I WAS honoured and humbled to continue to have the opportunity to represent the great people of Salford, and as I busily packed my bag this week to begin a new term in Parliament, I listened, as I regularly do, to one of the rare songs that always brings a lump to my throat, a fire in my belly and gets me ready to champion the city I love.

It is a story about love, hardship and strength. A haunting melodic tribute to a city and its people, and a burning hope for their future.

The city is Salford and the song is Dirty Old Town, written by legendary Salford-born folk singer Ewan MacColl 75 years ago. It charts the confusion and loneliness of a young man walking through the nighttime streets of industrial Salford where life was hard, poverty was rife but pride was in abundance.

Ewan’s widow, folk singer Peggy Seeger, recently commented that the rarely sung verse, “I’m going to get me a big sharp axe, Shining steel tempered in the fire, I’ll chop you down like an old dead tree, Dirty old town, dirty old town,” spoke to Ewan’s concerns about the struggle of working-class people.

Indeed it is symbolic of a desire to fight against inequality and build a society that serves the interests of all its people rather than those of a select few.

So as I listened to that song, full of hope for the future about how lives could be improved in Salford under a new Labour government, I wondered what Ewan would make of Salford now.

Of course, the slums and chimneys are long gone; replaced by new council housing estates in the 1950s and ’60s, and later from the 1990s onwards, gleaming docklands emerged, met by almost stratospheric apartment blocks cutting through the skyline and tram networks.

Now even new state-of-the-art eco-council homes are being built across the city, largely due to the driving ambition of a Salford Labour council which believes strongly that “the welfare of the people is the highest law.”

Sadly though, a painful truth is hidden behind our city’s burning ambitions, 14 years of successive Conservative governments have ravaged our public services, stifled investment, created gross levels of inequality, and entrenched widespread job and housing insecurity.

So, despite the profound changes seen by the city in the last 75 years, the financial struggles of so many families across Salford are relatively no different to those MacColl saw growing up.

Indeed, research by Loughborough University on behalf of the End Child Poverty Coalition reported that a staggering 333,000 children in Greater Manchester and Lancashire are now living in poverty — an increase of 31,197 compared with the previous year.

Nationally the figures are equally bleak. The Institute for Fiscal Studies stated recently that 30 per cent of children now live in households below the official poverty line, up from 27 per cent in 2010 and over the course of the next parliament, an additional 670,000 children will be affected by the two-child universal credit limit which restricts benefits.

Further, the TUC has found that wage stagnation was also a key part of these shameful child poverty figures. They stated that a “toxic combination” of insecure work and cuts to social security had a devastating impact on household Budgets, with the number of children in poverty with at least one parent in work increasing by 900,000 between 2010 and 2023.

Average wages are only £16 a week, or 2.5 per cent higher in real terms than when the Conservatives came to power in 2010, which, when placed next to the skyrocketing cost-of-living crisis costs so many face, makes it easy to see why so many families are struggling to make ends meet.

The hope these families place on the new Labour government is therefore immense. No-one underestimates the toxic financial legacy the Tories have left but these families have been promised “change” and for them, such change must mean that they are rapidly lifted out of poverty.

Labour’s new deal for working people is a step in the right direction. This will include banning exploitative zero-hours contracts; ending fire and rehire; and introducing basic rights from day one to parental leave, sick pay, and protection from unfair dismissal.

It will strengthen the collective voice of trade unions, and create a single enforcement body to ensure employment rights are upheld as well as implementing a genuinely liveable minimum wage. On child poverty, Labour has pledged to review universal credit, roll out breakfast clubs and develop a strategy to reduce child poverty which is also very welcome.

But such extensive plans will take considerable time to pass through into legislation and in the meantime, there are immediate measures the government can take now to alleviate the financial strain so many face.

So there is one thing I am asking the new Labour government to do now to help the city I love:

Immediately lift hundreds of thousands of children across the country out of poverty now by scrapping the two-child limit on universal credit.

The founding purpose of the Labour Party is to build for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few. To fulfil this purpose we should seek nothing less than ending child poverty now.

Rebecca Long Bailey is Labour MP for Salford & Eccles.