It used to be that when politicians wanted to bury bad news they’d orchestrate its release to time with a distracting event. Seeing Iain Duncan Smith publicly criticized for wasting at least £140 million of public money over Universal Credit at the start of this month, it struck me how we’ve slowly reached another level. “Unmitigated […]
Maria and her children have been in temporary accommodation for five years, after they became homeless in 2008. Her youngest is one year old and there’s four of them now crammed into a flat in London. The place smells of damp and she tells me it’s infested with rodents. She’s paying almost £400 a week […]
Safiya is in a cellar. She’s ten years old and is deaf and mute. It’s cold and damp and she can’t hear who’s coming. An elderly man slaps her. She is raped. … The man and his wife make her serve them. She cooks the meals and cleans the house. She washes their car and […]
Ross has bowel disease and depression. He’s 33 and living at home with his parents. He can’t afford the rent or bills and, eighteen months since being put onto the Work Programme – the Government’s welfare-to-work scheme – is still unemployed. “My mental health’s suffered due to the treatment I’ve received and my physical problems […]
It’s been a bit of a week for private schools. Ofsted announced they weren’t doing enough to help their oik counterparts and were only giving “crumbs off their table.” Tim Hands, the head of Oxford’s Magdalen College school and the upcoming chair of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, declared that public school parents were (wrongly) being made […]
When I was 15, I bought a t-shirt with the words “Porn star” on it. I remember there was choice, in the shop at least. Multiple t-shirts with multiple wordings, all drawn with silver glitter that said this was somehow fun. Did I want to be a playboy bunny or a porn star? I decided […]
This month sees the first anniversary of London’s Paralympics – and an inevitable need to ask, one year on from a burst of optimism around disability rights, where are we now? In my column for The Guardian, I argued that – in light of the benefit changes that have disproportionately hit disabled people this year […]
