The treatment in court of the three MPs charged with fiddling their expenses claims was not what they are used to

For the three MPs charged with fiddling their expenses claims, it may have been the unkindest moment. Their brief, Julian Knowles, wearing one of those vast chalk-stripe suits that possibly only lawyers may, by law, ever wear, asked the chief magistrate if the trio might be excused sitting in the dock.

The chief magistrate, district judge Timothy Workman, said in the mildest and gentlest fashion that it was usual for defendants to sit exactly there. So the MPs, who had plonked themselves on comfy chairs towards the back, had to file into a glass cage in the corner of the court. It looked slightly like the bulletproof conservatory the Israelis built for Adolf Eichmann. A tiny woman, a court attendant, locked them in, possibly in case they tried to flee in time for a crucial Commons vote.

This is not the kind of treatment MPs, who are kings of the castle in parliament, are used to.

Outside Westminster magistrates court a vast crowd of photographers had gathered, and a somewhat smaller crowd of protesters. What they lacked in numbers they made up in spray-gunned anger: placards denounced "Bakers, politicians, rozzers, grasping, corrupt, filthy pigs the lot ..." Some wore pig masks, others were dressed as Guy Fawkes.

Back in the Commons there was another mini-scandal on the way. It was They Just Don't Get It, episode CXXII. Having just spend £400,000 on refurbishing one of the bars, they plan to spend another £400,000 on turning it into a day nursery for the infant children of MPs and staff. This total sum, which would buy a family home in one of London's nicer areas, has not been vetted by the relevant committee - because, we are told, there isn't time. Tories suspect it's not been checked because it would be turned down.

Back at the beak's, the clerk, a young blonde woman, read out the charges. It took around 10 minutes. The MPs stood up in their glazed cage - Jim Devine looking truculent, David Chaytor anxious, Elliott Morley brick-red and cross.

Knowles explained how his clients were going to claim the charges were none of the court's business - thanks to article 9 in the Bill of Rights, 1689, what happens in parliament stays in parliament. Workman, mild as ever, said he declined jurisdiction and packed them off for trial at the end of the month.

Outside the court there was chaos. "Oink, oink, oink" yelled the people dressed as pigs. "Bye, bye, scum, bye!" said someone else - and he was a photographer. The three MPs and their brief somehow struggled into a cab which managed - just - to drive away without crushing a dozen cameramen's feet.

I pondered what MPs' children will be taught in the new creche. If they can't agree on finger painting or stories, a burly policeman will arrive and bellow "Division!" There will be instruction in expenses. "No, Jordan, you can claim for a Wendy house because you can sit in that, but not for a doll's house. Wayne, you're very naughty, claiming for a Matchbox lorry! Make that claim for a Tonka truck, but only if it's carrying Lego bricks deemed essential for your education under terms agreed with the Fees Office ..."

Or how the rich and vacuous decide on which party to support

Lost in Showbiz doffs its chapeau to Vogue for doing our job for us this week with its Tom Wolfe-esque feature about who the "party people" will vote for in that general election thingummybob. Jade Jagger, Colin Firth's wife, someone called "model Poppy Delevigne" and other political bellwethers all put in their red cents and, believe you me, there were looks of terror around the Guardian's politics desk yesterday morning as they sensed their imminent redundancy.

To single out a favourite moment in the piece would be like choosing the best evocation of hell by Hieronymus Bosch. But one hot contender would be the tableau in which the writer interviews Jimmy Choo's Tamara Mellon about her political bent, while the two of them lie on sunloungers in St Barts with Marc Jacobs and his partner, "posing like Mr Universes in their Speedos". Astonishingly, Tamara believes that "Britain desperately needs the Conservatives". But what does St Barts need, Tammy?

Jagger fille agrees with Mellon, maintaining her family's reputation for really sticking it to the man (the man who will tax them more, mind). And her reasoning is sound - they live near her: "Dave lives round here in north Kensington" - this is call-me-Dave speak for Ladbroke Grove, readers - "They're both working parents, they've had a lot of heartbreak. I mean, which bit is wrong?" If Jade truly is looking for the wrong bit - aside from the fact that she, as a former single mother, would herself be classified very much as a wrong 'un by her chosen party - Lost in Showbiz could direct her to an earlier paragraph in the piece: "The Camerons and the Freuds are what can be called 'tight': their dinner-party gang includes Jeremy Clarkson, Alex James, Rebekah Brooks (nee Wade) and her horse-trainer husband Charlie, and Soho House founder Nick Jones and his wife Kirsty Young."

But don't worry if such political tastes differ from yours. Vogue wisely concludes that "as long as they've succeeded in inveigling their place at the [No 10] table, [celebrities] couldn't care less who the victor turns out to be". Fret no more, Mr Blair - your legacy lives on.

o John Pluthero in line for £11m under new pay plans
o Investors ready to vote against 'excessive' pay awards

Cable & Wireless faces a shareholder revolt over plans to pay senior executive John Pluthero up to £11m under a controversial incentive scheme that has already drawn fire from corporate governance bodies.

The company is also braced for protests against "golden handcuff" proposals that would lock in senior managers at one of the companies that is being demerged and separately floated on the stock exchange this month. Under the terms of the scheme, three executives would be in line for millions of pounds if targets are met.

Pluthero, a former boss of the internet company Freeserve, has already received £8m under the cash part of the company's long-term incentive plan (LTIP), but stands to collect another £3m by 2011 if he can boost the group's share price. Details of his pay arrangements are contained in the company's demerger document, which sets the stage for a breakup of the group.

Andy Kerr, of the Communication Workers Union, said: "John Pluthero is completely out of touch with both the business world and his staff. He should pay this bonus back and give Cable & Wireless workers a decent pay rise. This scandalous bonus culture for senior managers is disgraceful." The company has recently cut 1,900 jobs.

Investors say they are ready to vote against the firm's remuneration report at the annual meeting this summer because pay awards at C&W are excessive.

One shareholder who spoke on the basis of anonymity said: "C&W shouldn't be inflaming tensions at a time of heightened investor sensitivity to excessive pay in the wake of the world financial crisis.Executive remuneration has become an explosive issue."

But the company said: "We pay our executives what we consider to be a reasonable rate, in line with their duties and comparable packages at peer companies." It added that Pluthero, chairman of C&W Worldwide, and other managers had increased shareholder returns by 44% since 2006. Richard Lapthorne, group chairman, said that shareholders had "benefited" from the scheme, which had underpinned the company's revival. Shares are up 30% in three years.

The company has published a document that sets the stage for separate listings of its UK and international businesses, known respectively as C&W Worldwide and C&W Communications.

The document also outlined proposed modifications to C&W's LTIP, which last year paid out £32m to senior managers. Changes to the plan are designed to pave the way for big share awards for exceptional performance for Jim Marsh, chief executive of C&W Worldwide; Tim Weller, finance director, and Ivan Gunatilleke, chief operating officer. The proposed awards for Marsh and his colleagues reflect how C&W is trying to ensure that managers responsible for the turnaround of the British business stay at the company well beyond the demerger.

But the proposals, which will be discussed by the company with investors after the split, have angered activists who are concerned that C&W's pay policies breach best practice. Alan MacDougall, of corporate governance champions Pirc, said: "The fundamental problem here is that C&W is encouraging risk because if executives really want these rewards they could be tempted to make decisions that are not in the long-term interests of the company or its shareholders."

The demerger will begin on 22 March with the listing of C&W Communications. C&W Worldwide will follow on 26 March.

Opposition to C&W's pay plans has been the norm since 2006 when it introduced a private equity-style LTIP that was designed to pay executives cash of up to 10% of growth in shareholder returns. Shareholders said there was not enough downside and that hurdles were based on too short a timescale. The scheme could have paid out £220m in total if C&W's shares had performed even more strongly.

Last year, C&W suffered one of the biggest shareholder rebellions of the year when 38% of its investors failed to endorse its pay policy after the Association of British Insurers objected to its remunerationstance by issuing a "red top" alert.
Shareholder rebellions

Jan 2009 A majority of shareholders vote against the remuneration report of Bellway, the UK housebuilder. Widespread anger because management pay themselves bonuses despite failing to meet performance targets.

April 2009 Royal Bank of Scotland shareholders vote overwhelmingly against the remuneration policy proposed by the bank's board. UK Financial Investments, the body set up to oversee taxpayers' interests in the bank, puts its voting weight behind the protest, fuelled by the pension awarded to Sir Fred Goodwin, RBS's disgraced former chief executive.

April 2009 More than a third of BP shareholders vote against the company's executive long-term incentive plan.

May 2009 Shareholders turn on Royal Dutch Shell, the multinational oil group. In one of the biggest investor rebellions over directors' pay, about 59% of Shell shareholders vote down the company's remuneration report. They objected to the discretionary award of bonuses for 2006-08, despite the company's disappointing financial performance.

May 2009 Investors vote against plans by Provident Financial to pay a bonus and double-digit salary increases to senior executives.

December 2009 More than 55% of shareholders vote against the Punch Taverns pay report in protest at grants of shares to directors and bonus payments to directors in the wake of dismal trading.

Progressives have been vindicated. The public are far ahead, and to the left, of government on the reforms we need

In November 2008, shortly after Barack Obama's election victory, his combative chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, revealed the new administration's approach to the sudden economic downturn. "Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste," he told the New York Times. "They are opportunities to do big things."

The left, however, never seems to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Social-democratic political parties across the west are in danger of allowing the financial crisis to "go to waste". Instead of seizing this once-in-a-lifetime chance to promote a radical, progressive and even populist political and economic agenda, much of the left has retreated into a familiar and introspective comfort zone, in which navel-gazing and self-flagellation become substitutes for action.

Since the crash of 2008, I have been deluged with an endless string of invitations to meetings, seminars and conferences on the future of the left. The titles tend to reflect the underlying doom and gloom: "Where next for the left?", "Whither the left?", "Which way's left?" For the past 18 months, these fatalistic congregations of British liberals and lefties have been accompanied by a slew of equally depressing books, articles and pamphlets. The latest offering this week is an ebook jointly published by the centre-left Labour pressure group Compass, and the leftist journal Soundings, and entitled After the Crash: Reinventing the Left in Britain.

In their introduction to the collection of essays, academics Richard Grayson and Jonathan Rutherford write that "the crisis has left the elites trapped in the discredited neoliberal orthodoxy of the past". But are they "trapped"? Or has the right, in fact, been oddly liberated - to advocate "swingeing" cuts to public spending, to defend a resurgent bank bonus culture, and to condemn "big government" - which, according to David Cameron, "got us into this mess"? Eighteen months on, few, if any, of the leading neoliberal ideologues have recanted their belief in the sort of market fundamentalism that unleashed the worst financial crisis in human history.

The irony is that leftist analyses, for example, of the fragility of financial markets and the corrosive effects of inequality, have been vindicated by events. Never before in living memory have such large swathes of public and expert opinion endorsed policies and positions long advanced by the progressive end of the political spectrum. The public is to the left not simply of New Labour, but the political and media classes as a whole.

You might not know it from reading the rightwing press. In January the Telegraph claimed the latest results from the respected British Social Attitudes survey revealed that: "The public has concluded 'enough is enough' for increased taxation and raised spending on key services such as health and education, with support at its lowest for almost three decades." True. But what the Telegraph failed to focus on is that the same survey revealed the most popular view, held by 50% of the public, was for taxes and spending to remain as they are. Only 8% supported cuts.

Meanwhile, specific taxes targeted at the rich have been welcomed by voters. The new 50p top-rate tax for high-earners and the tax on bankers' bonuses remain two of the most unequivocally popular policies this Labour government has implemented. So what do ministers go and do? Lord Mandelson promises the 50p rate will be abolished as soon as possible, and Alistair Darling makes the bonus tax a one-off, temporary measure. Whatever happened to New Labour, the party of opinion polls and focus groups?

The reality is that the public are far ahead, and to the left, of the government on financial and economic reform. Polling by YouGov in February, for example, revealed that 76% of those surveyed wanted the government to introduce a law to cap bonus payments; 51% said they backed the so-called Robin Hood tax, or Tobin tax, on financial transactions; and 68% said they supported rules to split retail and investment banking. The latter view is backed by the Trotskyist governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, and the former by "Red" Adair Turner of the Financial Services Authority.

Then there is the role of the state. The right could offer no real alternative to the de facto nationalisation of the banks in 2008 - and the late Michael Foot went to his grave having seen a key section of his 1983 "suicide note" manifesto implemented by a (New) Labour government. But the hankering for state ownership of the so-called commanding heights of the economy is not restricted to the financial sector. Polls show voters in favour of the renationalisation of electricity, gas, water, the railways and the telecommunications industry.

In fact, throughout the Thatcher era, more people voted for high-spending, tax-raising parties than voted for Thatcher. Despite three decades of tacking to the right, under Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, the public has remained rather collectivist in its attitudes. Happily, recent events have only served to entrench this British mindset - and Labour's belated semi-conversion to a populist, Keynesian social democracy surely explains the narrowing of the Tory lead since the new year.

To talk therefore of a crisis of leftwing thinking is defeatist nonsense. It is the market-worshipping right that should be in crisis. But there is a serious question as to whether, after a decade-long Faustian pact with the City, Labour, as it is currently constituted, is capable of delivering the radical, progressive agenda voters crave. The party once sought to split the difference between free-market capitalism and democratic socialism by taking the "third way". In the end, under Blair and Brown, this turned out to be less a new route map for the left, than a neoliberal dead end.

So here the "where next for the left?" brigade has a point. But will the forthcoming election provoke a political realignment on the left that cuts across party, sectarian and geographical lines, and incorporates, say, the traditions and ideologies of smaller parties like the Greens and non-party, community-based organisations like London Citizens? The ubiquitous Jon Cruddas, Labour MP and former deputy leadership candidate, argues in his contribution to the Compass/Soundings ebook that alliances of this kind are not alien to the Labour party's own history.

Crisis? What crisis? There is no need for postmortems; the patient is not dead. The left should be much more confident, triumphalist even; for this is a progressive moment.

Soldiers based in Musa Qala in northern Helmand to be redeployed, but 800 troops will remain in Sangin

Control of a key town in southern Afghanistan, twice captured by British troops and where 23 were killed, is to be handed over to the US marines, it was announced today.

Five hundred British soldiers based in Musa Qala, in northern Helmand, will be redeployed further south to join most of the UK's remaining 10,000 troops in the province, Bob Ainsworth, the defence secretary, told MPs.

However, 800 British troops will remain in Sangin, described by British commanders today as one of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan. Six British soldiers have been killed there since the beginning of March, some as a result of what military sources called "increasing accuracy" in small arms fire by Taliban fighters.

Military spokesman Major General Gordon Messenger described Sangin as a place which "matters to the Taliban" as an important transit route, near a major poppy route and a narcotics region.

He described the district as "one of the most enduring problems in Helmand". The Taliban were intimidating the population at night and British and Afghan troops are manning 30 patrol bases and checkpoints.

Messenger said it was possible that responsibility for Sangin could also be handed over to the US, though defence sources said that was extremely unlikely.

Musa Qala was taken by British forces in early 2006. In October that year, the British moved out after an agreement, pressed on them by the Karzai government in Kabul, with tribal elders. In February 2007 the Taliban took over the town. In December that year it was reclaimed by British troops, supported by Afghan forces, after a fierce battle.

Defence officials said today that the 500 British troops still there will be redeployed to "thicken and deepen" the British presence in central Helmand, closer to areas where thousands have been engaged in Operation Moshtarak with US and Afghan troops.

