The National Education Union general secretary speaks to Ben Chacko on growing calls to protect children from a toxic online culture
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Abra-cadaver: How to conjure fatal poverty
Iain Duncan Smith has an almost magical ability to spread misery to Britain’s most vulnerable, writes CLIVE ARNOLD
While Iranians take to the streets en masse to protest sky-high inflation, Trump and Netanyahu are threatening military intervention. The Iranian population is trapped between a repressive regime, a suffocating economic war from the outside, and a history of dark alliances, argues MARC VANDEPITTE
Unison Scotland’s BRENDA AITCHISON says her union won’t tolerate further cuts to public services
The Danish Communist Party’s Lotte Rortoft-Madsen assesses the fallout from US threats to annex the huge Arctic island
Trump threatens war and punitive tariffs to recapture Iranian resources – just as in 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mossadegh and US corporations immediately seized 40% of the oil, says SEVIM DAGDELEN
Once derided by Farage as a ‘fraud,’ Jenrick has defected to Reform, bringing experience and political ruthlessness to the populist right — and raising the unsettling prospect of a Farage-led movement with a seasoned operative pulling the strings, says ANDREW MURRAY
WHEN you have a dog that attacks people for no reason other than it’s an evil beast, you put it down. When you have a politician that attacks disabled people and the poor for no reason, you make them Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.
Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) decides to close the Independent Living Fund (ILF). This fund helped disabled people pay for visits from professionals to carry out some of the more personal elements of their care. It also gave them the ability to employ staff who lived with them to support them. It helps disabled people to stay out of institutions and live relatively independent lives.
In its final weeks the £320 million ILF paid out an average of £300 a week to approximately 18,000 disabled people, but that’s too much to pay out. Much better to waste billions on some vanity project like a train line or new runway in London.
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Any positives from the government’s green paper proposals are vastly overshadowed by the scale of the cuts to vulnerable low-income households, argues JENNY RATHBONE MS
Both Conservative and Labour administrations have now refused to release research showing PIP payments are vital for disabled people’s survival, exposing the ideological nature of planned welfare ‘reforms,’ writes Dr DYLAN MURPHY
Social security is lagging further and further behind inflation and our government quite simply does not care, argues Dr DYLAN MURPHY