UK Report finds worsening violations of disabled people’s rights

AUGUST 28, 2023LABOUR HUB 

UK Deaf and disabled people’s organisations have today launched a scathing report evaluating the government’s performance seven years on from a United Nations finding of grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s rights due to austerity and welfare reform.

Kamran Mallick, Chief Executive of Disability Rights UK said: “The evidence is clear: the situation has worsened for disabled people since the report in 2016. Disabled people have and continue to pay with their lives.

“The UK Government has made no attempt to respond in a positive way to the findings, and time and again refuses to engage with Disabled people and our organisations in a meaningful way.”

The findings published in November 2016 were the outcome of a special inquiry initiated by the United Nations Committee responsible for the Convention on the Rights of Disabled People.

The new report compiled as written evidence for a follow-up by the Committee describes how disabled people’s living standards have deteriorated further since 2016.

Continued cuts to support for disabled people living in the community have led to them becoming segregated away from society within their own homes.

A recent report by a disabled people-led Commission in Lewisham found that 20% of respondents didn’t always have access to food and drink, could not wash (or be washed) regularly and couldn’t go to the toilet when needed.

Social care charging is pushing thousands into debt or forcing disabled people to pull out of support they need. The last comprehensive research undertaken found 166,000 disabled people in social care arrears to their local council. A recent BBC investigation found 60,000 disabled people had debt proceedings started against them by their government.

“We are living in dire circumstances,” said Dr Jim Elder-Woodward, Convenor of Inclusion Scotland, “isolated, trapped at home or in institutions; cold, hungry, and humiliated. Despite the Scottish Government saying they want to hear from those ‘with lived experience’ in the development of their plans and policies, our human rights continue to be denied.”

Added to further regression under issues originally investigated by the inquiry, disabled people have now also experienced adverse consequences from Brexit exacerbating the social care recruitment crisis, and been disproportionately hit by both Covid and the current cost of living crisis.

Megan Thomas, Policy and Research Officer at Disability Wales said: “The high levels of poverty in Wales, the cost-of-living crisis, and the aftermath of Covid-19 have resulted in disabled people not having access to suitable accommodation, not being able to enjoy their right to the support they need, and in some cases, disabled people have lost their lives.”

The political crisis in Northern Ireland is yet another factor causing avoidable harm to disabled people: the austerity budget imposed on Northern Ireland in response to its lack of government will see services and funding for disabled people slashed.

Nual Toman, head of policy at Disability Action said: “The inadequate budget allocated to Northern Ireland from Westminster has resulted in a severe cuts programme which is shredding public services at an alarming rate with a severe and disproportionate impact on disabled people.

“The cost of living emergency combined with inadequate disability benefits and barriers in accessing work have resulted in increasing numbers of disabled people becoming reliant on food banks.

“All of this is occurring in the absence of a functioning government. Urgent action is required to protect the lives and rights of disabled people.”

The report also highlights the serious threat of further grave and systematic rights violations posed by recent plans announced by the government to intensify and expand the benefit sanctions regime and to scrap the current system of out of work benefits for disabled people unable to earn a living through paid employment.

Around 632,000 disabled people are at risk of losing essential income as a result of these plans.

More than a quarter of those who will be affected by the introduction of in-work conditionality – where claimants on low incomes in receipt of benefit top-ups will be required to look for higher paid jobs or more hours of work under threat of benefit stoppages if they do not comply – are disabled.

Many of these low-paid workers will struggle to increase their working hours and/or face barriers to the job search activities they will be required to undertake, such as digital exclusion.

The launch of the report has been timed to coincide with the Committee hearing evidence in Geneva from UK Deaf and disabled representatives and UK Equality and Human Rights Commissions. The UK government has decided not to attend.

John McArdle, founder of the Black Triangle campaign, said: “The government won’t attend because they haven’t got a hope of putting up a credible defence as they seek to compound their abuses and abrogation of the Convention.

“Rather than working with disabled people to ensure a rigorous and safe system that doesn’t cause avoidable harm to the most disadvantaged members of society, it has made its decision to scrap the Work Capability Assessment and replace it with a system that is guaranteed to be far, far worse and lethal.”

The report follows publication last week by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commissions of their own evaluation which found the government has made little or no progress on each of the Committee’s eleven recommendations.

The report is available here.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lccr/2865509591. Creator: The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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Is “radical tinkering” enough?