British troops currently make up 30% of the military force in Helmand, but are responsible for the security of 70% of the region's population, a state of affairs that has been described by British commanders as nonsensical. The 10,000 British troops in the province include some 500 special forces.

Lieutenant Colonel Harry Fullerton, commander of a Household Cavalry-led battlegroup, said today: "We didn't take over a disaster at the beginning, we took over a market system which was starting to be successful. We have seen the market enlarge. We have about 1,200 stall holders in the bazaar. It hasn't been without its cost but it has been a cost worth making."

Messenger said British troops were handing over "a going concern, a success story". He said Nato commanders were considering transferring other parts of Helmand, including Kajaki, to US forces.

Labour MPs and Tory peer plead not guilty and say workings of parliament should be dealt with by parliament

Three Labour MPs and a Conservative peer charged with theft over their expenses claims are to fight to keep their cases out of the criminal courts by attempting to invoke a 320-year-old law protecting them under parliamentary privilege.

Elliot Morley, David Chaytor, Jim Devine and Lord Hanningfield appeared today at City of Westminster magistrates court to plead not guilty to charges of false accounting under the Theft Act 1968.

The cases were committed to Southwark crown court after lawyers argued they raised issues of "high constitutional importance". If convicted, the four face a maximum sentence of seven years' imprisonment.

Julian Knowles, representing the three MPs, stressed the men were not saying they were above the law. "That would be quite wrong." But, he added, "parliamentary privilege is part of the law, and it is for parliament to apply the law in their cases".

The three MPs stood together in the functional reinforced glass dock of Court One at the Horseferry Road court, a short walk from the Palace of Westminster, during their 15-minute appearance.

A request they be allowed to remain outside the dock was refused by district judge Timothy Workman. Lord Hanningfield, who gave his name as "Paul Edward Winston Lord Hanningfield, previously White", appeared alone immediately after them.

Knowles said the three MPs "unequivocally and steadfastly maintain their innocence of the charges against them". Referring to the 1689 Bill of Rights, originally designed to protect freedom of speech, he said the MPs maintained "that to prosecute them in the criminal courts for their parliamentary activities would infringe the principle of the separation of powers, which is one of the principles which underpins the UK's constitutional structure.

"The principle of the separation of powers means that whatever matter arises concerning the working of parliament should be dealt with by parliament, and not elsewhere, and should be dealt with in a manner that is consistent with the way other members have been treated."

He added that parliamentary privilege meant that "proceedings in parliament cannot be impeached or questioned in any court or place outside of parliament".

"These principles mean that it is for the House of Commons alone to decide whether the conduct of Mr Morley, Mr Chaytor and Mr Devine has been such as to call for sanction."

Morley, 57, former agriculture minister and MP for Scunthorpe, is alleged to have dishonestly claimed £30,428 more than he was entitled to in second-home expenses between 2004 and 2007 on a house in Winterton, near Scunthorpe, towards a mortgage that was paid off.

Chaytor, 60, MP for Bury North, faces charges that he claimed almost £13,000 in rent in 2005 and 2006 on a London flat which he owned, as well as £5,425 in 2007 and 2008 to rent a property in Lancashire owned by his mother. He is also alleged to have used false invoices to claim £1,950 for IT services in 2006.

Devine, 56, MP for Livingston, is alleged to have claimed £3,240 for cleaning services and £5,505 for stationery using false invoices in 2008 and 2009.

All three have been barred as standing as Labour candidates in the forthcoming general election.

Hanningfield, 69, who was suspended from the parliamentary Conservative party and stood down as leader of Essex county council, pleaded not guilty to six charges relating to claims for overnight allowances, ranging from £154 to £172, from the House of Lords between 2006 and 2009 when records allegedly show he was driven to his home near Chelmsford.

The judge agreed with the defendants' application for the cases to be heard at crown court. All were released on unconditional bail to appear at Southwark crown court on 30 March.

Three Conservative committee members walk out claiming inquiry is pursuing Labour vendetta

A Westminster inquiry into the row over Lord Ashcroft's peerage was thrown into turmoil when the Tory MPs on the committee walked out and said they were boycotting it permanently.

In what is understood to be an unprecedented move, Conservative members have withdrawn from the public administration select committee, some following discussions with the party whips.

The committee, regarded as one of the most influential in parliament, announced an inquiry into Ashcroft's ennoblement in the aftermath of the peer's revelation last week that he has non-dom status. The billionaire described how he had renegotiated an undertaking he gave as a condition of his peerage to become a full British resident to allow him to retain his non-dom status and avoid paying tax on his substantial international earnings.

The disclosure ended 10 years of speculation about Lord Ashcroft's tax status and provoked a bitter row over whether he had broken the spirit of the undertakings he had given to secure his peerage.

The Tory leadership was also embarrassed after it was revealed that no one in the party knew of his tax status until the shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, found out a few months ago, and that he in turn kept David Cameron in the dark until last month.

Sources close to the committee have confirmed the three Tory members have walked out, claiming the inquiry is pursuing a Labour vendetta. Some are under pressure from their leadership via the party whips, one senior source claimed.

It also emerged that Lord Ashcroft failed to meet a 9.30am deadline today to respond to an invitation to give evidence to the committee next Thursday. Gordon Prentice, a Labour committee member who has campaigned vociferously against the peer, made the announcement on his website. The committee has no powers to order members of the Lords to give evidence.

The remaining members met yesterday and agreed the line-up for their one-day hearing on propriety in peerages.

Hague, who as Ashcroft's closest colleague sponsored his peerage and was subject to his promise to become a permanent resident, has been invited. Hayden Phillips, the senior civil servant at the time, has also received an invitation and Baroness Dean and Lord Hurd, who were on the scrutiny committee at the time of his appointment, are also understood to be on the list.

The three Tory members of the committee, David Burrowes, Ian Liddell-Grainger and Charles Walker, will not be attending any further meetings. An end of term lunch, scheduled for today, was cancelled after they failed to turn-up.

Liddell-Grainger, MP for Bridgwater, confirmed to the Guardian that he had walked out. "I've served on that committee since I've been a member of parliament. Tony Wright has been a good chair but three weeks before a general election is called they have decided to make this committee blatantly political. It has been totally politicised and is therefore not able to function as a proper select committee any more."

He denied he had been ordered to boycott the committee by the party leadership, saying he reached the decision himself.

Burrowes, MP for Enfield, confirmed that party whips had been involved in the discussion about the committee but said did not need the whips to tell him to boycott it. He said the inquiry would become a "political circus" and argued that Lord Paul, the Labour donor and non-dom, should also give evidence. Walker could not be contacted last night.

A spokesman for the Conservatives said: "We don't believe that it [the Ashcroft inquiry] is an appropriate use of the committee." He said that the central party had not been involved in the MPs' decisions to leave the committee.

Tony Wright, the Labour chairman of the committee, defended the decision to conduct the inquiry. He said: "We are not interested in the party political dimension of this but we are interested in trying to get to the bottom of an issue about propriety that has remained unresolved for the best part of a decade."

That's how I felt when I heard that the budget due in two weeks was not going to be a "big give-away". The news came from no less an authority than the chancellor himself - speaking tonight to my BBC colleague Hugh Pym.

Given that the government is legally committed to making £57,000,000,000 worth of tax rises and spending cuts to deal with Britain's budget deficit, only the economically illiterate could imagine that there was any scope for a big give-away budget.

So, what's interesting is the politics of this.

After months of tension between Number 10 and Number 11 about how open to be about the scale of the problem and the need for cuts, the government now has an agreed strategy.

First, it is to insist that massive borrowing was the necessary price of fighting the economic crisis. Gordon Brown told me yesterday that he would not apologise for the deficit. The Conservatives reply that, in fact, the deficit stems from irresponsible spending and borrowing leading up to the crisis.

Secondly, Labour wants to persuade voters - and the markets too - that they are acting responsibly and have a credible plan to deal with the deficit, while adding that Tory plans would be excessive and risk the recovery.

Thirdly, ministers are going to spell out how they will make promised effiiciency savings of £11bn as evidence that they are capable of making the tough decisions necessary. Ed Balls has already begun to spell out cuts of several hundred million pounds which he'll make in order, he says, to protect the schools budget. The Departments of Schools, Children and Families and Health is being allowed to recycle any savings it makes, so only £7bn of these savings will be used to cut the deficit.

So, the plan is simply stated - if not simply delivered.

Labour are committed to halving the deficit - by an estimated £82bn - over four years.

They forecast that £25bn will come from growth (assuming a strong recovery in the years ahead), £19bn will come from tax rises - which have already been announced, but which have not yet been implemented - and £38bn will come from spending cuts - which have not been announced in any detail. £7bn of those cuts will also come from efficiency savings.

The chancellor says there is too much economic uncertainty to spell out the other savings he needs to make, but promises there will be a spending round this Autumn (after the election).

Ponder this for a moment: Labour will go into an election planning - on their own figures - to make £31bn of cuts.

Now, of course, the Conservatives, who say that the deficit needs to be cut quicker, must be planning to cut even more than £31bn which they, too, have not specified (though they have announced plans for a wider pay freeze than the governments and a delay in the pensionable age).

Voters have two months to ask both parties for more details of where they'll find the money.

PS Today Liam Byrne, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, outlined "the plan" on the Daily Politics and abandoned the usual Treasury caution. When asked by Andrew Neil if there might be a need for further tax rises beyond those already announced you might have expected him to say he could rule out nothing (given that forecasts can turn out to be wrong).

This is what he said instead:

Andrew Neil: "Are you telling us that you can get to a fifty percent reduction in the deficit with the tax increases we already know about?"
Liam Byrne: "Yep"
Andrew Neil: "You don't need any more?"
Liam Byrne: "No, we've set out exactly how we'll find that £19bn, and we set that out in the Pre Budget Report"
Andrew Neil: "So there will be no need to increase VAT to say 20%?"
Byrne: "We don't see a need to do that because we've made some difficult decisions about National Insurance contributions."

Historic town of Wendover in Buckinghamshire in path of London to Birmingham high-speed network

Sitting in a favourite armchair, the family's elderly collie snuffling about at his feet, Richard Cooper surveys the rolling Chilterns view he and his wife have enjoyed from the rear of their house for half a century.

"It's hardly changed at all since 1963," the 84-year-old retired businessman says. "You can just see the pylons, of course, but the trees block out the bypass." His wife, Patricia, says: "I can't imagine would it would be like if  they build this railway. It could all be  different."

Though 35 miles from central London and a mere dozen from the far north-western reaches of the tube, much of the area around Wendover has barely changed in decades. Set within a fold in the Chiltern hills, in an area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB), strict green belt rules have maintained Wendover as a distinct market town, surrounded by rolling greenery.

But if the high-speed rail plans announced by Lord Adonis come to fruition, at some point within the next 10 years what are now fields to the west of Wendover could be land bisected by the fast track. Trains could be shooting through at 250mph several times an hour at peak times.

"The area is a huge and significant green lung for London. It's completely the wrong place for this line," said Colin White, from the Chilterns Conservation Board. "It's an AONB. This is meant to be significant, not something that can just be put aside because it's inconvenient."

White's organisation visited another AONB through which a high-speed rail line was driven, the Kent Downs, now home to part of the Channel tunnel route. They did not like what they saw. "We certainly wouldn't want to see the same sort of corporate, concrete, design in the Chilterns. It's not going to be the same for someone walking on the Chilterns if the dominant thing they see is all this concrete and metal."

It's not difficult to find residents in Wendover who share White's views.

"It would ruin the whole area," says Jim Fryer, walking his daughter's poodle-spaniel cross. "My daughter lives very close to where the line would probably run. What would happen to her?"

But two other local views, perhaps more surprising, are equally common. The first is a near complete ignorance, thus far, about the plans. "I have to confess I've heard about it, but that's it," said one resident, settling off along the Ridgeway trail. In the town centre Ian Toplis, 78, gestures towards the proposed rail line site, adjoining a bypass and commuter rail link to London. "We've already got these two intruders, as it were. The bypass is quite noisy though it's helped the town. I'm not sure how much difference it would make."

Tony Ecclestone, 62, contrasts transport policy in the UK to that in southern Spain, where he has a home close to part of a high-speed rail network. "It would bring benefits to the country but affect us in Wendover, so you could say I'm split. This country is desperately short of high-speed rail communication. I think there may be an overwhelming case to put in a fast line up the Midlands, even if it goes here."

Last-minute amendment could scupper bill protecting indebted poor countries in UK courts

Legislation to protect some of the world's poorest countries from being sued by rapacious "vulture funds" in UK courts risks being scuppered tomorrow, after a Conservative backbencher tabled a last-minute amendment.

The private members' bill, sponsored by Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, has won the support of both the government and the Conservative front bench. However, its supporters fear that with parliamentary time severely limited, the amendment, from Skipton MP Philip Davies, could prevent the bill reaching its third reading tomorrow, leaving it little chance of passing before a general election.

Vulture funds buy up the debts of poor countries, often at a fraction of their face value, and pursue them through the international courts, in many instances despite agreements by other creditors to give the country debt relief.

Davies' amendment is aimed at stopping the bill applying to past judgments - an issue its sponsors believed they had resolved in parliamentary committee.

Campaigners are keen for the legislation to apply retrospectively, because it could help countries such as Liberia, which lost a $20m (£13m) case in London against two vulture funds late last year. Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleef has urged parliament to pass the new law.

Labour MP Sally Keeble, who is proposing the Debt Relief (Developing Countries) bill on Gwynne's behalf, said: "This is a wrecking amendment by someone who has form in opposing progressive legislation. This bill has all-party agreement, concessions have been made to ensure this, and efforts to derail it at this stage are completely deplorable."

Nick Dearden, director of Jubilee Debt Campaign, said: "Rather than take part in a debate to discuss concerns, Mr Davies is using parliamentary procedure to get a bill thrown out that the vast majority of MPs have signed up to. It's appalling behaviour and will mean many of the poorest countries in the world will continue suffering at the hands of reckless and unethical investors."

Conservative MP David Gauke, who led his party's discussions on the bill, stressed that Davies was acting on his own initiative, and as far as the Conservatives are concerned, the issue at stake had been satisfactorily dealt with at the committee stage.

Critics complain that it's unfair, but an all-female audience on Question Time will redress an imbalance in our political arena

The BBC's decision to run with a women-only audience on tonight's Question Time should be commended for many reasons. The show will give ordinary women, whose all-important vote the parties have been falling over themselves to court, the chance to question if there's any policy substance behind their "female-friendly" spin.

The Fawcett Society, which this week challenged all parties to answer the question "what about women?", is not yet convinced that there is. With the parties' leadership and key policymakers still overwhelmingly male and in a week when polls showed 49% of women don't feel politicians are listening to their views on the economy, this programme can only be a good thing. Of course, women are not all the same - but I'm sure nearly all of us, women and men, can agree it's not good for anyone that we still have such an unequal position in the media and politics.

Despite this there have been some grumbles about the programme.First, there's the accusation that it's unbalanced to hear more from women as this is not reflective of the make-up of the population. I couldn't agree more. Public debates that are skewed towards one group or another have less general value. Unless, of course, it's about redressing an imbalance - in this case, by creating an exception to the usual rule of men's dominance in political broadcasts as guests or contributors.

