1. More funds for Combat Stress
2. More veterans in justice system than soldiers serving in Afghanistan
3. Vital Therapy Centre For Soldiers – Appeal

1. Another Brownie at PMQ's – Now Brown Foxed
2. Brown in La La Land – He's just making it up now
3. A Budget Brainteaser

Lib Dem leader outlines key demands before election expected on 6 May

The Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, last night spelled out the four "tests" he will set for Labour and the Conservatives if they are to seek his party's support in a hung parliament following the general election.

His "four steps to fairness" are: reform of the tax system to lift 4 million people earning £10,000 a year or less out of income tax altogether, financed by higher taxes for the rich; a "pupil premium" to target extra education spending at the most disadvantaged children; a switch to a greener economy with less reliance on financial services; and voting reform for Westminster elections.

Clegg declined to say whether his party would lean towards Labour or the Tories if neither party secured an overall majority in the poll expected on 6 May .

But he told the Independent he would talk to the party that won the "strongest mandate" and was keeping all options open - including a formal coalition with Lib Dem ministers in the cabinet.

"If a party with no majority has the strongest mandate, we accept the principle that that party has the right to govern either on its own or to reach out to others," he said.

But he said "no deals" would be discussed with other parties before the votes are counted.

"We are not here to play games with other parties," he said. "We are here to secure a big mandate for the big changes we want in Britain.

"Once we know the lie of the land after the election, we have to work out the best way to do that."

Clegg also said that, to calm market nerves in the event of a hung parliament, the Lib Dems would propose an immediate £10bn repayment of national debt, financed from £15bn of spending cuts to be outlined this month.

Speaking ahead of this weekend's Lib Dem spring conference in Birmingham, Clegg criticised the Tories for stoking fears that a hung parliament might cause a run on sterling because of market uncertainty about the ability of a minority government to reduce Britain's record £178bn deficit.

He branded the Conservative warning as "an act of economic vandalism and a political protection racket".

PM announces pay freeze for doctors, dentists and hospital consultants as well as senior managers across most of the public sector

Investigations will focus on how the MP, who is standing down at the general election, wrongly claimed the second-home allowance for four years

Police have launched an investigation into the expenses claims of the Labour MP Harry Cohen who received more than £70,000 in a second home allowance for a house he rarely visited, it was reported last night.

Cohen, who was severely criticised last month for a "particularly serious breach of the rules" by a Commons committee, is the fifth Labour MP to be subject to a Scotland Yard inquiry.

Officers will focus their investigations on how the MP, who is standing down at the general election, wrongly claimed the second-home allowance for four years.

Cohen received money for a second home when he was renting out the property designated as his main home, the standards and privileges committee said last month.

Over the past few weeks, the Metropolitan police are understood to have approached Commons authorities seeking documents relating to claims made by Cohen, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Today, three MPs, Elliot Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine, are due to appear before the courts after being charged last month with multiple offences under the Theft Act.

Another MP, Eric Illsley, is also being investigated over claims he allegedly made "phantom" claims for council tax.

The Commons committee last month called for the Leyton and Wanstead MP to become the first MP to lose a £65,000 retirement payoff to claw back the wrongly claimed money.

Attention has focussed on a Colchester home bought by Cohen in 1998 which he told the Commons authorities was his main residence. He used his second-home allowance to fund a home in his north-east London constituency, which was in accordance with the rules.

In 2003 Cohen's wife fell ill and the couple began to spend more time in the constituency home so that Cohen could look after her while still carrying out his parliamentary duties.

As the Cohens were not using their Colchester house, they began to rent it out. From early 2004 until August 2008 they periodically let the house on six-month leases.

But Cohen continued to tell the Commons authorities that the Colchester house was his main home, thus enabling him to use the second home allowance to claim for the home in the constituency.

The parliamentary commissioner for standards, John Lyon, found that Cohen was in breach of the rule saying that an MP's main home should normally be the one where he or she spends the most nights.

As an outer-London MP, Cohen could have claimed the London supplement, instead of the second-home allowance, if he had designated his constituency home as his main home.

But the committee said Cohen claimed more than £70,000 between April 2004 and August 2008. If he had claimed the London supplement instead, he would only have been able to claim about £9,000.

