UN tells Starmer: scrap 2-child benefit cap and increase benefits

UN says UK is discriminating against children, women, disabled and sick people, refugees, minorities and more

The United Nations have called on UK PM Keir Starmer to scrap the pointless and cruel two-child benefit cap that the Tories brought in and which Starmer has refused to end – even though keeping the cap costs the UK around £38bn more a year than scrapping it – and have told him that he is continuing the Tories’ blatant breaches of human rights for which the UK has been repeatedly criticised by UN experts.

The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) has published its “Seventh periodic report of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” which, among a very long list of failures and negligence, criticises the UK’s failure to properly enshrine human rights in UK law and dismisses the government’s excuses for not doing so, saying that many of them are obsolete and all should be abandoned.

The report also criticises the UK for failing even to properly measure the harm caused by austerity – the Starmer regime is in fact fighting in court to try to hide those harms – and for being discriminatory in its policies and for using anti-refugee and anti-minority rhetoric to justify its actions that harm minorities and refugees disproportionately.

Among its lengthy list of recommendations – in reality demands, if the UK wants to be a civilised and law-abiding state on human rights – are:

• end the two-child benefit cap
• undo the grotesque under-provision of social security benefits by immediately and unconditionally increasing budgets, and ensure they are relentlessly index-linked against inflation
• end all its policies inflicting poverty on children, disabled and sick people, ethnic and other minorities, single-parent families and others
• institute a right to food to ensure everyone is properly fed and has legal recourse if they are not
• end the price-gouging by water and energy companies to ensure realistic living costs
• rebuild the NHS to an adequate level far above what the Tories and now their red successors have inflicted – because “the highest attainable standard of health” is a right
• engage in – and fund – a mass social and affordable home-building programme

The two-child benefit cap, which was introduced by the Tories and which Starmer is determined to keep, hits around 1.6 million UK children in 440,000 families. Removing it would ‘cost’ around £1.6bn while saving £40bn – and would immediately lift around 300,000 children out of poverty while reducing poverty for well over double that number. Current policies are dragging more than a hundred children into poverty every single day.

One CESCR committee member said – and entirely accurately given Starmer’s and DWP Secretary Liz Kendall’s horrific language aimed at sick and disabled people – that:

I am under the impression that the [UK] continues to treat social security just as an instrument for getting people to work. I hope I am wrong. I am concerned that if this approach persists, I am afraid it is highly likely that the state party will continue to fail to address poverty.

The United Nations has for years condemned the UK government’s inhumane and deliberately cruel policies toward poor and disabled people, toward children and toward women as a gross breach of the UK’s international human rights obligations. UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty Philip Alston dismissed government excuses that there is no alternative to austerity, saying that the UK could fix the illegal hardships it has created ‘overnight’ if it wished to.

UK austerity policies have killed more than 300,000 people over the past decade or so. Around half of disability benefit claimants have attempted suicide because of the cruelty of government policy toward them.

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