Regular FreeThink readers will make sure they catch these four must-read pieces today:

• Peter Preston in The Guardian gives an end-of-term report on the Lib Dems, and finds them somewhat lacking. 'Unshiftable Sir Ming'
• Andrew Holdenbury of the think tank Reform does a similar job for Gordon Brown, and finds him equally lacking 'Gordon the going backwards PM'
  
• French presidential politics, and how its being operated by Sarozy, is the subject of John Thornhill in The Times (Its a while since the theme played big in the papers so its good to return to an old favourite) 'France's president spins his plates'
• Most entertaining, and essential reading (especially for anyone of a certain generation to remember "9 and a half weeks") is Tim Hames' very sharp piece in The Times on the theme of David Cameron's current worries entitled '9 and a half weeks and counting for David Cameron'
  

On Monday, Cabinet Office minister Ed Miliband used a Guardian interview  to indicate that measures to tackle inequality would figure prominently in the Labour manifesto he has begun to draft ('Miliband: "I want a buzz back in the manifesto"').  In it he said:

"I think we have to take a sober look in the manifesto work on whether we are on a path to tackle some of the great causes of inequality. In the kind of market economy we live in and the kind of world we live in, it is much harder than we thought to make a difference to child poverty."

[Mr Miliband] thinks most people care about "where are the poorest in society relative to the middle.

"I think the gap itself is an issue, but what a lot of people would say about Britain is that when we are the fourth richest society in the world, why do we have people with such low incomes and what can we do about them?"

Today's release of the policy document Freedom from Poverty, Opportunity for All: Policies for a Fairer Britain by Shadow  Schools Secretary David Laws and Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Danny Alexander suggests that the Lib Dems are willing to enter the debate. The paper proposes:

• Introducing a 'pupil premium', with £1.5bn extra targeted at the children with the greatest need, as recommended in Paul Marshall's recent paper Tackling Educational Inequality

• Reforming tax credits by ending the overpayments crisis and taking higher earners out of the system all together.

• Increasing Child Benefit by around £5 per family per week, taking 150,000 children out of poverty.

• Replacing Job Centre Plus with a new 'First Steps' agency, while outsourcing properly funded employment support to the private and voluntary sector and introducing a single working-age benefit.

• Immediately restoring the earnings link to the basic state pension and in the long run introducing a citizens' pension.

• Establishing an Independent Commission on Public Sector Pensions to ensure that they are fair and affordable - with any savings re-invested in a higher state pension.

The policy paper has already received coverage from the BBC ('Lib Dems unveil anti-policy plan') and the Guardian ('Lib Dem pledge on poverty'), with more considered responses likely to emerge in the coming days. For political and ideological context, Menzies Campbell's IPPR speech from last December is well worth reading ('Poverty and Opportunity: The Liberal Way').

With Ian Duncan-Smith's 'Breakthrough Britain', the Conservatives are also signalling they don't want to be left out of the debate.

David Cameron hasn't had a good few days.

[The Conservatives] are not serious about wanting power... They just haven't done the work. And they're still not doing it. For instance: the new text for the coming EU conference. Cameron says it's the Constitution by another name. But has he read it? Has he compared it with the Constitution line by line? Has he - or his researchers - got a list of copy-and-paste similarities to make the case? (Brown's admirers mistake pure dullness for honesty)

...says Simon Carr in The Independent

"The Tories, he said, were back on the same old agenda - anti-Europe, pro-tax cuts, for grammar schools, etc. "The wheels are falling off the Tory bicycle. It is just as well that he has a car following him when he is out on his rounds." Like all Gordon's gags, it sounded pre-scripted, but it didn't matter." ("An end of term squitting")

...says Simon Hoggart in The Guardian. 

