UP to three million children in the UK are at risk of waking up this morning with an empty feeling in their belly.

The number of children who are likely to be hungry, in our country, right at this moment, could fill the Riverside Stadium in Middlesbrough 100 times over.

This is the 21st century. We are supposedly a first world country, in the most technologically advanced civilisation the Earth has ever seen. Yet almost a third of our children don’t have enough food to eat.

I’m not plucking these figures out of the air, or using emotive figures from a charity in desperate need of extra donations.

A report from a cross-party group of MPs warned in April that one million children in receipt of free school meals, and a further two million with working parents, were at risk of hunger in the holidays.

We may have sleep-walked into this situation, as hatred whipped up against the poorest in society and an austerity-driven government has made cutbacks to benefits.

Foodbanks have become the norm. Harsh benefit sanctions have been well publicised but we are almost numb to the situation, unless you are at the receiving end of it.

But the future will judge us. Just as some of us, sitting in comfortable sofas with a fridge full of food, might think that it’s ok, because at least there are foodbanks. No-one is hungry in our green and pleasant land, we think. There are benefits for those who can’t be bothered to work, the readers of the right-wing press might think.

We might look back at the past, the Victorian era, and sit in harsh judgement over the chronic poverty of those at the bottom rung, and the chronic inequality in society, but 100 years from now our children and grandchildren will surely look at us and wonder how we let this happen.

When I was a child, hunger was something we associated only with third world countries, and we sent money and bought pop singles in an effort to help, and bemoaned how it could happen. Now hunger is on our doorsteps, we pass it every day on the street, or in our schools, and yet we are blinkered to it, even though it is there, silent, invisible, insidious.

What makes it worse it that two-thirds of these hungry children have parents who go to work every day. Unemployment is at its lowest in years, says the Government.

But when pay freezes are the norm, and tax credits are being replaced by Universal Credit, which in many cases means far less money than the system it is replacing, and people aren’t being given proper contracts, with sick pay or regular hours, then working for a living is far from a guarantee of security.

During the summer holidays, working parents struggle with childcare costs, and the children of those who struggle most do not have their free school meals, or breakfast clubs, to stave off hunger. A child’s football match in London had to be cancelled earlier this year because the players were too weak and hungry to play.

In a world where rents and bills are high, food is often the casualty in the monthly budget plan. Yet we are ruled by people who think nothing of spending £1,000 on a pair of leather trousers. I may be accused of political bias, of oversimplifying the problem, but I don’t think it gets much more tragically ridiculous than that.