During a 35 minute speech in the house yesterday, the shadow chancellor kicked back and experimented with what seemed to be a spot of early panto in his jousting with the chancellor. When he mentioned Boris Johnson, we half expected someone to shout “he’s behind you”…
(h/t: Left Foot Forward)
Tomorrow (Friday March 6th) Ed Miliband will lay out Labour’s plans for older people – including how the party would protect pensions, retirement savings and free TV licences and bus passes. Miliband will make this announcement in Redcar (no.91 on their target seat list). While there he’ll say Labour would guarantee there would only be changes to Winter Fuel Payments for the richest 5% of pensioners but would keep TV licences and bus passes free for all who are of […]
Read more →
It’s been a great week for the internet, whether your bag is controversially coloured dresses, hitchhiking weasels, llamas re-enacting Thelma & Louise, or – as I believe Wales Online uncovered yesterday – an impossibly adorable puppy that bears an uncanny resemblance to Hitler. But for me, the internet’s best produce this week was Michael Sheen’s blistering speech on the NHS. I won’t repeat it here, but spend five minutes reading it if you haven’t already. It was like catching a […]
Read more →
I was astonished and genuinely outraged (as others have been) at the reported remarks of my MP Conservative George Freeman. When answering questions about the low enforcement and prosecutions for those not paying the minimum wage (under this government, there have only been 9, prosecutions and 162 named and shamed) Freeman talked about this criticism as “practising politics of envy”. Stella Creasy MP is absolutely right to call him out , saying this is “the politics of justice “. When […]
Read more →
The conventional assessment is that the UK economy is in reasonable shape. Indeed, there has been some growth in GDP over the last year or two and unemployment has fallen. A harsher view – developed in detail in a book being published in March 2015 by Random House called Call to Action, written by myself and former Labour shadow minister Bryan Gould – is to note that average living standards are still well below what they were in 2007. The […]
Read more →
For years fuel poverty campaigners have been calling on politicians to recognise the affects of cold and damp homes on the health of our most vulnerable households. As early as 2011, a report from the World Health Organisation proved that on average nearly 8,000 people die in the UK every year due to living in cold homes – three to four times the number of people who die on British roads and far worse than really cold countries like Germany […]
Read more →