Our review of the papers normally takes in the most interesting stories from across the papers.

However, occasionally there are days when one paper corners the market.  For us today, it is The Guardian.

Firstly they have the most interesting insights into the Charles Clarke/Alan Milburn leadership stirrings in the Labour party.  Secondly they devote quite a lot of space to Brighton and Hove's implementation of an idea that CentreForum has championed in the past - a ballot or lottery system for allocating entry to the Council's schools. See 'Aiming Higher: a better future for England's schools'

We should also reference a piece published in The Guardian last week called 'This is a fork in the road' where he set out why the Lib Dems voted against the extension of Control Orders.  This was written in advance of a CentreForum event called 'Security with Liberty' at which Clegg was joined by Henry Porter of The Observer, Nick Stadlen QC and David Omand, the former Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator.  Details of the event are available on the CentreForum website.  (The fact that the event was chaired by Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian's editor, might hint at our current run of good form in the paper.)

Finally, though, they report on a meeting CentreForum held yesterday entitled 'The university funding system: is further reform inevitable?'

"The blanket interest rate subsidy on student loans should be scrapped, because it only benefits successful, high-flying graduates, it was suggested today. The subsidy costs the government around £1.2bn a year, which could be better spent on widening participation, a seminar was told."

The Guardian

A transcript of the whole meeting will also  be shortly appearing on the CentreForum website and you can also read the full text of a pamphlet written on the subject that was published by CentreForum last year - 'Open universities: a funding strategy for higher education'

We may be biased, but for us today The Guardian wins hands down!

The chattering classes are behaving like self-obsessed fashionistas today fresh from London Fashion Week. 

First, the FT reports that business is increasingly upset by David Cameron's fashionable but rather empty pronouncements about business ethics. ("Cameron attacked by business for his priorities")

The Doctors are having a fashionably vague recollection of the past, according to Nigel Hawkes in his piece entitled "Few remember why they hated Tories so much" in the Times.

Tim Hames, on another fashionable subject - the legacy of Tony Blair - implies that Praising Tony is the new Damning Tony.

Like all popular stories flying around the media cycles, the 'flawed legacy' opinion has been recycled so many times that must be re-examined.  Its rather like the wordsmiths have peered into the back their journalistic closets and seen long forgotten articles - once brought out every day - but now those views have been neglected for so long that they've become fashionable again.

After starting with a Fashion Week metaphor of his own, he sets out three areas of power on the international stage - economic, political and cultural and finds the UK doing very well in all three.  This leads him to wonder "...what might appear an outlandish claim... that the real foreign policy legacy of the Blair years is that Britain has become the second most powerful country in the world." 'We're great again.  Thanks Tony' Tim Hames The Times

Finally, Jim White in The Telegraph writes a wry little piece about another current vogue - the Downing Street email petition:

"The Government's e-petitioning website has only been in operation since November, but already there is nowhere that holds a better mirror up to the national psyche. In 50 years' time, all historians need do to find out precisely what kind of Britain their forebears inhabited is study the weekly top 10 e-petitions.

What more could they learn of our society, for instance, than that 3,626 people have signed up to demand that the Prime Minister stand on his head and juggle ice cream?"
Jim White - The Telegraph

He concludes with sanguine words that all fashionistas need to keep in mind:

"...maybe that's the most valuable lesson for us e-petitioning obsessives: we may have the technological wherewithal, but that doesn't mean anyone will pay us any heed."

How true!

It was to be expected.  That Britain has been placed at the bottom of Unicef's ranking on child wellbeing was bound to lead to an avalanche of comment.  The first big wave hits the papers today - but expect more in the next few days.

In The Times Mary Ann Sieghart writes a piece on "Our generation will do all it can to help the children" The Telegraph has a report titled "Crisis point on Britain's disaffected youth"

The Guardian has two stabs at the same cherry with Libby Brooks saying its a matter of children's rights ("Its not enough to say we should listen to children" The Guardian) Whilst Michael White in the same paper writes a report picking up on Steve Webb's response for the Lib Dems:

"In any case, Steve Webb, the Liberal Democrats' Mr Wonk, said Britain had taken the American, not the Scandinavian road to "consumerist, fractured individualism" in the past 20 years, under Labour and Tory.

...Like Unicef, Mr Webb notes that national wealth, government spending levels, unemployment, even single parenthood, do not necessarily condemn a nation's children, though they are all factors. "Perhaps the UK property market is partly to blame. You can't live in half the country without being a two-income family where the parents may not see much of the kids," he observed last night."

The Guardian

Steve Webb's positioning on this debate is interesting.  He is the Lib Dem often seen to be asking for biggest tax rises.  But he is also very much associated with the Christian wing of the party, the pet views of which this story rightly plays to.

The issue generally forces us to examine our own assumptions.  No public-spirited liberals would say that the effects of children taking drugs, having sex, being unfit and spending virtually no time with their parents (amongst other sins) are a good thing. But what does the liberal Netherlands (at the top of the list) get right that so-called liberal England gets so wrong?

Also in today's news

• The Independent asks "Is Norman Baker the most hated man in Westminster"
• In America we need to remember that The Blog giveth, but that The Blog can also taketh away:  "Blog backlash hits Edwards" The Guardian
• Only Boris Johnson, newly revealed as a fellow drinking/rioting buddy of David Cameron in their Bullingdon Club days, could say:
  "... since we are really talking about the growing gulf between the middle classes and the new super-rich, we should really refer to the haves and the have-yachts." Lets have schools to match London's wealth - The Telegraph.

No one story caught the FreeThink bloggers' eyes this morning, but there is a smattering of interesting reading that pick up on various ongoing FreeThink themes.

