The question that should be asked as a result of the Philpott case is how society deals with psychopaths – whether in work or not is irrelevant, although psychopathy may well make it less likely for someone to get/hold a job.

I am sure that is true.



When you look into what the government is on about it soon becomes clear this is an ideologically driven set of cuts because the amount of money being saved by them is going to be a relative pin-prick in terms of reducing the deficit.



As someone else pointed out the real big benefit bills are pensions and housing benefit and while they are reducing the latter in a pretty arbitrary manner they will still be necessarily large bills for the government.



It seems totally counter productive to put so much effort into clawing relatively small amounts of money back and causing a lot of misery at the same time when there are targets that would yield so much more revenue.

And it's worth noting that over 80% of households in receipt of housing benefit are working households.



A huge part of the problem is the shortage of decent, affordable housing.

As I said above, the government thinks those households should make more of an effort to earn more!

Well, it ain't the poor who move their dosh to tax havens.

Which is a load of utter e, when many will be caught in, for instance, zero-hours contracts.

I'd love to know just how many couples sit there and think: "Well we've got two kids, how can we become more wealthy? I know, lets' have another kid and get an extra £13.40 a week"

He takes a lot of stick from a lot of people in a lot of threads, but this once - maybe just this once - Dally is absolutely correct.



There can be little doubt that the tories' constant attacks on those in most need are ideologically driven and cannot survive economic or pragmatic examination or tests of basic decency; or that the lib-dems are hand-in-glove with them while the labour party is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate from them.



As my late mother-in-law used to say, "they all pee in the same pot".

Labour started going in that direction when Blair was elected as leader and immediately scrapped Clause 4.



Via Twitter earlier this week, there was some discussion going on about the preponderance of Parliamentary politicians from all parties that went to Oxford to study for a PPE. Some of the discussion focussed on how incredibly limited the philosophy part of that is.



But what it means, though, is that vast numbers of politicians – and we're talking career politicians here, which is also an important factor – have studied a limited and identical course, and come out with an inevitably limited range of ideas on the subjects shoehorned into that course.



And its influence in media terms is also noticeable.



[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_PPE_degrees_from_OxfordList[/url.

Interesting the 63% of taxes are paid by the richest 30% - this seems a high figure given these bods move all their dosh to tax havens?

and it's something like the top 1% pay 27% of income taxes.

That list is frightening.



Another factor is that Thatcher et al's unforgivable destruction of British industry and consequent emasculation of the trades unions has reduced the input of shop-floor to parliament MPs who could at least inject some experience of real life and work experience into the debates.