Stuart Weir, 2015 Jan 30 Young workers hit hardest by wages slump of post-crash Britain The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) claims that almost all groups have seen real wages fall following financial crisis. British workers are taking home less in real terms than when Tony Blair won his second general election victory in 2001, …
Stuart Weir, 2015 Jan 30 Low income households with children and the very rich have lost the most from the coalition government’s tax and benefit changes, according the Institute for Fiscal Studies. [Presumably the very rich won’t really notice! Ed.] The tax changes and cuts to benefits brought in by the coalition government have had …
Henry Tam, 2015 Jan 24 In the run-up to the general elections, a new series of day schools on the theme of “Politics: What is it Good For?” will be rolled out from February 2015 to the end of April 2015. These have been organised to engage members of the public in taking a fresh …
Henry Tam, 2015 Jan 24 For those fearing feral youth behaviour (according to the November 2011 ICM poll conducted for Barnados, 44% of the UK population believe young people are “becoming feral”), fodder education can seem an attractive antidote. Fodder education aims to secure a steady supply of thoroughly ‘domesticated’ workers who will do what …
Mark Page, 2015 Feb 06 A government commissioned report by Natalie Elphicke and Keith House offers recommendations for improving councils’ performance in house-building. The authors believe that “councils should be responsible for assessing and then meeting their local housing need, that they should invest more of their pension funds into local housing projects and that …
Deborah Padfield, 2015 Feb 07 Winter’s a bad time to be street homeless. It’s much less common in Saffron Walden where I work than in Cambridge, but even we had three street homeless clients around Christmas. We rang the homeless shelters in Cambridge, Braintree, Bishops Stortford, Chelmsford and Haverhill. All were full. We found temporary …
Henry Tam, 2015 Jan 24 People who create wealth in the sense of beneficial resources rarely refer to themselves as ‘wealth creators’, let alone pontificate about how uniquely important they are. They teach, they provide care, they protect the vulnerable, they grow food, they make what people need, but they don’t pretend they are superior …