been to attempt to move the goal posts by accusing Labour of "focusing too narrowly on income", as if it didn't matter. Instead ministers serve up variants on the Victorian tactic of blaming poverty on the poor. So we have Eric Pickles offering local authorities back a small portion of the millions cut from their budgets if they will tackle the bad habits of 120,000 "troubled families". Yesterday it was the turn of Chris Grayling on mandatory work activity schemes to force the indolent into work, so perpetuating the myth that there are plenty of jobs and the unemployed are all slackers.

Backed by asections of the press that have endlessly peddled scrounger mythology, the Government thinks it can get away with it. Recent opinion polls suggest they're wrong. Thank God.