Tweet There is no conceivable justification for slashing £220m from criminal legal aid and removing the defendant’s right to choose a solicitor. None more, at least, than a wilful determination gratuitously to hobble one of the fundamental pillars of the welfare state: equality before the law. This is yet another manifestation of the Tory objective [...]
Posts under ‘Social Affairs’
Support George Rolph: on hunger strike having had his disability benefits denied
Jun 5th, 2013 by Jon Lansman.Tweet Today, George Rolph is in day 16 of his hunger strike, which he is doing for others going through what he has had to endure, whilst also trying to get the general public to wake up to what is happening to the most vulnerable people in the United Kingdom, a country which once cared [...]
Means-testing winter fuel payments is another Labour own goal
Jun 4th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Tweet Ed Balls didn’t have to say it. It will save a piffling amount of money relative to the size of the budget deficit which is still plateaued at £122bn. Inasmuch as it’s a Tory-style policy, it’s doing the Tories’ dirty work for them. And it’s another nail (admittedly not the first or the only [...]
Louise Mensch and Conservative Feminism
May 31st, 2013 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.Tweet When I was an undergraduate I probably spent more time dosing up on heavy duty social theory than drinking until blindness set in. One module I took was on feminist social theory because, at that time, I was deeply concerned with questions around revolutionary subjectivity and the place socialism had in a fragmenting and [...]
Time for a cross-Europe living wage
May 30th, 2013 by Lucy Anderson.Tweet The latest official research from the Greater London Authority (GLA) demonstrates that the gap between rich and poor in London is growing. For example, the tenth of the capital’s population with the highest income have weekly income of over £1,000 while people in the lowest tenth have under £94 per week. We also know [...]
A challenge for the trades union movement
May 29th, 2013 by John Millington.Tweet Nazi saluting tanked up extremists who have sworn to rid the country of a religious minority in Britain, run amok through the heart of the capital passing within 200 metres of the House of Commons with a grand total of two police officers in pursuit. Going through all the possible opening paragraphs for a [...]
The Troika’s ‘Men in Black’ and the crime of organised money
May 28th, 2013 by Tom Gill.Tweet Continuing to force states to finance themselves at high-interest rates is just a strategy to justify wage control, the privatisation of public services and, ultimately, to enslave peoples, says Juan Torres Lopez, Professor of Economics at the University of Seville. Spain has once again received a visit from the so-called Men in Black, the Troika inspectors, [...]
We need to talk about porn
May 28th, 2013 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.Tweet You can’t move for it. Porn, that is. So ubiquitous has it become that the Graun even has its own dedicated porn page. We are, apparently, living in something called ‘pornified culture’. Diane Abbot has very recently partly blamed this for a crisis of masculinity. Christians lament the damage pornified culture has on relationships, and feminists have consistently critiqued the adult industry for [...]
Mothers facing brunt of Tory attacks
May 26th, 2013 by Marshajane Thompson.Tweet The economy may for now have escaped a ‘triple-dip’ but women, particularly those of us who are mothers, have experienced a triple- whammy from cuts which hit us as workers, as claimants and as carers. As the Fawcett Society recently identified: Women are being hit hardest by job cuts in the public sector; Women [...]
Judges overturn ATOS work capability assessment
May 26th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Tweet Three cheers for the courts and mental health activists, none for the politicians and the Department of Work & Pensions. This week three judges ruled – as we all knew, but it required the courts to make it the law of the land – that the Government’s prescriptors, regulations and guidelines used to assess [...]