Although you can just turn on the TV and observe this phenomenon, there is more formal evidence. A study released earlier this week highlighted that women are only used as major contributors on factually based programmes on 34% of occasions and when it comes to general vox pops, women are canvassed for their opinion only a third as frequently as men. The same research showed that men were much more likely to discuss so-called "harder" items, such as politics, international affairs, science and the economy on our screens, while women were more likely to be asked to give their views on education, environment, cooking, health and culture. Which brings me to the next critique I have heard: that it's wrong that the show should be skewed towards a prescribed set of "women's issues".

If this were true, there would be cause for complaint. But as the Question Time producers have pointed out, apart from the composition of the audience it will be an "ordinary" episode in every way. In other words, it will involve hearing women's questions and perspectives on the big issues of the day or the week. These will be as diverse as the women who take part. Of course, it's entirely possible that, just as happened in parliament when women's numbers increased, there might be more questions asked on issues that tend to impact more on women's lives and equality, such as childcare, public services funding cuts and low and unequal pay.

And that wouldn't be a bad thing. Question Time plays a key role in shaping debates and supporting participation in our democracy. You only have to look at the recent furore over Nick Griffin's appearance to see its influence on public and political opinion. As such, it is as important that women are equally heard and have equal chance to hold politicians to account on its platform as it is in the wider political arena. And because both female and male politicians need to be held to account by women, I also think it's right that men will be on the panel tonight - though the rationale behind asking Monty Don - though he seems very nice - evades me.

Chairman of joint presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina says Ejup Ganic, arrested in London after extradition request from Serbia, was denied access to medicine

The British government should apologise to a former Bosnian president for his "mistreatment" in prison, the chairman of the joint presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina said today.

Ejup Ganic, who served as vice-president and president of Bosnia and Herzegovina after the break from the former Yugoslavia, was arrested at Heathrow airport on 1 March after an extradition request from Serbia.

Haris Silajdzic said he was "shocked" by Ganic's claims that he was denied access to consular assistance, to a telephone and to his medicine for three days.

He said the foreign secretary, David Miliband, had promised to investigate the complaint.

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Ganic had been in the UK for several days before being detained by police at Heathrow. The Serbian government has accused him of being responsible for the deaths of 42 Bosnian-Serb soldiers in May 1992, a month after the start of the Bosnian war.

His bail request was adjourned last week to give the Serbian authorities more time to submit evidence backing their war crime allegations and oppose bail.

Lawyers for Ganic said moves to make him face trial in Serbia were politically motivated and his arrest was illegal.

Lord Justice Laws today granted the former president bail on what he described as "stringent" conditions.

Under the conditions, Ganic - who is currently being held in Wandsworth prison, in south-west London - has to live at a specified address in the capital and must remain "within the confines" of the property between 10am and 7pm.

He is not allowed to apply for a passport or travel document, and must report to a London police station every day.

Laws said £300,000 had been provided as security by a wellwisher who the court understood was "a lady of substantial means".

Terence Kealey, the vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, paid a further £25,000 surety to be retained if Ganic breached his bail conditions.

Ganic is president of the Sarajevo school of science and technology (SSST). He had been in the UK to attend events at Buckingham University, which is partnered with the SSST.

"Prof Ganic was visiting Buckingham to attend the graduation ceremony of the second cohort of SSST students to have graduated with a degree from Buckingham," a spokeswoman for the university said.

Earlier, a Foreign Office spokesman said Miliband had met Silajdzic this morning.

"They discussed a range of issues, including the UK's strong support for Bosnia and Herzegovina's European perspective," the spokesman said.

"The foreign secretary underlined that the arrest of Dr Ejup Ganic in London on 1 March is a judicial matter, which in no way amounts to a diplomatic or political statement by the British government or any UK point of view on past events in the western Balkans.

"The foreign secretary confirmed that the UK takes its obligations towards foreign nationals in detention very seriously, and that officials will continue to look into any concerns raised by the Bosnian authorities in this regard."

Human rights are a political issue, and we should remind politicians we don't want these to be dealt with by the courts

In the debate about the future of the Human Rights Act (HRA) the power of the home secretary to issue control orders poses significant difficulties for those who favour judicial and parliamentary restraint of executive power.

This series of cases might appear to demonstrate that judicial activism has turned the tide on excessive executive power. However, as Keith Ewing has pointed out, the effect of the control order cases is judicially sanctioned detention for up to 16 hours a day and I have previously argued that the decision in AF secures the unimpressive right that the subject of a control order should be told the "essence of the case against him".

But, if I am left underwhelmed by the brilliance of the courts, I despair at the inability of parliament to hold this government to account. On 1 March the Commons voted 206 to 85 in favour of renewal of the home secretary's power to issue control orders. This was despite a report by the joint committee on human rights (JCHR), which expressed "serious concerns" about the control order system and concluding that the "control order regime is no longer sustainable".

In his 2006 book The Rebels: How Blair Lost His Majority, Philip Cowley establishes that backbench rebellion is actually far more frequent that we might sometimes assume. On that basis, it might have been hoped that, faced with a series of judicial criticisms of control orders and a report for the JCHR condemning the system, parliament might have voted against renewal of the orders - it might have effectively utilised its sunset clause. That did not happen: some familiar faces filed into the Noe's lobby, but the Aye's still had it.

The Lords did little better. They renewed the order but did at least express their dissatisfaction by tagging on an amendment stating their regret that the government has not found some other means of dealing with suspected terrorists.

I propose one partial explanation and one potential response to the failure of parliament to adequately secure our liberties.

Ewing argues that "the erosion of liberty has increased not diminished under the 'culture of liberty' created by the HRA" - this might be because the existence of an apparently activist judiciary has lulled parliament into a false sense of security. While parliamentary rebellion may be more common than is often thought, there are a number of reasons why parliamentarians may vote in favour of something about which they have serious misgivings - for example, the potential impact on one's future career if one votes against the government. The belief that the judiciary will prevent executive abuse would provide an easy salve to any uneasy conscience unwilling to vote down a weakened government during an election year.

What we must do is ensure that parliamentarians have the incentive to rebel against their party whips when told to vote in favour of rights infringing measures. We, the electorate, must demonstrate that civil liberties matter to us and that they will matter to us when we vote in the election.

The courts have done their job - over time, they have ameliorated the worst elements of the control order system - but that is not enough. Judicial activism has arguably made things worse by providing apparent judicial approval for the slightly improved, still objectionable, control order system.

To secure our rights we must end the process of juridification - whereby political issues are professionalised and surrendered to the courts to be dealt with. Rights are political: we must remind the courts, our parliamentarians and ourselves of this in the weeks and months ahead.

Intelligence security committee says 'haphazard' monitoring meant it was not known whether top secret information had been mislaid

Staff at GCHQ, the government's electronic eavesdropping centre, mislaid 35 laptops and it was not known whether the computers contained top secret information because of the agency's "haphazard" monitoring system, it emerged today.

The computer disappearances were revealed in the latest report by the parliamentary intelligence security committee (ISC), which also expressed concern about GCHQ's failure to meet the growing threat of cyber attacks, both state-sponsored and by Islamist terrorists.

Referring to the mislaid laptops, the report described GCHQ's attitude towards valuable and sensitive assets as "cavalier" and "unacceptable".

A GCHQ spokesperson today said there was no evidence that any of the material on the laptops had "got into wrong hands", but admitted: "Given the state of the records, there is no way of confirming that".

The ISC said work to tackle the threat of electronic attacks was "about one-third below the level planned".

It added: "We have been told that the shortfall is because of the difficulties GCHQ has had in recruiting and retaining skilled internet specialists in sufficient numbers."

Unexplained delays in Gordon Brown's decision to clear the report mean the period covered by it ended eight months ago.

Kim Howells, a former Foreign Office minister and the Labour chairman of the committee said today the report was "therefore considerably out of date".

He also described as a "matter of great disappointment" an eight-month delay between the time the government promised to hand over guidance given to MI5 and MI6 officers engaged with detainees and terror suspects abroad.

The committee's views on the guidance, which was eventually handed over in November, have been sent to Brown, who has the power to the censor its reports as well as over the timing of their publication.

Today's report, which covers a seven-month period up to last July, is studded with asterisks where information considered to be sensitive has been suppressed.

These areas include the money spent by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. The one figure the report does publish is £2bn, described as the single combined expenditure of the three agencies.

The document refers to "critical weaknesses" in the way GCHQ manages its contracts, including what it describes as very large and unidentified sums involved in providing the Cheltenham-based agency with a "signals intelligence modernisation programme".

In an attempt to attract more recruits, GCHQ is using video boards on the London underground and "mass marketing along commuter routes into London", the ISC report said.

MI6, the agency responsible for intelligence-gathering abroad, is also now advertising for recruits on the London underground.

The recent expansion of MI6 has exacerbated the problem of managing data, with an accompanying risk described by the head of the agency as "not knowing what we know", the report disclosed.

Voting against the devolution of policing and justice powers brought opprobrium for the UUP, but suggests a vital future role

In what has been the worst postwar parliament, the most complicated and paradoxical political event has taken place - not at Westminster, but at Stormont. From the perspective of Westminster, the most perplexing thing has been why David Cameron has reheated the Conservative relationship with the Ulster Unionists (UUP). But in truth, the utterly confusing thing is why the current leadership of the UUP sought to get back into bed with the Conservative party.

Cynics have said it's nothing more complicated than the fact that the UUP was more literally than politically bankrupt. Its HQ had been flogged off and its employees were more sensibly using their time to read the death notices in the Belfast Telegraph than the leading local paper's political pages. Certainly, they were better informed about their party's collapsing membership that way than anything their own chaotic record-keeping might have told them.

Rather than institutional failings, though, the real problem with the UUP is not who it's with, but what's it for?

This week, the UUP voted against the transfer of policing and justice from being a Northern Ireland Office responsibility to being under the control of the devolved executive at Stormont. Where to start with the ironies? The fact that the old Stormont, in days of UUP ascendancy, was brought down by Brian Faulkner, Sir Reg Empey's distant predecessor as UUP leader, gibing at responsibility for law and order being removed from Stormont to Westminster? Or the fact that the UUP, progenitor of current settlement which involves, after all, former terrorists holding political office and the democracy-negating fix of "power-sharing", now objects to the transfer of policing and justice? And this, despite the post having been neutered inside the executive, uniquely ringfenced from any possibility of Sinn Féin holding it, while counterterrorism has been properly kept as a national security responsibility.

What explains this decision, apparently at variance with the UUP's role in the process thus far? Was it a political gambit, pure and simple? If so, how did the politics work?

And if the DUP had refused to go along with the transfer of policing and justice without UUP cover, would the government really have called an election to Stormont and might the UUP have profited from this? Already, the hypotheses piled upon conjectures are stacking up, but let's ask another question: what segment of Middle Ulster would have rallied to the UUP because it caused an election, on the basis of balking at a policy it didn't oppose on principle?

From a wider, rather than a partisan, Unionist viewpoint, it's hard to see what exactly the fuss has been about the transfer of policing and justice. The post will go to the leader of the Alliance party, David Ford. You don't have to be a Marxist, or even a Republican, to appreciate that if you're not against the system, you're for it; and no political party in history has ever been more of its system than the Alliance. Indeed, the transitory condition of elected office is, for most Alliance politicians, merely filling in time before their inevitable quango appointment.

But the genius, from a Unionist point of view, of making Republicans chase after this post, was precisely that: it was Republicans doing the running, and Unionists dictating terms. Instead of the crippling crises the UUP got itself into over whether the Provos would ever do what Sinn Féin claimed they would - namely, decommission terrorist weapons, with all the attendant, rolling compromises that Republican defaults brought in their wake - political Unionism was gifted an open goal over policing and justice by Sinn Féin. Every promise Republicans leaders made their followers about how and when and why powers would be transferred simply pushed them further into a corner.

Yet, any short-term advantage of delaying tactics aside, we keep coming back to why the UUP voted against it?

One thing is sure: you can't blame David Cameron. In the last week, Cameron has supported the transfer, and, at Westminster, whipped the Tory party in support of the noxious, discriminatory 50:50 (Catholic/Protestant) recruitment quotas for the PSNI - a policy opposed by the UUP at Stormont. Whatever criticisms can be made of Cameron as a party leader, his decision to ally with the UUP doesn't fit the standard template. It hasn't been a decision made out of expediency or because polling said so, or because a shining orange figure visited Steve Hilton in a dream one night. This has been a course taken by Cameron out of sincere unionist belief, and he's to be applauded for it.

But just what does the UUP mean to do to honour its end of the accord?

The last time a Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, sought to revive the old, united Tory party almost a decade ago, it was David Trimble to whom he reached out. Both men wanted the relationship re-established, but opponents inside the UUP stopped it. This charge was led by Sir Reg Empey, a man, then as now, resolutely genial, and at the time, the chief prop to Trimble's brittle leadership. Today, Sir Reg employs as his main frontbench colleague, and the UUP's only other executive member, Michael McGimpsey. Other than Sylvia Herman, no one in the front rank of the UUP has a longer and more consistent history of seemingly principled opposition to the Tory party and Toryism.

David Trimble himself, in some ways the main prize for Cameron of the renewed relationship, has been noticeably silent on UUP opposition to the transfer, even when his old friend George Bush obeyed the cynical Foreign Office summons to intervene.

The point of recounting all this isn't to reiterate once more how bizarre Ulster politics can be, but to seek to know what the UUP thinks it is for. Is the party in the grip of liberal extremists, forced out of opportunistic necessity to fall in with a Tory party still too rightwing for many of them? Or is the point of the UUP to revert to being the Ulster branch office of the wider Tory party? Or is it even to outflank Jim Allister's TUV, attacking the DUP from the right - an obvious temptation, now that the DUP has self-consciously established itself as a responsible, mainstream party? I'd argue that however contradictory and, as it happens, tactically mistaken, the party of the Belfast agreement opposing a consequence of that agreement might appear, the future for the UUP lies in that decision. It follows that its future should be opposition.

In the wider interests of the settlement, what Stormont needs more than anything else is a genuine opposition. And that's where Reg Empey should go. Both he and the excellent new leader of the SDLP, Margaret Ritchie, should simply resign their parties' executive posts, nominate whoever Sinn Féin and the DUP dare suggest, and get on with the business of providing what any democratic system depends upon: choice.

As things stand in Northern Ireland, voters have no meaningful democracy because they are prevented from choosing whom they want in office and whom they don't. If the DUP can sit in office with Sinn Féin, the UUP ought to have the courage to sit in opposition. If the system is as flawed as some of us now claim, then the logic of such a critique from the UUP is that we should not in all honesty be part of it. The route back to power for the UUP lies in opposition: the shame of the present situation is that there are more "future UUP MPs" working in the DUP's HQ than there are sitting on the UUP's blue benches at Stormont.

As to whether such a role for a revived UUP suits Cameron's purposes for the Conservative party, that is another matter entirely.

Tremor of magnitude 7.2 strikes just minutes before inauguration of Sebastián Piñera as president

The largest aftershock since Chile's devastating earthquake 12 days ago rocked the country today, minutes before the inauguration of Sebastián Piñera as president.

The 7.2-magnitude aftershock was stronger than the 12 January quake that devastated the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. It happened along the same fault zone as Chile's 8.8-magnitude quake on 27 February, said geophysicist Don Blakeman of the US Geological Survey.

"When we get quakes in the 8 range, we would expect to see maybe a couple of aftershocks in the 7 range," he said. Chile could now expect to feel "aftershocks of the aftershock".

The tremor rocked buildings and shook windows in the capital, Santiago, and provoked nervous smiles among dignitaries arriving for the ceremony at the congressional building in coastal Valparaiso. The Bolivian president, Evo Morales, seemed briefly disoriented and Peru's Alan Garcia joked that it gave them "a moment to dance".

