EU gotta be kidding! Yesterday’s vote in the European Parliament’s to extend maternity leave to 20 weeks on full pay across the EU should be welcomed by anyone who believes the work-life balance in the UK needs to be seriously revised. If approved, which is far from certain given Conservative opposition in Britain, it will [...]
I’ve got to admit, I haven’t had time to digest the full horror of the CSR yet, but here are a few quick points to think about (the full Review can be read here, points listed below all taken from pages 10, 28, 30 and 68): No family, regardless of size or the cost of [...]
Today’s comprehensive spending review delivered long-predicted cuts to welfare and housing. Even poor old EMA, bless her, got the chop. But perhaps the deepest cuts have been to journalists’ vocabularies. Plenty of column inches over the coming months and years will be devoted to the government’s harshest measures. But if I hear one more journalist [...]
The Education Maintenance Allowance gave £30 a week to students from poor families continuing their education past GCSE. I say ‘gave’ because it has been axed by the government. I never needed to subscribe to this, but I know that a lot of the people I studied alongside at the Sixth Form College I attended [...]
Asked what was the principal outcome of the French Revolution, Chou Enlai apparently replied: “It’s too early to tell.” None of that rubbish here. Follow the Third Estate on twitter for live, smug commentary on the Spending Review, to be followed by analysis later.
This is a guest post by Majeed Neky who blogs at http://whorunskingston.wordpress.com “It’s the spirit you see just down the road in Balsall Heath, where local residents’ street patrols have turned a no-go area into a place where people can once again feel safe.” Thus did David Cameron exemplify the Big Society in his Conference speech [...]
This is a guest post by Isabeau, our friend in Haiti A tense Friday morning in Port-au-Prince: shots fired in the air and blows traded between UN security personnel and a crowd of some 100 demonstrators gathered outside the UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince to protest the renewal of the forces’ mandate here. Though the mandate [...]
Like Cameron, the Tories came in in 1979 on a wave of rhetoric about cuts, deficit and spending. The top rate of tax was moved down (!) to 60%, and the bottom rate similarly adjusted down from 33 to 30% – which meant the decrease in government spending still ‘had to’ come from cuts to [...]
Whenever a modest tax rise is proposed, the rich show their patriotism by immediately threatening to leave the country. It has been an odd sight seeing bankers warning that they will jump ship to Switzerland if forced to pay rates of tax similar to the people who clean their offices: odd that they think this [...]
