Why do we insist that there is no difference between a profitable business that pays its own way, like the postal service, and one that depends mainly on taxation to fund it, like a school or a hospital?
Handing over management of major infrastructure to the private sector means decisions over its use are no longer made in the national interest but in the interests of shareholders, which can be very different.
Before Mrs Thatcher destroyed Britain’s post-war pension consensus, Beveridge had given us a decent state pension that kept up with earnings, and Barbara Castle had added an earnings related state pension (SERPS) to those whose employers did not provide a decent workplace pension on top.
This table has just been published by the OECD and shows the “tax wedge” taken from employment earnings for all 34 OECD countries.
Boris’s free trade agenda for Europe could be a social and environmental disaster for London and the rest of the UK.
Assisted dying is not just about patient rights at the end of life but about how society as a whole approaches death and dying, and Lord Falconer’s Bill does not champion rampant individualism but rather it challenges paternalism and the imposition of unshared principles. It is a progressive cause of our time, and an issue that will affect us all. It is time for change.
Today YouGov released poll data that UKIP are on 14 per cent – something that wasn’t news to me as this is exactly the same as the calculations I made last week. However the figure looks decidedly dodgy.
If the public have little or no understanding of the decisions and institutions that govern our lives and we continue to ignore the warning signs, how long before we can no longer say with honesty that we live in a democracy?
If we don’t raise wages, control rents or reverse welfare cuts, we are going to completely price low paid workers out of London.
The international community should disabuse those Palestinians promoting boycotts of the idea that they can avoid these compromises. By failing to take that stand against the boycott campaign, professor Hawking has done nothing for the cause of peace. If anything, by encouraging behaviour that entrenches the conflict, he has set it back.
