social enterprise

This article is provided courtesy of the news feed at http://www.newstartmag.co.uk/news

Equal citizenship and sweeping tax and welfare reforms are the cornerstones of a major new strategy to reduce, eliminate and prevent poverty in Britain.

The Fabian Society and Webb Memorial Trust’s Social solidarity report, published today, argues New Labour's covert redistribution has failed to win public support for tackling poverty and inequality.

With 20% of the population still in poverty, the report says the government must ‘reassert the value of a welfare state that binds us together’.

Reforming the tax and welfare systems would see higher earners fund more generous universal benefits, say report authors Tim Horton and James Gregory.

Moving away from universal benefits would create a ‘them and us’ society, the two-year study warns.

Social solidarity is the final report of the two organisations’ Fighting poverty and inequality in an age of affluence research project, commemorating the centenary of Beatrice Webb's 1909 Minority Report to the poor law reform commission.

Webb’s report set out the vision, arguments and values of social justice and challenged the dominant assumption that the poor were solely to blame for their own poverty, identifying society’s ‘collective responsibility to prevent poverty, not merely alleviate it’.