Starmer Promised to Reverse the Cuts—Then Doubled Down Instead

Right, so Keir Starmer once stood in courtrooms championing human dignity. Today, he stands in Parliament slashing it to bits with a red pen. Once the human rights lawyer who travelled the world to fight for the voiceless, he now silences those closest to home: Britain’s disabled citizens. The Universal Credit and PIP Reform Bill isn’t just a U-turn—it’s a handbrake skid into authoritarian cruelty. And the worst part? Even the cruelty is pointless now. It saves no money, fixes no system, and helps no one. It is just political theatre now at the expense of the vulnerable.
Keir Starmer literally built his name and reputation on human rights. Today, that legacy lies in ruins and questions arise as to whether he ever believed in any of it beneath the weight of a bill that, now serves no purpose except to inflict cruelty, has drawn outrage from disabled people, has received condemnation from the United Nations, and led to revolt from within his own party. What kind of man pushes ahead with something that is causing him so much damage? The Universal Credit and PIP Reform Bill—hailed by Labour’s Treasury team as a modernisation of the welfare system—is, in reality, a brutal exercise in exclusion, and a betrayal of both moral principle and political integrity. But that’s Starmer’s Labour for you isn’t it?
Right, so today marks third reading of the hated and now utterly pointless Universal Credit and PIP Reform Bill, necessary welfare reform as Labour might put it, but it saves no money at all anymore, so necessary is a word that is doing a lot of heavy lifting. This is not merely another welfare reform. It is a moral collapse disguised as a policy adjustment. It is, in the words of disability rights groups and legal experts, a "eugenics bill" in all but name. And it may mark the point at which the Labour Party under Keir Starmer and the reputational damage done after successive unpopular policies passes the point of no return. This will blight people’s lives, this will end lives, the eugenics label fits and what makes it all the worse is it no longer saves any money, which was supposedly the entire point of the exercise, so this is now all being done because Starmer wants to.
At the centre of the bill is the replacement of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) with a new eligibility standard known as the "Severe Conditions Criteria" (SCC). Under the SCC, claimants must prove that their condition is both lifelong and predictably disabling with no realistic prospect of improvement. On paper, this may sound like a targeted approach. In practice, it renders hundreds of thousands of people with fluctuating, invisible, and mental health conditions ineligible for vital support.
Charities and disability organisations have been clear: those with multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, bipolar disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, or PTSD—conditions that fluctuate by their very nature—will likely fail to meet the SCC. The bill structurally erases the reality of lived disability that does not conform to bureaucratic expectations of permanence or visual legibility. It codifies a tiered system of worthiness, in which only the visibly, unambiguously disabled deserve help.
The reforms also extend to Personal Independence Payments (PIP), tightening criteria and demanding more "objective" evidence—a demand that often cannot be met for conditions that evade standard diagnostic models. Disabled people cannot possibly all conform to a tick box exercise, everyone is unique, but that continues to be ignored, if anything, even more so now. These changes are to be applied initially to new claimants from late 2026, with existing recipients only temporarily protected. That protection is fragile and conditional, likely to collapse upon reassessment, changes in personal circumstances, or regional variations in implementation.
This shift is not only completely pig ignorant and cruel, it is purely ideological. The reforms reject the social model of disability, what disability actually is, which recognises societal barriers as a key factor in disabling people, in favour of a medicalised, fixed definition that requires sufferers to perform their suffering in the narrowest possible terms, the aid many need to live in dignity or access work removed if they can’t clap like a performing seal, doing the assessment equivalent of balancing a ball on their noses. This is not reform. It is systemic erasure and it is not just mouthpieces like me saying it, Starmer has come in for a battering from elsewhere too.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has formally intervened, demanding the UK halt the bill and provide evidence that it does not violate the CRPD, the Equality Act 2010, and international human rights norms along with it. According to Labour Hub, the Committee described the bill as showing "signs of regression" and warned it would "increase poverty rates among persons with disabilities." A bit polite for my taste, this is going to be so harmful to so many and for no purpose whatsoever except to preserve Starmer’s ego.
What does speak a bit harder though is that the UN has given the government until 11 August to respond with detailed justification, legal compliance documents, and proof of consultation with disabled communities. It is a rare and damning escalation, though the question remains as to what the UN would actually do if Labour refuse to comply. For a Labour government—with a supermajority, and a human rights lawyer as Prime Minister—one who used to literally address the UN on human rights once upon a time—to be scrutinised under international law for violating disabled people’s rights shows Starmer up to be a guy that should be justifiably questioned about whether he ever believed in any of it? I’ve said before that I think, given his track record he was only in it for the money and nothing here is making me think otherwise.
This intervention places Britain alongside authoritarian and austerity-driven governments that have historically gutted welfare protections under the guise of reform, not least the 14 years of the Tories blighting the lives of the long term sick and disabled. It is a stain not only on the record of Starmer’s government, but on Britain’s global reputation as a supposed champion of human rights and dignity and this countries role in creating the very international protections we now stand accused of violating.
