Owen jones

Bashing the rich has become trendy. Last night, the Spectator hosted a debate at the Guildhall School of Drama on whether the rich have contributed their fair share to society, or if we should ramp up wealth taxes. It’s a very emotive topic and each of the speakers made a solid case for and against the motion: politicians should leave the wealthy alone — they already contribute more than their fair share. Proposing the motion, Spectator editor Fraser Nelson described how London is a city ‘shaped by the super rich,’ pointing out the number of places that serve a £20 vodka martini. But Fraser argued that society needs these wealthy people and

I’m looking forward to tonight’s Spectator debate in which Fraser Nelson, William Cash and I will be taking on Owen Jones, Jack Monroe and Molly Scott Cato MEP over the issue of whether the rich should pay more in tax. One thing I’m sure Owen and his colleagues will do is point to figures released today from Trussell Trust food banks that seem to show that over a million people are now using their facilities. In fact, this figure is misleading, as Full Fact has pointed out: ‘The claim that over a million people are using Trussell Trust food banks is inaccurate. It comes from confusing the number of different people using Trussell Trust food

Owen Jones writes in the Guardian today on the subject of trans rights, making a revealing statement in the process. He says: ‘In truth, debates over the latest scientific research are of little interest to me: what matters is that the happiness, security and even lives of a minority are at stake, and all too little has been done about it.’ I’ve no desire to get involved in this particular debate, partly because I don’t know enough and I also don’t want to spend ten years getting harassed and threatened like Julie Bindel. One should never underestimate the threat of violence in shifting public debate, not just in religious matters. I

‘I don’t think Russell Brand has read much Orwell’, says the Catholic Herald, responding to the multi-millionaire revolutionary’s YouTube claim that IS are less of a threat than David Cameron: ‘Not just because he recently described Owen Jones as our generation’s incarnation of the left-wing iconoclast, but because yesterday he engaged in the kind of apologia for foreign fascism which the great man built his reputation on condemning.’ Brand’s video has now been seen by more than 200,000 people, and guess who is helping him make these visual treats happen? Non other than the self-confessed plagiarist and disgraced former Indy columnist Johann Hari. Hari was the ideological lodestar for the

I was attacked by a swan the other day, as I walked along the bank of the River Stour in Kent. The creature climbed out of the water and lunged towards me, wings puffed up, making this guttural and hate-filled coughing noise. I kicked out at its stupid neck and told it to fuck off and the bird backed away towards the river, still making that demented hissing, like a badly maintained boiler. At first I was mystified as to how I had gained its enmity. I wasn’t near its mate and still further distant from its sallow and bedraggled idiot children. Nor had I advanced towards it, or even

Columnists like the Guardian’s Owen Jones have perpetuated a myth that harms rather than eases access to truly affordable homes for the impoverished on whose behalf they campaign. Taken in by the rhetoric of special interest groups, they recycle claims that house building is stymied by Treasury restrictions on council borrowing. Abolishing this ‘cap’ would help town halls to ‘resolve the housing crisis’ by constructing ‘hundreds of thousands of homes’. So says Jones in his personal manifesto: ‘Agenda for Hope’. But Jones and others who adhere to such views are not only misguided. They are diverting attention from the real and practical problems that need to be urgently fixed: that

Are Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms necessary to bring fairness to our benefits system? This week’s Spectator leading article argues the work and pensions secretary returned to front-line politics for one reason only — to end the present waste of human potential. Author and Independent columnist Owen Jones disagrees; he debates with our associate editor Toby Young on this week’s View form 22 podcast (10:38). Will IDS’ reforms radically change the welfare system for the better? Is the government striving for more or less equality? And will the coalition’s legacy stand up to closer scrutiny from the left at the next general election? Clarissa Tan discusses her cover feature on

Haven’t you heard? Today is the official launch of the People’s Assembly, a grassroots movement to amplify ‘progressive opinion’ in the public square. Think Arab Spring, but for Brits who don’t have quite as much to rage about. It’s being launched by Owen Jones, Mark Steel, Caroline Lucas, and other such luminaries. The main thrust of their campaign seems to be against cuts. ‘It’s springtime for opposition to the nightmare of austerity,’ says Jones, deftly combining metaphors. ‘The People’s Assembly offers the one thing missing from British politics: Hope.’ Hope and change! Springtime! Who doesn’t want that? The trouble is, I’m not so sure that actual people agree with the People’s Assembly’s founding premise. Polls often