Fancy living on 62p a day? Thousands of families are going to have to do exactly that if the government’s Welfare Reform Bill becomes law, and the benefit cap comes in. Never mind the 100,000 children who’ll fall below the poverty line, or the projected 20,000 people who’ll be made homeless by it. Never mind [...]
“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 [...]
When explaining the Conservative vision of the ‘Big Society’ to the public, Cameron and co. have always emphasised the role to be played by the voluntary sector (after all, most people would agree that charities are generally a good thing). The state, they claim, often ‘crowds out’ other non-government organisations that are better suited to the task of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“I promise that if we pull together to deal with the debts today, then just a few years down the line the rewards will be felt by everyone in our country.” That’s what our glorious leader David Cameron had to tell us when he spoke at the Conservative Party conference yesterday. It is always uncomfortable [...]
In the last month we’ve all heard about David Cameron’s proposed crackdown on benefit frauds. Lots has been said around the left about how these proposals are completely missing the mark in terms of where the government can be saving money if need be, but there hasn’t been much of a defense of the benefit [...]
A letter from Tony Benn and 72 stalwart class warriors… It is time to organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government’s budget intentions. They plan the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s, which will wreck the lives of millions by devastating our jobs, pay, pensions, NHS, education, transport, postal and [...]
In an exclusive interview with The Third Estate, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg sets out his vision for change It can’t be easy, being the leader of Britain’s third major political party. Caught between a disintegrating New Labour and a resurgent Conservative Party waiting for its coronation, convincing the British public that what you have [...]
