At last, after three years of cuts to social care, there now seems to be a growing awareness that there may be a problem in cutting this vital public service. Sadly that problem, at least as far as the newspapers see it, is that this may lead to...

Few people realise that social care will be cut by 33% by 2015 and on current projections will be cut by 50% by 2018. This is the deepest cut to any part of the welfare state since its creation and yet it is going entirely unnoticed. How has this happened?

Iain Duncan Smith thinks he can live on £53 per week, but does he know how much of this he will have to pay in taxes? This blog explores the myth that the poor don't pay tax.

A common rhetorical trick for politicians is to talk about 'looking...

The government's welfare 'reforms' have just been launched, but they are now combined with a powerful smokescreen of claims that the government is not cutting welfare at all. It's all very confusing.

Unfortunately it is hard to reconcile the claim that benefits are not being cut with the...

In the next in my series of welfare myths I explore benefit fraud.

Fraud is always a problem. Lying and cheating is wrong and society should certainly discourage it. But benefit fraud - people lying and cheating in order to increase the size of their benefits - is not a...

Yesterday was World Down Syndrome Day, a celebration of the lives of people who have Down syndrome. Down syndrome is a genetic condition called a trisomy, where someone is born with an extra copy of chromosome 21 (three instead of the normal two). You may not think that...

This is the first in occasional series on welfare myths - those persuasive facts that everybody knows to be true, but which, on closer examination turn out to be totally false.

Welfare Myth Number One is that the benefit system is expensive. When politicians want to frighten us they add...

Workfare is a government scheme to force people into unpaid work. Recently the Archbishop of York made clear that this scheme is immoral, that it should be stopped and that employers should not join the scheme. There are powerful objections to workfare - both economic and...

As an Englishman who has spent much of my life studying and working in Scotland I have mixed feelings about the independence of Scotland. An independent Scotland is certainly feasible. Five million talented, hard working and caring people can certainly run their own country and will probably do a better...

In one of the strangest political alliances of our time Alec Shelbrooke MP and the 'think tank' Demos (in a project sponsored by Mastercard!) propose that people on benefits should be forced to use a special card that can only be used for expenditure approved by...