Tory MEPs scupper plan to cut emissions
Tory MEPs have rejected a proposed reform to the European emissions trading scheme that would have cut the huge surplus of allowances currently being traded.
Just how many families are there where three generations have ‘never worked’?
In seeking to justify the government’s reforms to the benefits system, Iain Duncan Smith has previously claimed that there exists a situation in Britain where “three generations of the same family have [often] never worked”. However all the the evidence shows what an insignificant problem “three generations of out-of-work families” are in the grand scheme of things.
Things you could do with £10 million
At some point during the past three years we’ve all heard the cliche that there’s “no money left”. Obviously there is – there’s never no money left or else the country would grind to a complete halt – but the phrase has become accepted wisdom due in large part to the success of the government in popularising the idea.
School sports: ruined by ‘political correctness gone mad’ or by something else?
Remember when school sports days were being cancelled in an effort to wrap British children up in the cotton wool of “political correctness gone mad”?
Thatcher didn’t destroy the Tories. They were already a party in decline
The Conservative Party has been in steady decline since the Second World War, as the graph below depicting the Conservative share of the vote since the turn of last century shows.
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Thatcherism saw child poverty grow by 121 per cent
Yesterday we ran a piece on the level of people living in poverty under Margaret Thatcher in response to a claim by Guido Fawkes which claimed the poor had “got richer under Thatcher”. I dealt with a lot of this yesterday; but here is another graph showing a bit more straightforwardly the growth in relative poverty during the Thatcher years.
The brighter side of famine
As we’ve been picking on the Daily Mail a lot recently, I thought it only fair that I should have a go at someone else today. With that in mind I decided to pick on the Guardian.
8 million people one paycheck away from homelessness
One in three people would be unable to pay their rent or mortgage for more than a month if they lost their job, new figures from Shelter reveal.
Did the poor get richer under Thatcher?
A post at Guido Fawkes’ blog boasts that under Thatcher “wages went up across the whole spectrum, including for the poorest”. As evidence, he produces this graph taken from Channel Four Factcheck.