Inequalities

Category: Blog posts

  • Inequalities is moving to Substack!

    The Inequalities blog is moving to Substack, as part of breathing life into the blog again. If you’re an email subscriber, then you have automatically been added as a subscriber on Substack (because this is the same blog, just at a different home), and will shortly receive the first post there. You can unsubscribe at…

  • The rise and fall of anti-welfare attitudes

    Today sees the publication of the latest British Social Attitudes report, and I – along with the amazing team of Rob de Vries, Tom O’Grady and Kate Summers – have a chapter in it on ‘the rise and fall of anti-welfare attitudes’.

  • Worse jobs have raised the level of incapacity benefits

    This post explains a claim I made on a BBC Radio 4 documentary ‘Fit for Work’ (episode 3), by Jolyon Jenkins – for transparency, I wanted people to be able to go and scrutinise the evidence behind it.

  • What’s happened to the WCA under UC? At last we know!

    This is a rapid post in response to statistics released earlier today – please let me know if you do further analyses of these statistics and I’ll link them in the comments below. Please see the comment at the bottom of this page for an important update! After continual pressure from campaigners, academics, and politicians,…

  • The WCA is bad – but will scrapping it be better? (part II)

    In the first part of this post, I explained that hundreds of thousands of sick/disabled people with limited work capacity – particularly those with mental health conditions – may end up with less money. In this post I look at other risks and benefits of scrapping the WCA. For the Government – and for many…

  • The WCA is bad – but will scrapping it be better?

    Is it ever bad to scrap a hated policy? For over a decade, disabled people have feared the ‘brown envelope’ from DWP that might mean that they are being called in for a Work Capability Assessment, or ‘WCA’. They have been worried by the prospect of a process that makes them feel less-than-human, and the…

  • Is there really a ‘glass floor’? Or can the children of the elite be genuinely downwardly mobile?

    In the previous post I explained why, in order to get a full picture of downward mobility in Britain, we need to consider the prestige of people’s occupations. I asked whether people who had apparently been downwardly mobile from advantaged backgrounds might, in many cases, have actually fallen sideways into highly prestigious jobs. In this…

  • The missing piece of the social mobility puzzle

    This is the first of a pair of posts about a project I’ve been working on looking at downward social mobility. In this first post I’m going to talk about why we should care about downward mobility, and what might be missing from our current understanding of it. You can find the second post here.…

  • Should we talk about ‘social security’ instead of ‘welfare’?

    When discussing unemployment and social security benefits, should those of us who believe in a more generous system try to avoid talking about ‘welfare’? Many researchers and campaigners believe that that the term ‘welfare’ activates ideas about ‘handouts’ and dependency which reduce public support benefits. For example, at a recent event hosted by the Commission…

  • The cut to Universal Credit is not the real problem

    This week’s cut to Universal Credit is an eye-catching policy, in all the wrong ways. It’s the largest overnight cut to the basic rate of benefits since WWII, taking money away from nearly two million people who are already food insecure. To make matters worse, it’s happening at a time when basic costs for low-income…