Revealed: how the Cameroons plan to win the election. A matter of cheques and balances

o Why all the fuss about Lord Ashcroft's money, asks David Cameron. Our accounts are healthy - the debts are down. It was useful once, but now we don't even need it. And there is some truth to that. For the beneficial effect of the Tory poll lead has been to attract many more donations from figures and companies keen to make nice with an incoming government. The coffers are swelling. But what to do with it all? Well, already we are told a deal has been struck with an outside company that will manage the digital side of the Tory manifesto. They have great hopes for dominating the campaign in cyberspace, with an intimidating online presence and a state-of-the-art marketing blitz. There will also be an irritating flurry of Obama campaign-style text messages, sending the Cameroonian doctrine to people's mobile phones whether they want it or not. But that's not to say that the high command won't be meeting the people, and when they do, it is likely to be via upmarket battle buses of the luxurious type favoured by the multimillionaire footballers of Roman Abramovich's Chelsea. Elections are always a long, tough grind. But with money, they needn't be unpleasant.

o And what more can we say about Donal Blaney, the rightwing Conservative activist whose Young Britons' Foundation runs "madrasa" training for party election candidates? That's the foundation whose leaders say the NHS is a waste of money and global warming is a scam. Views that Tory party chairman Eric Pickles was desperate to distance himself from this week. Well, we know he writes a blog, Blaney's Blarney, and that once the "attack dog of the right" was a face on the Conservative-leaning internet channel 10 Doughty Street. And would he be the same Donal Blaney who was a councillor in Hammersmith in 1999, and chair of the party's youth wing, Conservative Future; who was forced to defend his activities after being taken to task by the Commission for Racial Equality for a campaign with the slogan Fulham Homes for Fulham People, which made questionable claims about council housing of asylum seekers? "There is no racist implication in the leaflet," insisted the party back then, but certainly the whole thing left a sour taste in the mouth. And yes, that was him.

o Twitter is the world and the world is twitter, but with the character count so limited, people can't always say what they mean. For instance, yesterday culture secretary Ben Bradshaw tweeted: "Another brilliant column by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian plus Steve Bell at his best!" But there's confusion. For did he mean the Steve Bell cartoon lampooning George Bush and David Cameron? Or was it the other Steve Bell masterwork - the one in G2 depicting Tony Blair as a war criminal? We are left trying to work it out.

o For it could be the latter. Discipline isn't what it was in these, the dog days of New Labour. People speak more freely. They even have a laugh with the press. On Tuesday, said the prime minister's spokesman, Gordon chaired a cabinet meeting at which transport secretary Lord Adonis gave a presentation of the UK high-speed rail future. "Lord Adonis received 'a ripple of applause' after he called himself 'the thin controller'," said the spokesman, a reference to the Fat Controller of Thomas the Tank Engine, he explained. "And how is John Prescott?" quipped a voice from the ranks. "Always in our thoughts," came the reply.

o Finally, for all our misgivings, the trend towards outsourcing creeps its way through every area of national life. Today, the church. This from a notice sent to parishioners in the Hertfordshire town of Berkhamsted. "Beloved members of St Peter's, if you have an hour to spare one week in six, any day of the week, would you please help by being part of the cleaning rota (or send your domestic along)." It's the very latest thing: celestial brownie points by proxy. How the other half could save itself.

o Lobby consists of 90 academics, politicians and experts
o Claim appropriate information has not been made available

Pressure on the government to organise an independent inquiry into a new generation of nuclear power stations will intensify today with a call for action from a group of 90 high-ranking academics, politicians and technical experts.

The huge lobby says the "climategate" email scandal and other events have shaken public trust in the scientific governance of environmental risk, making a wider assessment of nuclear power more important than ever.

Paul Dorfman, an energy policy research fellow at Warwick University who has been coordinating support for an inquiry, said more debate was needed for a decision on nuclear to have full democratic backing. "The kind of consultation we have had so far has been flawed and inadequate. The government has put the cart before the horse by wanting endorsement before either the design of the reactor and the way waste will be treated has been decided. There is a democratic deficit here that needs correcting," he said.

Nuclear consulting engineer John Large, another campaign signatory, agreed. "The public consultation has been a failure because the appropriate information has not been made available for the public to make a proper assessment of the benefits and risks," he said.

