Richard Exell

I’ve been using this blog to moan about the Government’s harsh line on unemployed people, and on benefit claimants more generally, but you can rely on the Conservative Party conference to prove that there’s still clear blue water between Labour and the Opposition.

Chris Grayling, the Conservative spokesperson, seems to believe that the reason we have unemployed people is that they can’t be bothered “to get out of the house and to do something” and that the way to deal with this is to threaten them with taking away their benefits for up to three years.

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Nigel Stanley

The economic crisis is having some strange consequences: According to the Daily Mail it’s making us more likely to take time off sick. But the Guardian claims it is making us more likely to take afternoon tea, while the Times says it is boosting the sale of turnips.

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Nigel Stanley

Fears are now growing that many private equity (PE) takeovers will go bust. Almost none of the conditions needed for the kind of takeovers that unions were most worried about are now in play:

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Nicola Smith

Although the Conservatives are talking about ‘fairness’, this doesn’t mean fair treatment at work. The new Conservative website documents no proposals on employment rights, apart from committments to ‘simplify employment law to make it easier to hire people’ and ‘reduce the burden of regulation’.

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Philip Pearson

Hard on the heels of Gordon Brown’s vision of 1million new green jobs by 2030 or maybe sooner, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) has launched a major new study of the global employment opportunities and risks of a low carbon  future.

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Nigel Stanley

The Government’s decisive intervention to nationalise Bradford and Bingley is welcome. It contrasts with their dithering about Northern Rock. Then they seemed more worried about breaching the new Labour commandments against nationalisation than doing what everyone else could see was both inevitable and about as far removed from 1945-style nationalisation as possible.

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Adam Lent

Luke Johnson, serial entrepreneur and Chair of Channel Four, is obviously a man not afraid to stand out from the crowd.  His website boldly describes him as an “unrepentant capitalist” – a position that clearly distinguishes him from all the repentant capitalists around at the moment.  He is also one of the first people to publicly call today for a change to the remit of Bank of England so that it finds it easier to cut interest rates asap.

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Richard Exell

There’s an interesting entry today on Stumbling and Mumbling, looking at the latest Tax Benefit Model Tables. It quite rightly highlights the fact that a single person who leaves Jobseeker’s Allowance for a 16 hours a week job at the minimum wage will be just £8.42 a week better off; if one member of a couple with no children gets the same job they will actually be £6.63 a week worse off.

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Adam Lent

The frustrating thing about this Government is that they sometimes fail to follow through on good intentions with effective policies.  Example: we are still waiting for a clear policy programme to deliver on the 2006 commitment to 100,000 jobs in the green economy let alone the recent commitment to one million green jobs. 

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Nicola Smith

Today Gordon Brown committed Labour to increasing social mobility in the UK. He is not alone, with politicians from accross the specturm increasingly keen to commit to a socially mobile Britain. But are any of them willing to define how far their policy prescriptions would actually take us? And what are their visions for how wealth would be distributed in a perfectly socially mobile society?

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