I have just blogged about this over at my other blog, Rethinking Incapacity – you can read the full blog post (with the link to the research articles) here. Advertisements
Over the past twenty-five years, there has been a major and widely-reported change in British attitudes towards benefit claimants: simply put, we are less positive about benefit claimants than we used to be. More of us think that ‘large numbers … Continue reading
As long-term readers will know, I’m intrigued by people’s beliefs about the benefit system, and their truthfulness or falsity of these beliefs. Later in the summer, I’ll talk about a new aspect of this: people’s perceptions of how many out-of-work benefit claimants exist, … Continue reading
This post was originally going to be about the pros and cons of two recent UK government policy announcements. The first proposes to force people to wait a week after losing their jobs before claiming JSA (Jobseeker’s Allowance), and the … Continue reading
As part of the International Year of Statistics (by the way, it’s also the International Year of Water Cooperation, and the International Year of Quinoa, so good quinoa recipes in the comments please), Ipsos Mori recently conducted a survey looking … Continue reading
I’ve written before about how I think a lot of people’s antipathy towards the benefits system comes from their ideas about the sort of people benefits claimants are. That they are a special, different sort of person that is unworthy of … Continue reading
In the midst of the argument we in the UK are currently having about welfare, it’s worth highlighting one factor that’s standing in the way of honest debate. This is politicians’ routine, wilful abuse of numbers. It’s an old complaint. … Continue reading
Does the amount we spend on benefits for the unemployed justify the attention they get? We write a lot about welfare benefits on this blog. They’re an important part of social policy that rarely spends long out of the newspaper … Continue reading
This is part two of my duo of posts on why support for unemployment benefits seems to have crashed over the last 15-20 years. Last time I focused on what’s been going on in people’s heads. I argued that people … Continue reading
Inspired by Ben’s recent batch of posts on the benefits system, I wanted to spend some time talking a bit more about how people on benefits are perceived, and how and why that might have changed over time. In his … Continue reading
Latest articles Latest short posts Latest comments
