Britain's approach to welfare is starting to change. We saw this in the Budget, when chancellor George Osborne announced that he wanted to reduce benefits and raise the minimum wage to partially compensate. The aim is to ensure that work pays, a philosophy that goes back to the dawn of the postwar settlement, when it was assumed that honest people could always find work and that jobs were, in general, for life. But that assumption no longer holds true. One of the results of the great recession is that more of us are self-employed than ever before. One in six people now work for themselves and the numbers seem likely to keep on growing. This is what some call the 'gig economy', a world in which more and more of us flit from project to project and job to job.
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