Latest 300 | LSE Public lectures and events | Audio and pdf

Speaker(s): Professor John Kay, Professor Philippe Van Parijs, Dr Malcolm Torry, Polly Toynbee | Discussion of a Basic Income – an unconditional, nonwithdrawable income for every individual (and sometimes called a Citizen’s Income, a Citizen’s Basic Income, or a Universal Basic Income) – is now a mainstream global social policy debate. This event will bring together key figures on different sides of that debate – Professor Philippe Van Parijs from the University of Louvain, and Professor John Kay of the University of Oxford – to debate the motion: ‘This house believes that if the Beveridge Report were being written today then it would have recommended a Basic Income’. Before they speak, Dr Malcolm Torry, a Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE, and Director of the Citizen’s Basic Income Trust, will briefly define a Basic Income; and at the end of the debate the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee will offer her reflections on the event and on the wider debate about Basic Income. John Kay (@ProfJohnKay) is an economist whose career has spanned the academic world, business and finance, and public affairs. He has held chairs at the London Business School, the University of Oxford, and LSE, and is a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, where he began his academic career in 1970. Philippe Van Parijs (@pvpbrussels) is a special guest professor at the Universities of Louvain and Leuven, a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute and an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford. Malcolm Torry (@Citizensincome) has been Director of the Citizen's Basic Income Trust since 2001 (and was Director before that between 1988 and 1992); he is a Visiting Senior Fellow in the Social Policy Department at LSE; and he is General Manager of BIEN, The Basic Income Earth Network. Polly Toynbee (@pollytoynbee) is a columnist for The Guardian. She was formerly BBC social affairs editor, columnist and associate editor of The Independent, co-editor of the Washington Monthly and a reporter and feature writer for The Observer. Enkeleida Tahiraj (@edatahiraj) is Senior Visiting Fellow at LSEE European Institute at LSE, researching rights based social policies and policy innovation. Her current research and teaching involves Universal Basic Income pilot projects. This event follows on from the Citizen's Basic Income Day at LSE, a day of discussions bringing together experts and speakers from pilot projects and experiements around the world.

Speaker(s): Professor Sam Fankhauser, Professor Fawaz Gerges, Professor Naila Kabeer, Professor Mary Kaldor, Professor Lord Layard | Beveridge's "Five Giants" remain central issues in discussions about the welfare state today, but there are also new challenges that have emerged since the 1940s. Which "Giant" issue would a modern day Beveridge prioritise? Having polled LSE students, staff and alumni for their suggestions as to Beveridge’s missing giants, the sixth giant will be selected from one of the following: Sustainability, Equity, Loneliness/Isolation, Security, Extremism. You decide. Vote on which of these giant issues should take its place alongside Beveridge’s giants. In this event, on the opening night of the LSE Festival, prominent LSE academics will put forward their pitch for the missing giants on the shortlist. Sam Fankhauser is Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and Deputy Director of the ESRC-funded Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, both at LSE. Fawaz A Gerges is Professor of International Relations at LSE, and holder of the Emirates Professorship in Contemporary Middle East Studies. Naila Kabeer is Professor of Gender and Development at the Department of Gender Studies and Department of International Development. Mary Kaldor is Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit in the LSE Department of International Development. Professor Kaldor also directs the unit’s largest research project, the Conflict Research Programme (CRP), an international DFID-funded partnership investigating public authority, through a theoretical lens of the political marketplace and the concept of civicness, across a range of countries in Africa and the Middle East. Richard Layard is Emeritus Professor of Economics and Director of the Wellbeing Programme at the Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, and a member of the House of Lords. Jennifer Jackson-Preece is an Associate Professor of Nationalism, with a joint appointment in both the European Institute and the Department of International Relations, LSE. She is Deputy Head of the European Institute.

