The Left needs to stop parroting the terminology of the Right. Talk of "welfare" only fuels the scrounger myth - it's time to go back to "social security"

I've been planning for a few weeks to write about the change in the language used to describe people who claim benefits - a resolve hardened after seeing the much-shared Daily Mail front page pronouncing Mick Philpott, convicted of manslaughter following the death of six of his children, a "vile product of welfare UK".

Once my spluttering rage at the grotesque inappropriateness of equating an extreme criminal act with claiming benefits had subsided and I'd wiped my spittle-flecked monitor clean, I started to pay closer attention to the headline's wording. One word clearly took centre stage: welfare, a term known once upon a time as "social security".

Then, quite by accident, I stumbled across this excellent article by Labour peer Ruth Lister, chairman of the left-wing Compass group. Lister charts brilliantly why this change in language matters. If social security suggests a safety net to stop citizens falling through the cracks, then welfare, used as a noun, is easily associated in the minds of the public with what she calls:

a stigmatised US-style residual form of poor relief. It is all the more stigmatising because of the constant coupling with "dependency", so that in many people's eyes receipt of social security is now equated with a "dependency culture" that research does not in fact substantiate.

With the scrounger myth continuing to exert a strong hold over tabloids and public alike, it's ever-more important that the Left chooses its words carefully. In other words, it's time to stop borrowing the Right's terminology. Let's bid farewell to welfare and "benefits" (the latter carrying a vague suggestion of luxury rather than entitlement) and say hello to good old social security.

Mass murderers heart Melanie Phillips

While it’s difficult to find a silver lining to the mass murder of 76 human beings in Norway, it was hard to suppress a smirk at the news that killer Anders Behring Breivik had quoted Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips in his rambling manifesto.

Her initial response to this unnerving fact was to stress that Breivik had only quoted her twice in 1,500 pages - which is, let's face it, still not a great hit-rate.

But let’s be clear, there’s a world of difference between Breivik and Phillips. While her views might be repugnant, I think we can safely say that Melanie Phillips does not condone the mass slaughter of innocent civilians, even if they are card-carrying Labour Party members (now mass detention, that’s another story. No no, I jest.)

In fairness to Phillips, Breivik did also quote such luminaries as Winston Churchill, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, and George Orwell, and an author has no control over who reads their material. Was it J.D. Salinger's fault that the Catcher in the Rye "inspired" a psychotic Mark Chapman to kill John Lennon? Clearly not.

But the episode does serve to underline the danger of Phillips's intemperate words, her intolerance and hyperbole. She believes her tirades exist on some rarefied intellectual plane, and Keith Kahn-Harris may well be right when he says she is "polite company with a ready (if sometimes acidic) wit and a very sharp mind", but if you write incendiary words, there's always a chance they'll come back to bite you on the ass.

Phillips, a former Guardian staffer, seems to get much of the left foaming at the mouth, but the main emotion she evokes in me is sadness. I still remember reading this interview and thinking she sounded like the angriest, loneliest woman in the world.