British state plans to force unemployed people to look for work online and monitor them while they do so have been widely condemned. Privacy will be invaded, crime boosted and poor and disabled people victimised.

Confusion and dismay continue over plans for a ‘quadruple lock’ of legal safeguards to protect faith groups from being forced to celebrate marriages between same-sex couples in England and Wales.

After the Prime Minister’s positive commitment to equal marriage and religious freedom, the official Church of England response was disappointingly negative.

Update: Bristol University Christian Union performs U-turn on female speakers http://tinyurl.com/cojwb8j

General Synod’s rejection of a motion allowing women to be bishops has badly damaged the Church of England’s credibility. It's time for some wider reflection and self-examination.

After a walk through “the little world of poverty enclosed within the workhouse walls”, Charles Dickens concluded that “We have come to this absurd, this dangerous, this monstrous pass, that the dishonest felon is, in respect of cleanliness, order, diet, and accommodation, better provided for, and taken care of, than the honest pauper.”

In seeking once again to blame the poor for poverty, UK work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith has implied that several children of members of the royal family may be poorer than many living on the breadline with parents earning the minimum wage.

The son-in-law of Baron Cottesloe plans to punish those who do not limit their families to two children and at some time require welfare benefits. UK Welfare Secretary Iain Duncan Smith controversially proposes in future to limit housing benefit and other state assistance to the first two children only.

People over retirement age should be required to do community work or lose some of their pension, urged former Benefits Agency head Lord Bichard.

The government wants “To set our country back on the path to prosperity that all can share in” and “mend a broken society”, claimed UK Prime Minister David Cameron at the Conservative Party conference on 10 October. Despite national policies inflicting deepening misery on the poorest in society, and promises by his ministers of more of the same, he was seeking to portray his leadership as compassionate and inclusive.