Mike Phipps reviews When nothing works: From cost of living to foundational liveability, by Luca Calafati, Julie Froud, Colin Haslam, Sukhdev Johal and Karel Williams, published by Manchester University Press

AUGUST 31, 2023LABOUR HUB 

In a recent poll, 57% of the British electorate – including half of all Conservative voters – agreed with the statement ‘”nothing in Britain works anymore”. Only 19% disagreed. The verdict of course is vague: it covers NHS waiting lists, transport infrastructure, our education system, the state of our parks, the energy sector and much else. Right wing tabloid journalists compile a different list, from the criminal justice system to immigration controls.

The authors of this book trace the origin of the problem to the UK’s  pursuit of “a fantasy of market citizenship” which resulted in low wages and the rise of in-work benefits for an increasing proportion of economically active households who now receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. At the same time, “state underfunding has slowly undermined and distorted essential service provision.”

In a case study, the authors examine the NHS, where underfunding and wage cuts exacerbate a recruitment and retention crisis – as in many other parts of the public sector – but where additionally privatisation and reorganisations have “reconfigured key parts of the NHS so that they are unfit for health system purposes.”

A root cause of these failings is the shift in the balance of power between labour and capital in favour of the latter over the last fifty years, caused by the cumulative impact of weakened trade unions, growing privatisation and outsourcing and deregulated finance – “a rentier machine for rationing investment and extracting cash”.

“Britain needs a pay rise,” says the Trade Union Congress. But for low income households, this is only part of the solution, suggests this book: “Each extra one pound of wages turns into about 30 pence of disposable income for those who not only pay tax on their wage increase but also lose Universal Credit.” A reform of the “predatory” tax and benefit system is also required, plus big improvements in Britain’s social infrastructure. An immediate priority is reversing the austerity cuts of the 2010s in central government grants to local authorities.

“Quagmire politics”

This book proposes a new economic diagnosis and political approach to the UK’s problems: a break from the consensus “quagmire politics” and its objectives of faster growth and higher wages. In fact, faster growth is unattainable, argue the authors, “because the UK’s growth rate is declining and there is no evidence that technocratic centrist or free market supply side economic policies can shift the country onto a higher growth trajectory.”

But the aim of faster growth is not just unattainable, without a fundamental break from mainstream policies; it is also misconceived, insofar as faster growth aggravates the climate emergency. This is true even of ‘green growth’, claim the authors: the evidence suggests it’s simply not possible to decouple economic growth from environmental damage. The conclusion is inescapable: to achieve the necessary reductions in emissions, we will need to scale down aggregate economic activity. Fearing the electoral unpopularity of this message, few mainstream politicians are willing to articulate it.

On the face of it, the empirical evidence for this is insurmountable. Research suggests that every percent of growth raises emissions by a percent, because of the energy required to generate economic activity. But understanding this also indicates a potential solution: not all economic activity is equally energy-guzzling, and not all energy sources contribute the same amount of carbon emissions. In short, as one study puts it, “Clean up first, and then invest in development.”

A new framework

To address all these problems, the authors propose a new “foundational liveability framework”. This would end the focus on gross domestic product as the key measurement and would use instead household living standards as the basic unit of analysis. Liveability, argue the authors, “has been undermined by the crumbling of each of its three supporting pillars: essential services, social infrastructure and residual income. This is the result of the failed market citizenship project which has attempted to boost individual consumption at the expense of collective provision.”

This re-framing puts centre-stage a debate about universal basic services, universal basic income and even universal basic infrastructure which have been separately canvassed in the last few years.

The authors rightly bemoan the existing political consensus, but then suggest that several  constraints on an incoming Labour Government are likely to prevent a radical policy departure. “The room for fiscal expansionism will be limited by trade deficit and the debt to GDP ratio, while an independent Bank of England with a narrow remit will control monetary policy,” they argue. Some privatisation could be reversed, but the state has lost the capacity to run large-scale infrastructure projects and anyway regulation would be cheaper. An incremental approach would apparently work best, especially as voters are supposedly slow to grasp big economic ideas.

Thus the authors focus on “adaptive reuse which delivers slow, steady progress” and “starter and stealth policies.” These, they admit, “could be disparaged as tinkering, but sustained, purposive, broad front, radical tinkering is what adaptive reuse is all about.”

I’m not so sure. Of course, there is a sound logic to, for example, taking the best from local and regional government and rolling it out nationally. But the pragmatism and innovation that produced some excellent local initiatives were born of necessity amid severe financial constraints: a national government with a strong mandate should not be hamstrung in the same way. The caution advocated here could well backfire at a subsequent election, when a Starmer government, like New Labour before it, starts to lose the goodwill of voters increasingly impatient for change.

