Squeeze are wrong: the Tories are hellbent on fixing welfare, not destroying it

Squeeze were at their best in the 1970s, and this morning demonstrated that their political ideas haven’t much evolved from that awful decade. Playing out the Andrew Marr show in front of the Prime Minister, Glenn Tilbrook changed the lyrics of this latest song to insert the line “I grew up in council houses, they’re part of what made Britain great. But there are some people who are hellbent on destruction of the welfare state.” Not quite. Today’s Conservative Party is hellbent on reforming the welfare state – so it helps people out of poverty rather than traps them in it. That is what’s behind today’s news that the PM is minded to knock down the worst estates, rebuild the property and help rebuild the lives of the tenants.

Let’s take a better protest song: Jerusalem. Blake famously wrote about England’s ‘dark, satanic mills’ – the scourge, as he saw it, of British society.