The Children’s Society today releases a key report, Nowhere to Turn? Changes to Emergency Support. This paints a disturbing picture of how vulnerable children and families in financial crisis could pay the biggest price for government changes to the Social Fund.
It is well known these cuts have been savage, unfair, and that they seriously affect the disabled. But what if they actually targeted the disabled, hitting them the hardest, piling all the harshest cuts on the services that are actually the most vital?
If there is anything that really gets up the nose of the right it’s single mothers on benefits. No, in fact it’s any parents claiming benefits, as the sorry media sage around Mick Philpott demonstrated.
Ask anyone on a low to middle income renting in London if rents are too high, and you’re only going to get one answer.
A cap on the total amount of benefits that people receive begins rolling out across England, Wales and Scotland today. The cap applies to those aged 16 to 64 and means that couples and lone parents will no longer receive more than £500 a week, with single people limited to a maximum of £350 a week.
Eton has a practice known as “oiling”, which as Anthony Seldon has approvingly noted “is learning how to win friends and influence others, and how to clamber over them to get what you want. It’s a mixture of ambition, self-confidence and bloody-mindedness.”
Presumed consent is illiberal and unnecessary and the ends do not justify the means – especially when there is a better way of ensuring we get more donor organs to save lives.
Today we saw yet another disgraceful capitulation by this government to the interests of their friends in big business.
Payday lending has historically been referred to as fringe banking in the United States, but you couldn’t deny it’s anything other than big business today.
The government today announced that it will not be introducing legislation on standardised packaging for cigarettes and other tobacco products.
