Latest editorial
LEFT Labour MP Michael Meacher provoked a major public debate yesterday after he suggested that juries should consider not convicting benefits claimants driven to theft by sanctions.
On BBC London's Vanessa Feltz show, successive listeners called in to savage the draconian social security sanctions doled out by benefit offices for trivial offences such as "filling in forms incorrectly."
Almost a million claimants have been sanctioned by the Department for Work and Pensions in the past year - with payments cut off for up to nine weeks at a time.
by David Nicholson, Wales reporter
DYLAN MURPHY reports that far from helping people back into work, the sanctions regime is inflicting unnecessary trauma on working-class families
Labour will find increases in the state pension age are unacceptable, just as cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance, personal independence payments and universal credit are — it needs to change direction immediately, writes PCS general secretary FRAN HEATHCOTE
ANSELM ELDERGILL examines the government’s proposals to further limit the right of citizens to trial by jury