Speaker(s): Professor Sam Fankhauser, Professor Fawaz Gerges, Professor Naila Kabeer, Professor Mary Kaldor, Professor Lord Layard | Beveridge's "Five Giants" remain central issues in discussions about the welfare state today, but there are also new challenges that have emerged since the 1940s. Which "Giant" issue would a modern day Beveridge prioritise? Having polled LSE students, staff and alumni for their suggestions as to Beveridge’s missing giants, the sixth giant will be selected from one of the following: Sustainability, Equity, Loneliness/Isolation, Security, Extremism. You decide. Vote on which of these giant issues should take its place alongside Beveridge’s giants. In this event, on the opening night of the LSE Festival, prominent LSE academics will put forward their pitch for the missing giants on the shortlist. Sam Fankhauser is Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and Deputy Director of the ESRC-funded Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, both at LSE. Fawaz A Gerges is Professor of International Relations at LSE, and holder of the Emirates Professorship in Contemporary Middle East Studies. Naila Kabeer is Professor of Gender and Development at the Department of Gender Studies and Department of International Development. Mary Kaldor is Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit in the LSE Department of International Development. Professor Kaldor also directs the unit’s largest research project, the Conflict Research Programme (CRP), an international DFID-funded partnership investigating public authority, through a theoretical lens of the political marketplace and the concept of civicness, across a range of countries in Africa and the Middle East. Richard Layard is Emeritus Professor of Economics and Director of the Wellbeing Programme at the Centre for Economic Performance, LSE, and a member of the House of Lords. Jennifer Jackson-Preece is an Associate Professor of Nationalism, with a joint appointment in both the European Institute and the Department of International Relations, LSE. She is Deputy Head of the European Institute.

Speaker(s): Salonie Hiriyur, Laura-Jane Silverman, Dhruv Washishth | Editor's note: We apologise for the poor audio quality of this podcast. For the younger generations considering their future career options, are the technological advances transforming the way we work something to be afraid of or excited by? And are they being sufficiently prepared for the future of work? Salonie Hiriyur started work as a journalist in India, but wanting to develop a sound theoretical basis in development studies, she moved to London to complete a Master's from the Gender Institute at LSE. She graduated in 2016 and from there moved to work at the ILO (Geneva) in research. As a research assistant, she worked on reports on women's employment, the informal economy, social protection programmes for informal workers. She is now looking at starting a PhD in Social Policy, analysing the effects of the emergence of online platforms on the domestic work sector in India. Laura-Jane Silverman is a Careers Consultant and heads up the entrepreneurial work that LSE Careers offers to students and alumni. Having graduated from the University of Cambridge, Laura-Jane worked in various industries including Television and Film and Recruitment before starting up her own careers consulting and recruitment business. She has worked with universities and business schools across Europe and worked with students who are working out their future career strategies. In 2011 she joined LSE and now manages LSE Generate, the entrepreneurial skills development programme here at LSE and is also on the steering committee for the new Work It Out initiative that helps students think about their values and priorities as they explore future job opportunities. Dhruv Washishth is the Co-Founder and CEO of Paradigm Shift, a silicon valley startup that utilizes Virtual Reality for education. He is pursuing his MSc in Management of Information Systems, Digital Innovation & Philosophy at LSE. He has been a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London and in 2014, he was selected by the Government of UK as a global young entrepreneur. In the past, he also launched Angelhack's operations in India and used to manage the startup accelerator at TiE Bangalore. Megan Beddoe @MeganBeddoe is Activities and Development Officer at the LSE Students' Union.

Speaker(s): Professor Xenia Chryssochoou, Professor Peter Dwyer, David Goodhart, Celestin Okoroji | Editor's note: We apologise for the poor audio quality of this podcast. Central to the promise of the Beveridge Report is the assumption of social solidarity: we need a cohesive society to support social protection, and the resulting shared safety net should increase cohesion even further. Yet as the country and its welfare state evolved, so did the social bonds on which they depended. Given what we know about human behaviour and experience, what prospect is there for the level of solidarity needed to carry Beveridge’s vision into the twenty-first century? Bringing together policy and social psychology, this event will consider two challenges to welfare state solidarity. First, social policy expert Peter Dwyer and social psychologist Celestin Okoroji will present evidence from very different projects looking at the experiences of those receiving benefits in the context of greater demands for compliant behaviours and worsening stereotypes of the ‘welfare recipient’. Second, policy writer David Goodhart and social psychologist Xenia Chryssochoou will offer contrasting perspectives on whether greater diversity in the national population poses a challenge for the sense of collective solidarity needed to sustain the welfare state. This event will feature diverse research insights on thorny issues and will offer a chance for the audience to share their views on the debates at hand. Xenia Chryssochoou is Professor of Social and Political Psychology at Panteion University. Her research focuses on social psychological dimensions of identity in liberal societies, and in issues of multiculturalism and integration. Peter Dwyer (@ProfPeteDwyer) is Professor of Social Policy at the University of York. His research focuses on social citizenship, migration, and inclusion, and he directs the multi-site ESRC-funded project, Welfare Conditionality: Sanctions, Support and Behaviour Change. David Goodhart (@David_Goodhart) is Head of the Demography, Immigration and Integration Unit at the think tank Policy Exchange. He is the founder and former editor of Prospect magazine, and author of The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration and The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, a Sunday Times bestseller. Celestin Okoroji is a PhD student at the LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. His research focuses on the ways in which ideas associated with stigmatised groups become a part of stigmatised group member’s self-concept, with a focus on the unemployed in Britain. Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington is Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. Her research focuses on the psychology of poverty and intergroup relations in the context of widening economic inequality.