"We need Ed Miliband [the energy and climate change secretary] to organise an independent inquiry as he is entitled to do under the justification regulations," he added.

These two critics are standing alongside a long list of academics, such as Jerome Ravetz of Oxford University and Mark Pelling of King's College London, as well as MPs including Simon Hughes of the Liberal Democrats, Michael Meacher from Labour and Jane Davidson, the environment minister in the Welsh assembly.

A "justification" process is a requirement under European Union law but Miliband will himself be able to decide whether he needs an inquiry or not. He is believed to want to take this step as soon as possible so that new nuclear power stations could come on stream in 2017, in time to meet an expected energy shortage.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change was unable to comment on the matter last night.

On Monday, it was announced that a cross-party blueprint was being drawn up in an effort to stop the squabbling about funding for the care of elderly people (Political parties trade blows ahead of elderly social care talks, 10 March). Just a few days later though, these efforts have been sabotaged by the parties' unwillingness to compromise. Progress cannot be made in the current pressure-cooker pre-election atmosphere. The priority must be for the parties to outline their approach to the problem, rather than become trapped in ironing out the intricate details of a solution before their central visions are even defined.

But what is clear, is that each of the parties is neglecting to mention a key partner in this social care debate - the children of older people. The baby-boom generation will soon need support. It may well be that their children - in many cases affluent children - should be means-tested and assessed for contribution, in much the same way as older people themselves are asked to make a contribution. I hope that at the very least, the party manifestos will include a statement of what they intend to do. The worry is that by the time the election arrives, other priorities will take over and funding care for the elderly will slip down the agenda.

Leon Smith

Nightingale care home, London

o Localism is now the mantra of all three major parties. In principle, it's unarguable. But is also raises the key issue of who is accountable for what. In terms of government resources allocated to primary care trusts, the issue is simple. How can a government ever announce that money is going to be spent on this development or that expansion of a service when they no longer have any control over the decision-making mechanisms? This wouldn't be a problem if there were real accountability at local level. There is not. MPs or ministers can write to PCTs, hold meetings with them or require explanations. But in the end, the PCTs are responsible.

The Treasury has never liked earmarked funding. Devolving funding and responsibility ensures that reductions in spending aren't placed at the Treasury's door. It also makes it easier to announce that something will happen, even if the responsibility for delivering it doesn't lie with central government. One solution would be to ringfence funding - as was done in the early days of this government - to kickstart a particular programme. Everyone would know that the money would be absorbed locally, be it by local government or an agency. The government would get the credit for getting the service going, the politicians wouldn't be held in disrepute for promising something that the public doesn't see delivered and we would be able to have some genuine accountability.

Unfortunately, the trend is in entirely the opposite direction - which is one reason why people's disaffection with politics and politicians is so profound.

David Blunkett MP

Lab, Sheffield Brightside

The Conservative party's calls for immediate cuts to the economy have been met by a growing chorus of criticism, warning that this risks sending the economy back into recession (Report, 8 March). The government was right to stimulate the economy with a variety of measures last year and so offset some of the worst effects of the recession. Yet, as some of the world's leading economists have pointed out, the fragile nature of the recovery means that fiscal stimulus is still required. However, according to the IMF, Britain is one of only two G20 countries not currently planning any such fiscal stimulus in 2010.

A programme of government investment would not only stimulate the wider economy in the short term, but would increase long-term growth, thereby lowering the debt levels through a higher tax take. To this end, we encourage the chancellor to use the forthcoming budget to announce a second fiscal stimulus - especially in housing and transport, where investment has fallen most, and with a focus on developing a low-carbon economy - which would both help to secure economic recovery and create much needed jobs.

Colin Burgon MP

Alex Smith, Editor, Labourlist

Austin Mitchell MP

Anne Cryer MP

Alexandra Kemp, Chief Executive, West Norfolk Women and Carers' Pensions Network (personal capacity)

Bellavia Ribeiro-Addy, NUS National Officer

Billy Hayes, General Secretary, CWU

Byron Taylor, National Trade Union Liaison Officer, Trade Union & Labour Party Liaison Organisation (TULO)

Cat Smith, Vice Chair, London Young Labour

Chris Edwards, Senior Research Fellow, UEA,

Chris McCafferty MP

Chris McLaughlin, Editor, Tribune

Christopher Cramer, Professor of Political Economy of Development, SOAS

Clifford Singer, Director, The Other TaxPayers' Alliance

Colin Challen MP

Compass Youth Executive

Dave Anderson MP

David Drew MP

Dai Havard MP

Dave Prentis, General Secretary, Unison.

