A NEW front in the battle against child poverty will be opened up today, apparently – but I fear the war has already been lost. Ministers are due to publish a new strategy aimed at lifting more youngsters above the breadline, as they are required – by a Labour law – to do, every few years.

Help in the pipeline for the poorest families includes cuts to bills for energy, water and food, plus more free school transport, affordable homes and credit unions.

The backdrop could not be more serious for the Government, after the extraordinary attack by Church leaders who condemned the misery caused by harsh benefit cuts. More than 40 bishops and other clergy accused the Coalition of creating hardship and hunger, in an echo of their landmark 1980s attack on the Thatcher Government.

Indeed, considering the words of the Bishop of Bradford – the Government is “prepared for people to starve and become destitute”

– our Church leaders seem angrier than ever. However, the Bishops ain’t seen nothing yet, if the respected independent forecasts for the impact of many more years of austerity are to be believed.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), an extra 400,000 children will be plunged into poverty by 2016 and a mindblowing 900,000 by 2021, on current policy.

There’s no great mystery about this looming disaster. It’s the inevitable consequence of steep cuts to benefits, tax credits and public services on which the poorest families depend.

But the depressing reality is that it would wipe out all the gains made in the last decade, when 900,000 children were lifted out of poverty by Government action. Between 1998 and 2010, the proportions plunged in both the North-East (from 34 per cent to 26 per cent) and Yorkshire (from 32 per cent to 26 per cent). These numbers measure relative poverty – representing the number of children in families surviving on less than 60 per cent of median household income.

Today, all eyes will be on whether David Cameron has succeeded in redrawing that definition, after a battle with his own Treasury colleagues. The Prime Minister – and Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith – have repeatedly protested that a simple financial measure misses the real causes of poverty.

Hence, we have been told factors such as work, quality of education and health and freedom from addiction must somehow be included in the evaluation.

Of course, these problems matter as well as household finances, but how on earth can you measure them in one statistic?

Furthermore, the worrying reality is that two-thirds of children in poverty now have a parent in work – because pay, and help with low pay, has fallen. Whatever statistic is chosen, the chilling truth is that poverty is about to explode – just as it did the last time Church and state were at war.

ANNE MCINTOSH clearly hasn’t lost her sense of humour - even as she faces losing her Thirsk and Malton seat, having been deselected by her local Tory party. As chairwoman of the Commons environment committee, Miss McIntosh argued for more dredging of flood-prone rivers, likening it to cleaning a house.

When an expert said house-cleaning didn’t involve large sums of taxpayers cash, she quickly replied: “Ah, I tried that – and I got into trouble.”