Inside Labour, the rebellion is very much still alive. Having gutted the bill last time to get the votes he needed despite his majority, between 49 and 123 MPs have either voted against or sought to amend the bill and since then the reality of what remains is causing further ire on the backbenches, Starmer largely having been seen to have pulled a fast one again. This still marks the largest rebellion Starmer has faced to date, the question remains to see if, at this final hurdle for this bill today, as to whether those rebels show up again when it counts and if more of those who were placated last time, who were fooled once, get fooled twice and indeed whether any of these have a spine, with Starmer whipping MPs to vote as he demands. To trash their own reputations, so he can save face, because there is no other reason to now.
The whipping operation for a Bill that now saves no money, its very purpose rendered null and void goes to the heart of the fundamental problem with Starmer’s leadership: a refusal to tolerate dissent or consult those with relevant lived experience.
Many campaigners have drawn comparisons to the 2010s, when Conservative austerity ravaged Britain’s social safety net. The tragic irony now is that it is a Labour government—not a Tory one—that has chosen to make that even worse.
For those supporting this Bill, Rachel Reeves and Starmer, in a bid to avoid a catastrophic backbench rebellion, removed or softened several savings mechanisms, to the point the proposed £5 billion in saving have disappeared completely. What remains is a bill that retains the cruelty but has forfeited any economic rationale, so anyone still supporting it, is just supporting abject cruelty to the long term sick and disabled for the sake of it. The bill may now actually cost more than it saves not only through uprating up by 2030, but in the more immediate term, the government will incur further costs due to tribunal disputes, the greater administrative burdens which will now have to decide where the line in each case between being sufficiently disabled or not is, along with how the consequences of this bill should it become law, has on local care systems.
This is cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Austerity without the arithmetic. A policy that harms the vulnerable for no measurable gain. Starmer has taken the language of fiscal discipline and turned it into a justification for meaningless brutality just to save face.
The net result is a policy landscape in which harm is not an unfortunate byproduct of reform, but the reform itself. And this is the essence of political failure: when neither compassion nor efficiency survives, only ideology remains and Starmer’s is a cruel one, the eugenics label fits.
That Keir Starmer, of all people, should be the face of this betrayal is a staggering indictment of what Labour has become and actually who he is. As a human rights barrister, Starmer fought against the death penalty, stood up for due process, and advised on civil liberties legislation. He built a career on the principle that law must serve the most vulnerable.
Now, as Prime Minister, he signs into law a bill that rewrites the meaning of disability, criminalises ambiguity, and withdraws support based on ideological constructs of "dependence" and "deservedness" without consulting the very people it affects. Starmer the lawyer would have condemned this bill. Starmer the politician pushes it through Parliament without shame. Who is this man? Does he actually believe in anything? Are there any principles he will actually always stick to? There are as Tony Benn said in politics weathervanes and signposts, but Starmer is just a void.
In doing what he is doing, Starmer has crossed a line from upholding rights to actively dismantling them. When you legislate a hierarchy of human worth that excludes those with invisible, non-linear, or variable disabilities; when you pursue a policy that functionally deems certain lives too complex, too unstable, or too inconvenient to support—you are not reforming the welfare state. You are flirting with eugenics.
That is the moral abyss Starmer now occupies. And if this is what he thinks of everything he once claimed to believe in, if this is what his celebrated human rights legacy amounts to in practice, how can anyone trust what he says or stands for on anything? What does any promise mean when the first act of power is to shred the principles that built your name?
The danger now is not just that one bill has done this. It is that Starmer has revealed a governing philosophy based on managerial control, political optics, and moral disposability. He has governed not with vision, but with tyranny by spreadsheet.
The bill sends a chilling message to those it affects though. To disabled people: your life must be permanently and visibly impaired to be considered valid. To carers: your unpaid labour will go unsupported. To local authorities: you must pick up the pieces of a broken system. And to the international community: Britain is apparently willing to sacrifice dignity for Keir Starmer’s ego.
This isn’t just about benefits. It’s about the politics of abandonment—of treating some lives as disposable to sustain a political illusion of strength. This is not leadership. This is cowardice dressed up as necessity.
It is also about power: who has it, who is targeted by it, and who is erased in its exercise. The disabled are not just marginalised by this bill; they are written out of the moral and social contract entirely. And the silence from many senior Labour figures only compounds the violence.
The Universal Credit and PIP Reform Bill is not a necessary evil. It is not a tough decision made in hard times. It is a deliberate act of political cowardice and moral abandonment. For Keir Starmer, it has exposed the hollowness of his human rights credentials. For Labour, it has torn the mask from its face that they really are just another bunch of Tories, possibly even worse than the last lot.
If this bill defines the party, then Labour no longer deserves to define the future. It has failed not just the disabled, but the principles that once set it apart. It has sacrificed not only justice, but also logic, economics, and truth, it is an abandonment of the Party’s foundational principles and if they are gone, then Labour needs to soon follow.
For more on the £5 billion U-turn Starmer made last time to get this rancid legislation past second reading, check out all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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