Society

Ed Miliband’s manifesto can be boiled down to the simple act of shaking his fist at the wealthy. Yes, the super-rich can be annoying – but they are also super-taxpayers. Those at the top should shoulder their fair share, Miliband said today. But he didn’t give any figures: if he did, his argument would collapse. The best-paid 1 per cent pay 25 per cent of the income tax: that’s what I call a fair share. And for those who are serious about fairness, it’s a sign that our society has got something right. The super-wealthy are also super-taxpayers. The best-paid 0.1 per cent pay almost twice as much income tax as the lower-paid 50 per cent.  So wealthy

Close your eyes for a moment and place an image in your mind of the sort of person who needs to claim state benefit for their disability. The most common picture is someone almost destitute, reliant on the benefit just to function in their day to day life, likely to be claiming a multitude of other entitlements; the sort of person who won’t ever be able to derive a normal income. Whisper it: the majority of people claiming Disability Living Allowance are the sharp elbowed middle classes, with incomes placing them in the top half of those in the UK. Amongst pensioners, arguably those who need the most help with their

The latest brief was to submit irregular quatrains that bring together two people from the world of the arts and finish on a couplet describing the consequences. Popular couplings included Wendy Cope and Alexander Pope; Salvador Dalì and Bob Marley; Horace and William Morris; and Mel Gibson and Henrik Ibsen. Two competitors paired Tolkien and Graham Greene, with not dissimilar results. Here’s D.A. Prince: If J.R.R. Tolkien met Graham Greene would a hobbit’s story become The Power and The Glory? And take two from Virginia Price Evans: Had J.R.R. Tolkien Met Graham Greene, The Hobbit’s lair Might have been the end of the affair. This one drew the crowds and

Cricket-captain-turned-cricket-commentator Richie Benaud died in Sydney this morning. He would have been 85 next October.  That last pair of sentences contains, believe it or not, two of the most crucial facts in modern Australian history. As of the last (2011) census, approximately 24 million people lived in Australia. It is a fair bet that (whatever the Fourth Estate supposes) fully two-thirds of them would struggle to remember – on the optimistic assumption of their ever having known – who Malcolm Fraser was, or who Gough Whitlam was. (From the mere fact that voting at Australian elections is compulsory, it need not follow that voting at Australian elections is literate.) But