Speaker(s): Professor Xenia Chryssochoou, Professor Peter Dwyer, David Goodhart, Celestin Okoroji | Editor's note: We apologise for the poor audio quality of this podcast. Central to the promise of the Beveridge Report is the assumption of social solidarity: we need a cohesive society to support social protection, and the resulting shared safety net should increase cohesion even further. Yet as the country and its welfare state evolved, so did the social bonds on which they depended. Given what we know about human behaviour and experience, what prospect is there for the level of solidarity needed to carry Beveridge’s vision into the twenty-first century? Bringing together policy and social psychology, this event will consider two challenges to welfare state solidarity. First, social policy expert Peter Dwyer and social psychologist Celestin Okoroji will present evidence from very different projects looking at the experiences of those receiving benefits in the context of greater demands for compliant behaviours and worsening stereotypes of the ‘welfare recipient’. Second, policy writer David Goodhart and social psychologist Xenia Chryssochoou will offer contrasting perspectives on whether greater diversity in the national population poses a challenge for the sense of collective solidarity needed to sustain the welfare state. This event will feature diverse research insights on thorny issues and will offer a chance for the audience to share their views on the debates at hand. Xenia Chryssochoou is Professor of Social and Political Psychology at Panteion University. Her research focuses on social psychological dimensions of identity in liberal societies, and in issues of multiculturalism and integration. Peter Dwyer (@ProfPeteDwyer) is Professor of Social Policy at the University of York. His research focuses on social citizenship, migration, and inclusion, and he directs the multi-site ESRC-funded project, Welfare Conditionality: Sanctions, Support and Behaviour Change. David Goodhart (@David_Goodhart) is Head of the Demography, Immigration and Integration Unit at the think tank Policy Exchange. He is the founder and former editor of Prospect magazine, and author of The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration and The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics, a Sunday Times bestseller. Celestin Okoroji is a PhD student at the LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. His research focuses on the ways in which ideas associated with stigmatised groups become a part of stigmatised group member’s self-concept, with a focus on the unemployed in Britain. Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington is Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. Her research focuses on the psychology of poverty and intergroup relations in the context of widening economic inequality.

Speaker(s): Nicholas Timmins, Professor Sir Julian Le Grand, Minouche Shafik | Five tools and massive programmes were adopted to tackle Beveridge's "Five Giants": A policy of full employment; a National Health Service; a massively extended system of education; a new housing programme; and a much modernised system of social security. But in the 75 years since they took effect, who have been the "Five Giant" ministers in each of these areas? In this opening event of the LSE Festival: Beveridge 2.0, Nicholas Timmins and Professor Sir Julian Le Grand debate who, among the many hundreds of politicians who have held office, really made a difference between then and now. Nicholas Timmins is the author of The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State which tells its tale from Beveridge to the modern day, with a fully up-dated version published by William Collins in November 2017. He is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and at the King's Fund, and has been a Visiting Professor in the Department of Social Policy at LSE and a Visiting Fellow at King's College, London, in Public Management. Before that he was a journalist, working for Nature, the Press Association, The Times, The Independent (of which he was a founder member) and the Financial Times, where, between 1996 and 2012 he was Public Policy Editor and commentator. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and between 2008 and 2011 was President of the Social Policy Association. Julian Le Grand held the Richard Titmuss Chair of Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy and is now Professor in the Marshall Institute. From 2003 to 2005 he was seconded to No. 10 Downing Street as a Senior Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister. He is the author, co-author or editor of over twenty books and has written more than one hundred articles and book chapters on economics, philosophy and public policy. He has chaired several government commissions and working groups, including most recently the Mutuals Task Force for the Cabinet Office, and the Panels reviewing Doncaster's and Birmingham's Children's Services for the Department for Education. He has acted as an adviser to the President of the European Commission, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation, and the OECD. In 2015 he was awarded a knighthood for services to social sciences and public service. Minouche Shafik is Director of LSE. Prior to this she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.

