Gary Gibbon
Labour’s pledge on tax credits
Labour’s election manifesto commits to inflation-linked tax credits and a media sector in which no one owner enjoys undue influence.
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Gary Gibbon
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Paul Mason
Why universal credit won’t be universal until 2018. At the earliest.
Benefit claimants in areas piloting the new universal credit seem to like it. But with its roll-out taking much longer than anticipated, are government hopes for billions of pounds of savings misplaced?
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Gary Gibbon
George Osborne speech: complacency, traps and bombshells
George Osborne said he wanted to warn about “a dangerous new complacency” that he’d sensed on the economy. Privately, he and others at the top of the Tory party think they may have contributed to this.
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Jackie Long
No fairytale ending for Osborne’s welfare reforms
This is the moment when we get George Osborne’s famed fairytale scrounger, idling in bed with the curtains drawn all day, up and off his backside and into work. Or do we?
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Gary Gibbon
Brussels and Westminster wondering what that veto was about?
There isn’t normally a prime ministerial statement after an informal European Council like this one but one Tory MP told me he was sure there would be an attempt to table an urgent question and drag Mr Cameron to the Commons. “He’d better explain quickly,” one Tory MP said, “or he’s going to get his backside kicked.”
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Jon Snow
The House That Jack Didn't Build
Jon Snow asks if the UK would be in a welfare crisis if the housing sector was more healthy.
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Gary Gibbon
The government hung by a cashmere thread
So Gordon Brown is through this storm. And he has Peter Mandelson to thank for it. For one moment on Thursday night, the government hung by a cashmere thread. But Peter Mandelson rallied David Miliband, the moment of maximum danger passed. The Prime Minister is a weakened figure sitting in the Cabinet this morning. He…