Deborah Padfield, a citizen’s advice bureau adviser, returns to report from the poverty line. In the third of a series of five posts, she examines the drive to get claimants off benefits. Should we be deterring state 'scroungers', or helping the 'work-hungry' masses into employment?
A reformed upper House could provide a check on the power that the executive currently hold in Britain. Yet the proposed reforms would give the House of Lords democratic legitimacy, without extending their powers to hold the executive to account
A retreat from the present unsatisfactory half-way house to a Gaullist ‘Europe des Patries’ would be an act of reactionary vandalism.
Deborah Padfield, a citizen’s advice bureau adviser, returns to report from the poverty line – a part of Britain that is outside David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’. In the second of a series of five posts, she describes how politicians and the media would much rather focus on benefit fraud than the far
Bob Marshall-Andrews and Richard Wainwright were two MPs who, in very different ways, belonged to the honourable and increasingly rare breed of parliamentarians who brought integrity and a willingness to speak up to the House of Commons, the public and their parties.
With the government's White Paper, we are facing the full-scale privatisation of the NHS in England and Wales.
The UK's government's terrorism Threat Level is confused and confusing, raising the Orwellian specter of a state of constant war.
The opening of the first purpose-built immigration detention centre in Northern Ireland this month, is a sad day as it will expand the detention estate once again. But we can resist the simultaneous expansion of our own mental barriers against human equality and freedom, by denying the necessity a
Deborah Padfield, a citizen’s advice bureau adviser, returns to report from the poverty line – a part of Britain that is outside David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’. In the first of a series of five posts, she describes the benefits regime under which state beneficiaries lead their lives.
Ironically, working through the idiom of multicultural failure is a form of political correctness; a way of talking about issues of migration, identity, power, belonging, legitimacy and socio-political anxiety while steering clear of a lexicon associated with the overt history of a shameful, racis
