What could Lady Gaga learn from post-liberalism? asks Jonathan Todd.
The liberalism of the 1980s combined the free market economics of Thatcherism with a brash, no-such-thing-as-society individualism. Twenty years previous, the liberalism of the 1960s cast aside the shackles of conformity and granted rights and freedoms to minorities. The two share a connection. The individual rights of the 1960s are the legal foundation of the individualism of the 1980s. They are a continuum. From the financial crisis to the hollowing out of social capital, so many contempor...
The protracted, byzantine debate over press regulation is finally coming to a head, says Chris Tryhorn.
The future of press regulation in the UK appears at last to have been resolved today after the three main parties agreed on a royal charter, ending a protracted, byzantine debate that has split the press as well as the politicians. The breakthrough follows months of arduous negotiations since Lord Justice Leveson’s landmark report on the press appeared in November and avoids a rancorous parliamentary clash. This probably comes as a relief to most politicians, who must have been struggl...
It was inevitable that the changes to Housing Benefit would lead to rent arrears, says Claudia Wood.
In the news this week are reports that the pilots for the direct payment of housing benefit - i.e. local authorities paying the benefit to tenants to pay their rent, rather than paying it directly to landlords - had resulted in a significant rise in rent arrears. This was, I feel, not only unsurprising, but inevitable. Families on very low incomes are often masters at juggling their budgets, but when housing benefit gets paid into the family bank account, this money gets merged into a pot wh...
Ally Paget argues that the integration of health and social care is the most urgent aspect of yesterday’s Lords report into ageing.
The House of Lords committee on Public Service and Demographic Change yesterday published a report warning that, as a country, we are ‘woefully underprepared’ for the social and economic demands associated with our ageing society. The publication, which sets out a schedule for action and investigation by the Government to 2015 and beyond, addresses both dimensions of the crisis in social care funding – the need to increase individuals’ purchasing power, and the need to...
Jonathan Todd on The Physics of Finance, James Owen Weatherall's defence of the pointy-heads who develop complex financial instruments.
'They are only tools,' an American once said to me of guns. 'All tools can go wrong. But only when they are not used properly.' This exchange came back to me recently when James Owen Weatherall addressed a Demos Finance seminar on his new book, The Physics of Finance. Weatherall came to praise physicians but to bury those that have misapplied their tools. Like the physicists who developed the 'complex financial instruments', such as derivatives, which are invariably i...
Chris Tryhorn asks how close would a British Grillo be to Charlie Brooker's dark fantasy.
Charlie Brooker's dystopian satire Black Mirror this week featured a foul-mouthed cartoon bear called Waldo who takes a by-election by storm. The bear - a video projection voiced by a comedian - goes around town hassling the Tory candidate with puerile insults, and then at a student Question Time event launches a vicious anti-politics tirade that goes viral on YouTube. After watching The Waldo Moment on Monday night, I went online to learn that the blogger-comedian Beppe Grillo had won m...
Jamie Bartlett explains the importance of social media in the Italian comedian's electoral success.
Over the weekend, I predicted that Beppe Grillo and his Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S - Five Star Movement) would outperform the polls by four to five percentage points in the Italian general election. I didn't, however, expect him to secure one in every four votes. What is going on? In general, polling organisations are getting more accurate, and on the whole, they get it right. Nate Silver correctly predicted all 50 states in the 2012 US presidential election. But an average of pol...
Jonathan Todd compares two interpretations of the global power shift since Copenhagen.
It is now more than three years since the Copenhagen climate conference. If it is remembered at all in the UK, it is not remembered fondly. For all the sleeplessness that it induced in the then Climate Secretary, Ed Miliband, it did not produce a great leap forward in our response to climate change. The earth keeps getting hotter; the ice caps persistently melt; and amid the wreckage of a deeper and more sustained GDP slump than the notoriously grim 1930s, it is not obvious that many of us c...
David Goodhart introduces his Analysis programme on ‘bad jobs’ and how to improve their status.
In tonight’s Analysis programme I investigate two related issues about low skilled jobs. How, on the one hand, these ‘bad jobs’ have not disappeared in Britain, as many economists predicted they would, and yet, on the other hand, how so many British people have been discouraged from taking them. The most basic discouragement flows from the fact that over recent years these jobs have become relatively less well paid and often more demanding. There is also the impact of...
Jamie Bartlett on Beppe Grillo, whose Five Star political movement is currently polling third in the upcoming Italian election.
As one of Italy's best-known comedians, Beppe Grillo had often exposed political and business scandals as part of his routines, but in 2005 he published his first post on his blog, which established him as a public figure focusing on political and societal issues. In the ensuing years, this became the most visited political blog in Italy and was the launching pad for other online and offline initiatives. Grillo is a genuine anti-establishment politician. He believes that the Italian...