The myth most often used by politicians to justify their attack on the welfare state is that welfare spending is somehow unaffordable and is to blame for the current crisis. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The real challenge for Labour is to defend its heritage. The welfare state is under attack like never before, and fighting for real rights is the key to its defence.

The Labour Party leadership's embrace of welfare reform - set out in Ed Miliband's recent keynote speech on welfare to a select audience in Newham, East London - marks a victory for the right and describes another benchmark in the political degeneration of the party that created the welfare state.

As a disabled person myself, and one who has needed to fall back on the benefits system at different times during my life time, I think it is time that the truth was told, both about the figures and how the distortion of the truth is impacting on the lives of real people.

I wrote this post for Hardest Hit, and have simply cross-posted here. Hardest Hit was pleased to see Isabel Hardman's piece in the Telegraph on ESA. ...

Statistics brought together by the Centre for Social Justice in their press release today show that in the UK there are 6.8m people living in homes where no-one has a job. There are major concentrations of worklessness in some areas of Wales and Birmingham, for example. This scale and the inequality are clearly matters of deep concern.

I'm seeing the problem now; I know people who are struggling; I'm seeing what happens when there isn't enough money and there isn't enough health. I'm seeing the despair... People have ended their lives. People are going without food and medicine. People are becoming homeless. And this is because of the changes this government is making.

There can be no doubt who is the hardest hit by the cuts - it's disabled people (and that includes many of our children, our parents and our grandparents). Again the question must be asked - did the government know what it was doing when it focused the cuts on social care and benefits - or is this just some thoughtless accident?

Iain Duncan Smith has been rebuked for falsely claiming the coalition's controversial benefits cap had already caused 8,000 people to move into jobs. ...

Work as an incentive to move off benefits should be immeasurable and driven by a desire to unburden society and fend for oneself. In a nutshell to give oneself dignity and pride. In general our society has no regard such notions because people feel they have a right to welfare money, it is their money, to which they are entitled.

On Monday 29 April the 'revolution' began. The government's Universal Credit Scheme designed both to simplify the benefits system and disincentivise dependency on it began... in Ashton-under-Lyne.

It's such a shame. There was a wonderful opportunity to make something that worked. To get rid of what was failing and bring in new things that improved on the original. To end the mess and confusion. To repair the holes. Instead we have more holes. Bigger holes. Holes in places that used to work.

The government's welfare reforms will see as much as £850 taken away from individual residents in some of the most deprived areas of the country, Lab...

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?

New research by national sight loss charity RNIB has revealed that 17,000 vision impaired people of working age look set to be displaced from their homes as a result of the Bedroom Tax. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, they will have to choose between relocating or losing a portion of their benefits (which will be on average £14 a week; a sizeable sum when you are already struggling to make ends meet).

The coalition government knows that their benefit cap which comes into force this week, is going to crush ethnic minority families and force them out of the cities and into ghettos.