Dispatches: Tabloids, Tories and Telephone Hacking

Earlier this evening Channel 4 screened an edition of Dispatches looking at allegations that Andy Coulson was aware that News of the World journalists regularly hacked into the mobile phones of public figures while he was its editor.

The programme does not show the Conservative Party, the police or the Press Complaints Commission in a good light, and raises questions about how far the powerful are above the law in modern Britain.

You can watch Tabloids, Tories and Telephone Hacking on the Channel 4 website.

How will David Cameron's welfare reforms play with the middle classes?

Today's Sunday Times lead story begins:

David Cameron is to unveil a plan to get Britain back to work by forcing millions of welfare claimants into training.

The assault on the dependency culture is similar to programmes in America. Private firms that prepare people for employment and place them in jobs would be paid by results.

Most people who have been unemployed for more than six months, including the disabled and single mothers, would be required to join the new privatised schemes or see their payments cut.

I wonder how this will play with middle-class voters? Of course, we can all tolerate any amount of firm treatment of other people, but if we think it may apply to ourselves it becomes a different matter.

When the crisis in the financial system became known to the public, there was a great deal of talk about middle-class people losing their jobs. That talk has died down of late, but the full effects of the crisis have yet to work themselves out and middle-class job insecurity could well reappear.

If it does, David Cameron's ideas on welfare reform may prove a lot less popular with more affluent voters than he imagines they will.