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welfare

  • October 20, 2014

    In a brilliant piece in the Guardian, Ha-Joon Chang comprehensively demolishes the economic ‘recovery’ claimed by the coalition government, dismissing as an ‘economic fairytale’ its claims of success.

  • October 17, 2014

    When Lord Freud’s remarks about disabled people and the minimum wage became public, many people, myself included, reacted quickly and with anger. Did we over-react? Taking his words in context, was Lord Freud being "compassionate" as some of his defenders claimed, in wishing to find ways of getting severely disabled people into work?

  • October 15, 2014

    The National Minimum Wage is not a living wage, it’s a poverty wage.Yet the Minister in charge of welfare reform, Lord Freud, has suggested that disabled people’s labour is not even worth this much. He has now apologised, but for many disabled people his remarks simply confirm their suspicions of how the government really thinks about them.

  • October 7, 2014

    When my twin sister and I were very sick with the measles, aged six, it didn’t even occur to me that a home visit from the doctor was anything less than our due. I bet it occurred to my parents though. Having grown up in a world without the NHS, I bet they were grateful that they didn’t have to think about how to pay the doctor for his trouble, or for the medicines he left that helped relieve our symptoms and reduce the fever that was undoubtedly causing them concern.

  • September 30, 2014

    The Chancellor’s Conference speech contained a statement about disabled people and benefits which was misleading, but went largely unchallenged by the mainstream media. Mr Osborne promised a two year freeze on working age benefits if the Conservatives are re-elected but made a point of saying, "disability benefits will be excluded". Is that true?

  • September 12, 2014

    When I was young, my father often used to repeat a saying his mother had told him, “To whom much is given, of them much is expected.” It was long time before I realised that this early version of “check out your privilege” was in fact quoting Jesus in the Bible (Luke 12:48), but I have never forgotten it, and I always try to live by it.

  • August 18, 2014

    Pensioner families across the UK will suffer social security cuts worth £6.38bn a year by the time the government’s welfare reforms have taken full effect, the TUC warned yesterday (18 August)

  • August 14, 2014

    In an interview on LBC radio, Iain Duncan Smith displayed a startling ignorance of the social security benefits he has been administering, and cutting, for the last four years.

  • August 8, 2014

    New analysis published by the TUC shows that the majority of claimants who will be hit by the new five-week wait welfare reform are short-term claimants who only claim benefit for a few weeks.

  • July 18, 2014

    Welfare, education and the NHS are all being hit by the same cuts, driven, not by a desire to improve the national debt (which is now significantly worse than 2010), says Virginia Moffatt, but by a poisonous ideology that private profit must come before common good. "So I decided that the time had come to move somewhere, where I can be in a position to challenge that ideology. I have joined Ekklesia as the new Chief Operating Officer, because I can see what an important role a think-tank linking good quality research and ideas to civic action, political change and a positive role for churches and other NGOs can play in influencing mainstream politics. That is what I want to be part of."