David Hamilton MP

Diane Abbott MP

Denis Murphy MP

Edward O'Hara MP

Ellie Gellard, Labour blogger

Grazia Ietto-Gillies, Emeritus Professor of Applied Economics, Director Centre for International Business Studies, London South Bank University

Glenda Jackson MP

Gerry Doherty, General Secretary, TSSA

Gordon Prentis MP

Prof. George Irvin, Univerity of London, SOAS.

Professor Ian Gough, Professorial Research Fellow, LSE

Hugh Lanning PCS Deputy General Secretary

Hywel Francis MP

Harriet Yeo, Labour Party NEC

Hilary Wainright, Co-Editor, Red Pepper

Ismail Erturk, Senior Lecturer in Banking, Manchester Business School

Janet Dean MP

Jeremy Corbyn MP

Jim Cousins MP

Jim Sheridan MP

Jon Cruddas MP

John Austin MP

John Ross, Editor, Socialist Economic Bulletin

John Weeks, Professor Emeritus of Economics, SOAS, University of London, and former director of the Centre for Development Policy and Research.

Jonathan Rutherford, Professor of Cultural Studies, Middlesex University

Katy Clark MP

Karen Buck MP

Keith Norman, General Secretary, ASLEF

Ken Livingstone

Kevin Maguire, Associate Editor, Mirror

Kelvin Hopkins MP

Martin McIvor, Editor, Renewal

Malcolm Sawyer, Professor of Economics, University of Leeds

Mehdi Hasan, Senior Editor (politics), New Statesman

Michael Connarty MP

Michael Meacher MP

Mick Shaw, President, FBU

Mike Wood MP

Michael Burke, Economist and contributor to Socialist Economic Bulletin

Neal Lawson, Chair, Compass

Neil MacKinnon, Chief Economist, VTB Capital

Paul Kenny, General Secretary, GMB

Paul Truswell MP

Paul Sagar, New Political Economy Network.

Pat Devine, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Manchester

Peter Kilfoyle MP

Peter Willsman Labour Party NEC

Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting, University of Essex

Richard Ascough, Regional Secretary, South Eastern GMB

Richard Murphy, Director, Tax Research UK

Roger Berry MP

Robin Murray, Fellow, Young Foundation, Author of Danger and Opportunity:Crisis and the New Social Economy

Roger Godsiff MP

Ronnie Campbell MP

Sam Tarry, National Chair, Young Labour

Sunder Katwala, General Secretary, Fabian Society (personal capacity)

Susan Himmelweit, Professor of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University

Terry Rooney MP

Tim Roache, GMB Yorkshire Regional Secretary

Tony Juniper, environmentalist

Tony Woodley, Joint General Secretary UNITE

Will Straw, Editor, Left Foot Forward

o Madeleine Bunting is spot on (Comment, 8 March). Why on earth is Labour stumbling into an election playing to Tory rules? Who decided the public were not capable of understanding it will take time - and a strategy of growth and investment - to recover from the disaster brought about by the clowns of finance? Instead we are supposed to choose between competitive cuts manifestos which are financially illiterate. The economy should not be subjected to a choice between losing an arm or a leg when it should be given a hand up.

Ric Carey

Southsea, Hampshire

o Reading Madeleine Bunting's article, I was struck by everyone's reluctance to ask the beneficiaries of the last 10 boom years - those who made money out of property and shares, or saw huge pay increases - to pay something back to help repair the public finances. It's perverse that low-paid workers should have to pick up the tab.

Scott Wilson

St Andrews, Fifeshire

Former chief of the defence staff says plans to replace Trident should be abandoned and troop numbers increased

One of the country's leading military figures last night said plans to replace the Trident nuclear missile system and build two large aircraft carriers should be abandoned and the money saved spent on alternatives more relevant to future conflicts, including a bigger army.