Hoggart also had words of praise for Menzies Campbell, but he doesn't get as effusive as Andrew Gimson in The Telegraph:

It was left to Sir Menzies Campbell to defend our ancient liberties with proper passion. He reminded us that far from making us safer, internment can fan the flames of extremism, and he asked why we need more repressive laws than Australia. Many people cannot see the point of Sir Menzies, but his point is to uphold liberty against a control-freak prime minister at the head of an overmighty state. ('Why we need Ming Campbell')

For a more analytical account of Cameron's problems you can turn to Philip Webster's piece in The Times ('Bad luck and tactical blunders set the Tories whispering again')

What is striking is how Cameron is now under attack from the left and the right.  Steve Richards in The Independent says Cameron is being too ideological ('David Cameron is not doing badly, but where is his party's hunger for power?') whilst Simon Heffer rips into him for being too shallow. ('Bogged down beyond the comfort zone')

We might find Quentin Davies' defection both amusing and illogical - but lots of people are fed up with the Cameron project and are looking for serious political debate. Yesterday, Campbell seemed more than able to provide that.

America has always been somewhat ahead in utilising technology as a political tool.  Yesterday, the democratic candidates for president debated in South Carolina, with all the questions coming from videos uploaded onto the video sharing website YouTube.

The result was by far the most engaging of the presidential debates so far.

Questions ranged from extremely moving to the slightly disturbing.  Joe Biden pulled off one of the better one liners of the night in response to the latter.  'If that's his idea of a baby', the Senator quipped, 'he needs help'.  He then added that he hoped the man 'doesn't come looking for me'.

The questions added a personal touch, always clearly illustrating the human consequence of policy decisions - such as the question from a lesbian couple asking whether the candidates would allow them to marry.

Invariably though, the questioners and their videos added value to the questions they asked, leading to a debate which embodied the sort of bottom up, engaged, politics to which Greg Dyke was referring in his recent CentreForum speech.  Hopefully, by the time of the next British election, we will have caught up somewhat.

The FreeThink blog appears to have two kinds of readers: those attracted by party political comment; and those attracted by policy debate.  This weekend's papers has plenty on offer for both.

On the party political track, we have the fevered speculation about the health or otherwise of the Tory party - with columnists such as Andrew Rawnsley ('Could Cameron turn out to be the Tories' Kinnock?') and Janet Daley ('Tories must stop their modernisation mania') seemingly conspiring with the denizens of Conservative Home - and a fair share of opposition bloggers - to stoke a crisis in the Cameron project. In a similar vein but with very different conclusions, William Rees-Mogg in The Times makes a fairly bizarre case that the Ealing Southall and Sedgefield results represent a disaster for Brown - without so much as a nod to the fact that the government vote almost always gets squeezed at by-elections, especially in previously safe seats ('Why Brown should be reeling over Ealing').

Those who foam at the mouth for policy have an even meatier menu to choose from:

• Lynsey Hanley, author of the recently acclaimed book Estates, uses an article in The Guardian to make a strong case for the limitations of family elder-care. Certainly, it is well-known that it's not always possible for older people to live with family members, but Hanley's argument that extended family living arrangements may offer a less-than-ideal solution to the problems of care in old age even when they are possible perhaps represents a salutary corrective to the idealized picture of family responsibility painted by many on the right. ('Don't assume family care is always best for our elderly'.) No one wants to leave welfare in the hands of an impersonal state, but the social care system has no more of a monopoly on neglect and abuse than blood relatives have on the social commodities of trust and companionship.

• Writing in the FT ahead of today's housing green paper, Mark Clare of Barratt Developments calls for further reforms to the planning system to facilitate an expansion in housing supply.  Echoing Tim Leunig's paper for CentreForum, 'In my back yard', he advocates "giving local authorities a greater incentive to promote and escure development for the benefit of the communities for which they are responsible". Clare also argues that publicly-funded housebuilding deserves more consideration, and that housebuilders face a challenge of keeping costs down whilst improving environmental standards in the years ahead. ('Release land to build the homes Britain needs'.)
• The vocational training debate rumbles on with the revelation in The Guardian that a school in Sunderland has fitted out a classroom especially to train pupils for jobs in a call-centre. The school claims that the scheme is preparing pupils for work; the NUT argues that the scheme is depressing pupils' aspirations. ('School with call centre training site in classroom criticized'.)
• Finally, an IFS study has found that the new university grant system will benefit only those with household incomes over £17,500, since the poorest students already receive full grants and fee remission. ('New university grants "are no help to poorest"'.) I thought that was the point, though. After all, families with annual incomes in the region of £20-£30,000 are hardly well off, and may - with good reason - be just as averse to incurring debt to pay for education as those with lower incomes. Moreover, raising the threshold helps reduce the disincentive effect on earnings which all means-tested systems create in some form or another. Or must all policies be measured exclusively by their impact on the very poorest?
  