“Paradigm change is beyond this team of authors,” they declare in the Introduction. But if nothing really does work in contemporary Britain, isn’t that precisely what is needed?

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

ENDING THE ARTWASH

31 August 2023
Culture
Britain


A decade-long movement has largely dismantled fossil fuel sponsorships in the culture sector. Danny Chivers reports about how activism and international solidarity reshaped industry dynamics – and public sentiment.

Standing firm against BP sponsorship of British Museum’s ‘Troy’ exhibition on 8 February 2020. Hundreds of activists trying to end the artwash were also joined by a giant Trojan horse.

 IMAGEPLOTTER/ALAMY

Ten years ago, the UK arts and culture scene was awash with oil company logos. From the BP Portrait Award to the Shell-sponsored Southbank Centre in London, the industry was deeply embedded in the most high-profile arts institutions.

Today, things look very different. Earlier this year, it was confirmed that BP’s deals with the Royal Opera House and British Museum have ended, meaning the oil industry has now been almost entirely swept away from the UK culture sector. At least 15 cultural institutions have shuttered their oil partnerships in the last 10 years.

GREENWASH

By sponsoring theatres, museums and concert halls, the fossil fuel industry had been able to hide its destructive activities behind a friendly façade of arts and education. High-profile arts partnerships also ensured access to elites and decision-makers.

At the British Museum, for example, BP frequently sponsored exhibitions linked to countries where it operates. This allowed company executives to schmooze government officials from Mexico, Egypt, Russia or Iraq at exclusive exhibition launch parties, turning the (publicly-funded) British Museum into a space for BP to lobby for more drilling opportunities. In return, BP made sponsorship payments worth less than 0.5 per cent of the museum’s annual budget.

Many of the communities on the frontlines of oil extraction and climate change are the very same communities with colonially-looted artefacts in its vaults.

Resistance to these deals stretches back to 2004, when the campaign group London Rising Tide began targeting the BP Portrait Award. Things stepped up a gear in 2010 when the arts collective Liberate Tate began using creative interventions to challenge BP sponsorship of the galleries; and again in 2012, when a group of theatre-lovers (including me) started creating Shakespearean stage invasions before BP-branded plays put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company. This rebel theatre troupe became BP or not BP?, and went on to create around 70 impromptu performances in 11 different oil-sponsored institutions, involving giant props, creative blockades and thousands of people.

Campaigning research groups Platform and Culture Unstained exposed the dirty details of the oil companies’ arts sponsorship deals and built support from high-profile artists and performers, while arts and culture workers organized against the fossil fuel deals through the Public and Commercial Services Union Union and Culture Declares Emergency.

Ironically, the BP-sponsored British Museum provided a powerful opportunity for international solidarity. Many of the communities on the frontlines of oil extraction and climate change are the very same communities with colonially-looted artefacts in its vaults. By teaming up with activists and performers from Mexico, Colombia, West Papua, Iraq and Indigenous Australia, groups were able to highlight these connections and subvert BP’s sponsored exhibitions to tell more honest stories.

SHIFT IN PUBLIC OPINION

This broad-based, collaborative campaign has succeeded in almost completely eradicating oil industry partnerships from UK arts and culture. Alongside a wider ecosystem of actions and campaigns against the fossil fuel sector, these successes may have helped to drive a wider shift. Public opinion in recent years has swung firmly against the oil industry.

The UN climate talks refused direct sponsorship from fossil fuel companies for the first time in Glasgow in 2021, and the British LGBT Awards dropped BP and Shell sponsorship following protests in 2023. Parallel movements to end fossil fuel arts partnerships are picking up pace around the world, with major victories recently in the Netherlands, Canada and Australia.

Of course, there is still more work to do. The London Science Museum still has four fossil fuel partners, including the coal-mining giant Adani. The British Museum, which still has a BP Lecture Theatre, hasn’t ruled out future fossil fuel partnerships and is yet to properly address its colonial legacy.

The UK Art Not Oil movement shows the impact that a determined campaign of creativity, solidarity, and strategic direct action can have. Could it be a model for future victories over the fossil fuel industry?

This article is from the September-October 2023 issue of New Internationalist.

‘We Need to Confront the Lie That There are ‘Safe Routes’ for Refugees to Come to the UK’

The truth is that Rishi Sunak’s Government is complicit in forcing desperate people to risk their lives in order to seek refuge in this country

Zoe Gardner
31 August 2023

BYLINE TIMES

A group of people are brought in to Dungeness, Kent, by the RNLI following a small boat incident in the Channel.

