In The Guardian

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, the Labour leader said Thatcher had “set loose our natural entrepreneurialism” during her time as prime minister.

“Across Britain, there are people who feel disillusioned, frustrated, angry, worried. Many of them have always voted Conservative but feel that their party has left them,” he said. “I understand that. I saw that with my own party and acted to fix it. But I also understand that many will still be uncertain about Labour. I ask them to take a look at us again.”

[…] 

Starmer said it was “in this sense of public service” that he had overseen a dramatic change in the Labour party – cutting its ties with former leader Jeremy Corbyn and removing the whip.

“The course of shock therapy we gave our party had one purpose: to ensure that we were once again rooted in the priorities, the concerns and the dreams of ordinary British people. To put country before party,” he said.

In 1988, in a motel room in Atlanta, Georgia, I sat down with Shane to do an interview on the last night of a week-long trip through the American south with the band. It was a Sunday evening as I recall, and Shane, who hated interviews, was for once in a sober and reflective mood. When I asked him about the mixture of tenderness and brutal realism that characterised his songs, he said: “People don’t understand what it takes to write a truthful song, a song that is trying to be pure and honest.” Though I pressed him to elucidate, that was all he would say on the matter.

For a time, some would say too short a time, Shane MacGowan wrote pure and honest songs like no one else. Last week, when I chatted with his friend and fellow songwriter Nick Cave, at a public event in St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, we began with a kind of impromptu tribute to Shane, who had died that morning. Nick spoke candidly about his “pure spirit”, as well as how envious he had once felt about Shane’s ability to cut to the heart of things in his songs, and the empathy he evinced for the outsiders and marginalised who inhabited them. He regarded Shane with obvious awe as “the songwriter of his generation”.

Though this is not the time to go into it too deeply, it would be remiss not to acknowledge that Shane’s lifestyle of dogged excess – and the darkness that sometimes descended in its wake, at considerable cost to himself and those in his sway – diminished his extraordinary talent. “You call it chaos,” he once admonished me, when I asked about his rapidly advancing state of dissolution. “I don’t regard it as chaos. I regard it as natural living.”

Melissa Fisher believed her jobseeker payments would be cut off if she didn’t complete a resilience training course.

So the South Australian-based artist, who has a disability and has been on income support for several years, signed up. She found herself being asked to rate her friends and family, whether God played an important role in her life and if she felt grateful she had enough to eat.

At one point in the four-day course, she was shown pictures of Brad Pitt in a chicken suit to illustrate how people can go from “nothing to something”.

“I found all of it so condescending,” Fisher says of the resilience training run by WISE employment in South Australia.

“They said that who we have in our life is important and surrounding ourselves with successful people will make us successful. If we surround ourselves with unsuccessful people we will be unsuccessful.”

Fisher says she believed the course was part of her mutual obligations which jobseekers are required to undertake otherwise their payments can be suspended. Fisher says she was never told she could choose not to do the course – and other jobseekers across Australia say they also thought the same.

Victoria should commit to build 60,000 new social housing dwellings by 2034, end the first home owners grant and lobby the federal government to examine tax concessions for investment properties, the state inquiry into the rental and housing affordability crisis has recommended in its final report.

The report stopped short of making any recommendations on rental price regulation, which is a contentious issue between the Greens, who have been campaigning for rent caps, and the government, which has resisted calls.

The 34 recommendations included a call for the government to commit to building 60,000 new social housing dwellings by 2034, with 40,000 of them completed by 2028.

High-priced houses do not create wealth; they redistribute it. And it’s meaningless because we can’t use the wealth to buy anything else – a yacht or a fast car. We can only buy other expensive houses: sell your house and you have to buy another one, cheaper if you’re downsizing, more expensive if you’re still growing a family. At the end of your life, your children get to use your housing wealth for their own housing, except that we’re all living so much longer these days it’s usually too late to be useful. And much of this housing wealth is concentrated in Sydney, where the median house value is $1.1m, double that of Perth and regional Australia.

It’s destructive because of the inequality that results: with so much wealth concentrated in the home, it stays with those who already own a house and within their families. For someone with little or no family housing equity behind them, it’s virtually impossible to break out of the cycle and build new wealth.