The outgoing president, Michelle Bachelet, arrived in an open limousine, followed by Piñera, who entered the hall of congress to loud applause and swore his oath as president.

As she prepared to hand over the government to the first rightwing president elected in 52 years, Bachelet said: "I'm leaving office with sadness for the suffering of our people, but also with my head held high, satisfied with what we have accomplished."

Bachelet led a "Viva Chile" cheer and then delivered a long goodbye from the presidential palace, La Moneda, where she lingered with a passionate crowd in the plaza outside. Supporters waved socialist party flags and pressed forward to shake her hand, give her flowers and even caress her face.

Piñera, a billionaire investor, Harvard-trained economist and airline executive with little patience for bureaucracy, asked that pomp and circumstance be mostly set aside at his inauguration. Instead, he planned a brief lunch with foreign dignitaries, then a working visit to coastal Constitución, where the tsunami following the earthquake killed many people.

After meeting with survivors, he planned to fly back to the capital, address citizens from a balcony of the presidential palace and then hold a late-night strategy session with his cabinet.

Piñera had vowed on election night to make Chile "the best country in the world", spending billions to accelerate economic growth, create a million jobs in four years and combat crime.

Now reconstruction is his top priority. Last month's earthquake killed 500 identified victims and possibly hundreds of others, destroyed or heavily damaged at least 500,000 homes and broke apart highways and hospitals. Repairing infrastructure alone will cost $5bn and overall recovery costs could soar above $15bn.

Piñera's victory ended a 20-year run for the leftist coalition that led Chile back to democracy after the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, and puts the country's relatively small business elite in power.

The Conservative technology manifesto fails to tackle what's really holding the industry back - the City's reluctance to invest

No one can accuse today's Tory technology manifesto of failing to keep up with the hot trends. Crowdsourcing parliament? Check. Superfast broadband? Check. Opensource software and open data standards? Tick. Tick. Even price comparison websites get a namecheck in this whirlwind nine-page tour through Britain's internet landscape. Perhaps Aleksandr the Meerkat would have been a more fashionable choice of cover art than the slightly retro circuit board illustration.

The report is at its best when looking at how government employs technology. Few could argue that the disastrous NHS IT programme is a sign that throwing billions at a handful of big contractors is not always the best way to procure software. It's not clear that smaller suppliers or inhouse government teams would do better, but given how bad the alternative has proved, there is no harm in trying.

Similiarly, co-opting the phrase "skunk works" from US military contractors to describe a new team of Whitehall computer experts is an unpromising lingusitic start, but a useful way of recognising that government departments have been tragically naive in their dealings with industry so far. I'll leave it to others to decide whether publishing procurement and salary data is a positive step toward government transparency or just ammunition for its critics, but it's an idea worth exploring given the public anger over MPs' expenses.

Yet public sector failure is only one side of the story. Oddly for a Conservative manifesto there is little talk about how to fix private sector shortcomings. The big wasted opportunity in recent years has not been government technology spending but the failure to develop a world-beating technology industry. Some bright spots, such as mobile telephony, have flared and dimmed. Others, such as computer games or bioscience, go under-appreciated. But by and large, Britain punches below its (considerable) scientific weight when it comes to developing world-leading technology companies. And until Silicon Fen and other would-be British clusters can seriously compete with their Californian namesake for funding and investment, the rest is all window-dressing.

The Tories know this because their own report into the subject has told them so. But neither Sir James Dyson's recent study nor today's manifesto get far into asking why. Politicians prefer to talk about things that they have direct control over, such as red-tape or innovation tax credits, but the real problem of Britain's technology industry has been a lack of private sector investment and a City that is more interested in financial engineering than software engineering.

Recessions have historically been good times to launch technology businesses. Many of Silicon Valley's biggest names, from Cisco to HP, Google and Apple rose to prominence during downturns. But you only have to look at the list of companies receiving risk capital from the City of London today to see where British investment priorities lie. The Alternative Investment Market (an offshoot of the London Stock Exchange designed to compete with the Nasdaq in New York) lists six new public fund raisings currently: two African mining companies, a Guernsey fund manager, a Brazilian shopping mall developer and a rape alarm distributor. Only one can remotely be described as a technology company, and that is based in Malaysia.

In fact, ever since the dotcom boom, the City has almost entirely turned its back on venture capital and technology flotations, preferring the shorter-term lure of hedge fund management and private equity buy-outs. Only when this fundamental imbalance in our economy is addressed are we likely to see the garages of East Anglia become the birthplace of future Hewlett-Packards. But it is hard to see George Osborne wanting to rock more boats in the City when it is those same private equity and hedge funds that serve as his biggest donors. So much simpler to stick to attacking Whitehall.

The Conservatives have promised to open up data - even the vast Treasury database, Coins. That's a powerful pitch to voters

2010 is going to see the world's first data election.

If you don't believe me, then take account of one fact: data has become trendy. It might not win you any friends at parties - of the cocktail kind, that is - but in politics, it is the buzzword of the moment.

First - and probably coolest of all - Barack Obama launched data.gov, a gateway for US government statistics as his first legislative act. Then, Gordon Brown bought in inventor of the worldwide web Tim Berners-Lee to help launch data.gov.uk - which is the (better) UK version.

Now, it's the Tories' turn. Francis Maude, the Conservative party's shadow Cabinet office minister, launched the party's digital manifesto on Thursday. And, among the pledges for high-speed broadband and making the UK the most "technology friendly" country in the world, are promises to transform government information for all of us.

The fact that our major political parties are slugging it out over which has the most open data policy is an interesting turn of events for those of us who work in this peculiar area. Governments just love measuring stuff - and the internet has given web users access to thousands of datasets from around the world, covering everything from crime and health, to education and the economy. You name it: someone, somewhere, has the answer.

And around this data has sprung up a coalition of developers, freedom of information campaigners and journalists - they even have a name: datajournalists - all looking at which bits of data they can mash-up with which others to produce amazing visualisations and expose government statistical machinations. Ironically, it was the Tories who discovered this earlier in the year when shadow home secretary Chris Grayling got his crime figures in a twist to howls of derision from across the web.

So, what have the Conservatives promised to do?

o Publish all government datasets in full or online
o Legislate to create a right to government data
o Publish ultra-local data on crime, health and education
o Publish every item of local and government and quango expenditure over £25,000, plus every project that receives EU funds
o Publish all procurement tender documents for contracts worth over £10,000

They've promised to make it accessible, which presumably means binning the PDF files central government is so fond of.

But the most significant pledge is to publish every item of government spending over £25,000. It raises the big question in public data: would the Conservatives publish Coins?

If you haven't heard of it, don't worry; the Treasury barely makes a mention of its most significant database on its website (see if you can even find it here). The Combined Online Information System (Coins) is the ultimate shopping list. It includes up to 24 million items of government expenditure, and where that spending comes from. At the moment, you can easily get the big figures for government spending by area, such as defence or education. If you want anything more detailed, it takes hours of work extracting raw data from government departments - as we did here.

Campaigners have been after Coins for ages. With access to it, it would theoretically be possible to test every single government statement on spending and show exactly how much cash has been spent in each geographical location in the UK. In the wildest imaginations of developers, you would be able to enter your postcode and up would jump exactly what has been spent on your street.

Last year, BBC reporter Martin Rosenbaum was knocked back by the Treasury in his FoI request for the data on the grounds that the quantum is just too great. More recently, data campaigners Where Does My Money Go? (with whom the Guardian Datablog, which I edit, is involved) have put in their own request. The Treasury is still thinking about it.

Well, a Tory spokesman confirmed to me earlier today: "We will publish Coins straight away if we get into government."

Roll on the data election.

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Communications operations at the Cabinet Office and Downing Street to be rearranged under 'single senior management team'

David Cameron could have the most powerful Downing Street media operation in history at his disposal if he becomes prime minister in May.

Senior civil servants are planning to merge the communications operations at the Cabinet Office and Downing Street after a likely general election in May, creating what one political source describes as a "super press office".

Gus O'Donell, the Cabinet secretary, and Jeremy Heywood, the most senior civil servant at No 10, have agreed to the plan, which has been drawn up by Simon Lewis, the prime minister's official spokesman.

A briefing note written by Lewis explaining the proposed changes was circulated to staff yesterday. Lewis describes the changes as "a sensible and significant step forward" to produce "a more effective and aligned approach".

This enlarged PR operation will have a "single senior management team", according to the briefing note, which will be headed by Lewis.

The Downing Street press office has a staff of about 12, although closer to 40 work in the communications team as a whole. A similar number are employed in the equivalent operation in the Cabinet Office.

The combined press office will be run by Vickie Sheriff, currently head of news at No 10. A new head of digital communications will report to the Cabinet Office.

According to the briefing note, a new "strategic communications unit", headed by Mark Flanagan, one of Gordon Brown's most senior media advisors, will be created. It will report to Lewis.

The Cabinet Office, effectively the head office of government, will not be dismantled and it will continue to employ dedicated communications staff. Special advisors are unaffected by the plan.

A senior political source described the changes as "structural" and pointed out that few, if any, staff will relocate from the cabinet office to No 10. "It is about deploying resources more effectively," the insider said.

The move is being justified as a cost-saving measure internally, with the Cabinet Office claiming that it will generate efficiency savings of around 10%, mainly by merging back office and support staff. Some senior jobs at the Cabinet Office are also likely to be scrapped.

In his briefing note, Lewis says those functions will be merged under the new structure, with the cabinet office's responsibility to lead "cross-Government initiatives and pro-active communications projects" combined with the responsibilities of No 10 to overse "news management, strategic planning and direct communications support for the PM". It says the changes will be implemented by 1 July.

That could hand Cameron a powerful PR team and give Andy Coulson, his director of communications and strategy, an army of advisors on which to draw if the Conservatives form the next government and the former News of the World editor follows the Tory leader into Downing Street.

There is significant overlap between the two PR departments. Downing Street and the Cabinet Office each have separate strategic communications units and websites that could easily be merged.

These changes have been under consideration for some time and they will be pushed through during the election period, when Whitehall is relatively quiet.

No 10 has been making use of new media, including Twitter and Youtube, with varied results. Sarah Brown has well over a million followers on Twitter, but Brown was ridiculed for his clumsy delivery and rictus smile when he filmed a short clip for the video-sharing website.

In theory, the Cabinet Office, which sits at the heart of government, coordinates announcements from all Whitehall departments, while the No 10 press team deals with matters relating directly to the prime minister.

The Conservative party has not been consulted about the changes.

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David Chaytor, Jim Devine, Elliot Morley and Lord Hanningfield say the workings of parliament should be dealt with by parliament

Three Labour MPs and a Conservative peer facing charges over their expenses appeared in court today to argue that their cases should be dealt with by parliament rather than the criminal justice system.

Elliot Morley, David Chaytor, Jim Devine and Lord Hanningfield answered summonses at City of Westminster magistrates court to be charged with false accounting under the Theft Act.

Their cases were referred to Southwark crown court after lawyers for the men said the case was of "high constitutional importance" and they would be arguing their right for it to be heard by parliament.

Morley, Chaytor and Devine appeared together in the dock of court No 1 as their lawyer, Julian Knowles, said that they "unequivocally and steadfastly maintain their innocence of the charges against them".

Knowles told the chief metropolitan district judge, Timothy Workman: "They also maintain that to prosecute them in the criminal courts for their parliamentary activities would infringe the principle of the separation of powers, which is one of the principles which underpins the UK's constitutional structure."

He continued: "They would argue: 'The workings of parliament should be dealt with by parliament.'"

He said the subject matter of the prosecutions was covered by parliamentary privilege conferred upon them by article nine of the Bill of Rights 1689: "Article nine provides that proceedings in parliament cannot be impeached or questioned in any court or place outside parliament."

He said: "My clients should not be understood as saying they are above the law. That would be quite wrong. Parliamentary privilege is part of the law, and it is for parliament to apply the law in their cases."

He added: "The issues raised by these three cases are of high constitutional importance."

Morley, a former agriculture minister and MP for Scunthorpe, faces two charges relating to £30,000 mortgage claims to which, it is alleged, he was not entitled.

Chaytor, the MP for Bury North, faces three charges relating to claims of £1,950 for IT services and £18,000 relating to rent.

Devine is alleged to have claimed £3,240 for cleaning services and £5,505 for stationery using false invoices. All three entered not guilty pleas.

A move to allow the three MPs to remain in the main body of the court and not to stand in the dock was refused by the judge. All three were granted unconditional bail.

Hanningfield appeared separately to plead not guilty to six charges relating to claims for overnight stays in London on nights when he was at home in Essex. His lawyer, Rupert Bowers, indicated he too would be arguing that his case was covered by parliamentary privilege. Hanningfield made no attempt to avoid standing in the dock.

The former Essex county council leader, who appeared under the name of "Paul Edward Winston Lord Hanningfield, previously White", was also granted unconditional bail.

The judge declined jurisdiction of the cases.

The parliamentary privilege argument will now be argued at Southwark crown court.

The three MPs have been barred from standing as Labour candidates at the forthcoming general election.

They left court without commenting to journalists and got into a waiting black cab accompanied by their lawyers and escorted by police officers.

There was a brief crush around the vehicle as protesters hurled abuse, shouting "pigs" and "oink, oink".

After the hearing, Hanningfield issued a statement saying he was "devastated" by the affair.

His spokesman, Mark Spragg, said: "Lord Hanningfield has devoted the last 40 years of his life to public service including both as leader of Essex county council since 2000 and as a member of the House of Lords since 1998."

David Chaytor, the MP for Bury North, is accused of providing false information on an allowances form under the Theft Act 1968.

The charge states he falsely claimed rent between September 2005 and August 2006 for 152 Hide Tower, Regency Street, London, from Sarah Elizabeth.

It adds that he claimed £12,925 by lodging a claim for £1,175 a month in rent when he was in fact the owner of the premises.

A second charge states that on or about 19 May 2006, he dishonestly filed two invoices for computer IT services worth £975.

The court document adds that they purported to show the services had been provided in February and March 2006 by Paul France.

A third charge states that between November 2005 and September 2006 he dishonestly made use of a short-hold tenancy agreement in a claim form.

This showed that between August 2007 and January 2008 he rented Delph Cottage, Castle Street, Summerseat, Bury, from Olive Trickett for £775 a month plus a month deposit.

The charge adds that Trickett was his mother and it was not permissible to lease accommodation from a family member. The total sum claimed was £5,425.

Jim Devine, the MP for Livingston, is accused of falsely claiming costs for parliamentary duties in March 2009.

The charge sheet alleges he submitted two misleading invoices worth a total of £5,505 for services provided by Armstrong Printing Ltd.

A second charge alleges that between July 2008 and May 2009 he dishonestly claimed allowances for repair, insurance or security.

The document alleges he intended to gain by submitting false invoices for services, cleaning and maintenance worth £3,240.

The services were allegedly provided between April 2009 and March 2010 by Tom O'Donnell Hygiene and Cleaning Services.

Elliot Morley, the MP for Scunthorpe, is accused of falsely claiming a furnishing allowance between March 2006 and November 2007.

The charge sheet alleges he submitted a deceptive mortgage application.

This showed £800 mortgage monthly interest was charged by the Cheltenham and Gloucester when in fact the mortgage was paid off. A total overpayment of £16,000 was made.

A second charge alleges that between April 2004 and February 2006 Morley made a further false mortgage interest claim.