 Photo: PA Images / Alamy
 

If you listen to any of the many representatives of anti-migrant policies in the media, from the Prime Minister, to the Home Secretary, down through the pecking order to the third former Ukip leader you’ve never heard of, you could be forgiven for believing that migrants and refugees make some really strange personal choices.

Specifically, you would probably believe that the Government has made available safe, formal routes to the UK that refugees are able to access, and that many choose instead, out of some perverse thrill-seeking urge, to “jump the queue” and take incredibly dangerous, irregular journeys across the Channel facilitated by smugglers. It’s time we confront this absurdity head on: the availability of safe routes to the UK for refugees is a lie.

First of all, there is no legal pathway to the UK for the purpose of seeking asylum. While there may be ambiguity in other areas, on this there is none. There is no way to apply for asylum from a British embassy or anywhere else abroad, or to obtain a visa to enter the UK for the purpose of claiming asylum.

This is, in fact, the very reason why international law permits people who make it to the UK to request asylum, and the very reason why the Refugee Convention states that refugees must not be penalised for taking irregular routes to reach a country of asylum. The only way to legally claim asylum is to already be in the UK – and for most people that involves taking an illegal route – it’s a catch-22. 

Given this straightforward fact, one might wonder about the need for an article such as this. The lie about access to safe routes has been allowed to gain such power because it is based, as all the smartest lies are, on a kernel of truth. There are some very limited ways in which some people are able to enter the UK as refugees, that have been distorted to present a picture of available routes, which are in fact meaningless in the vast majority of cases. In recent years, available routes have been closed and reduced, bit by bit.

2R5EXMK Falmouth’s 2nd protest against the Bibby Stockholm vessel being modified by AP to hold 500 refugees

Today, if you are at risk of persecution, but not from Ukraine or a British Overseas National from Hong Kong, your options are so limited as to be functionally non-existent. The worldwide population of refugees outside of these categories that were able to benefit from a safe relocation pathway to the UK in the 12 months to June 2023 was 3,408 – this represents an 83% reduction on the year before. The Government obscures these stark figures by citing numbers for the last five years combined, or by simply citing routes that are no longer operational.

But the truth is, the pathetically small number of “good refugees” who come through these routes as they’re “supposed to” includes just 2,570 Afghans, who have benefited from a variety of routes, only one of which remains open to this day (and which it is not possible to apply for) which has so far helped just 54 people to reach us.

374 people from Syria and a mere 136 people from Sudan – two of the world’s most currently dangerous countries – have obtained passage to the UK through resettlement in the last year, with yet fewer from other refugee-producing countries like Eritrea, Iran and Iraq.

Nonetheless, it is not unusual for Government Ministers to cite the Syrian relocation scheme when they list examples of supposed safe routes that refugees can access. The specific Syrian relocation scheme in fact did enable 20,000 people to travel safely to the UK. But it was introduced in 2015 by David Cameron, literally five Conservative Prime Ministers ago, and has been closed since early 2021. There is no meaningful way for a Syrian person – regardless of their connections to the UK – to apply for passage to this country if their life is in danger now. But those 374 people allow the government to keep peddling the lie.

Meanwhile, over 8,000 Afghans have made it to the UK in the past 12 months by taking a small boat and risking their lives in the Channel. Six tragically died in August making the attempt. Unknown thousands more have died at earlier stages along the dangerous journey to escape from danger.

‘Making the ECHR the Bogeyman is the Conservatives’ Next Big Fear Campaign’

Calls for the UK to leave the European Convention on Human Rights shouldn’t be viewed as mere sabre-rattling – as many did with Conservative promises to leave the EU, writes Nicholas Reed Langen

Nicholas Reed Langen

---

Trading in Lives

Iurge you to read the story reported in the Washington Post of Thaer Khalid al-Rahal, a Syrian father who waited with his family in a camp in the “first safe country” he reached for ten years hoping for a chance at resettlement to a country where he could rebuild a life for his children. When his four-year-old son was diagnosed with leukaemia, he couldn’t wait any longer. He made his way across the desert to the North African coast and boarded a boat trying to get to Europe. That boat sank and Thaer Khalid drowned along with around 650 others. This is where the lie of those safe routes brings us in the end.

I cannot endure the lie that obscures our Government’s culpability for the deaths of people like Thaer Khalid. In the face of ever more brazen distortions and dishonesty from those who seek to build their careers off anti-migrant hatred, we human rights defenders have always taken comfort in our expertise, on the facts being on our side. We have spent so long waiting for the facts to come to light and everyone to realise we’ve been right all along, it’s hard to recognise that the other side will never be held to account in the way we long for.

