The Chancellor has scrapped the two-child limit, benefitting more than half a million families. More than half of the affected families have at least one member in work, and 88% had 3 or 4 children.

I really do object to the term ‘welfare’ which has become a pejorative word and is not ‘out of control’. I’ve paid for my pension through nearly 50 years of work and everyone pays in through taxes. Where’s the chart showing corporate welfare, tax breaks and tax avoidance?

The Tories doing their best to divide crudely between people who work who pay taxes and people on benefits. We all pay tax and we all receive public services, that’s how the system works. Calling everything ‘welfare’ is just ignorance.

Was trying to work out in which way Shabana Mahmood, an otherwise pretty unremarkable politician, could possibly be described as a "luminous golden star" who "dazzles like a blue-white supernova" and then I realised, its simply a willingness to be a bit more cruel to immigrants

The latest report came hours after the RSF agreed to a three-month humanitarian truce.

Asked if Keir Starmer believes British people want to "see refugee children pulled out of school and deported after 10 years in this country”, his spokesman says that “what the British public wants and what this government was elected on a mandate to deliver was to secure our borders"

Almost every BBC current affairs programme highlights the newspapers, most of which are right wing. Free advertising every day for appalling products, importing bias into every programme. BBC should end this practice immediately.

BBC News bulletins leading on the story of an Algerian man being mistakenly released by the prison service. Funnily enough I don't remember these cases ever leading the bulletins when an average of ten prisoners were mistakenly released a month in the final year of the last Government

It is way past time for the UK government & the BBC to get off X & for Musk to be treated as a threat to national security. The world's richest man is using his site to promote civil war, ethnic violence & the overthrow of an elected government. You won't win him over with another conference on AI

Nothing on the BBC Radio news this morning. Nothing I could find on their website. This is an MP from the party whose lead in the opinion polls normally ensures them wall-to-wall coverage. She spouts racist nonsense for which even she feels obliged to apologise. What on earth are they playing at?

It isn’t real convergence, and it isn’t fairness, unless ‘Affordable Rents’ are included as well as Social Rents. Converging all rents - some up, some down- would bring back coherence to rent setting and enable the eventual repeal of the AR tenancy.

Much of this borrowing funded capital assets and kept businesses going during the pandemic - which now pay tax. Where do the benefits of borrowing appear in the national accounts and why do @theIFS never focus on the upside?

This story is missing the crucial information about what rents will be charged to the eventual tenant. Is it genuinely affordable?

It’s an example of how much our views are manipulated that almost no one will believe that welfare payments are stable and not out of control.

More than 500,000 marched for Palestine in London on 11th October. The reaction of a Labour Government- Bridget Philipson speaking to Trevor Phillips (12th Oct). 'We're bringing in restrictions to curtail the marches'. A Labour Government?? wp.me/p15p2Q-fgR

Who benefits from the abolition of stamp duty land tax? The first answer: people buying very expensive homes. Average saving for someone buying a £10m+ home is £1.7m. Average saving for someone buying a £250k-£500k home is £5k.

Despite many excellent correspondents, BBC News and current affairs is now a complete joke. And it seems from Chris Mason’s comments that it has a very thin skin. Ed Davey is quite right.

“The trend in recent years has been for the great majority of extremist-related murders to be connected to some form of right-wing extremism. That is also true for 2024: for the third year in a row, all the murders identified were tied to right-wing extremism.” www.adl.org/resources/re...

Buying a retirement flat for £60k and having to sell for £40k sounds like a depressingly familiar story from that sector. But having to pay another £25k in 'deferred service charge' (despite already paying a service charge) to the developer is a new one on me www.theguardian.com/money/2025/s...

Shocking: less than 3% of private rentals in Britain are affordable for people needing housing benefit. People are being pushed towards homelessness and ill health. @RachelReevesMP can fix this in Nov’s budget by restoring housing benefit to the real cost of rent. Act now: bit.ly/3V1d76a

35% ‘affordable’, presumably only a share of it social rent, on a council-led development is really just not good enough.

So, the more candidates there are the harder it is for anyone to get to 80 except for the govt payroll candidate. Democracy in action.

