The government’s ‘New Homes Bonus’ scheme, which will match the council tax raised on each new house for six years, was slammed by shadow housing minister John Healey for being an expensive con, with the money coming mostly from existing local authority support grants – as revealed in a pre-election Tory green paper.
David Cameron has announced a war on ‘welfare cheats’. But the £5.1bn welfare gap – only £1.5bn of which is cheating – is dwarfed by the £40bn tax gap.
I’ve written a piece for the Channel 4 News website which outlines why, although he won’t be the next leader, Ed Balls is Labour’s kingmaker. Updating Left Foot Forward’s leadership model we find that the membership and trade union sectionstest
One issue yet to be dissected by contenders to the Labour crown is taxation – and more specifically its principles. We may still be licking our wounds from one of our worst electoral defeats in history, but timidity is no recipe for renewing and building a revitalised progressive force to counter the growing threat posed by the ConDem coalition government.
A debate is quietly raging in the US press over remote-controlled warfare. On one side is the Wall Street Journal, which ran an editorial in April praising the expansion of UCAVs under Obama; on the other side is The New Yorker and The Nation, with Tom Engelhardt of the latter taking a strong line.
Dianne Abbott has called for the next Labour leader to make the party greener. In an interview with Resonance FM she said green tech was the key to deficit reduction.
The tiny British territory of Diego Garcia is being used for a US military build up. David Cameron is silent on the issue.
Scotland • The Herald warned of a winter of discontent. It was reported that the Coalition’s welfare reforms will cost Scotland at least £480 million while there was a warning that mass public sector redundancies would be needed if Holyroodtest
The Coalition are using a loophole to help achieve their 10:10 carbon pledge. The Sustainable Development Commission warned about the ruse before being scrapped.
George Osborne used his emergency Budget to cut public spending by an additional £32 billion by 2014-15. The growing list of cuts underway makes for painful reading.