We need to trade in our facts for the larger truth. The facts may be that there are some, highly restrictive, extremely limited, cynically and minimally deployed ways in which a few “good refugees” can make it to the UK through government-sanctioned routes, but the real truth is that there are no safe routes to travel to the UK available to refugees. And that truth is killing refugees at our borders.

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WRITTEN BY

Zoe Gardner

Zoe Gardner is a Migrants Rights Campaigner and Researcher

 

Universal basic income and reproductive labour

With a renewed interest in universal basic income (UBI), maybe it is time to reconsider its gendered capabilities

bySophie Lively

 31-08-2023 

June of this year (2023) saw the announcement of two proposed UBI micro-pilot schemes in England, one in Jarrow, North East, and the other in East Finchley, north London. Once deemed ‘radical’, this particular proposal would see an unconditional basic income of £1,600 paid individually to participants for a specified period of time. Important features are that a UBI is an unconditional, regular cash payment paid directly to the individual, as opposed to the household, irrelevant of income status. Whilst criticism remains, across the political spectrum UBI has been touted as a contender for addressing poverty and guarding against problems of the future such as climate breakdown and loss of jobs due to automation and artificial intelligence.

Whilst the notion of a UBI is not new, with trials having already been implemented in places such as Alaska, North Carolina, California, Canada, Finland, Germany, Spain, and Kenya, there has been increased interest in the UK, particularly post-Covid. In July 2022, Wales introduced a pilot offering more than 500 care leavers £1,600 per month for a period of two years to support their transition to adult life. The ability to have this unconditional payment from state to citizen could have a wealth of benefits – financial, emotional and physical, all which may have positive outcomes not only for the individual but for society as a whole. Whilst the aforementioned benefits are regularly discussed, less so is the transformative potential of a UBI with regards to women and reproductive labour.

Women and work

Gendered divisions of labour have long been unequal and reproductive labour disproportionately burdens women and girls. Indeed, an Oxfam report highlighted that globally, women and girls do more than three-quarters of all unpaid care work which, if valued at minimum wage, would ‘represent a contribution to the global economy of at least $10.8trillion a year, more than three times the size of the global tech industry’.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, attention was drawn to this, with research from UCL revealing that women undertook twice as much home-schooling as men during the lockdown. Additionally, some evidence showed that when it came to household chores responsibility was more equal. However, this was quickly dispelled, with a study  by the World Economic Forum which found that by September 2020 ‘gender divisions had been re-established and women disproportionately held the majority of the domestic burdens’. Whilst such discussions have ceased in mainstream discourse, this wasn’t the first time the relationship between women and unpaid work has been highlighted. 

Wages for housework

Founded by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici and Brigitte Galtier, the 1970s Wages for Housework’s (WfH) campaign was a crucial moment in the widespread dialogue around women and labour. Attempting to have reproductive labour gain legitimacy politically, this grassroots campaign provided an intersectional, anti-capitalist and international feminist network across both the global north and global south. Seeking to disrupt power relations and redistribute wealth gained, the WfH campaign challenged an entrenched order in which women’s, mostly unnoticed, essential domestic work goes ‘undervalued, unremunerated or underpaid’. It demanded that ‘caring labour, mostly done by women, is not biological destiny or ‘love’, but – under capitalism – work that should receive a wage.’ Their first campaign was to keep family allowance in women’s hands as the government at the time ‘intended to transfer it to men’s pay packets’.

However, there have been subsequent concerns around providing a ‘wage’ for women’s unpaid labour. Such concern includes the potential for women to become institutionalised at home and for unpaid work to be commodified, thus further embedding them in the capitalist machine. Despite being 50 years on, the WfH campaign can offer an alternative perspective, reiterating the continued struggle to have women’s reproductive labour adequately recognised. Whilst acknowledging flaws, a UBI could go some way in creating such recognition, subsequently increasing agency and offering immediate relief for many in the current cost of living crisis.

Reproductive labour today

Today, women around the world continue to bear the brunt of unpaid domestic work along with child-care and elder-care. In 2016, the ONS reported that in the UK ‘women carry out an overall average of 60% more unpaid work than men’ and a later study by the Women’s Budget Group revealed that on top of this, austerity measures have hit women hardest. It is important to reiterate that this isn’t something new; such gendered divisions are long-standing, and whilst commendable work has been done in order to address gender inequality here in the UK and globally, divisions persist.

