Benefits

If you want an illustration of just how damaging tribalism can be in politics, look no further than this Westminster Hall debate, held yesterday. Labour’s Lisa Nandy had organised it, which was on ‘effects of government policy on UK poverty’, partly, it seems to raise some stories from her constituency about benefit sanctions that had been unfairly applied, and partly, presumably, to take a few party political pot shots at the Tories. That’s fair enough with an election coming up, and it would have been fair enough for the Tories in the debate to defend their record robustly. What doesn’t seem to be fair enough or indeed at all sensible is

The response to the Ukip surge has reached the panic stage. Just as British business and academia chorused the economic benefits of Union in the final stages of the Scottish referendum campaign, now their refrain is of the economic benefits of immigration. A letter from ten chief executives in the Financial Times pronounced that unimpeded immigration from Eastern Europe is highly valuable. The previous week economists estimated that immigration from Eastern Europe had contributed £20 billion net in taxes. But Ukip supporters are no longer overawed by businessmen and dons, so what is to be done? Within the accepted rules of English social hierarchy, the tempting implication for the rest

Back in February, Benefits Street star ‘White Dee’ promised to give David Cameron a ‘run for his money’. In her Spectator diary, she described how ‘Ladbrokes has made me 50-1 to be the next MP for Birmingham Ladywood, and until I read that patronising nonsense I wasn’t going to stand. Now, I think I will. As an independent, mind. How far will I get? Let’s just see.’ Dee hadn’t yet made it clear which party she was thinking of joining. She’s speaking at the Tory conference today, although she has been a strident critic of their policies. Previously, she has indicated that she used to vote LibDem, until they joined forces with

Here’s a funny thing: Labour claims to be the ‘party of work’, but the Tories have reasonable claim to be the workers’ party, given that they’ve overseen the creation of 1.5 million new jobs. Anyway, it was one of the slogans that shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves incanted on her Sunday Politics interview this morning, when she seemed to have a pretty torrid time of it. listen to ‘Rachel Reeves ’ on Audioboo She had to defend her party’s leader against his cratering approval ratings and the embarrassment of a leaked election strategy document which shows that people don’t trust him on immigration, the economy or welfare. And she had

More trouble for Ukip this morning: it seems that yet another party official has some colourful views about ‘people of color’. David Challice, who is understood to work at Ukip HQ, once suggested that ‘cash-strapped Moslems’ should have multiple wives. In a bizarre newspaper advert placed in the Exeter Express and Echo in 2009, Challice said that he had found a ‘money spinner’ for ‘any cash-strapped Moslems’. He recommended that they should have ‘multiple wives in order to claim an extra £33.65 per wife in benefits from the Department for Work and Pensions’. An outcry followed, with Challice accused of racism. Challice later denied that the advert was racist; arguing that ‘…the mention of Islam and

My friend and critic Jonathan Portes obviously took exception to my remarks about Keynesianism having been disproven. His entertaining rebuttal claims to have exposed my misreading of data. That’s not quite how I see it. I agree with him that the appalling build-up of out-of-work benefits happened before 1997. The Tories badly miscalculated incapacity benefit; thinking it would be a one-off way to help those affected by deindustrialization. But, in fact, it created a welfare dependency trap, and the 1992 recession caught too many people in it. John Major had an excuse: a recession. Tony Blair had no such excuse. I wasn’t joking about a quarter of Liverpool and Glasgow

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_27_February_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Ed West discusses political bias in the church” startat=640] Listen [/audioplayer]I am training for ordained ministry at a Church of England theological college. I am a trainee vicar, if you will. I am also a Conservative, which puts me in an extremely small minority and quite a tricky position. At my college, there are approximately 60 ordinands in full-time residential training. Of those 60, there are no more than three or four who would describe themselves as Conservative and the overwhelming majority would call themselves (proudly) socialist. There is also a sizable minority of Marxists. In recent weeks, our national press has seemed surprised that senior clergy in

Even though, as I said earlier, it makes sense for David Cameron to come out fighting in favour of his party’s welfare reforms after they were slammed by the Archbishop of Westminster, there’s a point worth considering about how useful these criticisms from leading lights both in the Catholic Church and Church of England are for the Left. Nichols has since said that the government’s cuts and reforms are ‘perfectly understandable’, but that ‘what is beyond my understanding is why a programme of reform needs to result in people who, when they are given some food, burst into tears because they haven’t eaten in three days’. This is precisely the stance

I spent yesterday evening in Birmingham with the residents of ‘Benefits Street’, assorted pundits and politicians. It was a slightly rowdy debate for Channel 4, and can be seen here. Since a number of controversial things came up perhaps I can deal with them in order. ‘The programme shouldn’t have been made.’ I felt very uncomfortable at one point last night, watching both the opposition minister, Chris Bryant, government minister Mike Penning and various pundits including Mehdi Hasan of the Huffington Post and Owen Jones of The Independent saying that Channel 4 should not have made the series, should have made a different series, made a series about something else or

‘Do you know what they used to call us?’ asked Theresa May ten years ago. ‘The nasty party.’ No one used that phrase, but ‘they’ had a point. The Conservatives seemed to be a group of efficient mercenaries, useful for fighting the economic war that broke out in the 1970s. But in the good times they seemed robotic, Spock-like and heartless. The message was: if you work, we’re with you. If you shirk, you’re the enemy. This was summed up by Peter Lilley’s infamous ‘Little List’ skit, above. ANd again in George Osborne’s 2012 Tory conference speech, where he invited his audience to imagine the anger of a worker passing