Bill Jordan — A Tribute
BIEN founding conference, Louvain-la-Neuve, 6 September 1986
From left to right: Bill Jordan, Claus Offe, Annie Miller, Nick Douben, Greetje Lubbi, Riccardo Petrella.
Bill Jordan died in the night from 11 to 12 April 2026 in Worcester (England). He was one of the founding members of BIEN. In September 1986, he played a central role at the conference at which the Basic Income European Network (later to become the Basic Income Earth Network) was founded. His work as a sociologist, a social worker and a political theorist contributed greatly to the vigour of the incipient British and European basic income movement.
Bill was born in Dublin on the 4th of January 1941. He spent most of his childhood in South Africa and settled in England with his mother and siblings in 1955. He studied Philosophy Politics and Economics at Oxford from 1959 to 1962 and next worked for 12 years as a probation officer in British prisons. He later taught sociology and social policy at the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth and at East European Universities.
In his prolific career, he published many books, including Automatic Poverty (1981), The State: Authority and Autonomy (1985), The Common Good (1989), Trapped in Poverty? Labour-Market Decisions in Low-Income Households (1992) and What’s Wrong with Social Policy and How to Fix it (2010).
Having settled in the town of Newton Abbott, near Torquay (Devon), in the early 1970s, he helped build the local Claimants’ Union and campaigned for the benefit claimants’ movement to establish a national structure. In his short book, Paupers. The Making of the New Claiming Class (1973), he explained how the claimants’ revolt against the existing means-tested and repressive welfare system led them to advocate a guaranteed income.
In 1984, Bill was a founding member of BIRG, the Basic Income Research Group, based in London, together with Anne Miller, Peter Ashby and Mimi Parker, who also helped found BIEN two years later.
Bill was a trenchant critic of Margaret Thatcher’s mean-spirited social policies of the 1980s and 1990s. His politics were ‘left liberal’. In 1989, he wrote what was effectively the manifesto for the Liberal Party leader, Paddy Ashdown, published as Citizen’s Britain. It led the Liberals to support basic income for several years. His most famous student was Mark Drakeford, whose Ph.D. he supervised. Drakeford went on to become First Minister of Wales and a very popular Labour Party politician.
Bill’s values were those of a classic English social liberal. Indeed, one might say that he was a solid west-country English liberal, wedded to the parts of the country where he resided. (He spent most of his adult life in Whimple, Devon, where several of us visited him.) Those were his physical and ideological roots, traceable to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. However, he was always painfully aware that he was preaching a social liberalism that was struggling against the grain of the time.
We mourn Bill’s passing as a long-time friend and a ‘fellow traveller’, with an impressive athletic record and an unforgettable sense of humour. He believed passionately in basic income — or what he preferred to call social dividend — as an essential component of the Good Society. Without a basic income, freedom was a mirage.
Bill will be sorely missed by his many friends and by all those who keep believing that there is a far better future than the neo-liberal dystopia that defined the social context in which he wrote.
Guy Standing, Sarath Davala, Alexander de Roo, Jurgen De Wispelaere, Louise Haagh, Annie Miller, Malcolm Torry, Walter Van Trier, Karl Widerquist, Toru Yamamori, Philippe Van Parijs