There’s no question that the United States provides great political theatre.  Yesterday, in a bid to embarrass Republicans blocking their demand for a deadline for troop withdrawal from Iraq, Senate democrats held a rare all-night session.  Beds and sheets were brought in for senators, with democratic aides handing out bags with toothpaste and toiletries (emblazoned with ‘stop the war’).  They have a majority in favour of a firm deadline, but not the 60 votes required to hold a vote on the issue, and are turning up the pressure on more republicans to join them.  If republican's refuse, the democrats will happily portray them as obstructing the will of the American people and a majority of Congress.

With ever more imposing majorities of the American people supportive of a timetable, democrats like nothing better than holding the feet of Republicans up for election in 2008 to the fire.  Many in tight races are already feeling the pressure – Susan Collins, Gordon Smith, John Warner, and Pete Dominici have all endorsed a change in strategy.  Others, such as Jeff Sessions of Alabama, are said to be wavering.

And yet despite endorsing a change in strategy, few of them are yet voting with the Democrats.  But with increasing pressure coming from democrats and from constituents, a Senate vote to instigate a timetable for withdrawal seems only a matter of time.

Paul Marshall's report on Tackling Educational Inequality, released by CentreForum on Tuesday and available for download here, has received widespread coverage in the national and local media, ranging from the marvellously titled 'School's Not Out' piece on GMTV to articles by Jon Boone in the FT ('Schools study backs "pupil premium"') and Richard Garner in the Belfast Telegraph ('Schools "should get reward for taking poor pupils"').

Over at the Liberal England blog, Jonathan Calder wonders whether the money might not be better spent on improving the quality of teaching within existing school hours, rather than extending the school week. ('CentreForum: Saturday lessons for poor children'). However, the report has received a firm endorsement from Kate Green, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, who commented in a CPAG press release:

"We strongly welcome the approach taken by Centre Forum, which recognises the need to tackle the inequality of school pupils at source. The proposal for extra schools funding to be delivered to the most disadvantaged through a 'Pupil Premium' is an important step in the right direction.

"Funding models that give schools extra resources according to individual pupils' needs are essential in the fight to end child poverty, but not enough on their own. Income inequality must be addressed too, or the poorest pupils will continue to come through the school gates with more barriers to learning than a pupil premium alone can fully compensate for. We hope that Liberal Democrat party members will not only endorse the 'pupil premium' proposal, but will support the extra investment of £4 billion that the Institute for Fiscal Studies says is needed to meet the Government's target of halving child poverty by 2010."

Last week we mentioned John McCain's struggling campaign.  Yesterday, his campaign was thrown into turmoil, as the majority of the top tier of his staff left the campaign.  The campaign director, Terry Nelson; the finance director, Mary Kate Johnson; and strategy chief John Weaver, along with their deputies.

Whether they jumped or were pushed depends on who you talk to, but what is not in doubt is that this is another blow to a campaign teetering on the brink.  The political futures market - probably the most reliable indicator of a candidate's likelihood to win the nomination - now prices a contract which will pay $100 if McCain wins the nomination at under $7 - compared to $34 for Fred Thompson (who hasn't even entered the race) and $36 for Rudy Giuliani - and around half the price of a month ago.

McCain lacks the money to compete across all the primary states. Most analysts think he will need to do better than expected in the Iowa caucuses to have any hope.  The problem for McCain is that this is a state in which he is unpopular and did not even bother to compete in when he ran for president in 2000.  Secondly, because the Iowa contests are caucuses rather than primaries, they demand massive organisational capacity.  It is far from clear that McCain will be able to fund this kind of operation.

