Jamie Bartlett revisits his 2010 interview with the EDL’s leader, Tommy Robinson.
It is almost four years since the English Defence League burst onto Britain’s streets and made their mark on Britain’s political discourse. Recent turn of events has seen the movement start to implode, but were the seeds of destruction present from its formation? Demos’ Jamie Bartlett interviewed the EDL’s notorious leader, Tommy Robinson, in October 2010. Here is the previously unpublished article: ------ It is customary to send the person you interview a copy of th...
You can't boil hardship down to a number, writes Claudia Wood.
There's been a lot of chatter this week about whether living on £53 is feasible. From radio phone-ins to letter pages in the Metro, everyone - whether they have first-hand experience or not - has an opinion. And it's interesting that many say yes, with qualifications. Those qualifications give us an insight into how people understand poverty. Many people seem to feel it's possible to survive for a week on £53, but not any longer than that. This articulates the widely ...
Claudia Wood on the news that councils might restrict what the Social Fund can be spent on.
Yesterday the Guardian exposed a concerning development in the localisation of the discretionary payments of the Social Fund. On reviewing several local schemes to replace this soon to be scrapped national system, it found that many were opting for food-stamp style payments, which can only be used to buy food. There are several issues to raise here. The first is that, in expressing concern about this, I don't think anyone would suggest that local authorities ought not to account for this...
Max Wind-Cowie applauds Theresa May's decision to bring the UK Border Agency back into the Home Office.
Theresa May's decision to effectively abolish the UK Border Agency is a throw of the dice. Returning its functions to her own department should mean an end to the nasty shocks that UKBA became so good at throwing in the path of the Home Secretary and her Ministers. Departmental oversight will mean that – at the very least – May will know when there are skeletons about to fall into the newspapers. And it will mean, hopefully, that where incompetence is found it can be rectifie...
Claudia Wood reveals the latest findings of our Disability in Austerity study, showing that disabled people stand to lose £28.3bn in benefits.
It has become clear, since as early as 2010, that radical cuts to welfare spending would be the centre-piece of the Government’s deficit reduction plan. The aim of reducing the benefits bill by £18 billion per year by 2014-15, was supplemented in 2012 by the announcement that a further £10 billion would be shaved off with a new round of reforms from 2017. But to achieve this scale of reduction, the Government has to implement dozens of individual policies, top-slicing every...
What could Lady Gaga learn from post-liberalism? asks Jonathan Todd.
The liberalism of the 1980s combined the free market economics of Thatcherism with a brash, no-such-thing-as-society individualism. Twenty years previous, the liberalism of the 1960s cast aside the shackles of conformity and granted rights and freedoms to minorities. The two share a connection. The individual rights of the 1960s are the legal foundation of the individualism of the 1980s. They are a continuum. From the financial crisis to the hollowing out of social capital, so many contempor...
The protracted, byzantine debate over press regulation is finally coming to a head, says Chris Tryhorn.
The future of press regulation in the UK appears at last to have been resolved today after the three main parties agreed on a royal charter, ending a protracted, byzantine debate that has split the press as well as the politicians. The breakthrough follows months of arduous negotiations since Lord Justice Leveson’s landmark report on the press appeared in November and avoids a rancorous parliamentary clash. This probably comes as a relief to most politicians, who must have been struggl...
It was inevitable that the changes to Housing Benefit would lead to rent arrears, says Claudia Wood.
In the news this week are reports that the pilots for the direct payment of housing benefit - i.e. local authorities paying the benefit to tenants to pay their rent, rather than paying it directly to landlords - had resulted in a significant rise in rent arrears. This was, I feel, not only unsurprising, but inevitable. Families on very low incomes are often masters at juggling their budgets, but when housing benefit gets paid into the family bank account, this money gets merged into a pot wh...
Ally Paget argues that the integration of health and social care is the most urgent aspect of yesterday’s Lords report into ageing.
The House of Lords committee on Public Service and Demographic Change yesterday published a report warning that, as a country, we are ‘woefully underprepared’ for the social and economic demands associated with our ageing society. The publication, which sets out a schedule for action and investigation by the Government to 2015 and beyond, addresses both dimensions of the crisis in social care funding – the need to increase individuals’ purchasing power, and the need to...
Jonathan Todd on The Physics of Finance, James Owen Weatherall's defence of the pointy-heads who develop complex financial instruments.
'They are only tools,' an American once said to me of guns. 'All tools can go wrong. But only when they are not used properly.' This exchange came back to me recently when James Owen Weatherall addressed a Demos Finance seminar on his new book, The Physics of Finance. Weatherall came to praise physicians but to bury those that have misapplied their tools. Like the physicists who developed the 'complex financial instruments', such as derivatives, which are invariably i...