It will be impossible to return the price of housing to something less destructive – preferably to what it was when my parents and I bought our first houses – without purging the idea that housing is a means to create wealth as opposed to simply a place to live.

Oh, FFS! Currency issuing governments do not — and as a matter of brute accountancy can not — "pay for" anything through tax revenue!

New Zealand’s new government will scrap the country’s world-leading law to ban smoking for future generations to help pay for tax cuts – a move that public health officials believe will cost thousands of lives and be “catastrophic” for Māori communities.

In 2022 the country passed pioneering legislation which introduced a steadily rising smoking age to stop those born after January 2009 from ever being able to legally buy cigarettes. The law was designed to prevent thousands of smoking-related deaths and save the health system billions of dollars.

The legislation, which is thought have inspired a plan in the UK to phase out smoking for future generations, contained a slew of other measures to make smoking less affordable and accessible. It included dramatically reducing the legal amount of nicotine in tobacco products, allowing their sale only through special tobacco stores, and slashing the number of stores legally allowed to sell cigarettes from 6,000 to just 600 nationwide.

Long sentences handed to two Just Stop Oil protesters for scaling the M25 bridge over the Thames are a potential breach of international law and risk silencing public concerns about the environment, a UN expert has said.

In a strongly worded intervention, Ian Fry, the UN’s rapporteur for climate change and human rights, said he was “particularly concerned” about the sentences, which were “significantly more severe than previous sentences imposed for this type of offending in the past”.

He said: “I am gravely concerned about the potential flow-on effect that the severity of the sentences could have on civil society and the work of activists, expressing concerns about the triple planetary crisis and, in particular, the impacts of climate change on human rights and on future generations.”

Nearly 160,000 people are living in hidden, often overcrowded and sometimes dangerous bedsit-style accommodation across England, analysis has found.

Intelligence compiled by councils suggests there are almost 32,000 unlicensed large houses in multiple occupation (HMOs). These are believed to be home to at least 159,340 tenants, who are often drawn by cheaper rents amid the cost of living crisis.

Conditions can be dire, with examples of more than 10 people sharing a single bathroom, squalid conditions and little protection in place should a fire break out.

Landlords have doubled their borrowing to invest in HMOs since 2018. A landlord renting to a single family can expect to generate 5% of the property’s value in annual rent, whereas a licensed HMO typically produces about 7.5%, and in some cases 10%. Profits in unlicensed bedsits are likely to be even higher, as landlords can cram in more tenants and do not have to comply with licensing standards.

Some of the first protests against lockdowns were outside of gyms. And I was trying to understand what was going on with that. Why were these super buff folks having these protests, doing push-ups outside of their gyms?

And I came to the conclusion that there was something similar to the way in which some ultra-religious people were reacting, where they were insisting no matter what this was, they had to go pray. They had to be in these collective spaces, because that was their force field. Prayer was their protection against death or what happens after death.

I vividly remember watching the news one night, and there was a story about a megachurch that had broken lockdown. Journalists were interviewing people as they were streaming out of the megachurch. And they said: “Aren’t you afraid of Covid? You’ve just been in a room with thousands of unmasked people singing.” And the answer from one worshipper was: “No way! I’m bathed in the blood of the Lord.”

I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.

I think that spark burns quietly inside so many of us. Smouldering since those days when everyone watched. A few weeks ago, I went to have my hair cut. The new barber glared at me, a tough, gnarly, squinting Scotsman. I was a bit terrified. Far too scared to turn round and walk out. He sat me down and asked me what I do. I said that I work on Doctor Who. “Never watch it,” he barked. OK.

But then he drifted. He smiled and got a faraway look in his eyes. He said he did watch it when he was a wee lad. Tea with mum and dad then the TV on a Saturday night. He remembered how scared he was, one week, when a woman simply walked into the sea. I said: ‘That’s Fury from the Deep! From 1968! That was Maggie Harris, possessed by a Weed Monster from under the North Sea, walking to her death.” I told him he could go and watch it again, on the iPlayer, 55 years later. He laughed and said he might, and then we talked about everything – TV and family and life and love and loss. All because of an old TV show.