Keith Cooper

Much dust was kicked up by the Conservative pledge to widen right-to-buy to housing association tenants. How dare the Tories offer six-figure discounts on homes that don’t belong to them? Or so the housing chiefs thundered, amid threats to mire the idea in a costly court battle. But as the dust settles, how much of that anger is justified? Will the idea seriously harm the landlords to most of the nation’s social housing tenants? The first thing to note is that much of the initial anger was poorly directed. Housing chiefs were caught somewhat off-guard by a surprise pledge to compensate them for the six-figure discounts.

There was much discussion recently about the rise in male suicide rates, after official figures published last week showed they were at their highest level since 2001. But one aspect of this has attracted little attention: the lack of support for men abused by their partners. In a poll of 130 Citizens Advice Bureaux workers, 63 per cent said it was easy to get help for women reporting domestic abuse, compared to 13 per cent for men. It’s bad enough that men struggle to find help once they pluck up the courage to ask for it. But they are also less likely than women to look for support in the first place - and more likely to be disbelieved.

The coalition helped bury an enduring and dangerous myth in a major report into the country’s chronic housing crisis released this week. The year-long probe rubbishes the idea councils are stopped from building new homes by Treasury 'caps' on their borrowing powers. As research published on Coffee House revealed last year, the idea caps hold them back is a distracting myth, perpetuated by special interest groups and parroted by columnists like the Guardian’s Owen Jones. All this bellyaching about borrowing 'restrictions' continues, led largely by Tom Copley, Labour’s housing spokesperson in City Hall and the Labour-led Local Government Association.

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.

NHS workers used to enjoy hearty backslaps for their ‘jolly hard work’ to bring down accident & emergency waiting times. Such praise was delivered by the Labour government’s chief nursing officer at a conference I covered back in 2003. Back then, talk was of shrinking queues rather than impending ‘A&E crisis’. Nurses should congratulate themselves, she beamed, for helping speed patients through casualty in fewer than four hours. This apparent success was just the beginning, if this graph, circulated in a campaign e-mail by Labour’s shadow health secretary recently, is to be believed: 'This is what three years of David Cameron running the NHS looks like: a crisis in A&E,' it rails.