Last week’s proposals on university funding are a rational response to the student loans system but 'they are also highly regressive, hitting low earners and benefiting high earners.'

'If women hadn’t become better-educated than men, we might well be looking at pay and employment gaps barely changed in the past quarter of a century.'

'The pandemic has shown us the power of the state to intervene in hitherto unimaginable ways in supporting employees. But it has also shown us that the self-employed remain something of an inconvenient afterthought.'

'A year ago, there was every indication the pandemic would widen inequalities in employment and earnings between old and young, whites and ethnic minorities, men and women. That now looks less likely.'

'The real problem is that spending can happily grow at 3 per cent a year if the economy is also growing at 3 per cent a year. It isn’t and it won’t, not least because of the chilling effect that Brexit will continue to have.'

"Both government funding decisions over the past decade and the structure of council tax have worked against “levelling up”." Paul Johnson in The Times on local government funding.

"When economic inequalities start to undermine our sense of equal citizenship, as they seem to have done in the UK, then the need for action becomes urgent."

Our social care system is the unfinished business of 1946 and the direct descendant of the poor law of 1834; the decision to fund it through a levy is a throwback to a time when we had a social insurance system. And that’s the trouble. If you want a rational system for tax, welfare and public spending, best not to start from here.

"Please government, stop putting good, professional, public servants in an almost impossible situation by forcing them to choose between two incompatible versions of doing the right thing." Paul Johnson in The Times.