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 Toru Yamamori | Mar 31, 2025 | News
- Date: 14th April
Time: noon – 1.30pm (BST) / 11am – 0.30pm (GMT)
Speaker: Hilde Latour
Title: Bitcoin in relation to BIEN’s definition of Basic Income
2. Time: noon – 1.30pm (BST) / 11am – 0.30pm (GMT)
Speaker: Almaz Zelleke
Title: Is a Gender-Neutral Basic Income Gender-Inclusive? A Feminist Perspective on the Justification and Design of a Basic Income
3. Date: 5th May
Time: noon – 1.30pm (BST) / 11am – 0.30pm (GMT)
Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83316926296?pwd=nZTMjaFnG6oK7fis1BIWYRdrliaw6D.1
Speaker: Lee Seng Kiat
Title: Design by Definition – deconstructing the definition to decontextualise Basic Income
To view abstracts and registration links, click here.
by Toru Yamamori, Annie Miller | Jan 31, 2025 | Events, News
The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), at its general assembly in 2019, created the Working Group for Clarification of Basic Income Definition. Since then we have had online open forum, including at the online venue of the BIEN congress in 2021 Glasgow and in 2022 Brisbane, and had an hybrid open forum at the 2024 Bath Congress. We are going to finalize our discussions by our Congress in August this year in Brazil.
We would like to make an open call for the final round of collective discussion. We expect to have several sessions from March to May. Each online session run around 90 – 120 minutes, started with speaker’s presentation(s) with discussions following. Each session would host 1 or 2 speakers. If you are interested in speaking, please show your interest by email both to anniemillerBI@gmail.com and toruyamamori@gmail.com, by 20 February. We might be able to accommodate later submission, but we would appreciate earlier submission.
After we and the speakers agree on the date, we expect speakers will send us a draft paper for their presentation at least a few weeks before the session. In June and July, the working group would work for making a final report on the ‘Clarification of Basic Income definition’. Papers presented at open forum might be attached to the report as appendicies.
by Toru Yamamori | Jul 30, 2024 | News
Date: 14 th August2024
Time: 1pm -3pm GMT (2pm-4pm BST)
Please register via this form: https://forms.gle/DZjSRS7wDdRhK1nw6
The information on Zoom link will be shown in the form.
- Télémaque Masson-Récipon
Why ‘high enough’ just ain’t good enough: the case against the notion of ‘partial
basic income’
- Toru Yamamori
Can BIEN police the definition of basic income? On plurality of authentic
definitions of basic income – its historical roots and lessons for today
- Open discussion related to the above two presentations
by Toru Yamamori | Mar 29, 2024 | Events, News
Open forum on feminist definitions of basic income
co-organised by FRIBIS UBI and Gender team (FRIBIS-UBIG) and by BIEN working group for Clarification of BI definition (BIEN-CBID)
7.30am Eastern Daylight Time (North America) / 12.30pm British Summer Time / 1.30pm Central European Summer Time / 8.30pm Japan Standard Time / 11.30pm New Zealand Standard Time
Facilitators: Chloe Halpenny, Annie Miller, Toru Yamamori, and Almaz Zelleke
Please register here.
Researchers, activists, and community members interested in basic income are invited to this open forum to discuss feminist definitions of basic income.
Background:
Is a penny a month basic income?
Would basic income replace all existing income transfer system?
What might happen to social services if basic income were to be introduced?
Why are some proposals to distribute money to the head of household called basic income, while many others define basic income as individual-based?
Currently there are many proposals made under the name of basic income. The current discourse of basic income has diverse origins. Some are from ivory towers, some are from grassroots social movements such as the Women’s Liberation movement. The difference on the definitions of basic incomes reflects (at least partially) these diverse origins.
It has been a while since this difference of the definitions attracts debates. However, except a few occasions, voices from feminist perspectives have been underrepresented. Here we would like to attempt redressing this situation. In this workshop we would not pursue to reach a particular consensus or direction. It is a place where diverse voices would be raised and heard. All those interested in the discussion are welcome to participate.