We have seen a number of policies in recent years aimed at women and labour. Despite not explicitly acknowledging the structural inequalities women face due to patriarchal power imbalances, their focus has been specifically on productive labour. But such policies fall far short from the transformative change needed. In 2015, Shared Parental Leave was introduced, but figures from Maternity Action reveal that an estimate of only 3 – 4% of eligible fathers have taken up the opportunity. In this year’s Spring Budget, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that from 2024 we would see a ‘revolution in childcare’, which he claimed, amongst other things, would ‘remove barriers to work for nearly half a million parents with children under 3 in England not working due to caring responsibilities’, with an emphasis on reducing ‘discrimination against women’. However, such a pledge comes with a plethora of its own issues. Indeed, CEO of the Early Years Alliance criticised the plan as he told Sky News, ‘such a policy would do little, if anything, to lower costs for parents’. Further criticisms have included several childcare providers raising concerns around recruitment, alongside risks regarding increasing child-to-adult ratios. Such policies merely tinker around the edge of an already failing system which puts economic growth above all else. They do little, if anything, to address structural inequalities women experience with regards to both paid and unpaid work and go no way to increasing agency.

Additional benefits for women

Enhancing women’s autonomy, both individually and as part of a family unit, allows for greater choice for women in both private and public spaces. Whilst the economic benefits of a UBI are regularly touted, such a proposal could also aid in both valuing and rewarding those who want to be full time care givers – either to their own children, disabled people or elderly relatives – echoing the WfH calls of the 1970s.

Going beyond the idea of wages for housework, there could be additional benefits for women. Assisting in avoiding the ‘unemployment traps’ that recipients of welfare may experience whereby they ‘risk losing their benefits should they increase their labour force participation’, a UBI offers a secure, unconditional minimum floor irrespective of changing circumstances. Such a ‘trap’ is shown to be of particular detriment to single parents, around 90% of which are women, as well as people with disabilities . Jason B. Whiting, writing in The Institute for Family Studies highlights the financial constraints many women experiencing domestic violence face, and the individual recipient stipulation of UBI means that women could ‘be empowered with their own financial independence, and increased access to necessary resources to escape abusive situations’. Helping to reshape entrenched patriarchal gender norms which continue to rest on the assumption of a heteronormative family consisting of a male breadwinner and female caregiver, could have transformative effects at both the individual and wider societal level, allowing women to have greater choice with regards to their own labour.

It’s no panacea but it may offer a way ahead

UBI is in no way a utopian dream. Alone, it would be insufficient in challenging the many barriers women experience with regards to both reproductive and productive labour. It is vital that our public services are adequately funded and any implementation of a UBI should go alongside the ongoing struggle for an improvement in workers’ rights and conditions. Of course there are flaws, but in contrast to meagre offerings from the current government, a UBI could provide increased support and agency for all.

With the exciting potential that the North East could be home to a pilot, perhaps now is the time to renew discussions regarding the gendered capabilities of a UBI. Whilst valid argument remains regarding the risk of entrenching and exploiting women’s unpaid work, the current cost of living crisis, broken education system, crumbling social care system and continued gender pay gap are just some of the reasons that UBI may not only have positive, widespread and impactful outcomes for all, but have the added benefit of contributing to the ongoing struggle towards a more just and gender equal society. 

UK
Pret a Manger fined £800,000 after worker left trapped in -18°C freezer


Sian Elvin

Thursday 31 Aug 2023 

She tried to tear up a cardboard box containing chocolate croissants

 to keep herself warm (Picture: Shutterstock)

A Pret a Manger worker feared for her life after she was left trapped in a walk-in freezer for two-and-a-half hours.

The sandwich chain was fined £800,000 over the incident at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday.

The company pleaded guilty to an offence contrary to the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 following an investigation by Westminster City Council.

The court heard how a member of staff working at the Victoria Coach Station branch became stuck in the shop’s commercial freezer on July 29, 2021.

She was wearing only jeans and a t-shirt in an environment where the temperature is typically set to run at -18°C.

Despite the limited space in the freezer the worker attempted to keep warm by moving around.

But after some time she started to feel ill – her breathing felt restricted and she was losing sensation in her thighs and feet.

At one point she attempted to tear up a cardboard box holding chocolate croissants to try and shield herself from the ventilator blowing out cold air, but found her hands were too stiff and cold to pull it apart.

A colleague eventually found her in ‘a state of distress’, thinking she was going to die.

She was taken to hospital and treated for suspected hypothermia.

The subsequent investigation found there was no suitable risk assessment in placeand over the past 19 months there had been several call-outs relating to broken or frozen push buttons inside the freezer.