Again he is accused of claiming £800 a month, a total overpayment of £14,428.67.

Lord Hanningfield, also known as Paul White, faces six charges.

The offences are alleged to have taken place in March 2006, May 2007, April 2008, July 2008, May 2009 and April 2009.

One charge states that on or about 1 April 2009, at Westminster, he made a dishonest claim for travelling allowances.

It states that Hanningfield "purported to show that you were entitled to be paid expenses when the conditions entitled you to payment of such expenses had not been fulfilled".

Sir Richard Mottram tells MPs government should be more businesslike, with secretaries of state set targets and permanent secretaries awarded bonuses on results

One of the country's most experienced senior civil servants today described the current system of government as a "variation on anarchy" calling for a radical overhaul of the system of running Whitehall.

Government should be made more businesslike, with secretaries of state set targets by the prime minister and permanent secretaries awarded bonuses on results, Sir Richard Mottram told MPs.

Setting out suggestions to reform Whitehall, Mottram suggested there was resistance to reform because "actually it suits some politicians, including some prime ministers, and it suits some officials, to run a system which is frankly a variation on anarchy, and when you have a variation on anarchy funnily enough things do not get decided and implemented in a structured, process-driven way."

Giving evidence to the public administration select committee, Mottram set out proposals to reform the management of government departments by No 10, saying that permanent secretaries - the most senior civil servants - and secretaries of state should be made to sign up to targets set by the prime minister instead of each senior mandarin being under dual pressure from the political heads of their departments and the head of the civil service.

He said: "When I was a permanent secretary I absolutely accepted that the cabinet secretary, the head of the home civil service, had authority over me.

"What I couldn't accept was that he could order me to do something which my secretary of state did not agree was the thing that had been decided by the government ... What you have to have is aligned accountability between on the one hand the secretary of state and prime minister and on the other hand the permanent secretary and the head of the civil service, the cabinet secretary."

He said that clear priorities and targets should be set for departments at the beginning of each parliament and that remuneration of permanent secretaries could be "influenced" by what they deliver.

He added: "All of this is possible to do; it is not rocket science. It just requires a much more careful focus on process and an acceptance that a group of people are going to be in charge of making these processes work and they will be identified people.

"I think those people should be civil servants who are trained up and required to run this system but actually it suits some politicians, including some prime ministers, and it suits some officials to run a system which is frankly a variation on anarchy, and when you have a variation on anarchy funnily enough things do not get decided and implemented in a structured process driven way."

Mottram was a permanent secretary in five government departments between 1992 and 2007. He is now a member of the Better Government Initiative, a group of former senior civil servants researching ways to reform Whitehall.

Last month it published a report proposing a series of reforms including reducing the numbers of laws, scrapping some special adviser roles to better clarify the distinction between civil servants and politicians and more scrutiny in parliament.

That report was one in a series that triggered today's select committee hearing, which also took evidence from Lord Sainsbury, a former science minister, and Jonathan Baume, the head of the FDA union of senior civil servants.

Mottram is no stranger to controversy. After he was caught up in the controversy over comments made by spin doctor Jo Moore that the 9/11 attacks presented a "good day to bury bad news", he was reported to say: "We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department is fucked. It's the biggest cock-up ever. We're all completely fucked."

Conservatives try to outdo Labour by promising broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps in technology manifesto

The Conservatives have launched a technology manifesto that aims to increase broadband speeds and improve access to government data as the government's digital economy bill moves quickly through parliament.

The manifesto pulls together a number of technology proposals that the Conservatives have floated in the runup to the general election, including promising superfast broadband connections of 100Mbps to most Britons and opening up data on contracts and public sector salaries.

The Tories are looking to outdo Labour by promising improved broadband speeds. Labour set a target of universal access of 2Mbps by 2012. The Tories promise 50 times that but to most citizens, not to everyone.

Rather than the controversial 50p a month levy on fixed-line phones proposed in the digital economy bill to pay for broadband rollout, the Tories promise to "unleash private sector investment to build this superfast broadband network by opening up network infrastructure, easing planning rules and boosting competition".

The party points to Singapore and South Korea, where such strategies have worked. However, Singapore is a city-state with the third highest population density in the world. Unlike the UK, it has very few rural areas. South Korea has a population density 10 times the global average and most its residents live in major cities, also making it much easier to deploy superfast broadband to most of its population.

If private sector investment does not achieve the desired target, the Conservatives would consider taking some of the licence fee settlement from the BBC currently dedicated to digital switchover.

In addition to trying to best Labour with their broadband plans, the Conservatives are trying to outdo the government's open-data plans, pledging to open up data on smaller contracts and information on public sector pay.

Their technology proposals also include changes to IT procurement so that large projects would be broken into smaller components and opened to small and medium-size businesses. They also want to create a "government skunkworks" to speed the development of low-cost IT projects.

The technology manifesto is couched in terms of economic development. Quoting Nesta, the Conservatives say their plans for a superfast broadband network will create 600,000 jobs and add £18bn to Britain's GDP. For their open-data proposals, they cite new research by Dr Rufus Pollock of Cambridge University which says open-data programmes could create £6bn in additional value to the UK.

Apart from the internet and IT, the manifesto also called for the creation of a high-speed rail network and a smart electrical grid.

There are exactly eight weeks to go before 6 May - the probable date of the general election. As polling day approaches, hardy perennial issues such as the economy, crime and education will get plenty of attention. But what of the issues we won't be hearing about?

Michael White explores the topics that candidates will be sidestepping on the doorsteps.

Meanwhile in the studio Seumas Milne, Polly Toynbee and Deborah Orr provide their own examples.

Leave yours in the comment section below.

Also on this week's show we hear from Conservative frontbencher David Willetts. He appeared at an event at Guardian HQ this week to argue that a breakdown in trust between the generations has helped to bring about what his party calls a "broken society".

Why has the phrase resonated above all others for the Tories - and is it backed up by evidence? Polly Toynbee, who took part in the debate, disputes the premise of the Tory argument.

Next week Politics Weekly will be recorded live at Manchester University. For details of how you can get tickets for the event on Tuesday 14 March click here.

David Chaytor, Jim Devine and Elliot Morley appear in dock

Three Labour MPs accused of expenses fraud said they would plead not guilty when they appeared in court today.

Elliot Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine appeared in the dock at City of Westminster magistrates court after an application from their barrister for them to be allowed to sit outside the dock was rejected.

The three MPs were released on unconditional bail and ordered to appear at Southwark crown court on 30 March.

At the hearing the three backbenchers told district judge Timothy Workman they denied any wrongdoing.

Their prosecution, at a court a short distance from parliament, is the first to result from the Westminster expenses scandal.

Workman declined jurisdiction and agreed with an application by the defence for the case to be heard at the crown court.

Julian Knowles, counsel for the three MPs, said the case raised issues of constitutional importance and it was right that it should be tested at the higher court.

The three politicians gathered in a consultation room after the hearing to speak to their legal team.

The three MPs were accused of stealing money by abusing the parliamentary allowance system.

If found guilty, they could face jail sentences of up to seven years.

Dozens of photographers and cameramen staked out the nondescript Horseferry Road court building for the arrival of the defendants.

The men appeared in Court No 1, the highest magistrates court in England and Wales, watched by 30 reporters who queued for several hours to get a seat.

The three MPs arrived shortly afternoon, accompanied by several legal representatives. They passed through security checks without comment.

Morley, the MP for Scunthorpe, is alleged to have dishonestly claimed a total of £30,428 more than he was entitled to in second home expenses on a house in Winterton, near Scunthorpe, between 2004 and 2007 - including 18 months after the mortgage on the property was paid off.

Chaytor, the MP for Bury North, faces charges that he claimed almost £13,000 in rent in 2005 and 2006 on a London flat which he owned, as well as £5,425 in 2007 and 2008 to rent a property in Lancashire owned by his mother. He is also alleged to have used false invoices to claim £1,950 for IT services in 2006.

Devine, the MP for Livingston, is alleged to have claimed £3,240 for cleaning services and £5,505 for stationery using false invoices in 2008 and 2009.

The three MPs have been barred from standing as Labour candidates at the forthcoming general election.

The charges were announced by director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer following a nine-month investigation triggered by the leak of expenses details to the Daily Telegraph.

Earlier new details of the charges faced by the three MPs - and by a Tory peer who has been accused of expenses fraud - were published ahead of the court hearing.

Chaytor is accused of providing false information on an allowances form under the Theft Act 1968.

The charge states he falsely claimed rents between September 2005 and August 2006 for 152 Hide Tower, Regency Street, London, from Sarah Elizabeth.

It added that he claimed £12,925 by lodging a claim for £1,175 a month in rent when he was in fact the owner of the premises.

A second charge stated that on or about 19 May 2006, he dishonestly filed two invoices for computer IT services worth £975.

The court document added that they purported to show the services had been provided in February and March 2006 by Paul France.

A third charge stated that between November 2005 and September 2006 he dishonestly made use of a short-hold tenancy agreement in a claim form.

This showed that between August 2007 and January 2008 he rented Delph Cottage, Castle Street, Summerseat, Bury, from Olive Trickett for £775 a month plus a month deposit.

The charge added that Trickett was his mother and it was not permissible to lease accommodation from a family member. The total sum claimed was £5,425.

Devine is accused of falsely claiming costs for parliamentary duties in March 2009.

The charge sheet alleged he submitted two misleading invoices worth a total of £5,505 for services provided by Armstrong Printing Ltd.

A second charge alleged that between July 2008 and May 2009 he dishonestly claimed allowances for repair, insurance or security.

The document alleges he intended to gain by submitting false invoices for services, cleaning and maintenance worth £3,240.

The services were allegedly provided between April 2009 and March 2010 by Tom O'Donnell Hygiene and Cleaning Services.

Morley is accused of falsely claiming a furnishing allowance between March 2006 and November 2007.

The charge sheet alleged he submitted a deceptive mortgage application.

This showed £800 mortgage monthly interest was charged by the Cheltenham and Gloucester when in fact the mortgage was paid off. A total overpayment of £16,000 was made.

A second charge alleged that between April 2004 and February 2006 Morley made a further false mortgage interest claim.

Again he is accused of claiming £800 a month, a total overpayment of £14,428.67.

Hanningfield, also known as Paul White, faced six charges.

The offences are alleged to have taken place in March 2006, May 2007, April 2008, July 2008, May 2009 and April 2009.

One charge stated that on or about 1 April 2009, at Westminster, he made a dishonest claim for travelling allowances.

It stated that Hanningfield "purported to show that you were entitled to be paid expenses when the conditions entitled you to payment of such expenses had not been fulfilled".

Leftwing MPs, trade unionists, and economists call for further investment to nurse economy back to health

Alistair Darling was today urged to use his impending budget to introduce "a second fiscal stimulus" to help secure economic recovery.

A coalition of over 80 signatories including leftwing MPs, trade union leaders and economists seized on a speech delivered yesterday by Gordon Brown in which he signalled a resistance to spending cuts while the economy was still in "choppy waters".

Brown said yesterday: "We are at a turning point, a crossroads, for our domestic economic recovery where we have to choose now to maintain the stimulus until recovery is assured or cut it and at a crossroads for the global economic governance that will shape the next decades for us and our children, and for families and children all across the world."

A letter in today's Guardian signed by MPs including Jon Cruddas and Colin Burgon, as well as the general secretaries of the heavyweight affiliated trade unions, called on the chancellor to introduce a "second fiscal stimulus" to nurse the economy back to full health.

The letter, designed to put pressure on Darling in the run-up to the budget on 24 March, noted that, despite leading economists pointing out that the fragile nature of the recovery means that investment is still required, "Britain is one of only two G20 countries not currently planning any such fiscal stimulus in 2010".

They called for such a stimulus, particularly in areas where investment has fallen most, notably housing and transport.

The letter said: "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."

Brown said yesterday that he would not rule out using money from the higher-than-expected bonus tax on banks, or a windfall from lower-than-expected unemployment claims, to spend on further recovery stimuli, as opposed to cutting the deficit faster than at present.

He said: "We're not going to withdraw the stimulus until the recovery is assured. We're sticking to our four-year deficit reduction plan."

His speech came just a day after senior ministers discussed how to frame the debate on the economy at a cabinet meeting. One cabinet source said: "The debate is how we position ourselves when we have said we will cut the deficit within four years."

The name of the young cyclist who died near Guy's hospital on Tuesday has been released:

Friends of a medical student who was crushed to death in a collision with a tipper truck while cycling to lectures paid tribute to an "incredibly talented" young man today. Muhammad "Haris" Ahmed, 21, died instantly in the collision near London Bridge on Tuesday morning...Mr Ahmed was a fourth-year medical student at King's College and was on his way to the Guy's Hospital campus when he died at the junction of Weston Street and Snowsfields.

The piece in the Standard also quotes Jenny Jones AM. She refers also to the second cyclist to die this week:

Many of us feel a mix of sadness and anger at these latest deaths of cyclists in London. This summer the Mayor is encouraging thousands of inexperienced riders to use the cycling superhighways and share the roads with some of the main lorry routes through the capital. The most obvious action for him is to ban lorries from these cycling commuter routes at peak times. The least he can do is to re-engineer these routes to give cyclists priority.

The same comment appears here and Jones covers the waterfront of road safety issues in a piece for Progressive London:

Having spent nine years pushing for road safety to be taken seriously by the Met Police, I find that the previous slow incremental improvements are now being reversed with barely a guilty shrug from the Mayor's office.

First, there is a decline of 20 police officers, 5 PCSOs and 5 staff working on road safety. Secondly, cuts to the London Safety Camera Partnership mean the redeployment of 45 police staff, which means it's a way of letting off 280,000 speeding drivers and red light jumpers who would previously have been sent fines.

What is particularly worrying is that this cutback on enforcing the rules of the road is happening at the same time as the Mayor is promoting trials of the naked streets idea and the removal of traffic lights.

Now read on.

Conservatives try to outdo Labour by promising broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps in technology manifesto

The Conservatives have launched a technology manifesto that aims to increase broadband speeds and improve access to government data as the government's digital economy bill moves quickly through parliament.

The manifesto pulls together a number of technology proposals that the Conservatives have floated in the runup to the general election, including promising superfast broadband connections of 100Mbps to most Britons and opening up data on contracts and public sector salaries.

The Tories are looking to outdo Labour by promising improved broadband speeds. Labour set a target of universal access of 2Mbps by 2012. The Tories promise 50 times that but to most citizens, not to everyone.

Rather than the controversial 50p a month levy on fixed-line phones proposed in the digital economy bill to pay for broadband rollout, the Tories promise to "unleash private sector investment to build this superfast broadband network by opening up network infrastructure, easing planning rules and boosting competition".

The party points to Singapore and South Korea, where such strategies have worked. However, Singapore is a city-state with the third highest population density in the world. Unlike the UK, it has very few rural areas. South Korea has a population density 10 times the global average and most its residents live in major cities, also making it much easier to deploy superfast broadband to most of its population.

If private sector investment does not achieve the desired target, the Conservatives would consider taking some of the licence fee settlement from the BBC currently dedicated to digital switchover.

In addition to trying to best Labour with their broadband plans, the Conservatives are trying to outdo the government's open-data plans, pledging to open up data on smaller contracts and information on public sector pay.

Their technology proposals also include changes to IT procurement so that large projects would be broken into smaller components and opened to small and medium-size businesses. They also want to create a "government skunkworks" to speed the development of low-cost IT projects.