Lord Guthrie, the first chief of the defence staff under New Labour, said the problems facing the defence budget was "too big to massage, to trim, to rely on efficiency savings and prayer". Britain, he added, faced a "moment of decision" in shaping a new defence strategy.

"Potentially the most devastating threat which we are only just beginning to face is that from non-state aggression. This would include the use of nuclear or radiological 'dirty bombs', detonated by terrorists who are able to slip across open borders with relative ease," he said. Other threats came from cyber warfare and piracy.

Replacing the four Trident nuclear missile submarines and building two aircraft carriers and buying planes to fly from them at a combined cost of £28bn were not in his view sustainable projects, Guthrie made clear in an address to the centre-right thinktank, the Centre for Policy Studies.

A new "lightweight" option for delivering nuclear weapons, for example cruise missiles, should be explored, he said.

The RAF, meanwhile, had too many fast jets. It was committed to buying 232 Typhoon Eurofighters at a cost of £20bn. Yet missions conducted by the RAF over the past 25 years had hardly ever involved more than a dozen aircraft, he added. What the RAF really needed was "more helicopters, unmanned drones, and transport". A former head of the army and member of the special forces, he said: "The threats of the present and the future point to the need for more troops, not less. This will mean that cuts have to be found elsewhere."

Guthrie recently sharply criticised the Treasury under Gordon Brown as Chancellor for blocking funds for the armed forces, notably depriving it of helicopters. "It will take political courage and determination to ensure that the best interests of the UK are secured and I wonder whether the MoD will be capable of achieving this."

Gordon Brown's best chance of winning the election is to keep warning that the Tories would rein in spending too soon

Warning: what follows will depress you. When Gordon Brown said yesterday that "there are still real risks to the recovery" he was if anything understating the hole the economy is in. As chancellor, Mr Brown was often surprisingly accurate in his economic forecasts (it was the tax revenues he overestimated, but that is another story); yet this rather gloomy prediction - an extraordinary statement to make for a party leader going into a general election - may if anything prove to be not gloomy enough.

Consider a few scraps of recent economic news: over two years of the pound dropping like a stone - and exports in January suffered their worst drop since the summer of 2006. Yes, the medium-term outlook is slightly better - but it is still not healthy. What about the housing market, that traditionally go-go area of the UK economy? Well, the mini-boom of last year appears to have puttered out, going by the recent slide in approvals for mortgages. Again, that may improve - but low interest rates are not working their usual magic (something to do, surely, with the high-street banks not passing on the easy credit they have been getting from Threadneedle Street). Look too at the results from Northern Rock yesterday which indicate that without record-low rates and a lot of forbearance by the mortgage lenders home repossessions would be a lot higher.

As for the rest of the world, in the former powerhouse economy of the US, Wall Street is enjoying more stable banks and a tearaway stockmarket - but the housing market (which is where the global economic crisis began) is in deep trouble. Repossessions are at an all-time high; home sales are plunging (again, despite a record-low Fed funds interest rate) and the house-building industry is on its back. Consumers in Germany have gone awol. One can point to explosive growth in China, and a relatively healthy Indian economy - but these are not major markets for British exports. The brute fact remains that unless and until the western economies pick up, the UK's best hope is to continue on state life support.

The recent spurt of relatively good economic news (the confirmation that the UK is out of recession, a few positive business surveys) may now be followed by a stream of bad tidings as the various bits of fiscal stimulus are suspended and banks continue to be miserly with their loans. For Mr Brown, this means his best chance of winning the election is to keep warning that the Tories would rein in spending too soon and too unfairly and hurt the worst-off. That is broadly true, but Labour should lighten the gloom with some proposals for how it will rebuild a shattered manufacturing base and an economy still too dependent on the City.

The conditions exist for a settlement, which would limit Taliban influence to the south, preserve advances and cut corruption

Two thoughtful speeches this week dealt with the challenging legacy of America's war on terror. The first was given in London by Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5. She spoke about the use of torture by American intelligence. Britain did not, she said, condone its use or carry it out directly, but nor did this country try as hard as it should have done (or perhaps at all) to discover what its allies were up to. As a result Britain gained information from suspects subjected to extreme and illegal techniques, while claiming that it did not condone the use of them. That is a greater matter for shame and scrutiny than the government seems able to admit, connivance being only one or two steps short of commission.