All in all, things aren't looking good for Senator McCain.

Whilst Alasdair Campbell was touting his book around the studios yesterday, those of us at a CentreForum event listened to an alternative view of UK politics.

At 'New prime minister, new democracy?' Greg Dyke outlined his belief that the current political system was on the verge of a 'Berlin Wall' moment; a time when our fundamental assumptions about how we are governed are turned on their heads.

The failings of the current system are so fundamental that only those in the Westminster village are unaware of the depth of the crisis.  Gordon Brown's constitutional reforms - though welcome - are too little, too late.

Dyke looks forward to an era of decentralisation and PR and derides the current take-it-or-leave-it choice between the two main parties' manifestos:

I’m not talking about constant local referendums, or on-line votes on issues where people’s uninformed prejudices can easily dominate, I’m talking about involving people in the decision making process by giving them the information they need to make proper judgements. That will involve their time and being involved in proper discussion and some won’t want to be involved on that basis, but the time has come to make the effort. The days of old fashioned representative democracy whereby we elect a councillor or MP for four or five years and let them make every decision on our behalf are, I suspect, over. We, as the public, want to be more involved than that.

Dyke's personal history makes the speech is especially interesting - you are reminded of Dyke's battles with Alasdair Campbell and ambitions to run London throughout the speech - though he doesn't directly refer to either.

Does this ultimately detract from his message? Some will think so - but why not decide for yourself?

The full speech can be read at the CentreForum website.

Also in today's news

• It seems the benefits of marriage will be much debated over the next few days.  The FreeThink blog will look at what people are saying later in the week, but there are a couple of early salvos from Mary Dejevsky in The Independent ('Why marriage is a dangerous game in politics') and Polly Toynbee in The Guardian ('This broken society rhetoric leaves Cameron marooned') .
  

Several of today's political stories bring to the fore a question that has been rumbling on at least since the Scottish and Welsh elections in early May: the question of partisanship in the new political arena. Can politicians afford to maintain their traditional hostility to members of other parties at a time when party leaders want to appear inclusive and PR electoral systems require coalition?

Let's look at a couple of examples:

• Some Labour peers are by all accounts apoplectic about the appointment of Sir Digby Jones as Minister for Trade Promotion and Investment, and they are unlikely to become much happier now that the Daily Mail has revealed Sir Digby's recent efforts to run for the London mayoralty with Conservative support. ('Labour's Digby "wanted to stand as Tory mayor"')
• Labour activists also want to know why Quentin Davies, an old-school Tory Europhile whose instincts on social policy are distinctly authoritarian, feels at home in their party. As one Tory strategist put it at last week:

What makes the whole thing so infuriating, is that it just doesn’t make sense. There is no logic in Davies swapping sides. He is a socially conservative retard, appallingly illiberal. He is a bucket of bile. Nicholas Soames is probably more liberal. Why would someone like that join Labour? ('Here comes trouble')

• Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, there is the continued reluctance of large elements in the Welsh Labour Party and the Welsh Lib Dems to enter a coalition Assembly government. First saw the All-Wales Accord / Triple Crown / Rainbow Coalition fall by the wayside as Lib Dems got cold feet about jumping in with the Tories; now Rhodri Morgan, who only weeks ago described his coalition options as "a choice between the inedible and the unpalatable" and claimed that Plaid were "unfit to run a cockle stall", is two special conference votes away from a red-green coalition - but not without sniping from several Labour MPs. Kim Howells accuses Morgan of "helping to deliver our communities into the hands of nationalist separatists and incompetents" ('Howells in attack on Plaid pact'), whilst Don Touhig calls the One Wales document electoral "suicide" ('Coalition means "suicide" for Labour'). Neither Labour, Plaid nor the Lib Dems can really claim much credit from these ill-tempered shenanigans.

