Max Wind-Cowie on how the Government needs to prepare for increased migration from Bulgaria and Romania.
Eric Pickles was in Andrew Neil's hot-seat on the Sunday Politics - defending everything from his Department's record on house-building to their ongoing efforts to liberate the public from the tyranny of over-zealous bin inspectors. It was, however, on Bulgarian and Romanian immigration that Pickles got into real trouble. Asked what projections DCLG had for the numbers likely to come from the accession countries Pickles first denied having any conversations with the Home Office abou...
Duncan O'Leary argues that both main parties are fighting the battle not the war over the Benefits Uprating Bill.
In 2004 George Lakoff published a book that has had a profound effect on US politics. Its central argument was that the way issues are framed plays a central role in determining which side of the argument people come down on. This explains, for example, why opponents of abortion describe themselves as ‘pro-life’ and supporters as ‘pro-choice’. Few want to be against ‘life’ or ‘choice’, so the battle is partly about how the question is framed. A...
The Benefits Uprating Bill will hit the working poor as hard as the unemployed, says Claudia Wood.
Today, the Benefits Uprating Bill is being voted on in Parliament. While there’s a lot to be concerned about with this piece of legislation, what annoys me the most is how the government has tried to sell it to the British public: as a way of making sure those out of work don’t do as well as those in work. Even if you think this is a good idea (as many do), the fact is the Bill won’t achieve this. Of the 11.5 million people who will have their income cut by the Bill, 7.9 mi...
Claudia Wood on Cllr Chris Steward's comments and the difference between absolute and relative poverty.
Today a debate regarding what poverty 'means' was sparked off following comments from a Conservative Councillor in York, Chris Steward. He argued that food banks were unnecessary in the UK and simply allowed poor people to spend their money on alcohol and cigarettes. Asked to elaborate, he said: "There is certainly no need for food banks; no-one in the UK is starving and I think food banks insult the one billion in the world that go to bed hungry every day and ignore the fact a ...
Eric Kaufmann on what the Census shows about immigration and trends in religious belief.
‘Christianity is on the decline while Islam is on the up,’ writes Peter Hitchens, echoing the views of many who digested the astounding 2011 census results. Those of White British ancestry have declined from 87 to 80 percent of the population of England and Wales while the proportion of Christians has plummeted from 71 to 59 percent. For many, this signals the emergence of what Hitchens dubs an ‘alien nation’: a singular process of English decline. But the link betwee...
Claudia Wood on the DCLG's ‘50 ways to save’ advice to local authorities.
Last year, Demos mapped the impact of cuts to local authority funding on services for disabled people. The results demonstrated that when it comes to local budgets, it's not just about how much you have, but what you do with it. We saw some incredibly innovative ways in which councils were making budgetary cuts while protecting front-line services. Necessity is the mother of invention – and inventive local authorities were trying new approaches to get more for less. Of co...
Scott Le Vine explores the reasons for the drop in London's traffic levels.
Conventional wisdom has it that traffic levels and economic activity are tightly coupled. But London’s economy grew steadily in the late 1990s and early 2000s, yet traffic fell 20 per cent from the mid-90s to just before the 2007 recession. So why are we driving less in the capital? Transport experts typically chalk up the dwindling traffic to massive investment in public transport, the Congestion Charge, road schemes that reduce car-moving capacity, and the like. Research I...
Eric Kaufmann on the Census results and why it has never been more important to investigate the phenomenon of ‘white flight’.
Of all the changes announced by the 2011 census, one of the most startling is the rapid change in the ethnic composition of London's population. This has caught experts by surprise and reflects an underestimate of the extent to which white British people have opted to leave an increasingly diverse London. Between 2001 and 2011, the proportion of white British in London's population fell from 58 to 45 per cent. The share of ethnic minorities reached 40 per cent of the total, a 39 perc...
When they help boost the government’s employment statistics, argues Claudia Wood.
Last week I blogged that in the current economic climate, today's 'striver' can often be tomorrow's 'scrounger'. Because the fact is, many of those we describe as working poor are often in temporary or insecure employment, in industries such as hospitality and retail, which are vulnerable to seasonal trends. It means many families are just a triple dip away from finding themselves on the wrong side of the Chinese Wall that the government has erected between the two so...
David Goodhart casts an eye over the latest Census figures and asks what they say about how we are living together.
The census has given us a snapshot of just how rapidly England's (and to a lesser extent Wales's) population is changing but it doesn't tell us much about how we are living together. What kind of new life is being created between the existing people and the new ones? Is a harmonious common life emerging across ethnic boundaries, or are different ethnic communities living largely apart from each other? There are a few signals from the census. On the positive side about 2m househol...