This month, the Traverse Theatre premieres Morna Pearson’s award-winning play How to Disappear. This tragi-comedy and social commentary, starring Kirsty Mackay, Sally Reid and Owen Whitelaw, combines the fantastical with the difficulty faced by benefit claimants in Tory Britain. How to Disappear masterfully blends the absurd and fantastical with the mundanely relatable. Few of us have experienced […]
In January, Finland became the first European country to pay their unemployed a set monthly sum, as part of a social experiment centred on the idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI). The two-year scheme offers unemployed Finns between the ages of 25 to 58, €560 (the equivalent to £475) a month, which will continue to […]
It seems like hardly a week goes by where George Osbourne doesn’t announce a new set of cut-backs, and it would almost be easy to become desensitised were it not for the fact that these are real people for whom the consequences are quite literally life-threatening. The latest is the cutting of the Personal Independence […]
Put quite simply, the idea of EU benefit scroungers draining UK resources is myth. Whilst undeniable that many EU citizens struggle with unemployment in the UK and subsequently rely on the state to help them get through these tough times with what meagre funds Job Seeker’s Allowance affords, recent figures have shown that on balance […]
This week, Katharine Sacks-Jones commented in the Guardian that, ‘Popular misconceptions lead to people who need support being treated with the same suspicion and contempt as those who abuse the system’. Indeed, there is a clear gravitation towards victimisation and scapegoating, both within government and the media, towards those receiving Britain’s essential welfare services. Last […]