So, one day after Gordon Brown launched his great constitutional consultation (add inverted commas where you wish), the plural character of modern British politics is demonstrated by a couple of news stories about English government away from Westminster. Top of the bill, of course, is Boris Johnson and his on-off campaign to challenge Ken Livingstone for the London mayoralty next May. For the broadsheets, this is primarily an example of Tory disarray:

With theatrical aplomb, the floppy-haired Tory higher education spokesman walked into the farce that is the party's selection process yesterday

The suggestion that Boris Johnson might run for London Mayor will be greeted with almost universal delight. Whether this is delight at the prospect of victory, or of a feast of comedy, is the vital question: would a Boris candidacy be about the future of London, or would it just be a hugely enjoyable romp with Boris the entertainer?

A different angle on the Boris run comes from Mike Smithson at Political Betting ('Could this man be London's next mayor?'), who suggests that the Conservatives simply need to persuade people who are already voting Tory in the London Assembly polls to back a Tory for mayor - and to sweep up a few more second preferences.  In 2004, the Conservatives led Labour 31% to 25% in the elections to the FPTP section of the Assembly, yet Norris gained only 28% of first preference votes to Livingstone's 36%. Perhaps Boris is the man to rally the soft right. On the other hand, the Conservatives' much-vaunted surge in London in the 2005 general election left them with less than half as many seats as Labour (21 compared with 44), so maybe Tories need to reach out to Labour and Lib Dem voters to have a chance of beating a whose stock has been boosted by winning the Olympics.

The second indication of Britain's increasingly plural - some would say complex and disorderly - institutional landscape comes in the shape of Hazel Blears' proposals for community consultation schemes to manage parts of local authority budgets. According to Ms. Blears:

Democracy should be about much more than casting a vote every few years. It should be a daily activity, not an abstract theory. Local people know the needs of their area better than anyone. This Government is delivering a real shift in power to town halls, and ensuring town halls pass this on to local communities. We want to bring devolution to the doorstep, giving communities a direct say over how to tackle the things that matter most to them, from improving playgrounds to tackling litter to making their street safer.

A few related points are picked up by the papers:

• Benedict Brogan of the Mail spots a resurgence of the old New Labour spin machine in Blears' trailing of her Local Government Association speech in the newspapers and on the Today programme. ('The end of spin lasted 7 days 3 hours').

• Jill Sherman reports in the Times that David Cameron will also speak at the LGA conference, calling for welfare budgets to be transferred to town halls to fund local welfare-to-work programmes. ('Neighbourhoods to take control of £20m kitties for local projects')
• Peter Hetherington in the Guardian points out that Blears has been working on neighbourhood-devolution proposals for many years ('Mini-democracy in the making')
• At a time when the floods in South Yorkshire and Humberside are prompting debate on the North-South divide, it's worth noting that eight of the ten pilot schemes announced by Blears are located north of the Watford Gap, and six lie north of the M62. Who said that Labour didn't care about its heartland?

So, the centre-piece announcement of Gordon Brown's first week in office was a Green Paper on constitutional reform. The Governance of Britain, they called it, in a conscious or unconscious echo of Harold Wilson's much-derided tome. The British press this morning generally gave Brown's measures a cautious welcome, with Peter Riddell in the Times accepting the Prime Minister's claims of change:

Nothing illustrates the change of regime in 10 Downing Street more strikingly than Gordon Brown's Commons statement and his 63 pages of proposals for constitutional reform. They could not conceivably been put forward by Tony Blair...

The result is a sensible and workable package to strengthen the accountability of the executive to Parliament, combined with some less precise, longer-term aspirations. On the latter, such as a British Bill of rights and duties and a possible written constitution, the government is opening a debate.

However, Simon Hoggart in the Guardian and Simon Carr in the Independent are less than convinced that Brown himself has altered. Hoggart thinks that the desire to appear generous while remaining parsimonious has followed Brown to Number 10:

It was Gordo's great giveaway. In his first words to parliament since becoming prime minister, he handed over stacks of his powers to the lads and lasses around him. Were they grateful? Some of them almost were. Though his tone was gentle - husky, soft-spoken Gordon, the clunking fist hidden in the velvet glove - I was reminded of one of those traders you see in markets.

