Social Policy
The Spirit Level’s Political Wobble: The Inequality Debate Rages On
Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone is an admirable book and has generated a long-overdue debate about the high social costs of inequality. Inequality is not just about the poor staying poor; it is about the huge leap in income and wealth of the rich, or ‘super rich’ as [...]
Obama’s Iftar-Speech Fuels Mosque Controversy
With the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico almost stopped, America all of a sudden finds itself enmeshed in a new ferocious debate about religion; one that is likely to further damage the president’s outreach agenda to the Muslim world. At a recent Iftar-dinner at the White House, Obama made the following remarks: ‘… [...]
Angela Merkel: The World’s ‘Most Valuable Leader’
Forget Barack Obama. Forget the Hu Jintao/Wen Jiaboa duo, or David Cameron or Vladimir Putin. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel is the world’s most important leader. The latest report showing Germany’s economy growing at a blistering annual rate of nearly 9%, well into recovery from a US-made economic collapse, is just further evidence of the obvious. Despite [...]
Squalid Isolation – Social Cohesion, Quality of Life and Losing the Ties that Bind
A few weeks ago I called on social democracy to come to terms with the fact that many of its voters are not on loan to other parties, but for the most part gone for good. One of the key problems behind this, I argued, is that the traditional bases of all mass parties are [...]
Salvaging Gender Equality Policy
The author puts forward five principles to establish a more equal gender order against the risks of recessionary cutbacks. These encompass parental support policies, gender-specific impacts of minimum wage and pension policies, women’s rights to economic independence, public sector restructuring, and the need to challenge the power of male elites in the private sector. As [...]
After the Crisis: Employment Relations for Sustained Recovery and Growth
Strengthening labour relations and workplace innovations are prerequisites for sustained recovery and future growth. Enabling workers and unions to negotiate wage growth in line with enhanced productivity growth requires the dissemination of high-performance working practices that engage workers, a raising of minimum standards, and substantial changes to labour law. The global economic crisis had its [...]
How to Reassure Markets Without Slashing Fiscal Deficits
Having spent the past few months denying reality, Europe’s governments are now facing it in the unpleasant form of a loss of confidence in their bonds. For centuries the standard problem for bond markets has been to distinguish between prudent and imprudent governments. I want to suggest how governments can now restore confidence in a [...]
The Greek Crisis is a ticking Social Bomb
The Greek crisis is not merely economic: behind the numbers are people, most of whom bear no responsibility for the economic mess they have ended up with. Manintaining social cohesion as poverty and unemployment levels rise ought to be a policy priority.
Sustainability will not be delivered without Equality
Global warming and climate change pose ever more urgently the question of how the world shares its resources. Environmental constraints mean the old capitalist trick of making and promising an ever increasing cake will not work any more, or not for much longer anyway. The question of how the cake is shared has to be [...]
The EU 2020 Strategy puts the European Social Model at Risk
For social democrats, the principles guiding any crisis exit strategy must be the smooth transition to a model based on sustainability and solidarity. This requires to recognise the social origins of the crisis and to draw the correct policy implications from it. This is not only a political, but also an ideological battle, as recent [...]
Which planet is America on (and which Europe)?
The American political commentator Robert Kagan once claimed that ‘Americans are from Mars, Europeans from Venus’. If so, I have just spent a week in the capital of Mars. And, back on Venus, I have watched from afar the debate, if that is the right word, on the reform of the Martian healthcare system. I [...]
Towards a Co-operative Europe
Human flourishing requires conditions of relative equality. Progressives have always realised this and have traditionally looked to the state to deliver. This has led to many successes, particularly in the 1945-75 period when robust profitability (rooted in the re-stocking of manufacturing capacity destroyed in World War II) and the communist threat obtained many social concessions [...]