The second important speech this week was made in Boston by David Miliband, the man who as foreign secretary has had to deal with the consequences of torture and the wars which brought it about. His words repay close analysis, since they stand above the routine, as a signal to the future rather than a justification of the past.

"In 1988, I would never have believed that 2010 years later I would be British foreign secretary explaining a war in Afghanistan," Mr Miliband began. That was a clue to the direction of his thinking. He knows that the Afghan war has gone wrong, cannot be won in military terms and in the form it is being fought is destroying Afghanistan rather than saving it. He could not say this directly, but did so instead by proposing a change of strategy, in which dialogue and serious compromise matter more than fighting.

"Talking to the Taliban" has become an easy slogan for many critics of the war, but it has now also become official British and - in some regards - US policy. "A political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome," the US general Stanley McChrysal said recently. Or as Mr Miliband put it in his speech: "While violence of the most murderous, indiscriminate and terrible kind started this Afghan war, politics will bring it to an end on the back of concerted military and civilian effort."

The foreign secretary does not need to persuade the British public. Six British deaths this month in Sangin alone are miserable evidence of the military struggle, and Mr Miliband is not the only politician who would like to see the fight come to an end. The American surge will not be sustained beyond 2011, as the presidential election comes closer. All this has added urgency to the search for an alternative. Tentative contacts with some Taliban figures, and a sham of an Afghan election to return a discredited president, are not in themselves a political solution.

A precipitate Nato pullout would require a latter-day version of the Soviet government's departing advice to its Afghan ally in 1989: "Forget Communism, abandon socialism, embrace Islam and work with the tribes." It would lead to the swift collapse of the Kabul regime, and chaos afterwards. But fighting on is no better. The answer, as Mr Miliband recognises, is some combination of less fighting and more talking, which could lead to a deal. This deal will not be the same as the "reconciliation" which has always been on offer - allowing Taliban fighters to surrender. The west and Kabul must compromise too. One target of Mr Miliband's speech was President Karzai, who has long since ceased to be anything other than an obstacle to a settlement. As the foreign secretary put it: "Without a genuine effort to understand and ultimately address the wider concerns which fuel the insurgency, it will be hard to convince significant numbers of combatants that their interests will be better served by working with the government than by fighting against it."

The conditions exist for a settlement. It would limit Taliban influence to the south, preserve advances such as female education, cut corruption and the number of foreign troops. Mr Miliband is right to be brave.

The debate over resourcing the armed forces that has ensued from Gordon Brown's presence at the Chilcot inquiry (Editorial, 6 March) is put into perspective by the recent failure of the MoD to respond to MPs inquiries about "black holes" in defence procurement. Without wishing to let the PM off the hook, is it not time for those responsible to be held to account? There is a long history of complacent mismanagement that appears to go unpunished, and this becomes all the more pertinent when other sectors of the government are expending huge amounts of energy to defend budgets that are, by comparison, petty cash.

Jeremy Theophilus

Sudbury, Suffolk

o The Chilcot inquiry has given rise to many accusations that our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have been under funded and inadequately equipped. It could be argued that, whenever a soldier is killed or wounded in combat, he has been inadequately protected - so there is no easy answer. One thing is certain; our troops are infinitely better equipped than those they are fighting. Those of us who fought in Normandy were painfully aware that our Shermans were much inferior to the German tanks, but nobody made political capital out of it.

Harvey Quilliam

Maghull, Merseyside

o Timothy Robey (Letters, 8th March) states "Gordon Brown told the Iraq inquiry that no request by the military for equipment had been turned down when he was chancellor This is quite different from his saying the military had everything that it needed." Is he accepting that there were things the military needed that they didn't ask for? How likely is that? There is a difference between what the military needs and what it wants. Boys and their toys cost this country quite enough as it is without requiring a blank cheque of any government - Trident being the obvious, but not the only, example.

