Good Society
For local government to be meaningful, it needs to have the power to make a difference over things that people care about
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.
The bedroom tax is already ruining Welsh communities
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.
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.
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.
How Margaret Thatcher turned the left upside down
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.
The musical backdrop to the backlash against Thatcherism
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.