Society

Labour’s minimum wage debate in the Commons last night was designed mainly to humiliate the Conservatives about their past opposition to it and to remind voters that only the Labour party cares about those on low wages. But it failed on two counts. The first was that Rachel Reeves fell into the easy trap of accusing someone of missing a vote without double-checking whether this had been for a good reason (all the more surprising given the party’s recent rage over a Sun article describing Lucy Powell as ‘lazy’ when she had in fact been away on maternity leave). She laid into Vince Cable for failing to vote on Labour’s

There was a lovely little ultrasound picture of a foetus to illustrate the Independent’s splash today about the incidence of sex-selective abortions in Britain. According to the paper’s analysis of ONS statistics, the incidence of second daughters among immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh and possibly those from other countries such as India isn’t quite the same as in the population at large. Either immigrants from these groups are, more than the rest of us, having child after child until they have a boy or they are simply aborting second pregnancies where the foetus is a girl in order to ensure their next child is a boy: most probably, according to

One of the most intriguing things about last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions was David Cameron’s decision to say he suspected the recent severe weather in the United Kingdom was linked to climate change. It seemed to be an interesting restatement of where the Prime Minister personally stands on green issues – a position that his own Environment Secretary Owen Paterson refused to back the very next day. So today when David Cameron appeared before the Liaison Committee to talk about, among other things, green issues, its members were understandably keen to probe him on whether, after the Green Crap Removals Team had rolled up their sleeves and got to work

The Synthetic Outrage Squad has been out in force over Channel 4’s Benefits Street, dubbing the series ‘poverty porn’ that ‘demonises’ a vulnerable group of people. In fact, as someone who’s lived in the city depicted on the programme for most of my life, what I saw not only rings true but also paints a rather flattering picture of life at the bottom in Birmingham. The reality can be much worse. Those who watched the second episode looking for ‘poverty porn’ would have wondered what all the fuss is about. It did not ‘demonise’ the poor; what we saw was a mother trying her hardest to give her children a

Jim O’Neill, the Mancunian former chief economist of Goldman Sachs in London, commands attention whenever he speaks and has a claim to fame as the coiner in 2001 of the acronym ‘Bric’ for the four rapidly developing countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China — to which economic power looked set to shift during the early part of the new century. Undeterred by the hindsight view that he should have gone for ‘Bic’, like the throwaway razor, because Russia has lagged so dismally behind the others on almost every measure of progress, O’Neill has now come up with ‘Mint’, for Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey, as the next cohort of economic

Fancy owning a slice of media history? Or living in a notorious crime scene? Well now you can lay your press hat where you call home at ‘Fortress Wapping’, home of the UK branch of Rupert Murdoch’s empire ever since the antipodean mogul’s 1986 battle with the print unions. With News Co moving to the baby Shard in London Bridge, the old home of the Times, the Sun and the late News of the Screws is going to be turned into 1,800 flats.