Universal Credit and The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

 

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

Article 2.

 

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 23.

 

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment….

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

Article 25.

 

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

When I first read through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) I was a little surprised at how much it focuses on work and employment conditions. I knew a little of the background of the creation of the UDHR, how it was created by the newly formed United Nations in 1948 after the Second World War, as a response to the Holocaust, with the hope that a universally acknowledged binding agreement between nations would ensure nothing like the suffering and genocide perpetrated would happen again. Unfortunately, there have been, and still are, conflicts within which this almost unfathomable scale of suffering is experienced has been repeated. So how and why did employment rights and social security become so important in a document trying to prevent war, torture and genocide? The answer lies in the way in which human rights are slowly eroded away for specific groups of people, whose worth to society is presented as being less than the majority, so that abuses against them become acceptable, even justified. It also lies in what the document was trying to enable, equality, freedom and justice for all, as well as what it is trying to prevent. 

Anyone who has ever been unemployed, reliant on the benefits system, or just poor - whatever their employment status - will understand the importance of these articles because in our society, money provides access to freedom and dignity. We use money to purchase everything in our lives that is required to fulfil ‘a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing’. The examples the article gives being the absolute basics we need to survive - ‘food housing clothing and medical care and necessary social services’. This is something most of us take for granted in the UK, and the safety net of a benefits system is one we just assume will provide this for us if we need it - until we do. 

The main point of a universal declaration of human rights is that everyone has them, and everyone deserves them. If you, or a loved one, were in a position where you were unable to meet your basic needs yourself, it seems obvious that they should be provided. If you were to ask most people if they or their loved ones lost their job (as many people did after the 2008 financial crisis) became ill or had a disability that prevented them from earning enough money to live ‘an existence worthy of human dignity’ what should happen, most people would agree that it is our responsibility as fellow human beings to support them. If loved ones are unable to, the government does. It’s a social contract we have with those in power;  you have the power and we let you keep it, if you use it to make sure everyone is ok. It’s partly to do with this assumption that no human being could possibly allow another human being to suffer, that can lead to disbelief when we are faced with stories of people being left without food, clothing, housing, medical care or social services. A specific intersection of circumstances and justifications needs to be believed before people will accept the possibility of human suffering. We want to believe the world we live in is fair. We want to believe that if it was us who needed support, we would get it. 

After the 2008 financial crisis, we were lead to believe that we had become a country with limited resources. We were lead to believe that the only way to change the situation was with austerity. We were lead to believe that the richest people had to remain rich because if they didn’t then we all got poorer. They broke the social contract, and we were lead to believe that there wasn’t any contract in the first place. It’s much easier to argue for everyone to have support if we have enough ourselves. It’s much easier to convince people we can’t support everyone if it seems like we won’t have enough for ourselves and our closest loved ones. Once the idea of scarce resources takes hold, and people feel that they are suffering themselves, it becomes easier to justify why other people will just have to put up with suffering too. The ideals of UDHR are made to seem unrealistic and un-achievable.  But there are still circumstances in which we normally wouldn’t tolerate human suffering, either because it is extreme, or because we believe the people who are suffering are innocent. 

 This is where Universal Credit comes in. In order to justify cutting further resources to people who have already been identified as disadvantaged, especially people with disabilities or illnesses, the perception of those people needs to be changed. Universal Credit did this by re-assessing every person who was entitled to benefits because of disabilities. They wanted to re-frame the definitions of disability and illness so that less people were judged by them as being legitimately disabled or ill. If someone is not judged by our government as legitimately disabled or ill then people might think they must be liars. Therefore, their lack of resources is their fault, because the are able to work to have enough money for what they need - but they choose not to. It’s just too scary to think that it could be the government can’t be trusted to be fair, so one more layer of empathy is stripped away.

It’s slightly easier to convince people that things aren’t really that bad because we want to believe that they aren’t. It’s terrifying to face up to the idea that if you end up being someone who becomes reliant on benefits, that the reality of how awful it is could be what you end up living with. That you might not be able to fulfil your basic needs, never mind a standard of living that ensures your health and wellbeing.  It’s especially difficult to face when the possibility of that happening seems more likely because of something huge like a financial crash. This means that it’s much easier for the government to brush off reports of genuinely horrific living situations as either exaggerated or as anomalies. So people can believe, for a little while, that things aren’t really that bad, even when they face evidence to the contrary.

The really key factor here is the first one; convincing people that our resources are suddenly scarce and that the people who have the most resources to spare cannot or should not be held responsible. This can happen because we have to have money to access everything we need, from basics to luxuries, and that makes money the biggest indicator of status and power. Our worth and value as human beings are therefore tied up in the amount of money we have, and it’s a vicious cycle; we need money to access the resources we need for ‘an existence worthy of human dignity’ therefore money becomes the symbol of our worth. That is why employment rights and social security takes up a relatively large amount of room in the UDHR. We need the government to provide a safety net that protects these rights, and if they don’t, they disappear. This leads me on the  final article from UDHR that I wanted to highlight;   

 

Article 5.

 

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

If you are a human being with a disability, it is likely that you will be unable to work or earn enough to cover your basic needs. By definition, having a disability puts you at a disadvantage in a world designed for people who do not have a disability. UDHR very clearly sets out that ‘everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being’ and one which is ‘worthy of human dignity’. There are no conditions to this rights, you do not have to earn it, prove you are worthy of it, or indeed purchase it. ‘Everyone is entitled … without distinction of any kind.’ But Universal Credit makes every applicant prove that they deserve to be given a small amount of money that isn’t even enough to provide a basic and decent standard of living. It is cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment to make someone prove that they have the right to this. It is inhuman to create a system whereby the people judging you at your most vulnerable are actively incentivised not to give it to you. It is cruel, inhuman and degrading to make someone prove that they have a disability with a written examination, an invasive interview in person, and then reduce their experience to  a points system that judges whether they are disabled  when they already have a medical certificate from a doctor that states they are not fit for work. It is inhuman to take money away from people who already don’t have enough no matter what the reason is. It is especially cruel, inhuman and degrading to create this system and then tell people that they are to blame if they don’t have enough money to fulfil their basic needs.   

UDHR wasn’t only written to try to prevent the worst suffering caused by war, torture and genocide. It was also written to prevent the everyday cruelties that can be perpetrated on our most vulnerable people. It was written to give us the basics we need to ensure money doesn’t become more important than humanity. And it was created as a document we can use to ensure that those in power do fulfil their side of the social contract. It was written with the faith that we want to be better than we are and the hope that we can achieve it. I genuinely believe that every single human being deserves the rights to everything set out in the UDHR, including those people who are trying to dismantle it. But I don’t believe that people in power who are trying to dismantle it deserve to wield that power. Protecting human rights creates a society where everyone has a better life, but we do have to protect them. 

More information!

https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html

https://www.mind.org.uk/about-us/our-policy-work/benefits/universal-credit/

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/issues/human-rights-uk

https://www.ohchr.org/documents/issues/poverty/eom_gb_16nov2018.pdf