The technology manifesto is couched in terms of economic development. Quoting Nesta, the Conservatives say their plans for a superfast broadband network will create 600,000 jobs and add £18bn to Britain's GDP. For their open-data proposals, they cite new research by Dr Rufus Pollock of Cambridge University which says open-data programmes could create £6bn in additional value to the UK.

Apart from the internet and IT, the manifesto also called for the creation of a high-speed rail network and a smart electrical grid.

Minister says building work on 250mph route cutting journey times between London and Birmingham could begin in 2017

The government today unveiled plans for a £30bn high-speed rail network, with the first phase between London and Birmingham opening in 2026.

Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, said building work on the 250mph route could begin in 2017 once a formal public consultation has been completed.

The route linking the capital and England's second city, which will cut journey times from 84 minutes to 49 minutes, will originate at London Euston and pass through Old Oak Common, in west London, where a Crossrail interchange will transport passengers to Heathrow airport.

Controversially, the line will then run through the Chiltern hills in Buckinghamshire, past picturesque villages such as Wendover, before arriving at an intermediate stop near Birmingham airport. There will be a new terminal in Birmingham city centre, and the main body of the line will sweep through the Trent valley to join existing tracks north of Lichfield, where journeys will continue to Manchester and Scotland at conventional speeds.

"The time has come for Britain to plan seriously for high-speed rail between our major cities," said Adonis. "The high-speed line from London to the Channel Tunnel has been a clear success, and many European and Asian countries now have extensive and successful high-speed networks. I believe high-speed rail has a big part to play in Britain's future."

In a nod to Tory objections over the Heathrow proposal, Adonis said the case for a station would be examined by the former Tory transport secretary Lord Mawhinney. "A complex decision of this nature should not be taken in a knee-jerk fashion but after a full analysis of the facts and opinions," Adonis said.

The first phase will cost up to £17.4bn for 128 miles of track from London to the west Midlands, with the full 330-mile network costing £30bn.

The transport secretary also unveiled the blueprint for a wider network, with a Y-shaped route splitting off from Birmingham to go eastwards to Manchester and westwards to Sheffield and Leeds. Journey times between London and Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield would come down from about two hours 10 minutes to 75 minutes when the new network is in place.

Formal planning for the route from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds will be completed next summer, with a consultation to follow in 2012. The route to Scotland would be completed on existing lines under the current proposal, even when the Manchester and Leeds sections are completed.

Despite the Mawhinney gesture, the Conservatives attacked the detailed proposal. The Tories have pledged to build a high-speed network instead of a third runway at Heathrow, and to start construction in 2015.

Theresa Villiers, the shadow transport secretary, said: "Labour have betrayed the vision we set out three years ago for [high-speed rail]. In leaving out Heathrow and setting out plans that give no firm guarantees north of the Midlands, Labour's plans are flawed both by lack of ambition and undermined by their inability to grasp the basic truth that high-speed rail should be an alternative to a third runway, not an addition to it."

The government-backed company that drew up the plans, HS2, believes there is no business case for a direct link to Heathrow airport and some industry experts argue that the Old Oak Common interchange provides an equally good link.

Ralph Smyth, of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, described elements of the plan as "a major concern" and called on the government to listen to local people.

"By using existing and disused transport corridors as well as tunnelling, the impact on the Chilterns is less than feared," he said. "But the impact on the Warwickshire, where the line is proposed to run through open countryside, is a major concern.

"There is a strong need for more than just fine-tuning. The firm commitment to community consultation made by Lord Adonis must be backed up by real engagement and flexibility. As with the Channel Tunnel rail link, local people's contribution can help turn a contentious route into something that works both national and locally."

The Tory document in full

Manifesto in full

Quietly, and with little fanfare, the shadow defence secretary has killed off ministerial ambitions of retired army chief

When you achieve victory - of the complete, earth-scorching variety - it is always best to avoid crowing. "In war: resolution; in defeat: defiance; in victory: magnanimity," is a handy bit of advice from Winston Churchill.

Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, has clearly been thinking of Churchill after achieving a complete victory over the Tory leadership.

David Cameron had planned to appoint General Sir Richard Dannatt, the former chief of the general staff, as a minister in a Tory government. That is now toast after Lord Guthrie, the former chief of the defence staff, told the Today programme this morning that it was a "great mistake" for Dannatt to have accepted a post as adviser to the Tories.

Gurthrie's remarks are significant because he has been highly critical of Gordon Brown over defence spending and was withering about Labour MPs who condemned retired defence chiefs in the Commons yesterday as Tories.

Guthrie showed why it is unwise to cross this former SAS commander. This is what he had to say about the attacks from the Labour MPs:

I thought it was rather a desperate act and actually rather cheap. I don't think everybody is a Tory. I certainly am a crossbencher and am quite prepared to criticise anybody.

And this is what he said about the planned Dannatt appointment:

I think personally it was a great mistake. I really do. I do not think serving officers should criticise publicly.

Guthrie's remarks will be welcomed by Fox, who has fought a clever under-the-radar campaign to sideline Dannatt after Cameron went over the heads of his shadow defence team to line up the former army chief for a ministerial post.

This is what Cameron told the Tory conference in October:

When the country is at war, when Whitehall is at war, we need people who understand war in Whitehall. That's why I'm proud to announce today that someone who has fought for our country and served for 40 years in our armed forces will not only advise our defence team but will join our benches in the House of Lords and if we win the election could serve in a future Conservative government: General Sir Richard Dannatt. As we welcome him to serve with us, let us all salute those who serve our country.

Fox signalled to the world the end of Dannatt's ministerial ambitions in a little-noticed interview at the end of January. In remarks that were helpfully buried towards the end of an interview with the Sunday Times on 31 January, Fox made clear that defence chiefs had vetoed Dannatt's appointment as a minister:

They think there would be a problem in the constitutional relationships if he were to hold a ministerial role.

Fox's victory means that he will be a formidable force in a Cameron cabinet. That is quite an achievement for someone who had been subject to a whispering campaign last summer that he may not be appointed defence secretary.

And the future? Fox is still only 48. He would be one of the few cabinet ministers to have served in the last Tory government. If the Tories follow Labour's example, Cameron's successor will probably emerge from the heart of the party. Step up Liam Fox, your time may arrive, though you might have to wait a decade.

Conservatives publish document based on technology manifesto Barack Obama used in his presidential campaign, which paved the way for a 'right to data policy' in the US

The Conservative technology manifesto

The Conservatives today promised to publish online every item of central government and quango spending worth over £25,000 - including the detail of contracts.

The plans are part of a "right to data" policy that the Tories believe will promote public accountability on issues such as "fat cat salaries" .

The UK government has already set up an online data store, which includes information on big spending by policy area, including some information on contracts.

However, it has so far resisted calls to put online the Combined Online Information System (Coins), which contains the Treasury's detailed analysis of departmental spending under thousands of category headings.

The Conservative document is based on the technology manifesto Barack Obama used in his presidential campaign, which paved the way for a "right to data policy" in the US.

It claims that access to government data would unleash innovative new applications and services that could lead to an estimated £6bn in additional value for the UK.

The "radical transparency agenda" would result in every item of central government and quango spending over £25,000 being published. From next year, if the Tories won the election, government contracts for goods and services worth over £25,000 would also be published in full, including details such as break clauses and penalty measures.

Details of UK projects that receive over £25,000 of funds from Europe will also be displayed. It is not the first time that the Tories have announced the £25,000 figure. However, it has been suggested that the policy will cost more to introduce than it would save.

All procurement tender documents for contracts worth over £10,000 will also be put online to allow small and medium businesses to bid for contracts.

The Conservatives also promise to publish detailed information on the salaries of the country's 35,000 most senior civil servants, alongside the names and salaries of all central government and quango managers earning £150,000 a year or more.

The remuneration packages of local council officials earning more than £60,000 will also be available in full, as well as councillors' expenses.

The party, which has publicly committed itself to giving local councils more say over their own affairs, intends to make town halls up and down the country publish every item of spending over £500, including contracts.

Many councils already publish spending online though this is down to local discretion.

The wide-ranging document also includes plans to create the fastest high speed broadband network in Europe, which would generate 600,000 additional jobs and help set Britain up as a "European hub" for the digital and creative industries.

In a foreword to the document, George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said the manifesto proposals presented "the most ambitious technology agenda ever proposed by a British political party", which would provide a boost to British business and help create "highly paid new jobs across the country".

He added: "We will make the British government the most technology friendly in the world, and meet our ambition that the next general of Googles, Microsofts and Facebooks are British companies."

Other proposals include creating a level playing field for small and medium businesses seeking lucrative IT contracts by breaking up larger projects into smaller components.

o RMT union refuses to rule out Easter national walkout
o Talks continuing over BA cabin crew strike threat

The prospect of a national rail strike over Easter loomed larger this morning after maintenance workers voted in favour of a walkout.

The RMT union refused to rule out a bank holiday strike by thousands of Network Rail staff, and they could be joined by 5,500 signal workers whose ballot result is announced next week.

Meanwhile, a source close to the fraught peace talks between British Airways and the Unite union said informal discussions over averting a cabin crew walkout were continuing, with the possibility that strike dates would not be announced today. A source close to Bassa, Unite's cabin crew branch, said it had no wish to disrupt BA passengers.

Bob Crow, the RMT general secretary, left open the option of an Easter national rail walkout this morning and called on Network Rail to hold further talks over changes to working practices. "It could well be that both the signal workers and maintenance workers take action together," he told Sky News.

Network Rail believes it can withstand a maintenance strike for at least a week, with some branch line closures, before services are disrupted by safety measures such as speed restrictions. However, the company admitted this week that a signallers' strike could bring the busiest sections of the network to a halt because the main signalling centres, which employ around 3,000 people, would be unstaffed.

Crow said the vote, with 77% in favour on a turnout of 65%, reflected concerns over rail safety after Network Rail's decision to restructure its maintenance division. The Network Rail proposals include 1,500 redundancies, the majority voluntary.

"RMT members were faced with a stark choice in this ballot. They could either sit back and wait for these cash-led maintenance cuts to lead to another major disaster on Britain's railways or they could vote to take action to stop the attack on rail safety. They have overwhelmingly voted to take action," said Crow.

Network Rail, which has overseen a significant increase in rail passenger safety since taking over from Railtrack in 2002, has denied vehemently that the new regime could see a return to the dark days of the Hatfield crash in 2000, in which four people died, and the Potters Bar accident in 2002, which claimed the lives of seven people.

A Network Rail spokesperson said: "The way the railway is maintained and operated needs to change. Work practices that date back to the steam age should no longer have a place on a modern railway.

"We cannot allow the unions to hold this country to ransom. Negotiation is the only way this dispute will be settled, and the sooner we get around the table the better for everyone."

Unite and Bassa officials met to discuss the next steps in the industrial dispute with BA that is close to escalating into a walkout, after a deadline to secure a deal was missed yesterday evening. The general secretary of the TUC, Brendan Barber, is acting as an intermediary in the talks with BA.

The Bassa source said it had "absolutely no wish" to trigger a strike and claimed that the two sides were £10m apart in agreeing on cost-saving proposals. Unite and Bassa have offered a one-off 2.6% pay cut in talks, but BA says the proposals are still "significantly short" of its £60m cost-saving target.

In a direct appeal to Willie Walsh, BA's chief executive, the source said: "We are taking this opportunity to ask him to reconsider the formal offer of cuts we have made and to accept the sacrifices that we and our members are willing to make in order to help British Airways to protect on board service levels for its customers, and so prevent industrial action.

"What company in their right mind would refuse the offer of a pay cut from its own staff to protect the health, safety and service offered to its customers? Before ordinary peoples travel plans are unnecessarily inconvenienced we hope that common sense will prevail and that our offer is reconsidered. The deadline for calling industrial action is very close. Mr Walsh should not squander that time."

A BA spokeswoman said the airline remained available for talks. One scenario emerging today could see BA lodge a formal offer to Unite that would allow the union to extend its strike mandate while members consider the proposal. Unite must announce strike dates by Monday under rules set down by the 1992 Trade Union Act.

One key sticking point in the BA proposals is that the airline appears to have accepted the partial repeal of staffing cuts but has not gone far enough to satisfy Unite and Bassa. BA is understood to have offered the return of about 184 cabin crew positions, while Unite is seeking around 700. BA unilaterally cut staffing levels on flights by at least one flight attendant last November, after a voluntary redundancy programme.

His email describes an experience he had yesterday evening:

At Victoria Station tonight at 8.00pm London Underground closed down one of the up escalators from Victoria Line to the main concourse. They put up a sign saying it was "switched off to save energy". It goes on to say that this would happen during quieter times of the day as a way of saving energy. But this happened at 8.00pm on a weekday night when trains were still pretty full, which meant there was a queue of people trying to get up one escalator, forcing others to walk up a non-moving escalator. See Picture.

I was sceptical that any saving made would be greater than the cost of the inconvenience to Tube users (especially as there are lots of travellers with suitcases going to Gatwick airport) plus the unintended side affect of some travellers deciding to use cars or other more polluting forms of transport than Tube travel.

Interesting. The reader asks?

How much money is saved per hour turning off the escalators? My original guess that it would need to be thousands of pounds per hour, to outweigh the potential dis-benefits of the above.

Helpfully the TFL website tells us how much per year an escalator costs to run. There is a report from 2009 which states: "The amount of electricity used by an escalator varies depending on how long it is and how far it rises but as a guide will cost in the region of between £7,000 and £12,000 each year."

This is from page 33 of the London Underground Carbon Footprint report 2008, published in 2009. My reader continues:

I was surprised by these low figures. If we assume that the escalator at Victoria station is one of the more expensive ones, the hourly cost is less than £2.00 per hour: £12,000 divided by 365 days divided by 18 hours per day.

£1.83, to be exact. Well, that's what my calculator says.

In July 2009 Boris Johnson said about the £695million plan to improve the station: "This key upgrade will transform the experience for those using the station - making life easier and more convenient." But TfL's own figures suggest it doesn't make economic or environmental sense to turn off escalators at 8.00pm in busy stations like Victoria.

I should disclose two things about this reader: one, I know him to be a very competent person; two, he is a Labour Party member. That done, I'll be asking TfL if they think he has a point.

Watchdog says couple claimed money from the second home allowance to which they were not entitled because their central London property had in effect become their main home

The Labour MPs Alan and Ann Keen were today ordered to repay £1,500 after an investigation found that they had broken Commons rules in relation to second home expenses.

The Commons standards and privileges committee said that the couple had claimed money from the second home allowance to which they were not entitled because their main home was empty and uninhabitable.

But the committee said that they should not have to repay all the money they were deemed to have claimed wrongly because the Commons authorities told them twice their arrangements were acceptable.

In a report, the committee also said the pair had been the victims of "malign and sometimes false" reporting in the media.

Alan Keen, MP for Feltham and Heston, and his wife Ann, a health minister and MP for Brentford and Isleworth, own a house in Brentford. In 2002 they bought a flat near parliament, which they used when the Commons was sitting and which they funded using the second home allowance.

In May 2008 the Keens began to renovate their Brentford home. They began to spend most of their time living in their central London flat and in December 2008 they had their Brentford home boarded up. They did not stay there overnight again until October 2009 and in the summer of 2009, after their case was publicised in the press, the house was occupied by squatters.

John Lyon, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, launched an inquiry into a complaint that they continued to claim the second home allowance when their central London property had in effect become their main home.

Lyon said that, even though the Commons authorities approved the claims, the Keens were ultimately responsible for what they did and that they had committed "a serious misjudgment".

