The Joy of Six 1601

"This low-cost strategy of largely relying on conditionality and sanctions to get unemployed claimants into work has clearly failed, as numbers have gone up since 2016, and the binary nature of our welfare system pushes our ageing and increasingly impaired population to claim incapacity benefits over limited working with in-work financial top-ups." Paul Gregg introduces the new Resolution Foundation report What's Gone Wrong With Welfare?

Flynn Devine and Hannah Perry, meanwhile, introduce a Demos report on how the lack of impartial local news sources fuels asylum housing clashes and what can be done about it.

"But what a diagnostic label cannot do is tell a teacher how a child learns. Those of us who have taught in classrooms know that two autistic children may need very different support." Mark Mon-Williams and Karen Guldberg call for a shift from a "diagnosis-dependent" system of helping children with special educational needs and disabilities, to a "needs-led plus diagnosis" one, where support is not withheld while waiting for a diagnosis.

Francisco Garcia on the Student List's victory in Serbia: "From the start, the student movement was determinedly horizontal. There were no leaders and decisions were taken collectively at assemblies. Over time, the movement agreed on a few key demands, with elections chief among them."

Stephanie Seul introduces us to Avis Waterman, the woman who covered the First World War on the Italian Front for The Times.

"Pawlikowski does not make arty films in which the imagery stops the story to admire itself. But he depends on the force and the simultaneous distancing of black and white, the way it tells us we are seeing something that has been chosen." David Thomson praises Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland (2026).