The Chancellor’s defeat in the House of Lords on Monday over cuts to tax credits has, rightly, generated acres of commentary. I don’t propose to review the debate in detail here, other than to observe, as a number of commentators and bloggers have already noted, that on this […]
The Herald carried a post yesterday that justifies a broader audience. Not for the first time this summer the paper has drawn attention to the fact that Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) have submitted a dossier to the UN’s Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) alleging […]
Last week I found myself discussing – indeed partially defending – economics in the face of somewhat indiscriminate accusations of “neoliberalism”. I have no doubt that some economists – while rarely self-defining as “neoliberal” – find themselves in sympathy with the political project that is usually signified by […]
We all know that the talk of compassionate conservatism that characterised the early years of Cameron’s leadership was quietly dropped. When one of your main political strategies is taking money from the poor and disabled – reducing thousands to penury – the whole compassion thing comes across as a bit […]
An awful lot seems to have happened on the housing policy front this week. Or at least the volume of housing talk has increased considerably. We started the week with Brandon Lewis announcing that the Government wants to see a million new homes by 2020. But the Government […]
There can be little argument that politics just got a whole lot more interesting. While we’ve been discussing – indeed anticipating – a Jeremy Corbyn win in the Labour leadership election for several weeks now, it was all tinged with an air of unreality. Now he’s been elected. […]
It is tempting to think that the UK housing system is uniquely dysfunctional. Policy over so many years has so manifestly failed to get the measure of the problem and failed to take sufficiently radical action that we might be tempted to consider those in charge uniquely inept. […]
At the end of last month Stephen Tall posted an essay entitled A liberal approach to evidence-based policy making on his blog. The essay had originally been submitted for last year’s CentreForum essay competition on The Challenges Facing Contemporary Liberalism but, for whatever reason, hadn’t appeared. I keep […]
Much of the political commentariat is currently obsessed with the soap opera of the Labour leadership election. The peculiar dynamics of the contest itself are fascinating. It is easy to forget how quickly we’ve moved from the prospect of a continuity Blairite Labour party to a party reshaped […]
Paul Mason’s new book Postcapitalism: a guide to our future is a serious book with an ambitious agenda. But you wouldn’t necessarily have picked that up from some of the early reviews. Political commentators from the centre and right were pretty quick to the pages of the Times […]
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