It’s hardly surprising. On the day that Oliver Letwin was hymning the Coalition’s signature motif of ‘fairness’, it was the conspicuous unfairness of the proposal that stuck in so many craws. As was heatedly pointed out, how could it be fair for a couple taking home between them some £80,000 to continue to receive Child Benefit, while it would be stripped from a household where only £43,000 was coming in -- especially where... But there is a much bigger point to be made than the pain of the already struggling middle-class or the frailties of means-testing. It has been made by Martin Narey, the Chief Executive of Barnardo’s. As reported in theTimes (£), Narey suggests that child benefit should be scrapped altogether. With so much pressure on public spending, he says, it is now impossible to justify; the $3 billion that would be saved by scrapping it should be ploughed instead into vulnerable public services and tax-credits for low-income families. Narey doesn’t... I assumed that Curtis – hitherto known for wildly successful rom-coms such asFour Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually -- was making the savage point that, beneath the veneer of principled and high-minded concern for the future of the planet, the advocates of man-made global warming theory were actually psychotic fanatics who cared so little about human beings, and were...Tuesday, 5th October 2010
Fiscal autism
2:21pm_-_Charity_(1878).jpg)
As was entirely predictable, the Coalition’s decision to axe Child Benefit for those earning more than £43,000 has blown up in its face. A number of papers this morning heaped furious scorn on the proposal. More ominously for the government, the welfare minister Iain Duncan Smith – used by David Cameron as a human shield against the Tory ‘right’ – made it clear that he didn’t approve.Monday, 4th October 2010
The engine of mass fatherlessness
2:01pm
The Tories’ benefit reforms do not go far enough. George Osborne has announcedtoday that higher rate taxpayers on £44,000+ will lose child benefit. The screams of outrage about ‘the squeezed middle class’ are already bouncing off the walls at the Tory party conference and beyond.Hate, actually
1:31am
Whoops, what a giveaway. It’s no wonder that Richard Curtis’s four-minute global warming propaganda film for the green campaign group 10:10, No Pressure, has been hastily withdrawn. When I saw it, I thought it was an anti-green satire. That’s because it depicted a variety of people --including two children -- being blown up by environmental campaigners because they were unenthusiastic about ‘reducing their carbon footprint’, with blood and flesh raining down on terrified and screaming children and adults.
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
Melanie Phillips.
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