News & Insight

Who was William Beveridge?

21 December 2012

70 years ago, at one of the darkest moments of the second world war, an obscure interdepartmental report on Social Insurance and Allied Services, composed by a temporary wartime civil servant, William Beveridge, suddenly shot to fame as what was...

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Fabian review of the year

21 December 2012

It’s been a very busy 2012 at the Fabian Society and, looking back, it feels like the political landscape has transformed. This year we set about arming the Labour party with the raw material for its political renewal, including the...

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Breadline Britain and the big society

21 December 2012

This week, as part of a London assembly investigation I am leading in to food poverty, results from a survey of teachers in London were published. This revealed that over 95 per cent of those teachers who responded said that...

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12 days of Fabian Christmas: What’s winter got to do with politics?

21 December 2012

The most recent figures from the Office of National Statistics show that there were 24,000 extra deaths last winter, the majority of these among older people. Age UK’s Mary Milne looks at how we can tackle cold weather related deaths...

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The next welfare settlement

20 December 2012

Listening to most commentary about the British welfare state might leave you depressed, fearing that the legacy of Sir William Beveridge’s 1942 report is all but dead. But in spite of legitimate and troubling concerns, ‘follow the money ’ and...

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Why the welfare uprating bill is bad economics

14 December 2012

Much of the reaction to the chancellor’s decision to uprate most working age benefits and tax credits by just 1 per cent per annum for three years has focussed on questions of distribution. As the Resolution Foundation analysis demonstrated 60...

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