Monday 11 November 2013


The BBC are reporting, in the way that they do, a report in the Telegraph of a speech by John Major:
In a speech to Tory activists reported in the Daily Telegraph he blamed "the collapse in social mobility" on the failures of the last Labour government.
More than half the current cabinet were educated at private schools.
I bet the BBC writer had fun juxtaposing those two sentences. But let's just think about this a tiny bit harder: Cameron was born in 1966, Osborne in 1971 and Clegg 1967. They would have all been in secondary education, then, from about 1979 - 1989. A prime time for John Major to have influenced social mobility, one might have thought!

Tuesday 26 March 2013

Iain Duncan Smith unironically evil

Via Mark Easton at the BBC:

Mr Duncan Smith says he is proud of the fact that his government agreed that Job Centre staff could refer people to food banks.
"What would you prefer? Under the last government, Job Centre staff were not allowed to talk about it. My concern is that the individual who is in front of Job Centre staff can get access to everything they need to."

Does anyone not see what the obvious error here is? For Christ's sake; the idea of a social safety net is that it provides enough to survive on. If welfare recipients (recipients! Not even people not receiving benefits!) aren't getting enough to even buy food then we've slid further under Tory rule than I thought.