Francis Coppola

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.My view of the women's state pension age problemI 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...

I do not like the direction in which our society is travelling.From a joint statement by several Christian churches, published in the Methodist Times in October: In March this year, the Churches published a report showing that nearly 100,000 children had been affected by sanctions in 2014 alone and that people with mental health problems were being sanctioned at a rate of more than 100 per day.  Seriously? 100,000 children are affected by sanctions imposed on their parents? Let us...

Guest post by Tom Streithorst The Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is back in the news.  The Finns are considering implementing it, as are the Swiss, replacing all means tested benefits with a simple grant to every citizen, giving everyone enough money to survive. Unlike most current benefits programmes, it is not contingent on being worthy or deserving or even poor.  Everybody gets it, you, me, Rupert Murdoch, the homeless man sleeping under a bridge. Last seriously proposed by Richard...

The world turns on its dark side......it is winter A Child of Our Time, Michael Tippett "Man has measured the heavens with a telescope, driven the gods from their thrones," proclaims the contralto at the start of Michael Tippett's wartime oratorio A Child Of Our Time. Like our counterparts before the dark time of which Tippett writes, we too believe that science leaves no place for religion. But religion endures, and when the world turns, it comes back in its most violent form, tearing...

Basic Income: How do we get there? Brian Eno, David Graeber and Frances Coppola Brian Eno, David Graeber, Frances Coppola will be leading a discussion facilitated by Becca Kirkpatrick from Unison. Venue to be announced. Brian Eno is a musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music. He recently spoke about basic income during his John Peel Lecture on Radio 6. David Graeber is an American anthropologist and anarchist...

Basic Income: How do we get there? Brian Eno, David Graeber and Frances Coppola Brian Eno, David Graeber, Frances Coppola will be leading a discussion facilitated by Becca Kirkpatrick from Unison. Venue to be announced. Brian Eno is a musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music. He recently spoke about basic income during his John Peel Lecture on Radio 6. David Graeber is an American anthropologist and anarchist...

The WASPIs are angry again. About the New State Pension, this time. Apparently it is unfair to women, especially those born in the 1950s.Paul Lewis, in the BBC's Money Box email (h/t Annie Shaw), lists six problems: 1. Women born 6 April 1951 to 5 April 1953 all reach state pension age before the new state pension begins. So they won’t get the new state pension while men of the same age – who will be 65 when it begins – will. That is sex discrimination and they want the choice to have new or...

At the ICAEW's conference "Do Banks Work?" last week, there was a fascinating interchange between Ian Gorham of Hargreaves Lansdowne and RBS's Ross McEwan. Apparently RBS had refused a large deposit from Hargreaves Lansdowne, to the irritation of the asset manager. "There is a problem placing client money", said Gorham. And he went on: "Banks don't need people's savings, because they now have much more capital to support lending. This means that savers receive much lower interest rates on...

Back in 1995, the UK government made what was widely regarded at the time as a sensible and long-overdue change to state pension legislation. Since World War II, women had retired five years earlier than men, a sop to compensate them for their inability to clock up pensions of the same size as their spouses - and incidentally to enable men and women to retire at approximately the same time, since it was assumed that most men were older than their wives. But by the mid-1990s far more women...

The Chancellor's Autumn Statement contained an apparent U-turn on the cuts to tax credits outlined in the July budget. Predictably, this was presented as the Chancellor "listening" to those concerned about the impact of sudden large falls in income for working families at the bottom end of the income spectrum. The Conservatives continue to position themselves as the party for "hard-working families".However, this isn't quite what it seems. The income cuts for low-income working families are...