Society

I became aware that there was real destitution in modern Britain five years ago. Destitution, as I see it, arises when a family or individual is hungry, unable to afford gas and electricity, and on the brink of homelessness. It was apparent to me then that too many people at the bottom of the pile who fall on hard times are slipping through holes in the nation’s safety net — some are even forced through those holes by the modern welfare state. The model of how society worked, which I had picked up as a child of the 1945 Attlee Government, survived my decade at the Child Poverty Action Group

Three quarters of people back the banning of unpaid internships beyond a four-week period. This is according to a survey of 5,000 people by the Social Mobility Commission.  Later this week Lord Holmes of Richmond will be leading a bill in the House of Lords with the aim of requiring companies to pay interns the minimum wage after a month’s work. This follows the same recommendation that was made in January in a report by the All Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility. It will need Parliamentary backing to succeed – but this may be unlikely, given that Parliament blocked a ban on unpaid internships last November. I am the founder of

For most people, their current account is the bank account that they use the most. So it makes sense to make sure that your account offers the highest possible rates of interest. Here are the best ones on the market at the moment, from data provided by moneyfacts.co.uk.

How far is the government going to row back on Universal Credit? This afternoon an emergency debate has been granted on the matter in the Commons tomorrow. Two of the pilot councils in the roll-out of the new benefit have warned that the new system could be a catastrophe once implemented fully, predicting rent arrears in ‘many hundreds of millions of pounds’ and reporting a huge surge in referrals to food banks. Southwark and Croydon Councils warned of ‘major flaws’ in UC, and urged the government to fix the policy immediately. The pressure, which grew last week with Labour’s Opposition Day debate on the roll-out, hasn’t diminished since ministers said

If Michel Barnier and David Davis, in their regular dialogue of the deaf, seem to be inhabiting different mental universes, that is because they are. The British and French have often found each other particularly difficult to negotiate with. Of course, Barnier represents not France but the EU, and he has a negotiating position, the notorious European Council Guidelines, on which the veteran British diplomat Sir Peter Marshall has recently commented that ‘I have never seen, nor heard tell of, a text as antipathetic to the principle of give and take which is generally assumed to be at the heart of negotiation among like-minded democracies’. But, as a senior German