But the committee, which considered Lyon's report, said that it was taking "a more lenient view". It said the fact that the Keens' claims were approved by the Commons department of resources was "a very significant mitigating factor".

The committee said that the Keens should have stopped claiming the second home allowance between June and October 2009 and that they had therefore received £5,678 to which they were not entitled. But it also said they should only have to repay £1,500 because of the "exceptional factors" in the case.

The data is unequivocal: investing in scientific research during times of recession results in economic growth

On Tuesday night, the science representatives of the three main parties jovially debated in front of a heaving Westminster audience, all pushing the agenda that science is now a central election issue.

Quite right too. All evidence suggests that increased expenditure in basic research results in economic growth. Conservative shadow science minister Adam Afriyie immediately set up their stall the wrong way round, by declaring that mending the economy came before investing in science. Science minister Lord Drayson countered, as he always does, by engaging well with critics, saying the right thing, but appearing hamstrung by his own party.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Royal Society, under Lord Martin Rees's excellent leadership, has the very clearest view on what needs to be done. Published on Monday, their report entitled The Scientific Century: Securing Our Future Prosperity is a masterful document, packed with robust data, and well written to boot. In it, they recommend a long-term strategy of ring-fenced investment, and increased funding towards people rather than projects. It plays down the sometimes false dichotomy of "basic" as opposed to "applied" research, but reasonably promotes revenue generating academic-industry collaboration.

This debate doesn't just centre on research. It also comes in a school education, and the Royal Society's report hammers home the primary importance of specialist science teachers. Afriyie cited shadow children's secretary Michael Gove's predictable declaration last week that the curriculum should return to the old school and comprise "traditional" lessons. Bizarrely, they are claiming to battle endemic dumbing down not by employing the knowledge of education experts, but by asking celebrities. To shape the science curriculum, Gove volunteered public scientists and figures including lords Rees and Winston, the publicity-courting Baroness Greenfield and Carol Vorderman. While no doubt these have all achieved excellence in particular fields, none is a school-level educational professional.

The New Labour project was in the thrall of expert advice, sometimes taking it, and in the case of the sacking of drugs advisor David Nutt, conspicuously ignoring it. The Conservatives appear to be following suit. Alongside their celebrity-endorsed curriculum, yesterday they issued a report by vacuum cleaner manufacturer James Dyson. It's not a bad document, glossy and vaguely in line with that of the Royal Society. But alongside Afriyie's statements in the debate, it's hard to see past this as being anything other than vacuous lip service, if you'll forgive the inevitable pun. Dyson, for the record, manufactures his vacuums, not in the UK, but in Malaysia.

The Lib Dems' Evan Harris is the only MP who genuinely appears to understand both the scientific process and the import of investing in that process to ensure our future. His position that the science budget can only be cut after we are out of recession is spot on. A coalition brought on by a hung parliament could result in the installation of this man as a science minister who will drive a genuinely progressive policy for the benefit of everyone. In a hung parliament, though, his position will be weakened in enacting those policies.

Science must be a major election issue. The data is unequivocal: investing in basic research during times of recession results in economic growth. That investment comes primarily at university level, and in hard times, by ring-fencing research council budgets. The current government has made some key progress on sorting out the science curriculum (such as on the teaching of evolution), but before 2009, the UK failed to meet its targets on attracting more secondary teachers into science and maths every year for a decade.

With little to call between the main parties on many issues, promises on how to bust the economic depression will be critical. Whichever party most heartily adopts the Royal Society's recommendations will secure the UK's future economically and, more importantly, create the science-literate society and research-driven economy we should all aim for. As this august organisation so pithily says: "Unless we get smarter, we'll get poorer."

Follow the train of events as the government's plans for a high-speed rail network are made public

12.02pm:
The Tory peer says the proposals "lack cost detail", contain "no viable route options" and there is no indication of when detailed planning will begin.

12.00pm:
Here's the detailed route:

11.56am:
The reports can be found on the Department of Transport website.

Adonis has stopped speaking.

A Conservative peer (sorry, not sure of her name) says she "half-congratulates" the government.

11.55am:
The main London terminal would be Euston, while in Birmingham it would be Curzon Street.

Former transport secretary Lord Mawhinney has been appointed to investigate whether a new station should be built at Heathrow as part of the network.

An estimated 10,000 jobs would be created.

11.53am:
Adonis confirms construction would not begin until after Crossrail completed (i.e. 2017)
Estimated cost of between £15.8bn and £17.4bn for first 120 miles of network from London to West Midlands. Total cost for the Y-shaped network would be £30bn. Adonis says there would be £2 of benefit for every £1 spent.
He says it would "sustainable" because there is less carbon per passenger compared to air travel.

11.48am:
Journey times from London to the west Midlands would be reduced to between 30 and 50 minutes depending on the stations used.
Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield would be brought within 75 minutes of London, down from around two hours now. The journey time of these cities to Birmingham would also be halved.
London to Edinburgh would be about three hours.

11.44am:
The government's view is that a high-speed rail network "could be the most efficient and sustainable way to provide transport" between London and the West Midlands.

The network will be capable of carrying trains travelling at 250mph. It could triple capacity.

11.40am:
Here's Adonis

Transportl networks are the "life-blood" of UK trade he says. We need a "high capacity" and "efficient" network.

11.38am:
Still waiting for Adonis. The Mail suggests the government can't afford the rail link.

This is the Conservatives' preferred route from Arup:

11.16am:
The Tories would take the high speed link closer to Heathrow (approximately two minutes closer) and take begin construction in 2015 (two years earlier).
They say:

Labour have got high speed rail wrong for the economy and wrong for the environment. Their line to Birmingham leaves the North, Scotland and Wales out of the massive social, economic and regeneration benefits of high speed rail. And failing to take high speed rail through Heathrow, would be a big mistake and a major lost opportunity for the environment. Labour's deeply misguided support for a third runway has distorted their approach to high speed rail.

11.12am:
It's rare to have good news stories regarding transport in the UK, but today might fit the bill. As rail workers and BA staff prepare to strike, the transport secretary, Lord Adonis, will stand up in the Lords at 11.30 to announce plans for a high-speed rail network, including a London to Birmingham route.

The announcement has been widely previewed - here is a good ITN curtain-raiser video, and Adonis wrote about his plans in the Times - but there are plenty of details to be confirmed. They include:

o The precise speeds and journey times.
o The cost and how it will be funded.
o When construction will begin (2017 is considered the earliest date).
o The environmental impact; it will go throught the Chiltern hills, an area of outstanding natural beauty in England and Wales.
o The route beyond Birmingham and estimated timescale for the V-shaped network touted to run through Manchester to Glasgow on the west side of the UK, and Leeds and Edinburgh on the east side.

The journey (if you were the train driver) would look something like this, although not quite as fast.

The Tories, incidentally have called the plans a "big mistake". More on that to follow

Comparative performance that can be measured - and good practice copied - is a valuable response to those who want to merge things to make them 'more efficient'

If the levels of police stop and search activities against black and south Asian Britons are as disproportionate as Vikram Dodd's report suggests in today's Guardian much hard work remains to be done. But there's a silver lining all the same.

Today's alarm is sounded by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which is threatening to denounce as "racist" those police forces that persist in excessive stop and search against ethnic minority citizens. Its report is due out next month.

The EHRC's research suggests that the Metropolitan police is still the prime offender despite robust efforts in recent years to recruit ethnic minority officers. It's an important ingredient in improving the performance of any large institution that should reflect the community it serves.

The Met was deemed to be responsible for 120,000 "excessive" stops, a power used up to five times as often as in comparable urban police forces. The Met carries out 71 stops per 1,000 people, whereas the West Midlands force covering multi-ethnic Birmingham carries out just 13.

If you break down the Met figures by race, 195 Afro-Caribbean Londoners are stopped per 1,000, compared with 78 Asian Brits and only 49 white Londoners. The stats relate only to "reasonable suspicion" stops - not public order or terrorism-related stops where (researchers claim) the figures may be worse.

The stereotypical response would be to say: "Well, young black kids are stopped more because experience probably suggests they are more likely to mug Granny. If you are looking for bank fraud you look for white blokes, usually in offices."

It's crude, but whether or not there's a point there, stops aren't supposed to be based on generalisations like race or appearance.

The price paid for doing so is that a lot of respectable people get pointlessly stopped and get hacked off with the law. That's bad. In a non-racial context you could say the same of young people, especially those with long hair. Do they still get stopped on suspicion of possession? They certainly did.

Yes, but here's where the silver lining comes in. Britain has 58 separate police forces if you count the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (750 officers), the MoD police and other small entities. The Met has 31,000 officers. They all do things differently.

And the EHRC research confirms that those differences show. Brum does better than the Met. Cleveland, presumably with a more homogenous ethnic base, has cut its stop and search to one fifth while also cutting crime.

The hard-pressed Stoke division of Staffordshire police - an area with high unemployment and a BNP presence - has done something similar. In mostly-white Dorset and Hampshire they stop 10 times the number of black people, always assuming they can find them in the villages.

Comparative performance that can be measured - and good practice copied - is a valuable response to those who always want to merge things to make them bigger and "more efficient". You see the impulse in private sector mergers that end in expensive tears and in the likes of Charles Clarke who, when home secretary, wanted to bundle up small police forces.

We know that small forces can screw up major investigations (think Soham, when Humberside failed to keep a proper record of Ian Huntley's past form in child molestation), but so can large ones. But the larger the institution, the larger the gaffe. There are also obviously political dangers in a national police force in the wrong hands.

The EHRC has had teething problems - too large and unwieldy to handle diverse forms of discrimination, say critics - and a lot of people are still gunning for its high-profile chief, ex-TV reporter and Labour politician Trevor Phillips.

But the Met also has its problems, highlighted not least by last month's conviction of Ali Dizaei, the former Met commander now serving four years for perverting the course of justice. According to Hugh Muir's verdict here, Dizaei was a bad guy with a lawyer's skills who still ran rings round the colleagues. They blamed "political correctness" for the problem. But as Hugh says: "They always do."

I think we're making progress all the same, albeit not as fast as we should have done in the Met, though I see more black faces in uniform these days. Dubbing errant forces "racist"? It's so sweeping and tars everyone in the force that I recoil from it.

I did when the Macpherson report created the label "institutional racism" for the Met after the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Having read the report myself I thought I saw incompetence and a spot of corruption in the initial investigation as more relevant to the failure. I still do.

Public administration committee is not impressed by proliferation of informal appointments

There's an old Westminster gag about Labour creating more tsars than Russia. It was never particularly funny, but at least it was recognisable as a joke. Until today - when new figures have been published showing that it is actually true.

The evidence comes from the Commons public administration committee, which has published a report called Goats and Tsars about the appointment of people from outside parliament to ministerial or other government posts.

In the appendix at the end (on page 79) it includes a memo from Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, who was asked to identify all the tsars appointed by the government. He named 25, not including the health tsars. A separate memo lists another 15 health tsars working as national clinical advisers in the NHS. That makes 40.

My knowledge of Russian history is very limited. But the internet is a wonderful thing and this morning I've learned that the title tsar was used by Russian rulers from 1546 until 1917. According to this list, there were 26 of them.

Tsars are a new development in British politics. According to the report, the term was first used in relation to the NHS appointments and the first tsar appointed in a wider political context was Keith Hellawell, who became drug tsar in 1998.

The committee isn't impressed.

At present there is little transparency concerning the informal and ad hoc appointments made by government to lead on, review or promote particular policies. Job titles are often uninformative, appointment processes informal and the work undertaken opaque and not clearly linked to results. The allegation that some of these posts might have been created for the sake of a press notice may be unfair, but it is difficult to refute without greater transparency.

The committee says that the government should produce a regular list of tsars working in Whitehall and that, whenever a minister appoints a new one, the relevant department should spell out exactly what his or her responsibilities will be.

Steve Bell's If...

Conservative attempts to pander to the tabloids by 'rebalancing privacy with freedom of expression' miss the legal point

One of the strangest thing about sitting in court is hearing judges who look like old-fashioned grandfathers grappling with the intimate details of sexual encounters. I remember, as a student, the first time I heard a crown court judge running through an unbelievably detailed chronology of how two young people liked to practise "sexual intercourse", as they insist on calling it, squirming in my seat and wondering why no one else looked freaked out.

Anyone in doubt about the capacity of the civil courts to grapple with the ins and outs (forgive the phrase) of illicit sex could just flick through the judgment in the Max Mosley case. Mosley, "for reasons best known to himself, enjoyed having his bottom shaved" Mr Justice Eady, who judged the case, remarked. Mosley was having so much fun he was "shaking with laughter", Eady went on, although sadly he couldn't verify the F1 president's facial expression because "in the DVD, it was not his face on display".

There were a few giggles in the audience yesterday when Eady continued in a similar vein at the launch of a new centre for law, justice and journalism at City University. No doubt he is used to encountering more blind rage than laughter in response to some of his views. The specialist privacy judge has become famous for the ire he provokes among tabloids as for his judgments themselves. They accuse him of single-handedly creating a law on privacy, as if it were something he had plucked out of thin air. He says, not surprisingly, that the Human Rights Act did that - with parliament's assent - by bringing in article 8 of the European convention into the UK's law. And that tabloids have a vested interest in stunting the growth of privacy because they make a lot of money by routinely violating it.

Eady couldn't resist a swipe at his tabloid critics last night. And just to make sure Paul Dacre and co are well and truly wound-up, he threw in a quote from Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, who has yet to fight a privacy case because the Guardian are not in the habit of splashing on sex sessions. Last summer Rusbridger told the select committee on culture, media and sport that privacy law had so far been a problem for the kiss-and-tell business of the tabloids, rather than serious or investigative journalism.

Look closely at the sections of the press most dependent on kiss-and-tell, or its less harmless contemporary equivalents (screw six dominatrix prostitutes and tell, for example) and there is an interesting correlation with vitriol towards the human rights act. The perception that the HRA is responsible for the growth in privacy is one of the major reasons why the Mail and the News of the World are so excited at the prospect of its demise. The Tories are not ones to miss a trick here. The shadow justice secretary Dominic Grieve has lately included "the need to rebalance privacy with freedom of expression" in his list of things the Conservative party would do to "improve" the HRA.

But in the end, it all comes back down to sex. As a specialist judge on privacy, Eady has spent a disproportionate amount of his judicial career dealing with what people think they are doing behind closed doors but in fact end up doing on the front pages of the red-tops.

"Most applications in privacy cases concern sexual shenanigans of one sort or another," Eady said. The law on privacy is designed to deal with the dilemmas these shenanigans throw up. Where does a paper's right to freedom of expression give way to a footballer's right to have extra-marital sex? Where do a golfer's lucrative commercial contracts provide a valid limit to the rights of the media to report his - if only they could be more original! - extra-marital sex.

These are not straightforward questions to answer. Eady insists that they cannot be codified. "No parliamentary draftsman could have dreamt up in advance the facts of the Mosley case - or at least, if he did, he should have been doing it in his own time," Eady joked.

The point is it is more than likely beyond the imagination of the Conservative party to account for every potential privacy case. To be honest the idea of any stiff-upper-lipped men of advanced years figuring out the circumstances in which sex is private and when it can be splashed by newspapers is less than palatable. But if someone has to do it, at least judges are used to it, even if curious newcomers to court will never stop finding it weird. And so there goes another argument for the Tory bill of rights.

