Iain Duncan Smith, the architect of welfare reform and therefore a man responsible for so much pain and suffering, especially among sick and disabled people, was on the Queen’s new year honours list. What sort of message does this send to families plunged into poverty by his cruel welfare policies? Their hardship is effectively being celebrated.

I stood as the Labour party candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green against IDS at the general election. My motivation was that my mum had been in the direct firing line of his welfare reforms. She was reassessed when he was secretary of state for work and pensions. The stress it caused her, how terrified she was, is something I can never forget. In her 50s at the time, she kept telling the rude and aggressive DWP assessors: “I don’t want to be sick. I want to work.” When she died in 2017, her house was full of letters fighting for her benefits. It’s a common story, but as I have since learned, she was relatively lucky.

I won’t accept awful people doing awful things at the top of our political system – why should I? Why should any of us?

During the election campaign I had countless people write to me or tell me in person about their own encounters with IDS’s policies. The lady losing her eyesight who had her benefits taken away and then reinstated after a lengthy appeal process; the mum with a grown-up son with severe brain damage receiving threatening letters from the jobcentre insisting he comes for an interview; the son mourning his mum who died six months after being declared “fit for work”; the wife whose husband killed himself in front of her after losing his benefits; I could go on.

Somehow this human suffering does not disqualify IDS from receiving a knighthood for his “public service”. This appears to be the perfect symbol for the moral bankruptcy that has enveloped this country.

How is this knighthood being justified? There are those that say because IDS was leader of the Conservative party between 2001 and 2003 there is a case. He used his power at the top to insist on a three-line whip to get the party to vote against a bill that would allow unmarried same-sex couples to adopt. He was forced out as leader via a vote of no confidence and never took the party to an election. But hey, we already know the system rewards failure at the top – just look at Zac Goldsmith, who has just lost his seat in the general election. Failing upwards is how the rich and powerful stay rich and powerful.

Of course IDS claims his welfare reforms, born at his ironically named Centre for Social Justice, got more people into work. Not according to the House of Commons work and pensions committee, which concluded in 2018 that sanctioning the sick or disabled “does not work. Worse, it is harmful and counterproductive”. The United Nations has deemed the welfare reforms since 2010 – the intensification of the conditionality and sanctioning regime, the introduction of the bedroom tax, a two-child limit on benefits policy as well as cuts to disability benefits and the botched introduction of universal credit – as a systematic violation of human rights. Totally worth a gold star.

Perhaps it’s actually fitting for IDS to be on the Queen’s honours list. In an era when people who refuse to apologise for racism become prime minister and 88% of Tory Facebook adverts can be deemed misleading without anyone batting an eyelid, why should we be surprised by people being rewarded for what seems to amount to state violence?

The honours list is without doubt an antiquated and deeply flawed system but there is no denying that to many it is still seen as the ultimate accolade. No wonder more than 130,000 people (at the time of writing) have already signed a petition demanding that he is not knighted. But will the establishment listen? One of the common reactions to me expressing dismay at IDS being on the honours list is to say I’m a sore loser. It’s true. As the election results were read out on 13 December, I could feel my faith in humanity drain away. “There’s no justice” was all I could hear in my head. How could IDS win yet again? I won’t just happily accept awful people doing awful things at the top of our political system – why should I? Why should any of us? How perfect it is for them to be able to tell us that this is a pill we should all just swallow. Forget that. We need to spit that pill out. Sometimes it takes these flagrant injustices for us to wake up and realise just how much work there is to do. Bring on the 2020s.

• Faiza Shaheen is the director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies and was 2019 Labour party candidate for Chingford & Woodford Green