Iain Montgomery

Glasgow

o Your editorial once again pursues your self-justifying stance against the war in Iraq by criticising Gordon Brown. By implication this means that the many people who supported the fight to rid Iraq of its dictator are also maligned. Given the failure of the security council to relieve the subjugated majority in Iraq from their predicament is in itself an indictment of this less than effective body. Brown was honest enough to claim that to take action was the right decision, and to show remorse for those who lost their lives. Iraq would never have been freed without direct action.

Colin Bower

Chelmsford, Essex

o Chilcot's statement that "life in Iraq today is almost incomparably much improved from where it was under Saddam". must be challenged. Iraqi lives continue to be blighted by the violence unleashed by a senseless and bloody war. For the chairman of the inquiry to make such a contentious remark raises serious questions of judgment.

Laurence Rowe

Manchester

o A quick answer to your editorial question "Why on earth did [Gordon Brown] not take a stand against the war?" Because, with so many Blairites on one side and anti-invasionists on the other, Brown would have split the Labour party in two. Brown is both a statesman and a party loyalist. We should be thankful.

Dr Ian Flintoff

Oxford

o In his testimony before the Chilcot inquiry, Gordon Brown said he was not privy to crucial information concerning the buildup to the war. Clare Short told the inquiry that at the beginning of 2003 several Arab countries were negotiating exile with Saddam Hussein. The right question to ask those who will be heard should be: how would have you reacted had you known that there was a way, such as Saddam's exile, to avoid a war? The entire truth needs to emerge or we will have missed an opportunity to restore the west's credibility in the promotion of human rights and democracy.

Marco Perduca

Senator, Radical party, Italy

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Dame Eliza was right to speak up for the security services, but only an inquiry will raise morale

The comments by former MI5 head Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, that the US hid from Britain's security services the torture they were meting out to detainees, at first blush appear extraordinary. They add to the growing mass of confusing and often contradictory information about Britain's knowledge of the US's mistreatment of prisoners. But she has done the right thing by speaking up, even if her remarks pose as many questions as they answer. Only an inquiry can sort this out.

Dame Manningham-Buller's revelations are bizarre on several counts. First, she said she had expressed surprise in 2002-3 to her staff that the US was able to gain so much information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but accepted as an explanation for his loquacity that he was proudly describing his achievements. Second, when she and the security services finally recognised that the US was, after all, torturing detainees, she said: "We did lodge a protest."

On the first, it seems odd that it did not occur to the security services that Sheikh Mohammed might have been tortured. By the time of his detention, the Bush administration's coercive interrogation techniques were already the subject of press comment in the US.

As for the protest, the Foreign Office - the BBC has reported - claims it cannot find any details of it. This is consonant with the shoddy record-keeping over the whole rendition issue. We need to know, once the security services did realise the US was using new interrogation tactics, under what guidelines they were operating. The prime minister promised in March 2009 that these would be published. We've still not seen them. Furthermore, it is very unsatisfactory that, having known about mistreatment of detainees and having lodged a protest about such treatment, the government still continues to rely on American assurances about rendition.

We can't carry on like this. The intelligence and security committee does not seem to have fulfilled its parliamentary role. Did the ISC know about the protest to the US? If it did, it has not told parliament. The revelations reinforce concerns about the ISC's ability to do its job properly. Reform of the way the committee's chairman is appointed is essential. A string of appointees has come out of government to chair the committee - only to return to the front bench afterwards. This revolving door should be blocked. The Wright committee's recommendation that the ISC chairman be elected by MPs, subject to a prime ministerial veto, would bolster accountability.

Whether Britain was complicit or merely ignorant about what was going on is not something that can or should be sorted out as a result of a drip-drip of revelations. Our security services, in particular, deserve better.

As Dame Manningham-Buller said herself, revelations like this will imperil morale; after all, the security services don't want to be involved in these practices. They are widely held to be counterproductive for obtaining information. The services also want the public to have confidence in them. Accountability is to their benefit. That is why we do them a disservice if we fail to get to the bottom of this. We can then draw a line under this episode and move on. Reading between the lines, I have the impression that this is what Dame Manningham-Buller wants too.

The quickest and most effective way to do this is in a brief, judge-led inquiry. With David Cameron, Nick Clegg, the government's own independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Lord Carlile, and many MPs all supporting an inquiry, and Lord Goldsmith also calling for an investigation, only ministers are resisting. Let us hope they soon relent.

