Sarah Kerr

👉 Stories about economic change are never neutral. They make politics. In my new article in Sociological Theory @sociologicaltheory.bsky.social, I show how narratives about economic disruption become a source of legitimacy:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Brilliant @cmmonwealth.bsky.social thread on the public wealth give-away that was 'right to buy'. Love the idea of right to buy back. 🔥 #publicwealth

Rachel Reeves needs to find cash fast. A wealth tax really is her only viable option | Faiza Shaheen The alternatives for the UK chancellor are either unworkable or will lose Labour votes, so here’s what she should try, says Faiza Shaheen of Tax Justice UK

"Instead of tinkering around the edges, with a wealth tax the government could win the argument on fairness – and finally start to reverse toxic wealth inequality in this country."

Your weekend reading, from our Executive Director @faizashaheen.bsky.social!

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I've been slow to share this because in all honesty I was a little bit hungover on Saturday, but I wrote the New Statesman's weekend essay this week, on why England's ex-mining areas have become especially disenchanted with politics:

www.newstatesman.com/politics/soc...

Listen to @ignaciapinto.bsky.social, our Senior Research and Policy Officer and author of the report, explain why we must tackle wealth inequality - and the options the Government has for taxing wealth.

Fair! Does sound interesting.

I'm attending @jowolff.bsky.social event online, and I have to say, I think I may have pulled the longer straw. It's great :)

#solidaritywithLA protest poster at US Embassy bus stop in London reads: ‘they blame immigrants so you don’t blame billionaires.’

Immigrants aren’t the problem. Othering immigrants is a deliberate strategy to encourage people to hate each other rather than examine what severe wealth inequality is doing to our societies.

Image from #SolidaritywithLA poster at US embassy bus stop in London.

👉 Our new @jrf-uk.bsky.social and @lseinequalities.bsky.social report finds that foregrounding the unfair political influence that extreme wealth can buy in narratives about wealth inequality increases support for higher taxes on the rich. With @michaelvaughan.bsky.social and Annalena Oppel.

Great @lseinequalities.bsky.social post from @sachahilhorst.bsky.social & Insa Koch on the new class politics: “the political & analytical challenge ahead lies in recuperating the radical potential implied in corruption talk for a solidarity across ethnic, racial, gendered and generational lines.”

Letter to the Government about the independent review of the Office for National Statistics (ONS) We welcome the independent review into the data collected and published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). We are writing to the Government and the UK Statistics Authority to ask that the te...

We've written to Pat McFadden welcoming the review of the ONS but also to express our concerns about plans to cut back work in areas like wellbeing & living standards to focus on core economic stats. Data on employment and growth are important but there's more to our economy - including unpaid care.

Let's talk about tax! After 2 weeks of events organised by member states, NGOs, UN agencies & other multilateral institutions, listening to different voices from all over the world, WBG's Viktoria Szczypior shares her key take away from the 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women.

New blog from Professor Susan Himmelweit and our Senior Research and Policy Officer,
@ignaciapinto.bsky.social

“Tax isn’t a burden—it’s how we build a fairer, more caring society.”

Why we need progressive reform to tackle gender inequality.

Read more: www.tax.org.uk/guest-blog-t...

🚨The chancellor's spring statement has reinforced the austerity doom loop the country is stuck in.

Only by replacing the fiscal rules can we get out of this cycle of austerity and economic decline.

Every 'difficult' decision to cut welfare is at the same time a decision to leave other things - including obscene levels of surplus wealth - as they are.

'Other levers' needs to be spelled out: 🔊Tax 🔊The 🔊Richest 🔊More.

It won't hurt them, it will help millions, & fair 💰tax has public support 🎯

📣 "Without it, labour market data fails to capture the full economic reality for women."

Who. Knew.

Another 🔥 thread and content from @womensbudgetgrp.bsky.social

🙄 What does the persistent lack of good gender-sensitive data say about how much women matter in policy?

👉 Agnotology lit talks about ignorance as the effect of decisions made to take knowledge in some directions *and not in others*. We count what matters, right?

Erm...doppelganger??

📣 Great opportunity to work with an organisation that is fleet, informed, puts out loads of amazing content and has a team you'd be mad not to want to work with. Looking forward to meeting the eventual role holder...

Sarah Kerr on LinkedIn: Social Policy Association and East Asian Social Policy Research Network -… 📣 Are you presenting a paper at the Social Policy Association (SPA) Conference this year? 📣 📣 Does your paper have a tax dimension? 📣 📣 Would you like…

📣 Are you presenting a paper at the Social Policy Association conference this year? Does it have a tax dimension? If so - join our symposium! More detail here: www.linkedin.com/posts/sarah-...

... and a perfect wfh view here in Nottingham, too. The blue certainly lifts the spirits doesn't it!

Changing the narrative on wealth inequality New approaches to framing wealth inequality as a social problem could build political pressure for change.

If you're interested in how wealth and wealth inequality are represented and what these representations contribute to campaigning or critical media content, then you could also check out this report that @michaelvaughan.bsky.social and I did for JRF: www.jrf.org.uk/narrative-ch...

We find: news media tend toward images of luxury and consumption (e.g. cars + yachts); civil society have more contrasts between rich and poor. We also look at two tropes which show how tricky this domain is: ambivalent representations of the super-rich, and birds-eye aerial photography.

📣 Out today - a new article with @michaelvaughan.bsky.social on visual representations of wealth inequality, by UK news media and civil society orgs journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

🧵Happy to announce our Special Issue on the #Political and #Transformative Uses of #Time is out! Coedited by me & E Colin Ruggero. Many thanks to all our contributors and to @timeandsociety.bsky.social. Hope it will be useful for those thinking time politically.

journals.sagepub.com/toc/tasa/34/1

Wealth, poverty and enduring inequality: let's talk wealtherty Public event at LSE | Sarah Kerr, Armine Ishkanian, Rajiv Prabhakar, Frank Soodeen | Weds 19 February, 6.00 to 7.30pm

📣 Why should extreme wealth be at the heart of conversations about poverty, and social and economic justice? Join me & @mikesavagelse.bsky.social, Armine Ishkanian, @jrf-uk.bsky.social Frank Soodeen & Rajiv Prabhakar to discuss ideas in my new book. Sign up here: www.lse.ac.uk/Internationa...

"Child poverty cannot be separated from women's poverty." Thank you @womensbudgetgrp.bsky.social. We won't #EndChildPoverty if we don't also #EndWomen'sPoverty.

🔥 Seeing these two chat about inequality is a *total* treat. And there's a whole mini-series! 🤓 🙏

Great thread from the consistently brilliant @womensbudgetgrp.bsky.social here drawing out the gendered nature of housing poverty: 52% of housing support claimants with a shortfall between rent and housing benefit are single women v 18% single men. 66% of those women have dependent children.

4.3 million children are in poverty

UK govt won’t see progress on child poverty by 2029 even with high economic growth 📢

Our analysis shows under our central scenario only Scotland will see child poverty rates fall by 2029 in part due to social security policies 1/5