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.
Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson outline a plan for a new progressive government to tackle inequality
Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson: Spirit Level Lessons Read More »
By Guy Standing We are living in an age of chronic uncertainty, in which crises pile into one another, plunging millions of people deeper into insecurity, impoverishment, stress and ill-health. There was the financial crash of 2008, a decade of austerity, a series of six pandemics culminating in Covid, with more to follow, and now
An Era of Chronic Uncertainty: Time for Basic Income Read More »
On the economic front, this period saw the theories of John Maynard Keynes provide the sound intellectual framework for the views which trade unionists had always instinctively known to be right. Trades Union Congress, The History of the T.U.C. 1868-1968, p. 85 The bond between Keynes and workers – obvious to trades unionists in 1968
Rejoinder to Robert Skidelsky: Keynes is on the side of the workers Read More »
The policy is uniquely flawed, with multiple faults. Of course, if government throws over £60 billion of subsidies to a minority of firms and workers, that will be popular with the recipients. But a scheme should be judged by what it does for the many, not the few, and for its opportunity cost.
Labour should not back another Job Furlough Read More »
Latest inflation figures from the Office for National Statistics put average price rises in the 12 months to September at 4.2%, its highest rate of growth since November 2011. Back then, a post-financial crisis surge in prices pushed inflation to above 5%, and it stayed high until mid-2014 when OPEC’s decision to maintain oil production
Inflation is here to stay, but not for the reasons you think – a response to Martin Wolf 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 »
The Conservative government looks set to announce that it will be introducing a rise in National Insurance Contributions of up to 1.25 percent on Tuesday this week. The intention is to raise around £10bn to attempt to staunch the crisis in social care – a crisis, it should be added, of the government’s own making,
Social care and the Tories’ raid on paypackets Read More »
The Progressive Economy Forum is today publishing a detailed new guide to the economic programme of the Joe Biden administration. In less than six months since his inauguration as US President, Joe Biden’s administration has staked out a new agenda for US policymaking, breaking with the previous four decades of Republican and Democratic domestic economic
New PEF publication – guide to Joe Biden’s economic programme Read More »
PEF Council member Robert Skidelsky advocates federal job guarantees and ‘compensated free trade’ to avoid inflation in the Biden plan
The Biden plan would be improved by federal job guarantees and compensated free trade Read More »