We realised he was running out of excitements to offer when we got on to letting parliament vote on the chairman of the new Independent Statistics Board. That's going to get the juices flowing!

Carr also detects a long-standing habit of drawing rabbits out of hats:

The details of this "new constitutional settlement" look like a series of eye-catching initiatives. Citizen juries? They will have the power to do things the Government wants them to do. A pre-Queen's Speech debate? Select Committees for the regions? Don't make me yawn. The changes [Brown] most liked were technical or cosmetic. The appointment of judges, bishops and the membership of NHS trusts. I can't think of any measure to spread apathy more efficiently. Dissolving and recalling Parliament? Ratifying international treaties? It sounds grand, but Alan Beith put his finger on it: Won't the Government just wheel out its majority to stifle dissent?

• The Indy reports that the Lib Dems are focussing their energies on Ealing Southall and holding little hope of taking Sedgefield ('Campbell channenges 'whisperers' to face him').

• The Scotsman expresses surprise at a promotion for Lembit Opik ('Scotland and Northern Ireland brief shared in Lib Dem reshuffle').

The second quarter fundraising numbers are in for the 2008 US presidential candidates – the big news is the astonishing amount raised by Barack Obama – $32.5 million, with almost all of it available immediately for the primary campaign.  This eclipses Hillary Clinton’s $27m – of which a much larger proportion cannot be used in the primaries and can only be used should she win the democratic nomination.

Obama’s fundraising prowess is the result of a massive grass roots campaign – in terms of the number of donors, he far exceeds Clinton, with 258,000.  With John Edwards raising $9 million and Bill Richardson $7 million, the main Democratic candidates are reaping the rewards of small internet-based contributions rather than chasing the big donors. With individuals only allowed to give a total of $2300, this strategy also allows growth – Obama’s  campaign expect over 90 percent of donors to contribute again.

The real blow this quarter is to John McCain’s campaign. Once the front-runner in the Republican race, he raised only $11.2 million, leaving him with just $2 million cash in hand, and he stands in single digits in the polls – dragged down by his unpopular stance on the troop surge in Iraq and his hated immigration bill.

McCain has been forced to let around 80 staff members, out of a staff of around 150 people, and the campaign has now decided to scale back its strategy, focusing exclusively on the key early contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.  The ultimate humiliation for McCain? His campaign is ‘seriously considering’ accepting federal matched funding.  With members of the media wondering if he might drop out altogether, McCain’s 'straight-talk express' seems to be running out of steam.

Its a mixed bag today.  Not of election results, but of topics and views from the newspapers.  Rather than try and link them, the more interesting pieces are listed here:

• Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writes passionately in The Independent following the terrorist plots last week:

These are hobby terrorists with screwdrivers and screwed heads; they appropriate legitimate concerns, turn them into excuses on their own violent reality shows, sure to be broadcast again and again on screens around the world. With no politics, no aim, no dreams, no noble imperative, for these Islamicists and their ideological masters, the means is the end. They are at once satanic abusers of our faith and social misfits unloved by all except their own reject band of brothers.  ('Sane, ordinary Muslims must stand up and be counted')

• Roy Hattersley reflects the upbeat mood felt by many Labour members are feeling thanks to the Brown honeymoon. ("A new dawn after 13 years")
• Almost as a retort, Bruce Anderson says that David Cameron is looking weak and needs to get some policy 'bottom' in his piece in The Independent ('Mr Cameron needs a narrative of his own').  Janet Daley treads much the same ground - 'Brown leaves Cameron looking hollow'
• The Telegraph re-runs a story over the weekend about rumblings about Ming Campbell's leadership ("By-elections 'hold Campbell's fate'')
• Finally there's this rather interesting piece about Gordon Brown's religious and moral ethics in The Guardian.  ('The church may be struggling, but in politics, its rhetoric is on the rise')