On a similar occasion in January 2020 another worker also became trapped in the freezer and couldn’t open the door from the inside due to the internal release mechanism not working.

Pret a Manger was ordered to pay the council its full costs and a victim surcharge within 28 days.

The district judge had reduced the fine from £1.6 million due to the early guilty plea and mitigation.

Councillor and deputy leader Aicha Less said: ‘The shocking details of this case show a lapse of due care and attention. This incident shows that overlooking basic safety measures can have the most serious consequences.

‘We hope the significant fine awarded in court acts to all businesses as a warning, preventing this from ever happening again.

‘Westminster City Council will continue to work with businesses to make sure the highest levels of health and safety are consistently maintained and educate staff in safe practice.’

A Pret A Manger spokesperson said: ‘We are incredibly sorry for our colleague’s experience and understand how distressing this must have been.

‘We have carried out a full review and have worked with the manufacturer to develop a solution to stop this from happening again.

‘Following the incident, we have revisited all our existing systems and where appropriate, enhanced these processes, and have co-operated fully with Westminster City Council’s investigation.’

Majority of Church of England priests support same-sex weddings
Staff writer 31 August 2023 

A Pride flag flies at the Church of St Peter & St Pauls in Bromley, Kent.

(Photo: Getty/iStock)

A survey of Church of England clergy by The Times newspaper has found widespread support for a change in rules to allow priests to conduct same-sex weddings.

The survey of 1,200 serving priests found that over half (53.4%) support a change in Church law to allow them to wed gay couples, compared to over a third (36.5%) who are opposed.

The Church of England's parliamentary body, the General Synod, backed plans to introduce same-sex blessings in February. Asked where they stand on the issue, most of the priests surveyed (59%) said they plan to offer same-sex blessings to couples, versus 32.3% who said they will not.

More than three in five (63.3%) said gay priests should be allowed to marry their same-sex partners.

A sizable majority (62.6%) support a change in position on premarital sex - 21.6% support an end to the teaching of abstinence before marriage, and 41% say opposition to premarital sex should be dropped for people in "committed relationships".

Just over a third (34.6%) say the Church's traditional teaching on premarital sex should not be changed.

The findings reflect a dramatic change in attitudes among CofE priests since 2014, when 51% said in a Lancaster University study that same-sex marriage was "wrong", compared to 39% who supported it.

Linda Woodhead, who led the 2014 study, said The Times survey revealed "a very rapid change" in attitudes.

The Rev Canon John Dunnett, director of the Church of England Evangelical Council, said the study "signposts a thoroughly divided Church of England".

"The question it raises, the million-dollar question, is how is the [Church] is going to face a situation in which the level of division is both so substantial and runs so deep?" he told the newspaper.

 

More than half of clergy think CofE establishment needs review

Posted:Thu, 31 Aug 2023

Nearly 12% of priests support disestablishment, survey finds

More than half of Church of England priests want the Church's established status to be reviewed, according to new figures.

A survey conducted by The Times found 53% of Church of England clerics think establishment should be reviewed. This is a significant increase from the last survey in 2014, which found 41% supported a review.

Clergy who question establishment include nearly 12% of priests who said Church should be disestablished – formally separated from the state.

Over 41% of clergy say the Church's established status "should be reviewed, with some elements of establishment retained and some abolished". Only 43% think the Church's status should be left unchanged.

The National Secular Society has said the figures underline the need for parliament to "take disestablishment seriously".

Most clergy want bishops' bench reformed, say Britain no longer a "Christian country"

The survey also indicated widespread doubt about the appropriateness of reserving 26 seats in the House of Lords exclusively for CofE bishops (Lords Spiritual, also known as the 'bishops bench'). Sixty per cent of priests back reform, including nearly 45% who say the seats should be opened up to other faith leaders, and over 8% who say their numbers should be reduced. Nearly 7% think Lords Spiritual should be abolished altogether.

Less than 37% say the bishops' bench should be left unchanged.

The survey, which analysed responses from 1,200 ordained serving priests, also found:

• Over 73% think modern Britain cannot be called a "Christian country". The 2021 census found less than half the population of England and Wales are Christian, while the percentage of nonreligious people has risen sharply to 37%.
• Approximately 67% predict church attendance will continue to decline.
• A majority (53%) think the Church should allow priests to choose to conduct same-sex weddings, and 63% believe gay priests should be allowed to enter same-sex civil marriages. Nearly 65% believe the Church's teaching that "homosexual practice is incompatible with scripture" should be dropped.
• Nearly 63% of priests think the Church should drop its opposition to sex outside of marriage.

