From Zoe Williams in the Guardian this morning - drawing attention to the fact that the Tories did not just get Murdoch wrong:
You can't cut a family's benefits then pay a Sure Start centre "by results" to run parenting classes about how stress and debt are bad for your family dynamic. Well you can, but it's an insult and a waste of money. You can't introduce a universal cap that means couples claiming housing benefit will be forced to live separately, while simultaneously emphasising the importance of parental stability. You can't make speeches about "removing the pressures on childhood" ... when one of those pressures is "being hungry". You can't have a benefits policy that chases parents out of work and then penalises them for being unemployed without accepting that that is also a family policy.
In short, family policy is indivisible from economic policy
And right now economic policy is fundamentally anti-family.
It's destroying work.
It's destroying incomes.
It's destryoing hope.
It's devaluing education.
It's denying access.
It's cutting away at some of the most basic of needs as ranked on Maslow's hierarchy.
That's Tory reality.
That's why their disaster on Murdoch - which will be ongoing as Cameron's lack of judgment is trawled through the press over coming months and years - is important. It will show that he and the Tories can't be trusted and that an alternative is needed. Soon.
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They’re only destroying these things for the poor and the middle classes, let’s not forget. Their policies are leaving the wealthy untouched, in fact,far better off by comparison. The pedestrian and incapable few are favoured over the able many. This, when you consider how many very able individuals will not be able to contribute to society to their fullest purely because of lack of funds, is wildly anti-social. This aspect is far more important than any relating to class. It’s the damage the ConDems are doing to society as a whole which needs to be taken onboard. Don’t expect it from them, they’d be the pedestrian and incapable types I spoke of earlier, nothing but Daddy’s money and an anti-social elitist system propping them up.
BB