AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’S new 157-page report Broken Britain criticises the Labour government/DWP for violating the human rights of those on benefits. It states that people on benefits face “violations of their human rights due to systemic discrimination and the failure of social security systems to meet human rights standards (for example, social security failures impact on health and access to food).”

Amnesty further notes that the right to social security (protection from income loss due to sickness, disability, unemployment) is outlined in Article 9 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which was ratified by the UK in 1976 but never incorporated into UK law. It further observes that since 2010 Britain’s austerity policies have violated these obligations repeatedly.

Amnesty’s forensically detailed report, based on hundreds of interviews with both claimants and benefits advisers, states that the current social security system in Britain is not fit for purpose as it “perpetuates the deprivation of living standards for those reliant on it, subjecting them to orchestrated stigma and a systematic erosion of their dignity.”

The report critiques the Labour government’s failure to uphold the right to social security under international human rights law. These failures include systemic discrimination, austerity policies and fragmented governance, disproportionately harming marginalised groups like disabled people. According to Amnesty Britain’s social security system violates the ICESCR, particularly due to inadequate payments, inaccessible processes and punitive sanctions which as we know have killed hundreds of disabled people since 2010.

Amnesty states that social security payments in Britain fail to meet basic needs. It adds that uprating methods (eg CPI inflation) lag behind the real costs of living. Disability and carers’ allowances are particularly inadequate, forcing widespread reliance on foodbanks. Freezes, caps and retrogressive policies such as the two-child benefit cap have served to deepen poverty. Labour’s proposed “reforms” to disability benefits fail to acknowledge that disabled people incur extra costs (heating, healthcare, mobility etc). Instead we are told that cutting benefits from hundreds of thousands of people will carry no negative consequences for those individuals nor the wider economy.

Labour’s proposed “reforms” of disability benefits do not constitute a strategy for providing an adequate standard of living for millions of disabled people on PIP and the health element of universal credit. Instead we have a pernicious strategy, which would fit perfectly in any novel by Charles Dickens, which is based on gaslighting those on benefits. This strategy is accompanied by Labour’s vicious stigmatisation of those on benefits as a set of “mickey-takers” who choose to be on benefits as a “lifestyle choice” and as a consequence should be forced to look for work as they are a “burden” on our economy.

Labour’s green paper fails to address the fact that health assessments for disability benefits are highly ineffective and designed to fail applicants which leaves many people very stressed out due to the lengthy appeals process. Large numbers of claimants report dehumanising treatment by DWP staff, which in many cases has contributed directly to the suicides of disabled people. John Pring, editor of the Disability News Service, has reported on many shocking cases of DWP abuse of highly vulnerable people who went on to kill themselves.

Amnesty’s report also acknowledges the terrible harm caused by benefit sanctions with minor infractions, such as being late to a meeting with a work coach, resulting in severe financial penalties that cause immense harm. In 2015 public health experts from Oxford University produced a report which stated that over 600 disabled people had killed themselves between 2010 and 2013 because of Tory cuts to benefits.

Amnesty’s report also states that inadequate social security violates rights to food, housing, health and education with no safeguards against these human rights violations. It further notes that Britain lacks robust human rights impact assessments. For example, policies like the Welfare Reform Act 2016 were implemented without evaluating their harm to vulnerable groups. It adds that there is no national action plan to implement ICESCR. Even worse is the judicial reluctance to address social security violations which leaves claimants without remedies to these human rights violations.

In its conclusion Amnesty’s report pulls no punches as it declares that Britain’s social security system institutionalises poverty, stigma and inequality. Systemic reform is urgent needed to align it with human rights principles. It makes the following damning assessment of Labour’s proposed cuts to disability benefits: “If implemented, the extensive reforms proposed in the Pathway to Work green paper would further undermine the compliance of the UK social security system with the principle of adequacy, and would be a deliberately discriminatory, disproportionate and retrogressive violation of human rights.”

Read that sentence again and reflect on the fact that a Labour government — yes, a Labour government — is carrying out attacks on disabled people which the blue Tories shied away from.

At the end of its report Amnesty International calls on the Labour government to implement a range of measures so that Britain is compliant with international human rights law. For example, it calls on it to establish a statutory social security commission to design rights-based reforms and legally incorporate ICESCR into domestic law.

Besides this, it demands that Keir Starmer’s government remove harmful policies such as the two-child benefit cap, benefit sanctions, the five-week wait for universal credit and adopt a social protection floor which guarantees a minimum income standard tied to the real cost of living.

Amnesty’s report underscores the fact that Britain’s social security system violates human rights by design, disproportionately harming disabled people. It calls for transformative reform to ensure dignity, adequacy, and accessibility for all.

Sadly, this seems unlikely as the current bunch of “red Tories” in power seem hell-bent on plunging hundreds of thousands of people into poverty. Meanwhile, a “Labour” government is committed to ensuring the upwards transfer of wealth to the millionaire and billionaire classes.

This report should leave no-one in any doubt as to the moral bankruptcy of the Labour Party which needs replacing by a new party of the working class.