Speaker(s): Nicholas Timmins, Professor Sir Julian Le Grand, Minouche Shafik | Five tools and massive programmes were adopted to tackle Beveridge's "Five Giants": A policy of full employment; a National Health Service; a massively extended system of education; a new housing programme; and a much modernised system of social security. But in the 75 years since they took effect, who have been the "Five Giant" ministers in each of these areas? In this opening event of the LSE Festival: Beveridge 2.0, Nicholas Timmins and Professor Sir Julian Le Grand debate who, among the many hundreds of politicians who have held office, really made a difference between then and now. Nicholas Timmins is the author of The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State which tells its tale from Beveridge to the modern day, with a fully up-dated version published by William Collins in November 2017. He is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and at the King's Fund, and has been a Visiting Professor in the Department of Social Policy at LSE and a Visiting Fellow at King's College, London, in Public Management. Before that he was a journalist, working for Nature, the Press Association, The Times, The Independent (of which he was a founder member) and the Financial Times, where, between 1996 and 2012 he was Public Policy Editor and commentator. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and between 2008 and 2011 was President of the Social Policy Association. Julian Le Grand held the Richard Titmuss Chair of Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy and is now Professor in the Marshall Institute. From 2003 to 2005 he was seconded to No. 10 Downing Street as a Senior Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister. He is the author, co-author or editor of over twenty books and has written more than one hundred articles and book chapters on economics, philosophy and public policy. He has chaired several government commissions and working groups, including most recently the Mutuals Task Force for the Cabinet Office, and the Panels reviewing Doncaster's and Birmingham's Children's Services for the Department for Education. He has acted as an adviser to the President of the European Commission, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation, and the OECD. In 2015 he was awarded a knighthood for services to social sciences and public service. Minouche Shafik is Director of LSE. Prior to this she was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.

Speaker(s): Kit de Waal, Paul McVeigh, Dr Aaron Reeves | In the run up to the LSE Festival: Beveridge 2.0, rethinking the welfare state for the 21st Century, we bring together a panel to discuss the relationship between literature and poverty. They reflect on questions such as: do you need money to access literature? If not, why are there comparatively few working-class writers? And can literature actively play a part in reducing financial hardship?

Speaker(s): Dr Tatiana Borisova, Professor Matthew Craven | This event will consider the relationship between Cold War International Law and the Beveridge moment. In particular, did the ideals of the Beveridge Report get translated into global legal idealism, or were they neutralised or depoliticized by international legal projects around human rights or co-existence? And did the Beveridge Moment in international law actually take place at the height of the Cold War in Bandung in 1955 with the establishment of the non-aligned movement (or still later with the New International Economic Order in the 1970s?). The Cold War and the Beveridge Report occupy similar moments in time (Beveridge issues his report in 1942 a few month after the Anglo-Americans devise their report on the future of world organisation in the 1941 Atlantic Charter, the Attlee Government announces the implementation of the Report as the early Cold war divisions are beginning to appear at Nuremberg and San Francisco; and the NHS is created in 1948 while the Soviets are succeeding in getting their first production reactor operating). This event brings together three world experts on international law during this post-war period to explore these topics. Tatiana Borisova will bring her knowledge of Russia and Europe at the time of the Cold War to the table. She has co-edited the 2012 publication, The Legal Dimension in Cold War Interactions: Some Notes from the Field. Matthew Craven is a leader of the Cold War and International Law Project. His work asks the question: is contemporary international law a product of the Cold War? He has also contributed to a wider debate about the future of the international legal and diplomatic order, as global divisions emerge that echo the ideological enmity and paranoia that pervaded the Cold War period. If you want to learn how International Law has developed in the post-war period, and particularly through the time of Beveridge and the Cold War, you must attend this talk. Tatiana Borisova is Associate Professor, Department of History, Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg. Matthew Craven is Director of the Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law, SOAS. Gerry Simpson is Professor of Public International Law, LSE Law. LSE Law (@lselaw) is an integral part of the School's mission, plays a major role in policy debates & in the education of lawyers and law teachers from around the world.