Engender blog

Guest Post: Scotland, a fairer and healthier nation?

Guest post by Pam Duncan-Glancy, Policy Officer for the Independent Living in Scotland project

There’s no doubt that social justice is the buzz term of the moment, and about time too! For disabled women like me, social justice means a lot of things, but a crucial part of it is about having access to enough, good quality and fairly funded social care. Without social care, I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, go to work, see friends, play my part in our society, put quite simply, I wouldn’t be healthy, and I wouldn’t have fair and equal access to society – and that’s not very socially just, is it?

AGORA Summer School 2015

The Agora Summer School organised by the European Women’s Lobby saw 50 young feminists from across Europe come together for four days of networking, skill sharing and discussion. I was lucky enough to be one of the participants from Scotland, so here’s a brief rundown of what happened.

Guest Post: A Citizen’s Income for Scotland?

Guest Post by Annie Miller, Chair of the Citizens' Income Trust

In this post Annie talks about why we need a Citizen's Income, and how it could work in Scotland.

The Citizen’s Income Trust is a think-tank with the object of educating the public about the desirability and feasibility of a Citizen’s Income or Basic Income. A Citizen's Income is like a Child Benefit, but for everyone. It is based on the individual, (not the couple or household), is universal for everyone with the legal right to residency in the country, and is not means-tested. It is unconditional and non-selective.

Women lose in Summer Budget 2015

Wednesday’s budget made for extremely grim listening and reading. Low-income women and their children will be pushed into poverty at the expense of increased spending on defence and tax breaks for the affluent. Women were always going to be penalised by this budget, not least because of the well-trailed £12 billion worth of cuts to the ‘welfare’ budget, but some of the detail and framing language is even worse than predicted.

Our recent report sets out why gender inequality has risen as the result of welfare reform. Women’s caring roles and low-paid jobs mean that different groups of women are particularly impacted by austerity measures. Summer Budget 2015 is no different. The House of Commons Library has already issued analysis estimating that 70% of the £34bn pounds of savings to be made by 2020/21 will come from women’s pockets. As HMT has not published an Equality Statement alongside its budget, outlining how different groups will be affected by its spending choices, we can only assume that it does not care that this will undermine gender equality, and increase women’s and children’s poverty.