It’s nearly three years since this government was formed, and every day we see more evidence to shred Osborne’s myth that we’re “all in this together”. With a cabinet whose combined personal wealth is around £70 million, it’s hardly surprising that the poorest are bearing the brunt of austerity while millionaires – like themselves – are getting a tax cut.
This government is shockingly unrepresentative: of ordinary working people, of ethnic minorities, of disabled people – and of women. Indeed, there are only four women in the current cabinet. And the fact that Eton is all-boys is no excuse.
After an unexpectedly brilliant Olympics – 29 golds and 65 medals, unprecedented for more than a century since 1908 – pleading questions are being asked whether it will bring about a transformation of Britain. It will not. It has certainly provided an enormous morale boost for the national psyche and made a naturally self-deprecating and iconoclastic Britain recover its self-esteem and sense of capacity to punch above its weight: the UK was third in the world in number of golds behind US and China, but relative to population the UK outsripped them by far. That is certainly something to be proud about. But there are deeper lessons to be learnt from these Olympic games which should have an even more penetrating impact. 
The agreement finally reached on the local government pension scheme after the government made significant concessions has rather less to do with official generosity than fear about the consequences if the scheme were so eviscerated that hundreds of thousands of local government workers might decide there was no point in continuing to contribute to it since, if they walked away, they would still get the same amount of money in retirement from means-tested income support.
It is hard to imagine a more ill-judged intervention into the debates about the public sector pensions dispute than that of Andrew Fisher, joint secretary of the 
The November 30 strikes saw unprecedented unity in the union movement but the speed of its collapse illustrates just how tenuous it was. Despite claims to have extracted significant concessions from the government, unions that sign up to the government’s offer are really guilty of selling short not only their members but millions more whose hopes for a decent pension depend on solidarity across the unions. This was evident when Danny Alexander triumphantly