Benefits

Jamie Oliver, eh, what a card? Why can’t Britain’s revolting poor eat better food? If they can afford televisions they can afford mussels and rocket too, don’t ya know? Something like that anyway. But instead they loaf in front of the goggle-box stuffing their fat faces with lardy ready-meals and fast food. What is to be done with them? And why can’t they be more like the Spanish or the Italians? Never mind that Italian children are more likely to be obese than British children. Never mind, too, that kids in impoverished southern Italy are more likely to be overweight than children in the wealthier north. Instead just fantasise about a

Universal pensioner benefits like the Winter Fuel Allowance (WFA) cost the Exchequer over £8 billion a year. This is not a massive sum compared to overall government expenditure but it is absurd that every pensioner gets WFA, even cash millionaires. We must face the fact that this is totally wrong. It is morally and economically wrong that lower-paid people are paying for the benefits of millionaires who are more than capable of paying their own fuel bills. In an ideal world we would stop handing out WFA to people who didn’t need it. But that’s not easy or cost-effective. So we need to look carefully at the WFA and other

I’m told there’s a joke that does the round in Whitehall, that to err is human, but if you really want to foul things up you need Iain Duncan Smith. I’m afraid a casual glance at DWP’s delivery record explains why. On every single one of DWP’s five big reforms things are going badly wrong. The human cost of this colossal bodge job is impossible to calculate. But the fiscal cost could be as high as £1.4 billion. Let’s start with reform of disability benefits. A vital reform that needs tremendous care. The test itself needs fast and fundamental reform (my speech on the subject is here). But the government’s

With the recent anniversary of the Beveridge report, TV channels have been packed with an array of documentaries on our welfare system. Most of these have been fairly hopeless, trying to make their points with extreme cases. Channel 4’s ‘How to get a council house’ was a notable exception. With devastating clarity it showed how our social housing system is nothing of the kind. My grandfather, an electrician, spent most of the Second World War on Malta with the RAF. His house in East London was destroyed by bombing during the war. With no home of his own he stayed with relatives when on leave and happily fell in love with my

Formulating policy on the back of what you believe human beings ought to be like rather than what they tend to be like can have serious consequences. Mass immigration is a case in point. I have tended to accept the proposition that immigration (the more the merrier) is an inherent good on the grounds that the economic case for it is strong. After all, migrants tend to put more into the pot than they take out and a rapidly ageing population means we require a young and dynamic workforce to pay for pensions further down the road. It is the economic case that explains why, as well as the bleeding

According to popular wisdom on the left — and even among some in the Conservative party — this ought to have been a tough week for the government. On Monday, the new £26,000 cap on benefits came into effect and with it a new principle: that no one on welfare should receive more than the average working family. Such a move, it was said, would expose the Conservatives to what is supposed to be their weak point: that they are the ‘nasty party’ who care about money, not people. Yet something remarkable has happened. Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare cap is turning out to be not just the boldest but the most popular

What are the Ashes? This question was put to former England cricket captain Ted Dexter, the guest of honour at the launch last night of the writer and broadcaster Simon Hughes’s latest book. Dexter replied that the Ashes is an idea; the terms of engagement that had united two sporting nations in rivalry for nearly 150 years. Few things in life are more durable than a simple idea. The idea of ‘austerity’ drives our political debate and yesterday’s spending review has extended the life of the idea deep into the next parliament. It is a political concept rather than a purely economic issue. It used to allow the government and Labour to define themselves broadly

I see that they have gone for Jane Austen as the face of the new ten pound note, after a long and bitter row. I find it incredible that they decided not to take the chance to show a true commitment to multicultural diversity and have instead chosen some boring dead white woman.  I wrote to the authorities demanding that the fiery Islamic organiser Anjem Choudary have his face on the note. After all, as taxpayers we give him enough of the stuff every year. But this was rejected out of hand, sadly. Choudary has backed a new organisation, called Islamic Emergency Defence. The initials are a deliberate reference to

I always enjoy Peter Oborne’s columns not least because his opinions are as entertaining, predictably unpredictable, quixotic and changeable as his cricket captaincy. This is not a bad thing. This week he’s back in full-on Cameron as Disraeli mode, arguing that the coalition’s reforms of education (in England, though sadly the Peter and the Telegraph refer to “Britain’s schools”) and welfare (across the UK) are so important that success here dwarfs any failure anywhere else. I think he may be right. Coincidentally, I’ve an article in today’s Scotsman that, though chiefly concerned with Iain Duncan Smith and welfare reform, makes passing reference to Gove too. These two, perhaps more than

As Fraser says, the welfare changes, cuts to legal aid and so forth, which have come into force today, have got a universal thumbs-down in the left-wing press. I expect that the barrage of negative headlines will please No.10 (you cannot make an omelette etc.). It also has the comfort of knowing that the public is broadly in favour of reform. But the government might be disgruntled at the comparatively muted reaction of the right-wing press. The Telegraph’s coverage is intriguing. It concentrates on the Tories’ clash with the church over benefit cuts, which was mentioned by Christian Guy in a post yesterday. There is also some coverage of Grant Shapps’s attempt

One of the most frustrating things about being a policymaker must surely be when something that sounds so very sensible and straightforward in your ivory tower ends up being a bit messy in practice. Take the ‘bedroom tax’: it’s not actually a tax, but Labour enjoy calling anything they don’t like a ‘tax’ (odd, given their own penchant for taxation). This is a housing benefit cut for social tenants living in homes with more bedrooms than they need. It was announced in the 2010 emergency budget and comes into effect from April. Very sensible, you might think, especially when private tenants don’t get extra housing benefit for spare rooms. The