Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What is the British equivalent of Social Security?
The National Insurance number is used as a reference number in the Pay As You Earn system, and also by the self-employed. It is also used in applications for Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs), to check that an individual has opened only one ISA in a tax year.
Canada (with the exception of the province of Quebec) is one of the few countries with a universal healthcare system that does not include coverage of prescription medication (other such countries are Russia and some of the former USSR republics even though Russia is considering a switch to full coverage of many prescription medications in the near future). Residents of Quebec who are covered by the province's public prescription drug plan pay an annual premium of $0 to $660 when they file their Quebec income tax return. Pharmaceutical medications are covered by public funds in some provinces for the elderly or indigent, or through employment-based private insurance or paid for out-of-pocket. Most drug prices are negotiated with suppliers by each provincial government to control costs but more recently, the Council of the Federation announced an initiative for select provinces to work together to create a larger buying block for more leverage to control costs of pharmaceutical drugs. More than 60 percent of prescription medications are paid for privately in Canada. Family physicians (often known as general practitioners or GPs in Canada) are chosen by individuals. If a patient wishes to see a specialist or is counselled to see a specialist by their GP, a referral is made by a GP in the local community. Preventive care and early detection are considered critical and yearly checkups are recommended for everyone.
Slavery was abolished throughout much of the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 but as early as 1706 the common law had recognised that as soon as a slave came to England, he became free. The courts did not recognise contracts which were equivalent to slavery or servitude.
Orwell returned to London in late 1946 and picked up his literary journalism again. Now a well-known writer, he was swamped with work. Apart from a visit to Jura in the new year he stayed in London for one of the coldest British winters on record and with such a national shortage of fuel that he burnt his furniture and his child's toys. The heavy smog in the days before the Clean Air Act 1956 did little to help his health about which he was reticent, keeping clear of medical attention. Meanwhile, he had to cope with rival claims of publishers Gollancz and Warburg for publishing rights. About this time he co-edited a collection titled "British Pamphleteers" with Reginald Reynolds. As a result of the success of "Animal Farm", Orwell was expecting a large bill from the Inland Revenue and he contacted a firm of accountants of which the senior partner was Jack Harrison. The firm advised Orwell to establish a company to own his copyright and to receive his royalties and set up a "service agreement" so that he could draw a salary. Such a company "George Orwell Productions Ltd" (GOP Ltd) was set up on 12 September 1947 although the service agreement was not then put into effect. Jack Harrison left the details at this stage to junior colleagues.
The landed gentry is a traditional British social class consisting of gentlemen in the original sense; that is, those who owned land in the form of country estates to such an extent that they were not required to actively work, except in an administrative capacity on their own lands. The estates were often (but not always) made up of tenanted farms, in which case the gentleman could live entirely off rent income.
The company was set up in 2004 when London-based company Securicor amalgamated with Danish business Group 4 Falck. The company offers a range of services, including the supply of security personnel, monitoring equipment, response units and secure prisoner transportation. G4S also works with governments overseas to deliver security.
In the United Kingdom, medicine is usually taught as an undergraduate course, with graduates being awarded a master's level qualification: normally the conjoined degrees of Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS, BM BCh, MB ChB, etc.) although at Queen's University Belfast (and universities in Ireland) Bachelor in the Art of Obstetrics (BAO) is added, and at some universities only the Bachelor of Medicine is awarded - all of these have equal standing. Unlike most undergraduate degrees, the MBBS is not normally considered an honours degree, and thus is not classified into first class honours, etc. Students may be awarded "Merits" and "Distinctions" for parts of the course or the whole course (depending on the institution) and "Honours" may be awarded at some institutions for exceptional performance throughout the course (as a grade above Distinction).
The Exeter Pound (£E) was a form of local complementary currency, or community currency launched in Exeter, UK on 1 September 2015. Its objective was to ensure more money was spent with local and independent businesses. It was one of the many alternatives in the UK to the official sterling currency. It was dissolved on 30 September 2018.
Within twenty years of the partition and independence in 1947 of British India (considered to be the most important colonial possession), most of the Empire's territories had achieved full independence. Today 14 former colonies (since 2002 known as British Overseas Territories) remain under British rule; the term "colonies" is no longer officially used to describe these.
