As the number of families in Britain with at least one working parent fall below the poverty threshold and 'payday loans' show a steep rise, Barbara Gunnell asks : who benefits from the British bargain-basement low-wage economy?
Why don't Americans want universal health care ? And what is it about American political culture that causes the uninsured, the poor and the ill, to accept the status quo? Ruth Rosen reports
The scandal of those in Britain with no shelter at all is well-known, but what of the "housed homeless" and the hundreds of thousands of sub-standard and squalid living spaces in the towns and cities where the poorest try to raise their families?
The argument is being made that “food sovereignty” is an organising principle so demonstrably strong that it has the potential to transform economic power. Can we really invest in it as the ecological principle to take us into the 21st century? Jenny Allsopp reports from the AWID Forum 2012
How can we empower women to participate in existing economic structures and also transform them? We need a model of economic power and citizenship that is not simply about sustaining capital or growth, but sustaining and celebrating life itself. Jenny Allsopp reports directly from the AWID Forum 2
In the global context of economic insecurity and emerging 'care crises', there is a real risk that the development industry becomes complicit in compounding women’s burden of unpaid care and entrenching traditional gender roles - something we must guard against, argues Emily Esplen
As the legal aid bill reaches its final stage, Britain’s welfare state is set to take another debilitating blow. In this extract from ‘Public Service on the Brink’, Rebekah Carrier considers the obstacles that prevent lawyers working in the system from acknowledging the uncompromising reality of t
Today marks the final reading of the legal aid bill in the Lords. If - as seems likely - the bill goes through, 'ordinary people' in Britain will be shocked to discover how thin is their access to law when things go wrong. Deborah Padfield, whose work has for several years been funded by legal aid
The real migration scandal in the UK are the people forced to live without any recourse to public funds. Migrant women who leave violent husbands, and women who have been trafficked into the UK to work in the sex industry, face the additional trauma of destitution, says Jenny Phillimore
Governments are constructing social policy based on misrepresentations and stereotypes about poor people and welfare claimants, rather than by reference to the structural inequalities that affect everyone, argues Kate Donald
If the measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable, then societies everywhere have cause to be ashamed. In a changing and dramatically unequal world, the global human rights system must prove its worth, says Vijay Nagaraj
Inequality in South Africa has deepened since 1994. Respect for fundamental rights, including socio-economic rights, must be rebuilt - for when rights begin to be seen as hindrances to development and change, people begin to question why they should be observed at all, says Isobel Frye