For a well-adjusted pet, status dogs who hang out with teenagers beat nutty, Saturday-only labradors hands down

Right, conjure a picture of an open-jawed rottweiler, and we can begin: Alan Johnson (who has twice been bitten by a dog) this week unveiled plans to target dog-owners. Proposals include compulsory micro-chipping and compulsory insurance. The RSPCA is broadly in favour, since it throws responsibility back on to owners, after the misguided Dangerous Dogs Act branded some dogs as simply born badder than others. That legislation was framed by someone who had never met a dog: this consultation paper is more sophisticated.

There is an automatic acceptance that "status dogs" (essentially, bull breeds) in the control of young men (tacitly, who live on council estates) are a problem. Johnson said: "The vast majority of dog owners are responsible, but there is no doubt that some people breed and keep dogs for the sole purpose of intimidating others, in a sense using dogs as a weapon." By vast majority, he doesn't mean the vast majority of young men with staffordshire bull terriers, he means the vast majority of families with spaniels.

Reporters and commentators often ask why a young man would even have a tough-looking dog, as if the act of choosing that over a whippet signified evil intent. This is just not true. Everybody wears the uniform of the group to which they wish to state their belonging. Young men want to look cool, that's why they smoke and motorbikes were invented. There is a world of difference between a young man who thinks he looks cool with a tough dog, and a young man training that dog, or even encouraging it to be vicious.

Furthermore, there's a subtext here that responsible dog owning is affluent dog owning. Responsible owners automatically have third-party insurance because they have a pet policy (the leading insurer Petplan charges £33 per month to insure a staff-ridgeback cross); and they automatically have their dogs microchipped because they are so upstanding (I've yet to find a vet in London charging less than £25).

This easy assumption of equivalence between wealth and responsibility is not just insulting: in no area more than dogs is it so flagrantly wrong. Canines simply don't buy the values of the market economy: they don't want an owner with a good job - they would rather have a tramp or a teenager. I always notice how well-adjusted and biddable are the dogs of people who spend a lot of time with them - in contrast to nutty labradors who only see their owners on a Saturday and have the recall of a squirrel. Piers Claughton, the RSPCA's senior local government adviser, points out: "This is part of the problem of banging on about youths with dogs. They can have a really positive impact. We talk to quite a lot of housing providers, particularly the ones who want to try to ban dogs from estates. But there are a multitude of benefits, from being good for a young person to learn responsibility, to helping them socialise, mix with other people; a dog is a great tool for all of that."

Still, there are these figures showing a massive rise in status dogs, used as weapons or to intimidate: in London, according to recent figures, the number of dogs seized by the police went up from 263 in 2006-07 to 719 in 2008-09 and a thousand so far this year. The Metropolitan police's status dog unit wouldn't comment this week, but did issue a statement last November saying that in the seven months since its launch in March 2009 the unit had carried out 680 seizures.

"The key benefit of the new unit is that it has made the [Met] response to the problem of dangerous dogs more efficient," it said. Which is brilliant: but it means that more dogs are being seized because a special unit has been set up to seize dogs. It's not a very exact science, this. The RSPCA has figures relating to an increase in complaints about dog fights - 24 in 2004, 36 in 2005, 137 in 2006, 358 in 2007 (including 132 calls about youths with dogs/fights in streets and parks) and 284 in 2008 (including 188 calls about youths with dogs/fights in streets and parks). First, these are nationwide figures, suggesting that those thousand dogs seized by London police this year were not dogs with youths hanging about looking threatening (more probably, dogs bred for violence in organised crime circles, a very different proposition, and likely to remain unaffected whether the law comes in to require microchipping or not). Second, the figures have spiked and are actually going down. Finally, this problem is not that large.

What we're looking at, obviously, is not a dog problem but a British election.This is how our politicians fight battles: they introduce a meaningless opposition between the right-thinking and the wrong-uns, then frame overwrought plans to deal with this pilloried small group, whether it's foxhunters or dog owners. It won't make a great difference to anything, but it allows us to line up behind something that all sensible people would line up behind. And then we're supposed to feel good. It's so uninspiring. Come on, think big, little home secretary! What would Obama do? Would Obama be talking about dogs?