The day I played cricket with Nigel Farage

The news last night that Nigel Farage had resigned as leader of UKIP, having helped lead Britain out of the European Union, made me cast my mind back to the time we were briefly united through that most British of mediums, cricket, and he made a rather unpleasant impression on me. About a decade ago,…

The Bare Minimum Budget

The best label for this year’s announcement by Bill English might be the ‘Bare Minimum Budget’. It does the bare minimum to defuse potential political damage in a range of areas – homelessness and health are prime among them – but almost nothing to address the country’s most deep-rooted, systemic social problems.  Indeed the Budget…

Revealed: how the govt ‘defused’ inequality

New data shows how the government’s Budget last year took a huge amount of heat out of inequality as a political issue – though it may not have changed the long-term pressure very much. A previously unpublished poll by UMR shows that the proportion of people listing poverty and inequality as ‘the most important problem…

Is Labour really going to deliver a UBI?

In news stories this week, senior Labour politicians have suggested they are open to a “debate” on the idea of a universal basic income, a no-strings-attached annual salary paid to everyone in the country. The basic income has various rationales: increasing human dignity, giving people a base from which to be entrepreneurial, simplifying the benefits…