Posted by David Osler

After Philpott: Labour should make a positive case for welfare

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, as the Kevin Spacey character argues in The Usual Suspects, is convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.

Given our government’s success in persuading the electorate, millions of claimants included, that it doesn’t need the welfare state, I’m starting to suspect that Old Nick numbers among Lynton Crosby’s sources of inspiration.

The sheer crudity of the Daily Mail’s now infamous ‘Vile product of welfare UK’ front page, directly linking Mick Philpott’s murder of six kids to his receipt of benefits, probably came across as just that little bit too strident for the ostensibly detoxified mainstream of what claims to be no longer a nasty party. Continue reading →

Opposing poverty: a job for the left, not the churches

When I give food to the poor, I’m propping up David Cameron’s Big Society programme. When I ask why the poor have no food, I sometimes wonder what I’m doing in the Labour Party any more.

Recent weeks have seen the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, 42 other Church of England bishops, the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Church of Scotland and the Methodist and United Reformed churches all speak out against poverty, which for many people on the left is the very issue that galvanised them into political commitment in the first place. Continue reading →

Bedroom tax: Labour should follow SNP lead

Britain is about to witness the first co-ordinated attempt by multiple local authorities to obstruct a Westminster edict in almost three decades. Good news, but don’t dust off those ‘defiance not compliance’ badges just yet.

Sassenachs who haven’t been keeping up may need to be told that eight Scottish National Party councils are to follow Dundee’s lead in refusing to evict bedroom tax victims who fall behind with rent. South of the border, England’s solitary Green-held municipality in Brighton has also adopted this policy.

The only potential parallel in recent history come from the mid-1980s, when a number of left-led Labour councils deliberately declined to set a legal budget, in protest at cuts in central government grants that inevitably entailed hardship for many of the people they represented. Continue reading →

A brief history of Victorian welfare reform

Back in the 1830s, the Tories and the forerunners of the Liberal Democrats were of one mind concerning the need for sweeping reform of Britain’s horrendously expensive welfare provision.

Not only did the Speenhamland System constitute a direct incentive to indolence, but with the public finances in disarray after a series of ruinous military episodes in other countries, such generosity was patently unsustainable in the long run. Continue reading →

Don’t exaggerate the UKIP threat

British parliamentary contests are described as first past the post for a reason, and the reason is that coming second does not get you a seat at Westminster. Yet somehow UKIP is basking in a spectacular degree of favourable publicity through the simple expedient of losing the Eastleigh by-election.

One factor at work is that many rightwing pundits have a vested interest in bigging up UKIP’s ‘triumph’ – if one wishes to call it that – by way of a weapon in what they see as a war to recapture the Conservative Party for Conservatism. Continue reading →