After a decade of austerity and the trauma of a two-year long pandemic, the UK’s public sector workers deserved some respite come 2022. Instead, they are now enduring the largest real wage cuts in recent history.
This week the UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak delivered the 2021 Autumn Budget in the House of Commons. The Budget confirms that this government has accepted a permanently larger role for the state in the economy. Spending will grow in real terms by 3.8% across government, amounting to a £111bn annual increase by 2024–25. Analysis by
The UK has embraced the big state — but lacks a vision for it Read More »
For three hundred years, care work and care labour have been woefully trivialised or ignored by economists. One is inclined to think this is partly due to the domination of the subject by men until recently. But it is also true that the subject is incredibly complex, partly because the very idea of ‘care’ is
Care and the Pandemic: a comment in reply to Sue Himmelweit Read More »
The pandemic has exposed how dependent on care we are not only as individuals, but as a society. But our care system, already struggling well before the outbreak of the coronavirus, has failed to cope. Care work is poorly-paid and insecure, whilst the entire system suffers from chronic underfunding. Government promises to fix the system
New PEF publication – Care and the Pandemic Read More »
“After decades of assault by state-shrinking ideologues, a collision of crises has revealed how only the power of good government can save us. Covid, climate catastrophe and Brexit crashed in on a public realm stripped bare by a decade of extreme austerity. Here all the best writers and thinkers on the good society show recovery is possible, with a radical rethink of all the old errors. Read this, and feel hope that things can change. ”
Polly Toynbee
PEF publishes blue print for the post-covid economy on 29th April 2021 Read More »
We need a public sector led National Care Service nationally funded, but locally delivered, operating with decent working conditions alongside the NHS providing support for all who need it free at the point of use.
Did social care save the NHS? Read More »
Guy Standing, PEF Council member and Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, writes for the PEF blog on the ongoing privatisation of the National Health Service – with private contracts having now risen to £9 billion a year.
The National Health Service – Privatisation in prospect? Read More »
Of the nineteen UK governments since the Second World War, only two have torn up the rule book and tried to build a better future, instead of simply recycling the tired slogans and policies of the past. The two governments that did try radical change – not always successfully – were those of Clement Attlee
Rethinking Britain – How to build a better future Read More »
Labour’s policy for buses is a key part of reversing the impact of neoliberalism on transport since the 1980s.
Buses are about redistribution, productivity and a greener future Read More »
What would it mean to reverse austerity – for the NHS, for education, for local government?
Measuring austerity Read More »
