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It would be easy to be dismissive of Labour’s proposed welfare cap on policy grounds. It would be equally easy to hail it on political grounds, as a brilliant landgrab of populist territory where Labour tends to fare badly. But either of…
New research by a number of distinguished experts published today by the Child Poverty Action Group explores how Labour’s unprecedented commitment to reduce child poverty affected families in the UK during its time in office. The verdict is…
Apart from one piece for Left Foot Forward last year I’ve generally refrained from writing about the coalition’s proposal for a ‘household benefit cap’. That’s partly because the issue has received a disproportionate share of media…
By Declan Gaffney New figures in an answer to a Parliamentary Question by Karen Buck reveal a hitherto unrecognised problem with the coalition's cuts to housing benefit. While government's presentation of the cuts has been shamelessly…
By Declan Gaffney Confirmation bias is the tendency to find what you are looking for in the evidence while ignoring any facts which would require you to revise your pre-conceived views. Last week, the ONS's annual bulletin Work and…
By Declan Gaffney The chancellor and the chief secretary to the treasury have both adopted a simplistic narrative of out of control welfare spending in framing the June budget decisions and the coming spending review. George Osborne said in…
By Declan Gaffney During the election campaign, Labour attacked Conservative proposals to reduce tax credit entitlement for better off families, saying that the savings they were aiming for would require cuts to entitlement for families…
By Declan Gaffney As the public is softened up for expenditure cuts, we can expect the ConDem criticism of New Labour's record on poverty to move from results to objectives. Labour will be accused not only of having failed dismally on child…
By Declan Gaffney An open discussion of migration is one thing. Allowing it to dominate the most important debate on Labour's future since 1994 is quite another. All of the main leadership candidates have placed immigration at the centre of…
By Declan Gaffney In a piece for LabourList on Tuesday, Paul Richards offered some reasons for Ken Livingstone's defeat in the 2008 Mayoral Election: "Most of all, he lost the support in outer London of white, hard-working families." Paul…
By Declan Gaffney The idea that Labour's election defeat was due to the sudden desertion of the party by skilled working class voters - known as 'C2's in the jargon of market research - has gained widespread currency, reflected in the…
By Declan Gaffney The Observer and Guardian are telling us that Gordon Brown's leadership of the Labour Party is the main block to a Labour-LibDem reforming coalition. A Lab-Lib coalition may be impossible, but if that is the case, it has…
