Melissa Benn

It was not the stuff of banner headlines. Potentially dodgy economic dossiers took that particular crown. But Alistair Darling’s Budget day announcement of 50,000 new traineeships in social care for unemployed young people — part of a package aimed at creating a quarter of a million jobs — was a substantive footnote to the economic [...]

Read my latest Public Finance opinion piece The tone was positively Churchillian: ‘Britain can beat this… just like we’ve beaten everything else this world has thrown at us. We’ll win by pulling together, not by facing the storm alone.’ But such stirring language came not from beleaguered national leaders at a world summit but from [...]