Liam Byrne
Liam Byrne tries to answer Labour’s welfare question
One can’t help but feel sorry for Liam Byrne. He is a fish out of water in Ed Miliband’s Labour party, something he implicitly acknowledged when he announced his intention… Continue reading
25 Comments
Labour’s frontbench gets a taste of the welfare battles to come
The Commons this evening approved emergency regulations for the government’s work experience programme so the DWP can avoid repaying benefits to those who were sanctioned for refusing to take part.… Continue reading
36 Comments
Lib Dems and Labour to push for changes to benefits uprating bill
Round two of the row over rises in benefit payments is on the way, with Lib Dems and opposition parties tabling a series of amendments to the government’s legislation. I… Continue reading
9 Comments The next Labour welfare policy?
As he was selling his party’s plan for a jobs guarantee on the airwaves today, Liam Byrne made a passing reference to something that could form another part of Labour’s… Continue reading
32 Comments
Labour revisits old welfare ghosts with its jobs guarantee
Dig out the bunting, fly the red flags in celebration, for finally we have a policy from the Labour party. Ed Miliband promised that 2013 would be the year he’d… Continue reading
50 Comments
Ed Miliband vs the working class
Who’s on the side of the strivers? Is it George Osborne, who’s cutting benefits in real terms for the next three years, which he defends as ‘being fair to the… Continue reading
27 Comments
Why Ed Balls is so confident about benefit wars
The debate over benefit uprating will run and run because both sides think they are winning. George Osborne thinks the public resent generous benefits rises. Liam Byrne and Ed Balls… Continue reading
24 Comments
Liam Byrne interview: The welfare system is ‘completely out of whack’
Liam Byrne is a modernising, Blairite Labour MP, and in case you were in any doubt about that, he conducts his interview with Coffee House sitting next to a framed… Continue reading
48 Comments
The strivers vs scroungers battleground
Welfare will be one of the key battlegrounds at the next general election, and George Osborne’s Welfare Uprating Bill will certainly be one way the Conservative party can prod Labour… Continue reading
42 Comments
Liam Byrne tries to turn David Cameron’s striver language back on him
The Leveson Inquiry will dominate this week. Inside Number 10 they regard it as ‘the most difficult’ of the three big issues dominating their time at the moment – the… Continue reading
36 Comments
Iain Duncan Smith denies threat to universal credit
Allowing Iain Duncan Smith to dig his heels in at the Work and Pensions department in last week’s reshuffle sent out two messages. The first was that the Prime Minister… Continue reading
13 Comments
A more ambitious approach to fighting poverty
‘You attack poverty by knowing what you do changes the lives of those people.’ In that phrase on this morning’s Today programme, Iain Duncan Smith summed up the difference between… Continue reading
7 Comments
Miliband’s reshuffle isn’t necessarily to the left
Ed Miliband’s reshuffle turned out to be a rather small affair. The news out of it is that control over the policy review passes from Liam Byrne to Jon Cruddas,… Continue reading
17 Comments
Byrne for Birmingham?
Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet could soon lack a Liam Byrne. The shadow work and pensions secretary is expected to announce his intention to run for the position of Mayor of… Continue reading
9 Comments
Ed Miliband turns back to Brown (again)
At the end of last year, Ed Balls suggested that Labour would be ‘taking a tougher approach to conditionality [for benefit claimants]. If people can work, they should work.’ Now… Continue reading
11 Comments
Grayling bows to the inevitable
The changes announced to the work experience programme today have been designed to reassure the companies involved. Those on the scheme will now only face any benefits sanction if they… Continue reading
10 CommentsTories push benefit cap in PMQs, Miliband ignores it
As expected, the Tories did everything they could to make the benefit cap the subject of PMQs. One Tory MP managed to slip in a question on it just before… Continue reading
16 Comments
Miliband hopes to put a cap on his welfare policy problems
A-ha! Labour have hit on a line on the benefits cap, and Liam Byrne is peddling it in the Daily Telegraph this morning. ‘Now, there are some people who are… Continue reading
29 Comments
Bringing the squeeze into focus
The ‘word of the year’ for 2011 is already featuring prominently in 2012. Yep, the ‘squeezed middle’ is the focus of the Resolution Foundation’s latest report, which they launched in… Continue reading
14 Comments
Byrne offers ‘something for something’ — but what does it mean?
What’s this? Seems like Liam Byrne has emerged from his policy review with an idea. He calls it, in an article for the Guardian today, ‘something for something’: ‘…“something for… Continue reading
32 Comments