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.
Much has been asked about Margaret Thatcher’s contribution to feminism during the past week. But what of lesbian and gay equality? Two moments last week made me wonder.
It is a curious irony that, with the death of Margaret Thatcher and the release of Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45, the two great ideological consensuses of the 20th century should return to sharp focus at the same time.
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”?
Labour’s announcement that it would give councils more control over “use classes” is extremely welcome. In England, any “development” requires planning permission, unless it is “permitted development”. However, under current legislation, many changes in the use of a building count as “permitted development”, and many more (specifically, changes within a certain “use class”) do not count as development at all.
Just over a week since George Osborne declared as “unbelievable” the Welsh government’s opposition to many of his welfare reforms, the BBC has today unearthed evidence demonstrating the extent of the impact of the bedroom tax.
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.
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.
The return of the Conservatives to power in Britain in 2010 has reminded us of just how negative so much of Thatcher’s legacy has been, as they attack public services and the living standards of ordinary people. Thatcher was a disaster for British society, culture and morals. Yet since her intervention of April 1993 into the debate over the former Yugoslavia nobody can justifiably assume simply that ‘left-wing is good; right-wing is bad’. The reality is more complicated.
From the late 1970s Thatcherism ushered in an unexpectedly rich dimension of music-based protest and activism that pulled together youth movements from the very communities she sought to destroy.