In general, a Commonwealth citizen is a citizen of a member state of the Commonwealth of Nations. This designation is given legal effect in the nationality laws of some Commonwealth countries, and Commonwealth citizens may enjoy some privileges in the United Kingdom and, less commonly, other member states. Each Commonwealth country determines what special rights, if any, are accorded to citizens of other Commonwealth countries. The status is most significant in British law and has little effect in many other Commonwealth countries, such as Australia.
In 2017, Blackpool had the fourth highest rate of antidepressant prescription in England with the most common health problems being depression, stress and anxiety. At 12.9%, Blackpool had the highest fraction of working-age people too sick to work and has no improvement on this percentage since 1999 despite the rate in the North West England as a whole improved from 11% in 1999 to 7.8% in 2016. Blackpool also has high rates of obesity (13.5%), smoking (27%) and alcoholic liver disease (28 deaths per 100 thousand). Men in the Bloomfield ward had the lowest life expectancy at birth, 68.2 years, of any ward in England and Wales in 2016.
At the time of the Suez Crisis in 1956, in the face of colonial unrest and international tensions, French Premier Guy Mollet proposed to British Prime Minister Anthony Eden that their two countries be joined in a "union". When that proposal was turned down, Mollet suggested that France join the Commonwealth, possibly with "a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis". Talks regarding a form of union faded away with the end of the Suez crisis.
In the UK a full-time training contract is normally for two years, and applicants must have first completed the Legal Practice Course. Trainee solicitors and training contracts were formerly known as articled clerks and articles of clerkship, respectively. In the UK, the barrister's equivalent is a twelve-month pupillage under a pupilmaster, in barristers' chambers.
The landed gentry, or simply the gentry, is a largely historical British social class consisting in theory of landowners who could live entirely from rental income, or at least had a country estate. It was distinct from, and socially "below", the aristocracy or peerage, although in fact some of the landed gentry were wealthier than some peers, and many gentry were related to peers. They often worked as administrators of their own lands, while others became public, political, religious, and armed forces figures. The decline of this privileged class largely stemmed from the 1870s agricultural depression; however, there are still a large number of hereditary gentry in the UK to this day, many of whom transferred their landlord style management skills after the agricultural depression into the business of land agency, the act of buying and selling land.
By 1928 Scotland had 1,298 different local authorities, many of them overlapping. In November the Scottish Office issued a bill to reform local government: this sought to abolish 1,064 of the various bodies, leaving only 33 county councils and 201 burgh councils. Burghs (other than the counties of cities) were to be divided into two classes: large burghs and small burghs. Large burghs were to gain considerable powers from the county councils. Small burghs, conversely, were to cede most of their duties to the county councils.
Sterling banknotes are the banknotes in circulation in the United Kingdom and its related territories, denominated in pounds sterling (symbol: £; ISO 4217 currency code GBP [Great Britain pound]).
and many other generally English-speaking countries or Commonwealth countries (except the UK's Scotland, which is bijuridicial, and Malta). Essentially, every country that was colonised at some time by England, Great Britain, or the United Kingdom uses common law except those that were formerly colonised by other nations, such as Quebec (which follows the law of France in part), South Africa and Sri Lanka (which follow Roman Dutch law), where the prior civil law system was retained to respect the civil rights of the local colonists. Guyana and Saint Lucia have mixed Common Law and Civil Law systems.
There are two sovereign states in the isles: Ireland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Ireland, sometimes called "the Republic of Ireland", governs five sixths of the island of Ireland, with the remainder of the island forming Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, usually shortened to simply "the United Kingdom", which governs the remainder of the archipelago with the exception of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. The Isle of Man and the two states of the Channel Islands, Jersey and Guernsey, are known as the Crown dependencies. They exercise constitutional rights of self-government and judicial independence; responsibility for international representation rests largely upon the UK (in consultation with the respective governments); and responsibility for defence is reserved by the UK. The United Kingdom is made up of four constituent parts: England, Scotland and Wales, forming Great Britain, and Northern Ireland in the north-east of the island of Ireland. Of these, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have "devolved" governments, meaning that each has its own parliament or assembly and is self-governing with respect to certain areas set down by law. For judicial purposes, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England and Wales (the latter being one entity) form separate legal jurisdiction, with there being no single law for the UK as a whole.
