It is perhaps a sign of the apathy of these dark days that more people in Parliament turned up for the badger cull debate than the debate on benefits sanctions that followed it. 

We are living through an era where being disabled, poor and disenfranchised attracts state punishment rather than help. The government’s flagship social security reforms and their wider austerity measures are pushing vulnerable people to the brink. 

It is a period in our history that will be looked on by future generations with horror.

This is 2014. We are meant to be living in enlightened times, where the barbaric treatment of humans and animals is a thing of the past. It is 180 years since the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was passed. But almost two centuries on, the Act’s incredibly harsh ideas have taken seed among a new generation on the government benches.

The hate-filled rhetoric of those tasked today with responsibility for looking after the well-being of our poorest and most vulnerable citizens is strikingly similar to that of the politicians who passed the
infamous Act.

Based on a royal commission into the existing poor laws and largely the work of Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick, it took some rather extreme yet strikingly familiar views. 

It supposed that poverty was essentially caused by the individual rather than economic and social conditions. Thus, the pauper claimed relief regardless of his merits. That because larger families got more, it encouraged irresponsible marriages. That women claimed relief for illegitimate children, encouraging immorality.

Among its recommendations were that workhouse conditions should be “less desirable” than those of an independent labourer of the lowest class.

Substitute the workhouse for the welfare state, move the protagonists from the last days of Georgian to modern Britain and change the scene of the crime from the slums of the industrial towns and cities to socially and privately rented accommodation throughout Britain. Welcome to IDS UK.

The Work and Pensions Secretary and his cabal of true blue Tories, only some of whom actually belong to the party, are intent on imposing the severest of welfare reforms and are causing misery for people throughout the country. 

With the white-hot fires of spite and intolerance fanned by a right-wing media determined to see the end of the welfare state, is it any wonder that they are succeeding in going further than even Thatcher dared?

This is an ideological crusade to shrink the state led by people who simply don’t care about its consequences and are unmoved by the harrowing personal stories. Each piece of pernicious legislation that they have introduced has been exacerbated by the sheer incompetence of the ministers overseeing them. 

The Department of Work and Pensions approach to sanctions is no different and has been characterised by the chaotic implementation of universal credit, personal independence payments and the bedroom tax.

The DWP’s own website showed that almost 60 per cent of decisions on sanctions were overturned on appeal. These figures, perhaps unsurprisingly, have now been removed from the website.

As I said in the Commons debate, we are now saddled with a system which disproportionately imposes penalties for non-compliance with harsh and often ridiculous rules. It is a system set up to punish people.

Even in the most extreme cases of non-compliance, who actually suffers when sanctions are applied? With crimes under the law, it is the perpetrator who is punished, but when DWP rules are broken the people around a person are punished too.

There is no thought for the partner of the person who has had their social security halted — the person whose often meagre wage or social security income now has to support two people. No thought for the family who now have even less to live on than before. 

The system may well be sanctioning the person by name but it is a broad swipe at everyone in a household, family or circle of friends who have the obligation of the state transferred to them.

It amounts to no more than torture by hunger and forcing families into dire poverty. In a civilised society it would be unacceptable.

For each person who attracts the attention of the right-wing media for playing the system, there are literally hundreds of thousands more who are trying to do the right thing. 

They are forced to jump through hoops and take part in meaningless exercises to be awarded a few measly pounds, barely enough to survive on. Fall foul of the system and it can be a descent into degradation as the victims of circumstance, officious advisers and cruel policy.

The impact of sanctions is reaching crisis proportions. People are being sanctioned for the most cruel, arbitrary and ridiculous reasons.

A man from south-east England, who has been blind since birth had his benefits stopped because he wasn’t replying to letters. The DWP failed to send the letters in Braille or any other accessible format. He didn’t reply because he didn’t know he had them. 

This was a man who had worked for most of his life and because of the DWP’s error was forced to turn to a payday loan to survive. Forced, through the chaotic system, into hunger and poverty.

A man in my own constituency visited my offices in desperate need having been sanctioned after missing an appointment with a works training provider. 

He had a problem with his heart and had to visit hospital. He was sanctioned despite his training provider submitting a letter the next day to support him. This sanction was later overturned but not before he was driven to almost starvation and the local food bank. 

All he had eaten in the previous days were mushrooms from a local field and eggs borrowed from a neighbour. Do we really want to live in a country where we force sick people into starvation?

This sanctioning regime needs serious investigation. But just why are people being treated in this way? 

Is the government offering incentives to penalise a set number of people to get them off the claimant count and make the figures look better? Or are advisers being deliberately given sketchy information and no room for common sense to confuse them and recipients?

In the run-up to the election in 2010 people were worried the Conservatives would take us back to the 1980s. With the help of their Lib Dem allies they have succeeded in dragging us back much further than that. 

As a society we will be judged harshly by history, harshly for punishing the poor, the disabled and the vulnerable. It is time we, as a wider society, said enough is enough and ended these terrible injustices once and for all.

Ian Lavery is Labour MP for Wansbeck.