by Jurgen De Wispelaere | Apr 28, 2026 | News
BIEN’s annual Congress is the major global meeting for people advocating for, researching debating and putting into practice basic income in all its dimensions. But participation in an international congress costs money. Travel, accommodation and visa costs can be serious obstacles, especially for people on low incomes and for participants without institutional backing.
The BIEN Congress Solidarity Fund exists to help low-income participants attend the Congress by contributing towards essential costs. Its purpose is simple: to make it easier for people with valuable experience, insight and ideas to take part in a genuinely international conversation. BIEN firmly believes that a serious global conversation about economic security should itself be open to people from a wide range of backgrounds and circumstances.
We are trialling the Congress Solidarity Fund at our upcoming BIEN Congress 2026 taking place on 19-22 August in Toronto. BIEN Treasurer Lindsay Stirton is running the Rio Marathon to raise money for the BIEN Congress Solidarity Fund. You can donate here: https://bien.enthuse.com/pf/lindsay-stirton.
More information of how the Congress Solidarity Fund works and how you can apply for financial support for participating in the congress will be available soon on the BIEN Congress website.
by Guy Standing, Sarath Davala, Jurgen De Wispelaere, Louise Haagh, Annie Miller, Malcolm Torry, Karl Widerquist, Toru Yamamori, Philippe van Parijs, Walter Van Trier, Alexander de Roo | Apr 24, 2026 | News
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
by Jurgen De Wispelaere | Apr 22, 2026 | Events, Featured, News
On 7 June 2026, BIEN Treasurer Lindsay Stirton is running the Rio Marathon to raise money for the BIEN Congress Solidarity Fund.
The Congress Solidarity Fund exists to help low-income participants attend BIEN’s annual Congress by contributing towards essential costs such as travel, accommodation and visa applications.
BIEN’s annual Congress is the major global meeting for people advocating for, researching debating and putting into practice basic income in all its dimensions, which this year takes place 19–22 August in Toronto, Canada.
Basic income is, at heart, about security, dignity and inclusion. Supporting broader participation in the BIEN Congress is one practical way of advancing those same values. A serious global conversation about economic security should itself be open to people from a wide range of backgrounds and circumstances.
Lindsay is running the Rio Marathon to help make that happen. Every donation, large or small, will support the BIEN Congress Solidarity Fund and help widen access to the most important international gathering devoted to basic income.
You can donate here: https://bien.enthuse.com/pf/lindsay-stirton. Spread the word across our community and please donate if you can!
by Leticia Morales, Jurgen De Wispelaere | Apr 16, 2026 | News, Research
Abstract
The contemporary debate about basic income and gender primarily adopts an external perspective according to which women as a group are pitched against men as a group. This article examines tensions internal to women as a group. We distinguish three types of tensions, each of which lead to a so-called intra-gender trade-off: (1) horizontal tensions trade off different spheres of activities in which women have an interest (e.g. labor market vs. family); (2) vertical tensions pitch better-off women against worse-off women (e.g. high educated vs. low educated); (3) temporal tensions trade off impact in one part of the life-cycle against another (e.g. early vs. later in life). The article argues for the importance of acknowledging the internal perspective on gender equality and the challenges this poses for the basic income proposal while also suggesting how it may constructively address avenues for designing and implementing a gender-sensitive basic income.
To read the full article, click here.
by Jurgen De Wispelaere | Dec 4, 2024 | News
“Researchers are conducting the UK’s first major scientific trials to establish whether giving homeless people cash is a more effective way of reducing poverty than traditional forms of help.
Poverty campaigners have long believed that cash transfers are the most cost-effective way of helping people, but most studies have examined schemes in developing countries.
The new study, funded by the government and carried out by King’s College London (KCL) and the homelessness charity Greater Change, will recruit 360 people in England and Wales. Half will continue to get help from frontline charities. The other half will get additional help from Greater Change, whose support workers will discuss their financial problems then pay for items such as rent deposits, outstanding debts, work equipment, white goods, furniture or new clothes. They do not make direct transfers to avoid benefits being stopped due to a cash influx.’
To read the full article, click here.