NSS: Separating religion and state most "practical, sustainable and suitable approach"

NSS chief executive Stephen Evans said: "It's encouraging to see support for reforms to remove the Church's privileges coming from within the Church itself.

"The issue of automatic seats for religious clerics in House of Lords certainly needs to be addressed, but extending the privilege to leaders of other faiths is wholly unworkable.

"The question of which faith communities would be represented, and then identifying and selecting individuals who could legitimately represent those faith communities, would be both extremely difficult and divisive.

"It would also add to the alienation of the rapidly growing numbers of nonreligious people.

"A clear separation of religion and state through disestablishment, including ending seats 'as of right' for religious leaders, is much more practical, sustainable and suitable approach for a modern pluralistic Britain.

"It's time for parliament to take disestablishment seriously and ensure mechanisms are in place to enable a clean break between Church and state."

 

Jane Dodds writes: Basic Income is a liberal idea and we must reclaim it

By Jane Dodds | Thu 31st August 2023 - 

As a long-standing advocate of Basic Income I was incredibly excited that my native Wales was the first part of the UK to pilot this policy idea. I have supported the Labour Government in this process and am following developments with optimism.

The pilot is centred around young people leaving the care system. This is a particularly disadvantaged group of youngsters who ordinarily would be more or less left to their own devices when they reach their 18th birthday and are no longer considered children by the system.

There is already evidence that the generous £400 per week package is being used by these young people to go on courses, or to put down a deposit on a flat. One young person has used it to pay for driving lessons.

Even though the scheme has been criticised constantly by Conservatives in Wales, who say among other things that these young people will be taken advantage of, there is no evidence so far of that happening.

The scheme has been in place for a year and there is another year to go. The trial is being evaluated independently by Cardiff University and I am convinced that it will show that a Basic Income is good for people, for communities and for the economy.

Which is also why I am disappointed that our own party, which led the way in the UK by making Basic Income official party policy back in 2020, now appears to be backsliding in its commitment to this very liberal idea.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, a Basic Income is a regular and unconditional payment to every individual in society, as a right of citizenship.

A Basic Income has five core characteristics:

• It’s paid in cash: it’s money you can spend on whatever you want.
• It’s paid regularly: so you know the next payment is coming.
• It’s for individuals: Each person gets their own basic income, paid to the individual not the household.
• It’s unconditional: You don’t have to work or make any promises to get your basic income, there are no strings attached
• It’s universal: everyone gets it.

Basic Income is, at its core, about financial stability and dignity for all.

Basic Income trials like the one in Wales (and others currently being proposed in England) are a good idea, although there is already plenty of evidence that these sorts of unconditional cash transfer programmes have incredibly positive impacts on the wellbeing of communities and individuals.

A four-year experiment in Canada in the 1970s found that giving people a basic income made everyone nearly 10% less likely to end up in hospital. It also concluded, contrary to most popular beliefs, that giving people a bit of money does not have a measurable impact on their willingness to work.

More recently, a smaller basic income study among a cohort of unemployed people in Finland also concluded that their health outcomes were better and their inclination to work unaffected.

Modelling of Basic Income schemes shows that they reduce child poverty and health inequalities.

The Liberal Democrats made support for Basic Income official party policy at our 2020 party conference. With millions facing economic uncertainty because of the Covid-19 pandemic, we recognised that financial stability had to be for everyone and that we had a vested interest in looking out for each other in society.

Our policy people went to work and produced a sensible policy proposal for giving everyone in the country a Basic Income.

And yet, just three years later, that clarity of vision appears to have been lost. The Basic Income proposal was buried inside yet another consultation and essentially discarded at this year’s spring conference. Even the original proposal document has been removed from the party’s website (They published it here https://www.libdems.org.uk/a21-universal-basic-income but have now removed that page.)

I want our party to reclaim this liberal idea. Basic Income was proposed by Paddy Ashdown as a fundamental component of his “Radical Agenda for the 1990s”, a book published in the late 1980s. It is liberal because it recognises the agency of the individual and their contribution to society. A Basic Income, he said, “gives security to each individual”, and will also “liberate power in the hands of the citizen.”

We need to be a party that is not afraid to articulate bold ideas that strengthen our citizens, reduce inequality and make for stronger communities. Basic Income is one such idea. A Basic Income does not solve every problem, but it makes every problem easier to solve.

I will be at our autumn conference making the case for a Basic Income and I hope you will join me. Our session is on Sunday, September 24th 19.45 to 21.00 in the Meyrick Suite and the BIC.

* Jane Dodds is Leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats