Coppola Comment

In 1795, the parish of Speen, in Berkshire, England, embarked on a radical new system of poor relief . Due to the ruinous French wars and a series of poor harvests, grain prices were rising sharply. As bread was the staple food of the poor, rising grain prices increased poverty and caused unrest. Concerned by the possibility of riots, the parish decided to provide subsistence-level income support to the working poor. The amounts paid were anchored to the price of bread. Each member of a family qualified for a payment, so the larger the family, the more they received. In effect, it was a system of in-work benefits. Subsistence-level income support already existed for the non-working poor. The Poor Laws , first introduced in Elizabethan times, distinguished between different categories of “poor” and treated them differently. At the time that the Speenhamland system was introduced, the old, inflrm and children were placed in poorhouses, where they were cared for and were not expecte...

The desire to judge people's motives rather than addressing their needs is a “British disease”. We have been suffering from it for hundreds of years, cycling endlessly through repeated cycles of generosity and harshness. Each cycle ends in public outrage and an abrupt reversal: but the memory eventually fades, and the disease reappears in a new form. In this post, I outline the tragic history of Britain's repeated attempts to "categorise the poor". For centuries, successive British social systems have recognised that there are people who cannot work, whether because they are too young, too old, too ill or too infirm. These people need to be provided for by others – in the first instance families, but where family support networks break down, support must be provided by the wider community. And for centuries, successive British social systems have also recognised the existence of people who are perfectly capable of working but are not doing so. Most of these ...

We have a crisis of work. The secure, well-paid jobs of the past - many of them in manufacturing - are disappearing. What is replacing them is insecurity and uncertainty. Low-paid, part-time, temporary and seasonal work. The "feast or famine" of self-employment. The so-called "sharing economy", where people rent out their possessions for a pittance. The "gig economy", where people are paid performance by performance - or piece by piece. " Piecework ", we used to call it. Perhaps we should rediscover this name. Piecework has been the lot of most humans throughout history. Secure full-time jobs for wages have existed for less than a hundred years. And they were never available to everyone. In the post-war "golden age" of manufacturing to which many would like to return, most men had secure full-time jobs - but women did not. My father left school at 16 and went to work for an insurance company. He stayed with that company for hi...

I've written before about the arbitrary and cruel judgments made by DWP frontline staff in relation to ESA claimants, particularly the mentally ill. And Guy Standing, in his excellent books about the precarious lives of the "new underclass", describes how the process of claiming benefits creates huge amounts of unproductive "work". Benefit claimants have to "earn" their benefits by what amounts to jumping through hoops. But I confess that - not being a claimant myself - I lacked real understanding of just how insane and tortuous the JSA & ESA system is. Today, I read a powerful blogpost by Lizzie Cornish, a 61-year old woman who has found herself without a job and - because of women's rising state pension age - also without a pension. She describes her personal experience of claiming JSA and ESA. The story she tells is worthy of Kafka. Lizzie (who is involved with the WASPI campaign) blocked me on Twitter long ago, so I have not been ...

I'm collecting here all the pieces I have written on the UK state pension and its problems. What a shambles. Here are my recent posts, in disaster order. WASPI As I explain in these posts, I would be supportive of WASPI if they were only concerned with addressing the blatant injustice of the 2011 acceleration of the pension age rise for women. But they aren't, and what they are actually after is seriously unfair to other groups. So I can't support them. And I don't like the way they and their supporters behave towards people who don't agree with them.  But the 2011 change IS unfair. Kudos to Mhairi Black of the SNP for getting the 2011 acceleration debated in Parliament, and a very impressive result - 158 to ZERO in favour of rethinking it.  The angry WASPIs Here I stand, I can do no other  (Position paper on WASPI) Dylan Thomas and the Furies What they really want The WASPI campaign's unreasonable demand Never mind WASPI, look at Back ...

This is my response to the Slog's takedown of my Forbes post on the UK state pension system. I am addressing it directly to Anthony Ward, the author of the Slog blog.  For obvious reasons, I have not provided a link to Anthony's post.  I can't begin to tell you how upset and horrified I was by the post you wrote today. It was factually incorrect (I shall explain the factual errors below). But more importantly, it was an unfair and brutal attack on me, for no reason that I can see other than you wanted to find an "opponent" to knock down and I was an easy target. Given that you know there have been sustained and very unpleasant attacks on me from WASPI supporters in the last few weeks, what you wrote could hardly have been more hurtful or damaging to me. It amounted to pouring a large amount of petrol on an already raging fire.   As I pointed out on Twitter, you misrepresented my Forbes post  in order to justify your support of the WASPI cause. When I explained...

I wasn't going to write another post about the WASPI campaign, but things have become so unpleasant and confused that I have no choice. This post is my final and definitive statement on where I stand on the women's state pension debate. Hence the title. My view of the women's state pension age problem I described the women's state pension age problem in some detail in a previous post , so I shall only outline it here, along with my view on each part of this complex problem. Recent changes to women's state pension age are these: The 1995 Pensions Act raised women's state pension age (SPA) from 60 to 65, the same as men's. To give women time to prepare, the transition did not start for 15 years, and it then raised the age over the course of 10 years, from 2010 to 2020. The effect was that women born prior to 6 April 1950 would remain eligible for the state pension on their 60th birthday, but women born later than that would see their eligibility gr...