The priority must be to end poverty, not worsen it |
It can be forgotten, amid the day-to-day machinations of our parliaments, that politics is really quite simple. At its heart, it is a case of priorities and choices; what is important, and what do we want our society to be? It is through those priorities and choices that politicians, and governments, must be judged.
And the judgement from Amnesty’s new report Social Insecurity is clear; consciously cruel choices made by UK ministers – like the two-child limit, sanctions, and the fundamental inadequacy of support – have created a UK social security system that ruins lives. Based on interviews with over 782 people across the UK, it finds a system that dehumanises the people it should be supporting, and that locks them into the poverty and destitution that it should be protecting them against.
Among the experiences in........