The Labour Party paid a convicted US paedophile to work on its last general election campaign, the BBC learns.

Everyone has an opinion about sex work. Straight off - is it work? Why not say “prostitution”? A few days ago I wrote about how preserving an ideology should be secondary to the safety of sex workers; comments were overtaken swiftly by a discussion on whether or not sex work could be properly defined as

  A fellow blogger from PR Media Blog has, in the past, suggested I am unrepentant in using sex to sell this site. Not wishing to disappoint, today’s Sex Uncovered supplement in The Observer is the perfect excuse to blend media talk and sex. But forgive me if I fall asleep somewhere in the middle. The British media

How the income tax system has become markedly more regressive over the years. I’m pretty sure that it has you know. Time was when only the rich paid income tax. Then the middle….now people working part time on minimum wage. For the personal allowance is only ever raised in line with retail inflation (and sometimes is not raised

Meanwhile, in Labour’s decade, billionaires’ wealth quadrupled and three out of five of them paid no income tax. Well, leave aside the fact that income tax is paid upon income and not increases in wealth, I still don’t believe that figure. Whatever you say about the ways in which you can dodge taxes, it really isn’t that

George Osborne says that a 45p top rate of income tax is now “difficult to avoid”. Not for him, of course. He has never paid income tax in his life. Or National Insurance, since you have to have had a job to have paid National Insurance. Oh well, the Tories, and the Tories alone, going into a General Election calling for higher income tax. How times change…?

HM Revenue and Customs - Percentage of earnings paid in income tax and Income tax receipts analysis by type

Matthew Parris was in bracing form today: "This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously...

A delightful little typo: Gross income pain in all taxes (%) That’s their heading for “gross income paid in all taxes” as a percentage of household income by decile.

A sex offender was subsequently paid £2,560 by the Labour party for helping its 2005 general election campaign, it has been reported.