In waging the war on poverty, congressional opposition was too strong to pass an income maintenance law. So LBJ took advantage of the biggest automatic cash machine around: Social Security. He proposed, and Congress enacted, whopping increases in the minimum benefits that lifted some two million Americans 65 and older above the poverty line. In 1996, thanks to those increased minimum benefits, Social Security lifted 12 million senior citizens above the poverty line ... No Great Society undertaking has been subjected to more withering conservative attacks than the Office of Economic Opportunity. Yet, the War on Poverty was founded on the most conservative principle: Put the power in the local community, not in Washington; give people at the grassroots the ability to stand tall on their own two feet. Conservative claims that the OEO poverty programs were nothing but a waste of money are preposterous ... Eleven of the 12 programs that OEO launched in the mid-'60s are alive, well and funded at an annual rate exceeding $10 billion; apparently legislators believe they're still working.
President Johnson's "War on Poverty" speech was delivered at a time of recovery (the poverty level had fallen from 22.4% in 1959 to 19% in 1964 when the War on Poverty was announced) and it was viewed by critics as an effort to get the United States Congress to authorize social welfare programs.
Modern Scotland is subdivided in various ways depending on the purpose. In local government, there have been 32 single-tier council areas since 1996, whose councils are responsible for the provision of all local government services. Decisions are made by councillors who are elected at local elections every five years. The head of each council is usually the Lord Provost alongside the Leader of the Council, with a Chief Executive being appointed as director of the council area. Community Councils are informal organisations that represent specific sub-divisions within each council area.
Much of the migration to New Zealand took place from the constituent countries of the British Isles. This was facilitated from 1839 by the New Zealand Company founded for the purpose of colonization. The work of the Otago Association and Canterbury Association in establishing the primarily Scottish settlement in Dunedin and the primarily English settlement in Christchurch, respectively, encouraged further New Zealand-bound emigration from Britain.
Although Social Security is sometimes compared to private pensions, the two systems are different in a number of respects. It has been argued that Social Security is an insurance plan as opposed to a retirement plan. Unlike a pension, for example, Social Security pays disability benefits. A private pension fund accumulates the money paid into it, eventually using those reserves to pay pensions to the workers who contributed to the fund; and a private system is not universal. Social Security cannot "prefund" by investing in marketable assets such as equities, because federal law prohibits it from investing in assets other than those backed by the U.S. government. As a result, its investments to date have been limited to special non-negotiable securities issued by the U.S. Treasury, although some argue that debt issued by the Federal National Mortgage Association and other quasi-governmental organizations could meet legal standards. Social Security cannot by law invest in private equities, although some other countries (such as Canada) and some states permit their pension funds to invest in private equities. As a universal system, Social Security generally operates as a pipeline, through which current tax receipts from workers are used to pay current benefits to retirees, survivors, and the disabled. When there is an excess of taxes withheld over benefits paid, by law this excess is invested in Treasury securities (not in private equities) as described above.
The ISSA publishes a quarterly journal in the social security field, the International Social Security Review in English, in collaboration with Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. The ISSA's periodic series "Developments and Trends" and "Social Policy Highlight" disseminate new findings on social security policy and practice internationally. It co-publishes the series "Social Security Programs Throughout the World", in co-operation with the [ United States Social Security Administration]]] In partnership with the OECD and the International Organisation of Pension Supervisors (IOPS), the ISSA produces "Complementary and Private Pensions Throughout the World". The ISSA also issues an electronic newsletter; social security policy briefs; analytical reports on specific topics; and a range of thematic technical reports. The ISSA provides comprehensive data on various aspects of social security including: an overview of social security systems worldwide; a monitor of social security reforms; summaries of complementary and private pension systems; social security legislation; a comprehensive bibliography; and a thesaurus of social security terminology. Databases are available via the ISSA Web portal.
Cramme and Diamond identify market conforming as being equivalent to British Labour Party politician and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden's desire for a very moderate socialist agenda based above all upon fiscal prudence, as Snowden insisted that socialism had to build upon fiscal prudence or else it would not be achieved.
Bush's April press conference detailed the proposal further, with Bush describing his preference in "a reform system should protect those who depend on Social Security the most" and describing his proposal as "a Social Security system in the future where benefits for low-income workers will grow faster than benefits for people who are better off." Opponents countered that middle-class retirees would experience cuts, and that those below the poverty line would receive only what they are entitled to under current law. Democrats also expressed concern that a Social Security system that primarily benefited the poor would have less widespread political support. Finally, the issue of private accounts continued to be a divisive one. Many legislators remained opposed or dubious, while Bush, in his press conference, said he felt strongly about the point.