Holding govts to ransom. Head of UK's banking lobby warns chancellor about additional tax on banks. Banks happy to be bailed out, take £895bn QE, £10bn+ interest a year on central reserves. Banks make excessive profits, must face windfall tax.

So much humbug about Angela Rayner in the right wing press. Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of MPs, Ministers (and journalists and newspaper owners) will have inadvertently filed a tax return with an error. Her actions are conceptually indistinguishable from theirs.

Given how many grifters infect our politics, media and business I see no reason why Rayner should resign given the complex family position she has explained and the advice she had. There are many many reasons to criticise her and the govt but this is not one of them.

This is the enduring lesson of Weimar: extremism never triumphs on its own. It succeeds because others enable it—because of their ambition, because of their fear, or because they misjudge the dangers of small concessions www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/hitl...

Much the largest UK protest on Friday was a Palestine solidarity protest in London at the Embassy of Israel, with a small pro-Israel protest. That isn't being covered as newsworthy by UK mainstream print/broadcast outlets who are following the smaller asylum protests www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/pr...

I have not heard anything at all from government ministers nor the opposition nor many media outlets about the dangers of this epidemic of sweeping casual racism. It is sometimes seen as comical - as with Rupert Lowe and the rowers - but it is dangerous and dehumanising

UK Govt to kick off public-private partnerships in England. It is new name for Private Finance Initiative. Private sector invests £1, gets £6+ back. The state guarantees corporate profits. Nothing learnt? Govt can create money, borrow, do QE, tax the rich ... why hand free cash to corporations?

This is what Labour members think about the government's ban on Palestine Action. 👇

BBC covers small boats/asylum seekers almost every day, often repeating lurid gutter press headlines, and then we’re surprised it has become a top issue for people.

What if the wealthy disappeared tomorrow? youtu.be/YtNJN9fOksU?... Are the wealthy essential to our economy? In this video I examine whether we need the wealthy, their taxes, their consumption, or their ideas. And I explain why redistributing wealth could make us all better off – even the rich.

Time to challenge the cosy consensus about taxing and spending. Taxing the rich is the best thing to do.

Yep.

Almost every BBC news and current affairs programme, from Politics Live to Newsnight, regularly leads with ‘the papers’. It is a huge source of right wing framing on the BBC. The papers are commercial organisations that get endless free advertising on the national broadcaster. End #bbcbias

Shouldn’t she be arrested for sedition?

Shameful www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

How is it possible for Starmer to sign this and still not do anything?

Brilliant analysis of the pressures constituency offices are under as they try to mitigate the effects of austerity, bad policy and bureaucratic inertia on constituents. From Karen Buck @queensparkkaren.bsky.social , who probably knows more about all this than anyone.

I was honoured to be invited to today’s memorial service in Srebrenica, 30 years since 8,372 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered while the world looked away. In their memory, we speak out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and governments — including our own — enabling it.

Difficult to express how I feel about those in our politics and media who are more concerned about what some rapper said at Glastonbury than fact that, as a matter of deliberate policy, the Israeli government is paying mercenaries to murder starving civilians for fun. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Great if there is a reasonable discussion on this important announcement on blue sky. The responses to Matthew on X are just awful and show why that platform is dying as a place to debate issues.

So much to like in this thread and the announcement, sensible detailed housing policies after years of awful decisions. But there are questions: crucially why only 60% for social rent? Why less than 30% for London? How much social rent is expected from s106 and regeneration? Not clear so far.

Rather than cuts to disability benefits and how to manage the decline in public services, this is what Labour should be debating.

Starmer offers ‘massive concessions’ on welfare bill to Labour rebels. Not so massive. Disability benefits will still be cut. New claimants will be hit hard. Consultation after the Bill is passed - So why not delay the bill. Shambolic. Tell your MP to vote against.

On LBC @zoejardiniere.bsky.social lists 3 previous instances where military aircraft have been targeted by campaigners in order to prevent them being used in war crimes, and she describes the govt banning Palestine Action as terrorists as an abuse of state power. Well said.

Keir Starmer endorses an attack which his own Attorney General has advised may be illegal

Don’t agree with Starmer much but here is the far right bandwagon.

The crisis in Sudan has become ‘a grave human rights and protection emergency’, the United Nations mission says.