Six of the Best 843

"In many ways, the desire to pull all of those in poverty under one roof, literally or figuratively in the case of Universal Credit, stems from the same impulses today as it did in 1834: a desire to drive down spending and make people work, or work harder." Alannah Tomkins says Universal Credit is like the Victorian workhouse.

Simon Parker looks at the government’s response to civil disorder in Liverpool in the 1980s and specifically at the policy of 'managed decline'.

"'It’s a programme designed to knock current affairs broadcasting off its axis,' said editor Ross Edwards in that week’s Radio Times, 'then blow a hole in its spluttering head'. It did nothing of the sort, of course. If anything, it carved a path for it." Jude Rogers marks 25 years of The Day Today.

Andy Boddington welcomes plans to improve Mortimer Forest, which straddles the Shropshire and Herefordshire border.

Christopher Hilton says the concert programmes held by the Britten-Pears Foundation offer valuable insights into social history: "With a jolt, we realise that virtually all of the events documented here would have been seen through something of a blue haze."

Ian Wells, an English chess prospect who died in 1982 at the age of 17, is remembered by simaginfan.