The Department of Work and Pensions today rushed through emergency legislation to ensure that job-seekers unfairly sanctioned by their policies are unable to claim compensation. This provides an opportunity to look at how utterly infective they have been at getting people into work.
The new childcare policy will do very little to help the millions of people who have already lost out under benefit cuts, but it will help those with joint incomes of just short of £300,000.
The least worst option for Labour could be to stand up for the victims and resist David Cameron’s suffocating embrace – even if that means going back to the drawing board and starting over together with the Lib Dems.
The old Marxist cliche has it that history repeats itself “first as tragedy then as farce”. It is hugely important that the Left continues to hammer home the point that the Bedroom Tax is grossly unfair – as the polls show, it isn’t falling on deaf ears.
It’s increasingly clear that the Bedroom Tax is Cameron’s Poll tax. The Left must ensure history repeats itself as farce, rather than as a tragedy for the country’s disabled people.
The childcare problem that David Cameron is trying to solve is one of his own making.
The evidence for privatising aid is thin. So let’s at least have the debate before subjecting millions of people in the global south to free market experiments.
Sinn Fein have pledged to oppose a vote at Stormont that seeks to restrict access to abortions. The amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill, tabled by the DUP and SDLP, would make illegal abortions that are carried out outside of NHS institutions.
New polling shows overwhelming support among the public for a mansion tax, with voters from all three main parties backing the measure by a significant majority.
When one third of government ministers have links to either the fossil fuel industry itself or to financial sector firms dependent on high carbon investments, the likelihood of meaningful government regulation of the City’s fossil fuel funding shenanigans look slim.
Thanks to ever-increasing prescription costs for the essential medication people with long-term conditions need to keep them well, or even alive, many are facing the stark choice between food, clothing, bills or their prescriptions.