Firstly, Lords reform.  It seems that enough of a consensus will form around the Government's White Paper.  The Independent quotes Norman Baker who feels that their lordships should not just go quietly, but also cheaply

"I don't see why they should pay redundancy. They didn't compensate the hereditaries when they went. Peers are officially paid nothing so I'm happy to give them three years' pay on that basis."

The next item we liked was in The FT. Lord David Owen, now a crossbencher, is quoted as being in favour of a younger generation should take charge of the party he refused to join. 'These youngsters are the party's future, he said, and "many of them are sensible people". Faint praise, indeed.' says the FT.  Especially as one criticism that you can't level at Ming is that has been too radical or silly.

Peter Riddell in The Times writes a commentary on the latest Populus opinion poll which shows that the north/south divide in the Conservatives appeal is still very stark.

Finally, and more seriously, Alice Miles in The Times writes a very sympathetic piece about Fiona Jones, the former MP for Newark who died earlier this week after succumbing to alcoholism.

"She was convicted of electoral fraud in March 1999 and stripped of her seat, before being acquitted on appeal and reinstated. The party hierarchy wasn’t too interested. New Labour was a successful election-winning machine, remember; it had no time for embarrassments or failures."

Alice Miles, The Times

Commentary over the next few months will have an 'end of the age' feelas Blair shuffles off his political coil.  Some will no doubt want to allegorise Fiona Jones' death in that light - spectacular gain in 97, ruined by the sleaze of electoral fraud and ending rather hideously without having acheived a great deal.

Poetic as this might be, it would be inaccurate. If you look at her whole career you see that bickering and splits followed her whereever she was active politically, including as a local councillor before she fought Newark.  The lessons Alice Miles draws are no doubt true up to a point.  But this rather ugly story shows that in order to survive today a politician needs the most adept people skills in order to build loyalty and friendship amongst people who otherwise will neither respect nor care for you.

The news cycle is very predictable.  First the storm in the front reports section; then the stern comment in the leader columns; then, if the story is deemed to have particularly strong legs, a columnist or two will pick up on the same story a day or two afterwards.  The overcrowded prison's story clearly has legs like Darren Campbells as it just carries on running.  You know a story is getting a little old when the Church of England starts addressing it, and the Guardian's report about the Archbishop of Canterbury's interjection adds little new apart from silly hats.

The Independent clearly feels that it hasn't given the story enough column inches yet though. It adds spice to the narrative by getting Domonic Lawson to point out some of the inconsistencies made by The Independent's own leaders earlier in the week.  He makes some interesting points.  One of his penultimate paragraph's is this: :

"I can understand why many commentators are distressed that we imprison a greater proportion of the population than any other European country save Luxembourg; it does not speak well of us as a nation. The less-quoted statistic, however, is the prison population as a proportion of crimes committed. That paints a more pertinent picture. In England and Wales 12 people are imprisoned for every 1,000 crimes committed. In Spain the figure is 48 per 1,000; in Ireland it is 33 per 1,000. Both those countries have much lower crime rates than ours."

Domonic Lawson, The Independent

Liberal voices, including today the Archbishop, keep saying free up resources from wasteful prisons and use them to track down more crime.  This is certainly a laudable aim with conviction rates so poor. But at some point we need to answer the Lawson's challenge.  Namely if we get to a stage where we do detect and convict more criminals, what else are we going to do with them apart from lock them up?

Also in today's news:

• The Economist's main Leader this week ends with the following paragraph:
  

"If neither party wins an overall majority, the balance will be held by Britain's third party, the Liberal Democrats, led by Sir Menzies Campbell. As the two main parties have scrambled for the centre ground, the Lib Dems have emerged as the real opposition on issues such as Iraq and civil liberties. The last time the Liberals were part of government was during the Lib-Lab pact of 1977-78. At that time a Liberal-Conservative alliance would have been unthinkable. But if Mr Cameron gets more votes than Mr Brown, the Lib Dems will have to put their thinking caps on."

The Economist (NB subscription required)

• It seems the fact that the Lib Dems will will end up with the balance of power is becoming more and more widely accepted.

The Lib Dem lordships are campaigning across the newspapers at the moment about the nature of power.  True, it falls somewhat short of some tabloid campaigns we've seen of late ("Jade Goody Out Now!" its not) but they are spreading their battalions out across the sheets of the broadsheets.

In The Guardian, Anthony Lester sets out a noble and learned case for why the Attorney General should be set free from political machinations.  He shows how from Suez onwards the Government were able to sideline independent legal advice and the mistakes that arose.

The Financial Times reports how Lib Dem peers will use a debate tomorrow to highlight the Lord Goldsmith's delicate position when the Serious Fraud Office was ordered to end its Saudi investigation.

Yesterday Lord Oakeshott got a good quote into reports of the Lord Levy re-arrest saying:

"In any public company, or any public body in Britain, where the chief executive has announced he's going in a few months and his close associates have been arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice, the chairman would tell the chief executive to go now and limit the damage. This just proves Britain's PM has too much personal power," sad Lord Oakeshott, Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman.

The Financial Times

It seems like not only do their lordships have a campaign, they have a campaign with a press strategy!  Couple this with a solid response to the undemocratic proposals about House of Lords reform and they're dangerously near to a whole narrative!

Also in the news:

• Andrew Duff MEP looks (again) at the prospects of the European Constitution, also in The Financial Times.
  
• Disgraced Lib Dem donor, Michael Brown is not getting far in trying to get Lib Dem MPs to use their power to get him out of a high security wing, according to (as ever) The Times.