On the Monday just passed which saw the heaviest rioting, I was getting something to eat from my local Chinese takeaway in Ealing Broadway when 40 masked and armed youths ran passed me towards the shopping centre. It was 8pm and I was relatively surprised to see the riots spread to the now baptised “leafy [...]
A version of this article was first published in International Tax Review Bongo players, Robin Hood, men dressed as drag dinner ladies and Mrs Doyle from Father Ted proclaiming the only tea she does not like is poverty greeted activists as they filed into Westminster Central Hall to lobby their MPs. But behind the fun [...]
“There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading…To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it [...]
Mathew Bell’s interview with Lord Tebbit, in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday, predictably touched upon immigration. “When he steps off the train into London” the interview asks, “doesn’t he see an exciting and creative powerhouse, fuelled in part by the injection of foreign blood and money?” No, he says, he worries that Londoners are being pushed [...]
I swore I’d never write about tax in my private life, but given tax avoidance kills 1,000 children in the developing world every day since these countries lose more through multinational corporations shifting taxable profits abroad than they receive in aid, I feel the need to post this very important press release I received from Christian Aid today. Tuesday 8 [...]
“There’s always a bigger fish.” – Qui-Gon Jinn Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog notes a symptom of just how far the West has regressed in the distribution of income: so much of America’s wealth is concentrated in the top 1% of the income scale that those only just below actually feel insecure about [...]
Stephanie Flanders at the BBC has posted a nice accessible explanation of the dispute between the IFS and the Government over whether or not the CSR is fair, for the benefit of those dunces lacking a formal training in economics (like me, for example). In making their calculations, both sides estimate the value of public [...]
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 [...]
Frank Field was recently dubbed the government’s ‘poverty tsar’ after the PM asked him to produce a report on inequality, particularly concerning the effects of childhood development on adult life. Today he came out in favour of a 1950s-style ‘tough love’ approach to parenting as a way to shrink inequalities at school. The remedy for the often [...]
There are so many things to write about at the moment that I’ve been slightly struck dumb. There’s a strange ‘it’s all a bit 1936′ feeling in the air: expulsion of the Roma; increasing privatisation; the dismantling of the NHS; trade union tub-thumping; the pope. It’s like these demons of another age have been hiding [...]
