The UK government needs to listen to Iceland’s progressive prime minister when she says robust welfare policies are the antidote to far-right extremism. And what’s more, investing in social infrastructure – in care, in health, in schools – is essential to driving the growth the government wants, says Amy Brooker of the Women’s Budget Group.

I recently listened enthralled to Simon Szreter of Cambridge University at an ODI conference on growth and equity (more on that later). Simon set out some of the history of social protection in the UK and its possible implications for today’s developing countries. For the two centuries before the industrial revolution, the UK had a universal system of decentralized social protection