By Preth Rao Gordon Brown's opening keynote speech at the Fabian conference today was clearly an attempt to re-capture the centre ground, following weeks of "class war" political debates - also in a week in which John Denham, the Communities Secretary, emphasised the importance of class in talking about race equality. The Prime Minister coined what may become a flagship campaigning cry: "social mobility for the majority". However, the fact that many people do not truly understand what that term...
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By Jonathan Slater As a Labour PPC standing in a constituency in which the British Army reside, I have become acutely aware of many of the concerns of our army personnel and their families. As such, I felt it important to address the current political debate over the Labour Government’s support for the British armed services personnel, particularly with many of them currently serving in Afghanistan. This is a timely matter. The Secretary of State for Defence, Bob Ainsworth, announced...
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By Peter Barnard “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” I came across this saying only recently; perhaps in a comment on LabourList. According to this website, it’s a Chinese proverb, but, what was true in China a few thousand years ago is still true today. The saying invites the immediate question: who does the teaching? It appears to me that there is...
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By Peter Barnard It’s a common criticism from Conservatives that Labour has created its ‘client electorate’ in the form of people drawing state benefits, that is, people dependent on the state for their beer, baccy and bingo money. The reality is different. The Conservatives, between 1979 and 1997, created “welfare dependency” on a scale hitherto unseen. Take a look at the following table (numbers obtained from the Annual Abstract of Statistics for various years): * (i) SSB: total social security...
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By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 On the day the Fabian Society launches its Solidarity Society report - two years in the making - one of its authors, Tim Horton, has written to David Cameron challenging him to speak to the Fabians about poverty in modern Britain. In his Hugo Young Memorial Speech recently, David Cameron critiqued Fabianism and argued that the size and scope of government were “now inhibiting, not advancing the progressive aims of reducing poverty and fighting inequality”....
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By Paul Richards Britain’s welfare services are about to be overwhelmed by an epidemic of loneliness, anxiety and social isolation, according to a new report out this morning by the Young Foundation, and sponsored by the Big Lottery Fund. It will make depressing reading for Labour ministers as they prepare the pre-budget report. What the report says is that Britain is a country where the majority of people have a roof over their heads, enough to eat, clothes to wear,...
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Caroline Flint is the former Europe minister and MP for Don Valley. She met Alex Smith on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at the Houses of Parliament. You left the cabinet six months ago now. What have you been doing with yourself since June? Well, what’s been great is that I’ve been able to spend more time on things in the constituency. Obviously, with the election coming up over the next few months, it’s allowed me to look at how the...
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The Labour movement column By Anthony Painter / @anthonypainter Phillip Blond has electrified politics with his Red Toryism. There is nothing in political discourse that is more exciting, intellectually challenging, and politically intriguing than this combination of pre-industrial values and modern conservatism. It would be glib to accuse Conservatives of living in the past. If they do, then Phillip Blond makes it a virtue and agitates for a different society on that basis. This is the ‘red’ in him. However,...
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By Peter Thomson The best thing about the ‘Nye Bevan is the one wot done it’ piece the other day was that it made me revisit the original 1942 Beveridge Report and review what the fundamental function of the Welfare System is and that is to act as a backstop, not as a nanny. That is the starting premise of the multiple bills which came from the 1944 White Paper, based on Beveridge’s 1942 Report. The 1944 Education Act's...
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By Alexandra Kemp The race is now on to personalise Welfare Reform and get it right for every family. The outcome of the Government's successful welfare policy to reduce child poverty by helping parents back into work - children's centres, extended schools, the New Deal for Loan Parents, tax credits - has seen the number of lone parents in work soar from 44% back in 1997 to 57% today. But 35% of non-working lone parents have disabled children. The overwhelming...
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By Floyd Millen Last week, the Conservatives proposed: 1 - To simplify Labour’s welfare programmes into one single back-to-work programme for everyone on out of work benefits. This is new; whilst there have been calls for a Single Working Age Benefit (SWAB), no government has actually brought this in - although it has been said that the new Employment Support Allowance (ESA) goes some way towards this. 2 - The Conservatives have proposed that the Work Programme will include back...
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By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 Graeme Cooke, a former advisor to James Purnell at the Department for Work and Pensions, has written on the Progress blog that the Tory announcements announcements on Welfare today are largely a rehash of Labour's own Welfare policies - but set to vague new and impossible to reach targets where the sums don't add up. Cooke also says: "The £600m upfront costs they say is needed apparently comes from assuming that half a million current...
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By Rowenna Davis Do the Brits hate benefits? Well not really, but they do kind of hate the people on them. This was the main finding behind a key Fabian report presented at party conference last night. Most taxpayers think that people on benefits take without any intention of giving back. As Brits we have a strong sense of fairness, but we believe benefits should be given to peple who put effort in, not simply to people who have the...
View 'Denham: we may need to change the welfare system to adapt to people's sense of fairness' >

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 LabourList readers have voted the National Minimum Wage as Labour's biggest achievement over the last 12 years of government, in a poll conducted with IPPR ahead of its fringe event at conference next week. The minimum wage received twice as many votes as the next most popular Labour achievement. Speaking about the polls - which were conducted to take grassroots voices to the conference fringe - Carey Oppenheim, IPPR's co-director, told Politics.co.uk: "The aim is...
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By Jack Scott / @Jack_Scott Next week, the minimum wage will rise to £5.80. Since it was first introduced in the teeth of Conservative opposition, the minimum wage has risen by 81.25%, far outstripping a decade of low inflation. Does anyone believe the Tories would have raised it above inflation so consistently? Since its introduction, Labour has also legislated to ensure tips do not count towards the minimum wage and that there are the toughest powers in Europe for rogue...
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By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 According to a report in today's Times, budget smallprint will abolish the £780 per year surplus housing benefit allowance. That's £15 per week that could be withdrawn from the pockets of the worse off in the middle of a recession. With the economy not yet recovered, these plans will hit the poorest the hardest and ignore calls from Labour supporters for more supportive housing benefit reform. Indeed, dropping the surplus benefit allowance may leave the...
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By Julian Ware-Lane / @warelane The state of the economy is still the number one issue at the moment as almost everyone has either a job, mortgage, pension, savings, etc. No-one would be foolish enough to talk of total recovery just yet, but there are some signs that it may be around the corner. For instance, the rise in unemployment may be slowing. Everyone without a job is a personal story of misery, and the sooner we get...
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By Mike Aistrop I am becoming more and more irritated with the continuous attacks on the people who are claiming benefits. The benefit system is a God send to people who have fallen on hard times and need help. Yet this system is attacked, picked and poked at. I do agree that some people take the taxpayer for a ride - though I think this could be said for most systems - and these people should be stripped of their...
View 'Attacks on bogus welfare claimants ignore the elephant in the room of those other non-contributors: tax evaders' >

By Shamik Das Today's front page lead on the Daily Express - Labour's £186bn Benefits Madness revealed that in 2009/10 spending on benefits would amount to a quarter of all State spending. The "madness" to which the Express refers is, presumably, their belief that the £186 billion, or the vast majority of it, is being squandered: given out to undeserving recipients or fraudulently claimed. When analysed, however, the figures in the Centre for Policy Studies report reveal a somewhat different...
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By Julian Ware-Lane /@warelane Letters from a Tory is not a blog I visit very often. Thursday's posting, The Left should be ashamed of themselves, is an example of why I usually avoid it. Firstly, I cannot understand why the right think every scallywag out there is put there by the deliberate machinations of the Left. I and my fellow travellers do not support the idea of welfare dependency or achieve contentment when the system is cheated. The reality is...
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