Oxfam

Today, dozens of campaign groups rushed to defend Oxfam’s advert attacking government austerity for ‘forcing more and more people into poverty’, claiming complaints about politicisation were an attempt to ‘silence legitimate debate’. In a free country, pressure groups are part of the fabric of our democracy. But, if they choose to be charities for ‘public benefit’, they must remain independent to justify extensive tax breaks.  Oxfam sounds like an echo chamber for the Labour Party – and taxpayers aren’t there to subsidise that. Like the Hollywood blockbuster it was mimicking, Oxfam’s ad mixes fact and fiction. It conjurs a tempestuous image of The Perfect Storm of ‘austerity Britain’, ‘starring: zero-hours

I’m sure HS2 chairman Sir David Higgins is right to argue that if we’re serious about building a new north-south rail network, we should get on with it. The greater the number of general elections between conception and completion of any infrastructure scheme, the less likely it is to happen. Lord Mandelson revealed last year that Labour only gave this one the go-ahead in 2009 as a political gimmick; Ed Balls’s comments on it last week signalled that an incoming Labour cabinet might drop the project as casually as it was green-lighted in the first place if it doesn’t suit the short-term  politics of 2015. So the best option for