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
On October 1, 2025, one of the co-founders of BIEN, Claus Offe died in Berlin, the city in which he was born on March 16,1940. He was one of Germany’s most distinguished sociologists, associated with the Frankfurt School of thought. He long identified himself as ‘Green Left’ – being a founding member of the German Greens – and as such saw basic income very much as a transformational policy. He was our friend and colleague for forty years and will be sorely missed.
Claus studied sociology and political science in Köln and at Berlin’s Freie Universität, was an assistant of Jürgen Habermas at the University of Frankfurt, where he obtained his doctorate in political science. Habermas remained influential in his research and publications, along with Albert Hirschman, whom he also greatly admired.
He subsequently worked at the Universities of Konstanz, Bielefeld and Bremen, before returning to Berlin after the fall of the wall in 1989, first at Humboldt University and then at the Hertie School of Government, of which he was a co-founder. Along the way, he had several periods in the United States, at Berkeley, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard and the New School in New York, as well as in the ANU in Australia.
November 1985, Claus Offe, then still at Bielefeld, was invited to participate in the “first international conference on basic income”, held in Louvain-la-Neuve in September 1986. He replied straight away: “I find the whole idea of your conference very promising and attractive, and I gladly accept your invitation. As you may know, I am presently involved in the work of the group that tries to develop concrete legislative proposals on basic income for the green group within the Bundestag… Let me just say that you are really providing a public service in taking the initiative of this conference.”
Claus (first from the left) at an Executive Committee meeting in Brussels (November 1999), preparing the 2000 Berlin congress of BIEN which he organized
The conference turned out to be the meeting at which BIEN was founded. Together with Peter Ashby, Claus Offe agreed to serve as BIEN’s first co-chair, a position he held until September 1988, when the duo was replaced by Edwin Morley-Fletcher and Guy Standing. Claus Offe remained an enthusiastic member of BIEN and regular participant in its congresses in the decades to follow. In particular, he rejoined the executive committee in 1998 as the efficient organizer of BIEN’s 2000 congress, hosted by the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.
Claus (second from the right) at an Executive Committee meeting in Barcelona (October 2003), preparing the 2004 Barcelona congress of BIEN, which turned BIEN into the Basic Income Earth Network
During his long career, Claus played an active role in the international scientific community and in Germany’s and the EU’s public debate. His superbly argued Europe Entrapped (2015), for example, was an exceptionally lucid and influential contribution to the discussion of the European monetary union, the conclusion of which was captured in one sentence: “The euro was a big mistake, the undoing of which would be an even bigger mistake.”
Among his other influential books was Disorganized Capitalism, a set of essays published in English in 1985 probing the links between social power and political authority, in which he first advocated a basic income as a response to modern unemployment. For a while, he was drawn to Tony Atkinson’s idea of a Participation Income, but came to see the limitation of that variant of basic income.
In recent years, Claus’s lung cancer increasingly limited his mobility, but not the sharpness of his mind and the warmth of his friendship. He was an enthusiastic fisherman, loving to prowl on the banks in search of ‘the big one’. Above all, he was one of those formidable intellectual personalities who helped give the worldwide basic income movement its strength and influence.
Recent UBI trials reveal that guaranteed income provides immediate mental health relief, but sustaining long-term benefits may depend on lasting economic security.
Interest is surging in the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) – a regular income paid by the government to each adult member of society, regardless of their personal or financial circumstances. But can it achieve its stated goals of reducing poverty, improving working conditions and increasing well-being? Thanks to a global flurry of pilot programmes putting these claims to the test, answers to this question are starting to trickle in.
Olivier De Schutter, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, sent me his most recent report (attached). As you will see, §§ 54-57 contain a strong plea for UBI.
BIEN has made a crucial contribution to the worldwide awareness of the idea of an unconditional basic income. For this to happen, perseverance was key, but also technology.
Philippe Van Parijs reflects on the shaky birth of our network in this article published in The Brussels Times on 17 August 2022.
