Benefits

In his Budget, the Chancellor claimed that ‘those currently on the minimum wage will see their pay rise by over a third this Parliament, a cash increase for a full time worker of over £5,000.’ But this wasn’t quite the whole story. What he didn’t say is that a full-time worker could see just 7pc of this pay rise in their pockets due to the withdrawal of benefits and tax credits. Osborne’s Treasury will accrue the remaining 93pc in reduced welfare payments and increased tax revenue. The simple truth is that the Living Wage helps government more than it does workers. In Britain, tax credits and other benefits conspire to make low-paid work a fiendishly complex network of allowances and taper rates.

Each year Anjem Choudary earns more in benefits than a soldier does starting off in our armed forces. This is a fact I never tire of pointing out – especially to Anjem’s face whenever we have the misfortune to meet. The follow-on point, which I think also worth continuing to make, is that there is something suicidal about a society that rewards its enemies better than it does its defenders. Choudary and his family rake in around £25,000 each year  and - as you can see from this newly-released video above  – we taxpayers now get even more for our money than we had previously thought.

Close your eyes for a moment and place an image in your mind of the sort of person who needs to claim state benefit for their disability. The most common picture is someone almost destitute, reliant on the benefit just to function in their day to day life, likely to be claiming a multitude of other entitlements; the sort of person who won’t ever be able to derive a normal income. Whisper it: the majority of people claiming Disability Living Allowance are the sharp elbowed middle classes, with incomes placing them in the top half of those in the UK.

I was signed off work five years ago. I had lost my job and was, unsurprisingly, feeling low; I went to see my GP, as I was having difficulty sleeping. Rather than dishing out a few sleeping pills, as I had hoped, my doctor googled the letters PHQ-9 on his computer and quickly went through the multiple-choice test for depression he found. Within a few minutes, I walked out of the surgery with a diagnosis of depression and a sick note stating that I was, in his medical judgment, unfit for work. Looking at the Patient Health Questionnaire now, one thing immediately stands out: the copyright notice.

I suspect that you were as appalled as I by the plight of young mum, Marie Buchan, from Selly Oak in Birmingham. She has eight children – called stuff like Latoya and Tia – and currently claims a meagre £26,000 per year in benefits to feed them all. But now the government’s benefits cap has started to bite and Marie will see her income reduce to £23,000. She said: 'I am being forced into work. You're going to get similar cases as to what happened with the bedroom tax - people taking their own lives due to the financial pressures they are feeling. It will hit people that hard.' You and I can only guess at the trauma facing Marie and her lovely children. A choice between killing herself and being 'forced into work'.

I have the honour of having my Ch4 Dispatches documentary, now available online, reviewed by Michael White in the Guardian today. I think he was expecting me to lay into Labour, and critiques the show as if I did. In general, I seem to be charged with being in possession of opinions about inequality while being right-wing. I plead guilty, but would still like to offer up a few points in mitigation. First, let’s take the original headline of his piece: 'Fraser Nelson’s Dispatches show blames Labour for inequality.' I don’t. As I say right at the start: 'Decades of government policy intended to help the poorest is now hurting them instead.

Tough at the top The clocks on Big Ben were cleaned by abseiling window-cleaners. Some other big cleaning/painting jobs: — Repainting the Forth Railway Bridge used to be a metaphor for never-ending work, but a new coating completed in 2012 is estimated to have a life of 25 years. — Sydney Harbour Bridge was, for the first 80 years of its life, cleaned by hand, but last year it was done for the first time by robot. — The world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is cleaned by a team of abseilers, with all 24,000 windows taking three months to get through. — Most New York skyscrapers are cleaned by hand. The World Trade Center had an automated cleaner, but it could not cover the corners or upper windows. Two window cleaners were among the victims on 9/11.

How have British attitudes changed over the last decade? The latest British Social Attitudes survey is out today, suggesting that Britons have become less tolerant of immigration, benefits tourism and those who don’t speak English since 2003. Here are the five key things you need to know about what Britain is thinking and feeling as a country: 1. You must be born here and speak English to be ‘truly British’ Britons still have a strong sense of what it is to be British. According to the BSA, 95 per cent think you need to speak English to be ’truly British'. The last time the BSA tackled the question in 2003, just after the Iraq war, 91 per cent thought it was important. It's becoming more important to people.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF)  published a paper on Wednesday comparing a range of policies to help low paid workers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they conclude that increasing benefits is the best option. Like so much analysis on poverty, the report suffers from policy myopia in two respects. First, it looks only at cash benefits and direct taxes, ignoring the policy choices which set the constraints of the problem. Secondly, wider implications of the options are ignored. Cost of living The report uses a basket of goods which determines a ‘minimum income standard’. But no attention is paid to policies which increase the cost of goods in that basket, save for childcare. And the only 'solution' offered is to increase subsidies.