Tag Archives: social market foundation

Nick Clegg chairs meeting on educational inequality in Sheffield

Back in January, the Social Market Foundation, a think tank, established its cross-party Commission on Inequality in Education. It wants to tackle the disparity of attainment and break down barriers it identified relating to where you live, your family’s income and your ethnicity.

Yesterday, Nick chaired a meeting  of the Commission at Sheffield Hallam University.

Nick said:

On launching the commission, our research showed that where young people live now has more impact on their performance at school than used to be the case.

It is not just the relative wealth of parents that holds lots of bright kids back: it is postcode inequality too. What part of the country a child grows up in has a real impact on their life chances.

Posted in News | Also tagged , , and | 12 Comments

John Prescott should ignore this post. It asks you to think.

I had a leeetle bit of a moan about Twitter at the weekend — in particular its tendency to turn even normally quite intelligent and courteous people into the worst kind of insult-spewing trolls — and I’m afraid I’m going to do it again now…

Yesterday saw the launch by the think-tank Policy Exchange of a report entitled Ending Expensive Social Tenancies. Now I’ve not had chance to read it yet. (It’s 48 pages long.) But then I doubt that many folk have.

You don’t have to agree with its reasoning or conclusions to try and engage with its …

Posted in News | Also tagged , , and | 26 Comments

ISA tax breaks for savings: cap them at £15,000

The combination of being in government and of facing a large deficit means the list of tax increases and spending cuts Liberal Democrats have been calling for over many years has been mostly exhausted. Capital gains tax is up, pension tax breaks for the richest has been curbed, the ID cards database is gone and so on.

It is good that so many policies are now in place and there are plenty of political battles still to come in the second half of this Parliament, especially over mansion tax. However, …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 36 Comments
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