Ollie Haydon-Mulligan says that family warmth and family wealth aren't competitors.
The problem with David Cameron’s speech at Demos earlier this month wasn’t the speech itself but the way it took shape in the media, as a claim that parenting matters more for children’s development than a family’s material wellbeing. It isn’t that this particular claim is untrue. It’s that the claim threatened to frame the child poverty debate as a row over the relative importance of ‘warmth’ against ‘wealth’. Framed like this, the ...
Richard Reeves finds a curious trajectory of inequality in the UK.
If the principal weapons against inequality were reports, commissions and panels, we'd have reached an egalitarian nirvana decades ago. This week's report from the National Equality Panel - dubbed an 'inequality bible' by Harriet Harman - comes after dozens of think-tank reports, the publication of official poverty figures. But this report is important. Hills, when it comes to this kind of research, is the real deal - the Godfather of the Gini coefficient. The report he a...
Pippa Read defends Train to Gain against recent criticisms.
Train to Gain, the government's flagship £2bn workforce training programme, has just received another bashing. Hot on the heels of the criticisms of the National Audit Office last summer, the Public Accounts Committee has now judged the overall financial management of the project to be poor. There is room for improvement. A product of the 2006 Leitch Review, which recognised Britain's woeful skills shortage, the programme has not driven up the demand for training among employ...
Richard Reeves looks at what the Social Attitudes Survey means for party politics.
At last, amid the political positioning and rhetoric about ‘broken Britain’ and Etonian playing fields, a clear-eyed view the state of the nation from the annual Social Attitudes Survey published today. Britain, in short, is becoming much more tolerant of diverse lifestyles; more sceptical about the role of the state as an antidote to economic inequality; and less certain about the value of parliamentary democracy. Only a third of the population thinks gay relat...
Marcus Fergusson takes issue with the bias around digital rights.
The Digital Economy Bill is struggling: an extraordinary 300 amendments are being discussed in the Lords, mostly centred on proposals to prevent illegal file sharing by making internet service providers (ISPs) tell pirates they are breaking the law, and especially on Lord Mandelson’s 'three strikes' idea under which repeat offenders would be disconnected. The Bill is flawed in three ways. First, evidence for the scale of the problem is biased. Rights holders like BMI say illega...
Jamie Bartlett says that satire should be the weapon of choice against terrorism.
Every country has its own distinct way to fight terrorism. The Americans, shock and awe. The French, a dismissive laicite. The Dutch an obsessive multiculturalism. And us? Not much until now. But finally, we have rediscovered our most effective weapon: wit. This week, Chris Morris’ new spoof film Four Lions features at the Sundance Festival, and it joins a growing number of satires taking aim at al-Qaeda wannabes. It is amazing it’s taken so long. Al...
Louise Bazalgette argues that money is still the key factor in child poverty.
In his blog earlier this week, Max Wind-Cowie commented on the FT’s report that the Conservatives plan to move away from Labour’s narrow, income-based measure of child poverty, towards a broader range of measures that would reflect the wider social context of child poverty (e.g. underage pregnancy, joblessness, lone parenting and other factors). What perplexes me about these plans is that we already know which children (and parents) are affected by child poverty; Government fig...
Claudia Wood says that cold hard cash must follow new rights for grandparents.
A few months ago, I blogged about the Conservative’s intention to establish a “fair deal for grandparents” when it came to custody and care hearings. I pointed out that whilst it was all well and good to put grandparents “at the front of the queue” when it came to placing children in care, making sure these pensioners could actually cope once they were there was a more fundamental issue. Now, not to be outdone on family friendly policies, Labour have come ...
Max Wind-Cowie believes the Tories' new policies show they are radically progressive.
The Conservative Party got much stick over the last week about their approach to families. While he was at Demos to deliver a speech on character and responsibility, David Cameron was presented with a moral dilemma by queen-of-the-sensible-left Polly Toynbee – ‘what’ she asked ‘happens to your tax break for married couples when a man leaves his wife and children in order to remarry?’ Cameron was less than forthcoming. He said that the policy w...
Celia Hannon argues that social services need support not cynicism.
A leaked serious case review once again draws attention to the failings of Doncaster social services. The report from the Children's Safety Board is to be published this week and it will suggest that the brutal attack by two brothers on two boys in Edlington, which left one in a coma, were predictable and preventable. When it is released the report will no doubt focus on the chain of events leading up to the shocking attack by the two boys who were living with foster carers at the t...