Thoughts on yesterday's Times

In the Times today, there's more on the Miliband reshuffle replacing Blairites with Blairites. Labour remains desperate not to be thought Left wing. Yet if the Daily Mail episode has taught the Labour party anything, it should be that it is pointless trying to appease rags like the Mail, Sun and, yes, the Times. 

Inside, 70 leading social welfare charities call on the coalition to stop maligning and stigmatizing those depending on welfare.

Miliband was forceful and angry in defence of his father. Would that he would show the same spirit in defence of ordinary people.

We learn that overstretched care-workers are being paid less than minimum wage even though they are working at the edge of society, with difficult and vulnerable cases. 

Yet proof that this is a wealthy country, not a poor one, but that the wealth is increasingly unequally distributed is provided by the story that private tutors, at up to £100 a session, outnumber school teachers. 

And we learn that the Milgram 'we're all concentration camp guards really' experiments were effectively faked.  An aspect of neo-liberal mythology is that humans are unpleasant and out for what they can get.  (Though in practice dependant on the philanthropy of those in ragged trousers - such as care workers).  This shows that humans have a much higher degree of decency and it takes a lot to get most people to behave like b*stards.

The UK's largest prison, HMP Oakwood, privately run by G4S, has failed every test of how a prison should operate. Imagine if this had been a state-run institution, the Times might have given it rather more than a paragraph.