Charlotte Higgins in CiF on the ‘attack’ on the arts: The Central Library in Sheffield opened in 1934, when my father was four. As a teenager and medical student in the 1940s and 50s, he would work there, an escape from the confined, cramped home he grew up in. It was, he remembers, “state of the art”: a grand public building with elegant, deco curves to the custom-made furniture, handsome…
Children commit crime because they lack morals and not just because of the environment they live in, according to a study carried out by local researchers which has now been finalised by Paige, a representative for Avon and Somerset Constabulary. Really? Well, I never! Who’da thunk it? *continue ad infinitum* Researchers studied around 600 young people in Bristol and discovered that most adolescent crime is not just youthful opportunism. In…
….shouldn’t they be to the incompetents responsible for this cock-up instead? The fire authority agreed to make mileage payments to a number of staff members when its headquarters movedfrom Rayleigh Close in Hutton to Kelvedon Park, near Witham, in May 2008. The report, entitled Employment Taxes Review and compiled by accountancy firm RSM Tenon, explains: “As part of the move, it was agreed that employees could claim any extra miles…
I belong to a household that is one of the million reported to be “excluded from home ownership” by a combination of low housing supply and the impossibility of raising a deposit for the smallest house in a country that boasts the smallest houses in Europe. Me too, Lynsey – I’m ‘excluded’ from yacht and Ferrari ownership. It’s so unfair! *stamps foot* Renting has worked for us in the sense…
It’s a perennial observation of mine that the free market that various people keep telling us failed a few years ago, leading to much crisising of global finance and the invention of words such as ‘bankster’ (when perfectly adequate words such as ‘banker’, ‘crook’ and ‘twat’ already existed to cover those who are respectively successful, dishonest or inept), actually has about as much reality as the tooth fairy. To describe…
The statistics show almost 10,000 children in Brighton and Hove are growing up in poverty. Oh noes! Shock! Horror! Families in parts of Brighton and Hove are relying on handouts of bread, clothes and shoes to keep going. Appalling! Outrage! …health experts warn that breaking barriers to doctors, immunisations and later health problems are harder for children living under the poverty line. Disgrac… Wait. What? Aren’t all those things….free (at…
Polly Toynbee rages at the ConDem ‘localism’ plans: Sigoma, the municipal authorities group, says that if councils were all allowed to keep their business rates, the City of London would gain £517m. Together, the Tory boroughs of the City, Westminster, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Kensington and Chelsea would gain £1.6bn. Who would be the losers? Birmingham would lose £175m, Hackney £116m, Liverpool £104m – and Cornwall £45m. It’s as if…
Up to a fifth of councils in England may not accept the government’s offer to help pay for a freeze in council tax next year, a survey suggests. Councils denying government money? Can this be true? According to the Local Government Chronicle’s research, based on responses from 146 local authority finance directors, 116 said their councils would implement the freeze, six councils said they would refuse and 24 remained undecided.…
Content warning – this post was written under the influence of a descending red mist and contains horrible oaths and general bad language. All is not forgiven by any means, not even remotely, but when the Cobbleition are doing things that are just as stupid as those Gordon Clown himself did there’s a case to be made that you might as well put the lurching, snot munching, cyclopean horror…
Parents today told of their fears for affordable childcare if plans to close two council-run nurseries go ahead. Oh, dear. What a shame. No more subsidies. Parents at Treetops Children’s Centre in Willesden said they were given eight weeks to come up with a business plan to run the nursery from March – or face paying more than twice as much for private childcare. Yes, well, there’s no more money.…
Matthew Pennycook (Labour councillor in the London Borough of Greenwich and a trustee of the Fair Pay Network) on the government’s awfully ‘unfair’ ideas about social housing: If the coalition government, ostensibly wedded to the creation of “sustainable, inclusive, mixed communities in all areas, both rural and urban”, truly valued these ideals, it would praise tenants that have improved their circumstances rather than penalise them. Well, leaving aside the utter…
For a few weeks now, the ‘Guardian’ has been running a series of posts under the subheading ‘The Cuts Get Personal’. Some of them have been those stories you’d expect (cuts to disability benefits, etc), but most of them, well, they’ve merely shown the parochial interests of the ‘Guardian’ readership. Rachel Millward is one such plaintive voice: I launched the inaugural Birds Eye View Film Festival in 2005, with a…
…they aren’t ‘aggressively commercial’ enough: James Daunt, managing director of Waterstone’s, told The Bookseller: “It’s disappointing, to say the least, that a very British institution is driving readers away from local libraries and high- street bookshops. In an environment where high-street booksellers and libraries face huge pressures, it is a shame that the British Library choose to give their endorsement to one aggressively commercial organisation.” Oh, how unfair! If only…
There are those who claim that a payment only counts as ‘tax’ if it is paid to the government and dismiss my notion that there is such a thing as ‘privately collected tax’. So can anybody tell me what the big difference is between Scenario A and Scenario B? Background The government decides, in its infinite wisdom, that we are relying too much on natural moonlight and should be sourcing…
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