“If you had the luck of the Irish, you’d wish you were English instead” sang John Lennon – a second generation Irishman. When it comes to the public health of the Irish in Britain, he was right. It is well-established that Irish people have poorer health than the White British population as a whole, including lower life expectancy and a host of limiting long-term illnesses; including the highest cancer rates of any ethnic minority group.
Simon Kuznets, the Nobel Prize winning economist who helped develop GDP, recognised such flaws when warning the US Congress in 1934: “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of the national income.”
Remembrance Day is always a day that makes one particularly melancholic and not just for the most obvious reasons. In many respects Remembrance Day is meant to be a celebration rather than a time of sorrow and mourning; who can doubt the joy that many hundreds of thousands would have felt in 1918 when one of the most harrowing conflicts in modern history finally came to an end?
Over the last few days the coalition has been keen to sell Universal Credit as the answer to all the labour market’s problems. After the deepest recession in decades, they are confident they can reduce worklessness by 300,000 jobs (a ‘conservative’ estimate), reduce child and working age poverty, reduce working-age welfare expenditure by £18 billion and make everyone in work better off, simply by reforming the welfare system.
This week we’ve learnt that Number 10 welcomed American welfare gurus for tea to advise on the forthcoming White Paper. Given the all-time high of 43.6 million Americans living in poverty, and a US unemployment rate that is almost double what was considered the norm in better times, what should work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith take as the real lessons of the American welfare reform story?
Nick Clegg writes in today’s Guardian about welfare reform. But his claims on jobs, incentives for work, the welfare bill, and poverty do not stack up.
Government projections show there will be more than 250,000 new households every year over the decade to 2020, the result of growth in the number of single person households, increasing life expectancy and net migration. Building 110,000 new homes in 2009 clearly falls far short of this.
The Government yesterday announced its plans to make benefit claimants work for their benefits. Under this US-style Workfare, people who have been claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance for 12 months or more will be required to do community work for 30 hours a week for four months. This could be cleaning the streets, picking up litter or painting walls.
A time of ‘anxious aspiration’ that is founded upon the uncertainty of ever increasingly dynamic technological change in a world of globalised production and global culture. Here then is a space where the left can win back the middle classes in a thoroughly authentic manner – perhaps for the first time since Atlee and 1945. Familiar fairness for unfamiliar times.
The Yes to fairer votes site launches this week. In contrast to the dull oppressive shades of the No campaign’s site, it is clear, bright and colourful, and focuses on the grassroots nature of the campaign with ways in which people can get involved. There is now a network of determined activists across the country that has grown steadily since the extraordinary outpouring of energy during the purple “fair votes” protests back in May.
