For the past few weeks Ed Miliband has repeated the words ‘bedroom tax’ ad nauseum. The average voter may think that such a thing exists. His obsession makes little sense without historic context. The last time a Labour opposition succeeded in attaching the word ‘tax’ to something which a Conservative government preferred to call something
Home Housing benefit for council and housing association tenants was reduced by 14 per cent for those deemed to have one spare bedroom and by 25 per cent for those with two or more spare bedrooms. Council Tax Benefit, claimed by 5.9 million families, was transformed into Council Tax Support, supplied by local authority schemes.
We’ve discovered that we own an island. But dreams of independence and tax-havenry evaporate when we try to picnic there on Easter Sunday: we watch it submerge slowly beneath the incoming tide. It’s a barnacle-encrusted rock, about the size of a tennis court, just off the beach at Cambois, north of Blyth, which for some
The new Archbishop of Canterbury has argued against ‘pinning hopes on individuals’. The Roman historian Livy (59 BC–AD 17) would have found that most bizarre. Livy’s 142-book Ab Urbe Condita traced the history of Rome from the city’s foundation in 753 BC to the first Roman emperor Augustus (died AD 14). For Livy, it was individuals above
Googling lessons Delegates at the National Union of Teachers conference complained about Michael Gove’s ‘pub quiz’ curriculum and suggested that children didn’t need to learn facts any more because they could Google them. Some things you can Google about the NUT: — The union was formed on 25 June 1870 as the National Union of
Quantitative ease Sir: Unlike Louise Cooper (‘The great savings robbery’, 30 March), I don’t have a problem with inflation or quantitative easing. It’s the perfect tax: painless, easy to collect and fair. It’s painless because after having been collected you still have the proverbial pound in your pocket. OK, it’s worth less — but as