Critics complain that it's unfair, but an all-women audience on Question Time will redress an imbalance in our political arena

The BBC's decision to run with a women-only audience on tonight's Question Time should be commended for many reasons. The show will give ordinary women, whose all-important vote the parties have been falling over themselves to court, the chance to question if there's any policy substance behind their "female-friendly" spin.

The Fawcett Society, which this week challenged all parties to answer the question "what about women?", is not yet convinced that there is. With the parties' leadership and key policymakers still overwhelmingly male and in a week when polls showed 49% of women don't feel politicians are listening to their views on the economy, this programme can only be a good thing. Of course, women are not all the same - but I'm sure nearly all of us, women and men, can agree it's not good for anyone that we still have such an unequal position in the media and politics.

Despite this there have been some grumbles about the programme.First, there's the accusation that it's unbalanced to hear more from women as this is not reflective of the make-up of the population. I couldn't agree more. Public debates that are skewed towards one group or another have less general value. Unless, of course, it's about redressing an imbalance - in this case, by creating an exception to the usual rule of men's dominance in political broadcasts as guests or contributors.

Although you can just turn on the TV and observe this phenomenon, there is more formal evidence. A study released earlier this week highlighted that women are only used as major contributors on factually based programmes on 34% of occasions and when it comes to general vox pops, women are canvassed for their opinion only a third as frequently as men. The same research showed that men were much more likely to discuss so-called "harder" items, such as politics, international affairs, science and the economy on our screens, while women were more likely to be asked to give their views on education, environment, cooking, health and culture. Which brings me to the next critique I have heard: that it's wrong that the show should be skewed towards a prescribed set of "women's issues".

If this were true, there would be cause for complaint. But as the Question Time producers have pointed out, apart from the composition of the audience it will be an "ordinary" episode in every way. In other words, it will involve hearing women's questions and perspectives on the big issues of the day or the week. These will be as diverse as the women who take part. Of course, it's entirely possible that, just as happened in parliament when women's numbers increased, there might be more questions asked on issues that tend to impact more on women's lives and equality, such as childcare, public services funding cuts and low and unequal pay.

And that wouldn't be a bad thing. Question Time plays a key role in shaping debates and supporting participation in our democracy. You only have to look at the recent furore over Nick Griffin's appearance to see its influence on public and political opinion. As such, it is as important that women are equally heard and have equal chance to hold politicians to account on its platform as it is in the wider political arena. And because both female and male politicians need to be held to account by women, I also think it's right that men will be on the panel tonight - though the rationale behind asking Monty Don - though he seems very nice - evades me.

Ex-chief of the defence staff says Labour MPs' claims he is a Tory were 'desperate' and a 'cheap shot'

The former defence chief Lord Guthrie today renewed his attack on Gordon Brown's military spending record, saying he had been "unsympathetic" during his tenure as chancellor.

Guthrie, the first chief of the defence staff under New Labour, said claims from Labour MPs in the Commons yesterday that he was a Tory were "desperate" and a "cheap shot".

Brown responded to the criticisms on British forces radio today, saying that "urgent operational requests" were always met.

Guthrie told BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning: "I think he was unsympathetic to defence. I think everybody who has had anything to do with defence thinks that. Particularly in the early days when he was chancellor and there was a lot of money in this country and he showered it on other departments but he didn't give much to defence.

"I think nowadays the personal kit of people in Afghanistan, for instance, is better than it ever has been, but goodness it has taken some time to get there."

The issue came up at prime minister's questions in the Commons yesterday when David Cameron took Brown to task over comments by two former chiefs of defence staff - Guthrie and Admiral Lord Boyce - who had branded his evidence to the Chilcot inquiry on Iraq "disingenuous" and "dissembling". The two former chiefs argued that, while urgent operational requirements were always funded, the Treasury failed to maintain the MoD's overall budget at a level needed to fight two wars.

During heated exchanges, several Labour MPs accused the pair of being Tories.

Guthrie told the Today programme: "I thought it was rather a desperate act and rather cheap. I don't think everybody is a Tory. I certainly am a crossbencher and quite prepared to criticise anyone."

Speaking earlier on BFBS radio, Brown said it was "incredibly unfair" of Conservatives, including Sir John Major, the former prime minister, to accuse him of using a visit to troops in Afghanistan as a party political stunt ahead of the general election.

Brown insisted when giving evidence to the inquiry on Friday that he had always provided military commanders with the equipment they requested. However, the two former chiefs argued that, while urgent operational requirements were always funded, the Treasury failed to maintain the MoD's overall budget at a level needed to fight two wars.

The prime minister said today: "I think they are wrong. To be honest, I don't think it is appropriate for people to criticise us for not providing what we did provide. The urgent operational requirements that were asked for by our forces were always met."

Brown was also forced to respond to an accusation by Major that his visit to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of his appearance before the Chilcot inquiry last Friday and weeks ahead of a general election was "unbecoming conduct for a prime minister".

Brown told BFBS: "I think that is an incredibly unfair accusation. I have gone to Afghanistan every year at this time for four years. I have visited Afghanistan eight times. People are making very politically loaded statements. I was doing my duty as prime minister, going to meet our forces. I wanted to thank our troops for what they had done.

"I find it quite unusual for people to criticise me for doing what I consider to be my duty. This is nothing to do with partisan politics. It is everything to do with wanting to assure our troops that they have the support and warm wishes of everybody in Britain and that we are absolutely confident they are doing the best job they can."

In response to allegations that the government was slow to replace the soft-skinned Snatch Land Rover patrol vehicles, which are vulnerable to roadside bombs, Brown said that it was not known for some time in either Iraq or Afghanistan that enemy forces would use guerilla tactics, including homemade bombs, rather than facing allied troops in open battle.

"This happened in Iraq in about 2005-06 and it happened in Afghanistan a bit later," he said.

"The moment people realised that this was the nature of the guerilla warfare that was going to be practised, Des Browne, the defence secretary, came to me and said, 'We need to buy new vehicles' and we approved those new vehicles immediately."

The prime minister went on: "In 2006 we took a decision that we needed to do more and put about £90m in and bought Mastiffs and Ridgebacks. Then we decided to put out to competition a design for a light patrol vehicle and that is what we have done in the last few months."

An inquest earlier this week into the deaths of four soldiers in Afghanistan in 2008 heard a string of criticisms over their equipment and training. Wiltshire and Swindon coroner David Masters pledged to raise his concerns with the Ministry of Defence.

He recorded unlawful killing verdicts for Corporal Sarah Bryant, 26, the first female casualty in Afghanistan, and special forces reservists Corporal Sean Robert Reeve, 28, Lance Corporal Richard Larkin, 39, and Private Paul Stout, 31, who died when their Snatch Land Rover hit a roadside bomb in June 2008.

We're haunted by the idea that religious figures might influence the political process. But would that be such a disaster?

Pope Gregory VII haunts the English imagination. Like any self-respecting ghost he never fully reveals himself. But he's there, hovering in the background, the spectre of aggressive religious interference.

Gregory's papacy was short (1073-1085) and ended in exile and apparent defeat. But he was responsible, more than anyone else, for the transformation of Rome into a papal monarchy, which claimed the right to depose emperors and absolve subjects of their allegiance. Within 130 years, when King John was forced to surrender his entire kingdom to Pope Innocent III and receive it back as a papal vassal as a way of ending a particularly acrimonious battle with Rome, it seemed as if Gregory's mission was accomplished.

In reality the later Middle Ages saw papal power wane across Europe and the Reformation effectively stamped it out in Britain. Yet despite, indeed because of this shift in political allegiance, the papacy has ever since been a bogeyman for the English, embodying the divided loyalties which apparently make kingdoms fall.

Ghosts can scare us but they have little substance. Contemporary Christian documents on electoral issues are shy, sometimes too shy, of indicating any party political preference. In his recent encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict reiterated the Roman Catholic teaching that "the church does not have technical solutions to offer and does not claim to interfere in any way in the politics of states". Nobody reading Choosing the Common Good, the recent publication from the Catholic bishops conference of England and Wales will find a secret manifesto there. Those who react badly to papal statements on equality legislation (they tend not to react so badly to statements on economic regulation or international development) need to understand that statements are not infringements. Benedict is no Gregory.

The Church of England, once known as the Conservative party at prayer, can no longer be so described today. Studies show that Anglican clergy tend to be socially conservative, opposing moves to liberalise legislation on euthanasia, abortion and drugs, but economically left-of-centre, concerned to promote high levels of employment, to extend welfare provision and to boost Britain's overseas aid budget. Antagonistic to the Thatcher government - the Tories famously labelled the Faith in the City report "Marxist" - Anglican clergy flocked to Tony Blair's "third way" in the 90s, along with millions of others.

Arguably this political bent shapes their public statements, hence the interest in the report, Moral, But No Compass which criticised Labour for "a significant lack of understanding of, or interest in, the Church of England's current or potential contribution in the public sphere". However, there is a long way between having a reasonably coherent political view and telling your congregation how to vote. I have a yet to hear an Anglican minister tell me which spot X should mark.

On the face of it Muslims seem most likely to be be politically directed by their leaders, as they are comparatively homogeneous in their political views. In spite of the Iraq war, the majority of British Muslims consider themselves to be and intend to vote Labour. However, Islam's decentralised structure makes such political coaching highly improbable. Indeed, whether the Muslim vote is in fact a Muslim vote, as opposed to one that is simply disproportionally young, urban, lower-income and unemployed, is debatable.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying the "religious leaders tell their mindless flock which political pen to rush into" is usually just scaremongering, invoking the Gregorian ghost as a way of frightening "the rest of us" into political action or, more ominously, anti-religious feeling.

None of this is to claim that there is no tension between religious and political affiliations. The spat between John Kerry and the American Catholic bishops during the 2004 US elections, over the former's attitude to abortion, came perilously close to witnessing the bishops tell US Catholics they could not vote Democrat. Indeed, de facto that is arguably what it did.

However, even if the US Catholic bishops had done that, would it have been a problem? It may have been ecclesiastically divisive, pastorally crass, and distasteful to those Catholics who loathed George Bush (there were quite a few). But it would not have been qualitatively different to the stance taken by the "Marxist" Anglican leadership during the mid-80s, or to the violently partisan political position that Archbishop Desmond Tutu adopted in the 1980s. Perhaps religious leaders should be willing to throw themselves off the political fence with a bit more force. If we don't like what they say, we can always ignore them.

What happened at the Red Road tower blocks highlights the horror of being an immigrant in Britain

Few details are known, and even those few are very much open to dispute. But it seems that the three people who threw themselves from the tower block on Glasgow's Red Road this week were Russians. Serge Serykh, his wife, Tatiana, and her son, who has not yet been named, had first sought asylum in Canada, alleging that the Russian secret police were after them. They left Canada in 2007 after Serykh had become obsessed with the idea that the Canadian government was trying to kill him because he had uncovered their plot to assassinate the Queen. Coming to Britain, they alerted an MP to this alleged plot.

The family had not been granted leave to remain in Britain, but neither were they in immediate danger of being deported. Notice of eviction from their charity-leased flat appears to have been the most urgent trigger for their suicide pact. The idea is that Serykh had infected his wife and his stepson with his paranoia, and persuaded them to kill themselves. Yet the fact that the three had to chuck down a large wardrobe before they jumped, to break the anti-suicide netting that had been installed, is an indication that they were not the only people in the vicinity who were considered to be in danger of finding their lives intolerable.

Glasgow city council declared both the block and its neighbour unfit for habitation way back in 1980. For a long time, the blocks were leased to the YMCA, to house homeless people and students. Even before "national dispersal" became the official government policy for asylum seekers, under the 1999 Asylum and Immigration Act, asylum seekers were being housed there. Campaigners complained about dispersal. People were being sent to areas were there was little supportive infrastructure - few immigration lawyers, few translators, let alone little chance of living near family, friends or even fellow countrymen. There was not much public sympathy. After all, people were born and bred in Glasgow's Springburn day in, day out, and it was good enough for them, was it not?

It's tricky, politically, when debate around the treatment of asylum seekers serves to highlight the appalling conditions that already exist for the extant electorate. In part, that was surely the motivation behind policies that withdrew even the most basic rights from asylum seekers. So, no money, just vouchers for food. No freedom of movement for those who might bolt, even families with small children, but incarceration in a detention centre, to be on the safe side.

When detention centres were first established in Britain, their inmates were accorded the dubious distinction of being the only people in Britain who had no right to treatment under the NHS. No tiny detail that could add to the discomfort of a person held in a detention centre was left unattended to. When I interviewed a woman in Yarl's Wood detention centre, by telephone, the call was terminated every few minutes, and a return to the switchboard to apply for another snatch of the story was necessary. It was just one more petty little trick to promote isolation. The crackdown on asylum seekers very successfully moved a populist issue that was embarrassing for the government off the mainstream agenda. But if more people saw for themselves the privations that are heaped on refugees to make Britain less of a "soft touch", they would feel nothing but sadness for a world that turns its back on such a despised and cruelly treated diaspora.

The paradox, of course, is that the harrying of asylum seekers was carried out under the suspicion that they were really "economic migrants". Yet, the prevailing ideology was that economic migration was a good thing. The government used economic arguments to bolster its wider policies on immigration. Those things that annoyed the electorate - the huge pressure on scarce housing that inflated the bubble, or the downward pressure on wages that kept the minimum wage at a level considerably lower than subsistence - were the very things that were fuelling "growth", assisted not by asylum seekers but economic migrants. Now only Boris Johnson has the balls to continue defending economic migrants. They are the guys we cannot tax, in case they skip the country.

Yet some of the other reasons for the boom in immigration were even less attractive than intense relaxation about the filthy rich. Britain needed immigrants to staff the NHS. Certain developing nations even had to persuade the British government to stop recruiting in their countries, because the skills-drain was disrupting their own more fragile health systems so greatly. What an ugly sort of reverse colonisation that is.

Andrew Neather, who was once an advisor to Blair, Straw and Blunkett, and is now a journalist, last year alleged that while ministers publicly clung to the economic argument for immigration, they privately revelled in the idea that it would "rub the right's nose in diversity". This the pressure group MigrationWatch described as "dynamite", alleging that it proved that the Labour government had deliberately attempted to change the nature of Britain, and make it "multicultural". But it isn't dynamite. It's just a glimpse of the petty tribalism that too often engulfs the political process.

The debate around immigration has been crazy for years. The right claims to champion globalisation because it will spread wealth across the world. But the leading controlled experiment in globalisation in existence is Europe, which they hate. Likewise, Europe remains a pet project of the left, many of whose disparate members would claim the free market is a force to be distrusted and feared.

Essentially, for many years now, the government has pursued policies designed to deflect those who need sanctuary in Britain for reasons of compassion, and to attract those who will bring economic clout. I can't be the only person who wonders whether this might be a weird way of going about creating global economic equality.

Back in Glasgow, it is reported that Serykh was known to be suffering from severe mental illness, and his alleged story certainly does not refute that. Yet the fact that he and his family were tied together by a rope as they fell, is very much part of the singular horror of this event. One cannot help thinking that Serykh's wife and stepson must have been caught in the invisible bonds of the 43-year-old's illness for many years already, unable to access the help they needed to free themselves, anywhere. What can be done, though? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the public discourse focused on outrage about the idea that Britain was a "soft touch" for asylum seekers. The government dealt with that problem very effectively, and without a great deal of opposition. Who wants to live in a country or a world that's a soft touch for damaged, desperate, sick, troubled people, when it can be this place, a place where only the "economic argument" ever gets any traction?