I think it’s more than 18 months since I last blogged about politics and Europe. But today I found myself almost agreeing with something Boris writes in his Daily Telegraph column on the Tories’ referendum ructions. That doesn’t happens very often. So that got me thinking. The main […]
Last night I was working my way through the parts of the MoJ’s consultation paper on Transforming Legal Aid relating to competition in the market for criminal representation. This is a fascinating and contentious document. The legal profession is especially exercised by the proposals to restructure the market […]
It’s been a fascinating and frustrating few days in politics. On Thursday lunchtime I discovered that Claus Offe, one of the world’s most famous political sociologists, as giving a lecture entitled Participatory inequality in the austerity state about a hundred metres from my office late on Thursday afternoon. […]
When the Chancellor announced his two-part Help to Buy scheme in the Budget last month it was met with a chorus of disapproval. Representatives from the mortgage and construction industries – who, of course, have a financial interest in seeing the scheme implemented – were positive about it. […]
The Conservative party views welfare reform as one of the most popular policies it has pursued through the Coalition government. But welfare reform has been subject to sustained critique. Even the use of the term “welfare”, rather than more neutral descriptors such as “social assistance” or “social security”, […]
Making work pay. Few sensible people would object to this as a policy aspiration. It’s at the core of the Coalition Government’s justification for its reforms to the social security system. So that’s got to be good. The cracks begin to appear when we move on to consider […]
Yesterday I participated in a consultation event organised by Bristol City Council. it was designed to start a debate locally about the revision of social housing allocations policy. My talk, which ranged rather more broadly than simply allocations policy, is a bit too long to include in a […]
We’ve now had three years of the blue-tinged contingent of the Coalition perpetrating a sustained attack on social security recipients – those slugabed skivers – in the name of curbing the deficit. Yesterday’s post at the Guardian again maps the profoundly negative tone of the language that has […]
The mainstream media seem finally to have cottoned on to the fact that our welfare system is to undergo substantial change tomorrow. I mentioned a couple of months ago that the changes around the so-called bedroom tax were, belatedly, attracting broader media interest. And the media are connecting […]
On Friday we published a report on the prospects for an elected mayor in Bristol. It is the first report from the Bristol Civic Leadership Project. The prospects report was based primarily on views collected from around Bristol prior to the mayoral election in November. It drew on […]
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