CentreForum's recent publication on Liberal Democrat-Conservative relationships continues to get press coverage - this time in an article by John Rentoul on Tory preparations for a potential hung parliament...

Read the article here, and find the publication here.

Press Review:

BBC: Clegg joins Lib Dem leader race

Independent: Clegg: We must broaden our electoral appeal or face oblivion

Telegraph: Senior Lib Dems line up behind Clegg

Guardian: Boost for Clegg as potential rival stands aside

The press coverage of the Lib Dem leader's race today is fairly non-descript.

However, it is a blog entry from yesterday on the Times' website which is most interesting, providing an insight into Nick Clegg's thinking on the thorny issue of Europe. Clegg is clearly someone who could easily be branded by the Conservatives as overly European, and, to make the point, one rabid Tory MP failed to restrain himself yesterday in the New Statesman: 

In refreshing Tory tradition, there is always one MP who does not hold back: "Nick Clegg is a screaming Euro-fanatic man-child; he's half Dutch; he should be called Nick Clog."

This sort of attack is unlikely to be damaging to Clegg during the leadership race (and could help him) but it could prove a greater political worry should he win the leadership. Clegg has clearly been doing some of the thinking necessary to carve out a distinctive, pro-European, but not uncritical, position on Europe.

Nearly all the papers cover the launch of the UKIP local election manifesto yesterday. The Guardian is typical - "UKIP trebles candidates for local elections".

That report is one of the few that also covers UKIP's policy review. At the launch, UKIP leader, Nigel Farage sought to present his party as “a libertarian band of bureaucracy-busters that would slash council tax, put power back in the hands of local leaders and give people more control over their lives." The Guardian

In part, this is about Farage’s attempt to shed UKIP 's image as that of a single issue party.  However, the party’s constitution, website and the majority of its policies serve only to strengthen its single-issue credentials.  The constitution is quite clear:

"The principal aim of the Party is that the United Kingdom (" UK ") shall again be governed by laws made to suit its own needs by its own Parliament, which must be directly and solely accountable to the electorate of the UK ." UKIP Constitution

Perhaps Farage, like Cameron and Blair before him, will seek a 'Clause 4 moment' of his own to convince us that he really does want to break with the single issue past.  Whether he could carry his party with him is another matter, not least because, by developing a 'full range of domestic and foreign policies' UKIP will look dangerously like the thing it is campaigning against: all the other parties.

Or was it? After yesterday's initial scandal-mongering, some semblance of rationality seems to have return to most of the broadsheets. Least surprisingly, Polly Toynbee rails valiantly against the right-wing press (The Tory tactic is simple - get low down and dirty), accusing them of whipping up a scandal in order to serve the Tories' electoral interests:

"The Tory tactic is simple: demolish what they see as Labour's great asset - Gordon Brown's record and character. Fairly or not, Tony Blair's character has been shot to pieces on the streets of Iraq, in the White House rose garden, in holiday villas, his wife's lecture tours and in cash for honours, even if charges are never brought. Brown offers a marked contrast in style and content."

In the Independent, Steve Richards (Gordon Brown's main worry should be that this non-story has run with such ferocity), not for the first time, offers a cool-headed and unsensationalist analysis:

"The current row is over nothing in the sense that nothing of significance has surfaced in recent days. In the 1997 Budget, Brown scrapped the tax credits on payments of dividends to pension funds. This was known at the time and caused a fuss in the immediate aftermath."

Of course civil servants warned of the consequences of a cut in pensions tax relief - that is what they do. Treasury officials are there to advise of the effects of a change in policy, but it is up to the minister to make the final decision. The fact that he took the decision despite some potentially negative consequences is barely worthy of column inches.

Even in the Times, who originally "broke" the story, there is a sensible reaction from David Aaronovitch (I'm afraid Brown's not as black as he's painted), who considers Brown's biggest mistake to be the lack of discosure, rather than the actual policy. Indeed, he argues, the revenue earned by abolishing the tax relief may actually have done some good. Addressing an elderly reader, he claims:

"this five billion a year, I don’t think he spent it all on wars and speed cameras. A lot of it will have helped, in the early days, to reduce government borrowing. Some may have contributed, say, to the radically reduced orthopaedic waiting times now enjoyed (if that’s the word) by your generation. Maybe someone you know got a hip? Is it also conceivable that the money helped to fund the reduction in corporation tax, thus assisting in the creation of jobs."

However, judging by the comments to this piece, few Times readers would agree with his analysis.

I mentioned at the beginning that "most" broadsheets have offered some semblance of rationality. With tiresome predictability, the Telegraph continues to rouse rabbles in its own inimitable way (The plot thickens over pensions fiasco). Without a hint of hyperbole, it claims:

"This Government has been responsible for a number of bad policy judgments, but Gordon Brown's decision to change the rules for tax relief on pension funds is in another league from most of its administrative or political mistakes. It is no exaggeration to say that it has ruined the lives of many people who had every reason to believe that the pensions to which they had been contributing throughout their productive years would provide them with security in their retirement. Removing £5 billion a year from the value of funded pensions must have seemed at the time to be the perfect stealth tax: no one would notice (until much later) that their private or occupational scheme would no longer provide them with the income they needed to survive in the last years of their lives."

My biggest quibble with this is the suggestion that removing tax relief on pensions is a policy mistake that surpasses any other. That it will have more disastrous consequences than, oh, say, the war in Iraq, growing income inequality, the complexities of the tax credit scheme, the loss of civil liberties etc. is simply preposterous. The Labour government has made far worse policy mistakes during the last 10 years - could we not focus on those instead please?

Also in today's news:

• The Independent publishes its "poll of polls" that shows the Tories opening up an 8 point gap ahead of Labour. The Lib Dems are unchanged on 18%. Cameron only needs another small advance to deny Labour the option of forming a pact with the Lib Dems to retain power (Independent).
  
• The Guardian reveals that the RAF has considered the use of "suicide flights" to combat terrorism (Guardian).
  

Arch right-winger, Danniel Hannan is often regarded as a rabid neo-con outrider. His piece in today's Telegraph gives ample justification for this.  Along with his rather lazy attitude to basing his arguments on facts – much of his opinion is equally misplaced.

However, in the same article, he raises some more interesting points apposite to the CentreForum Middle East conference on Saturday. 

He then states that:

"The 1979 Iranian Revolution will one day be seen as an epochal event, on a par with the 1789 French Revolution and the 1917 Russian Revolution. Like them, it immediately burst out from behind its borders, seeking to replicate itself across the world. Before 1979, it would not have occurred to most Muslims that there might be a tension between their religious devotion and their civic loyalty. Today, that notion is becoming commonplace."

Danniel Hannan – The Telegraph

This intriguing interpretation is attractive – and one that he believes explains why some first and second generation Muslim men are less patriotic than their parents.  He also suggests that the fracturing of ‘British’ identity into ‘the four constituent nations’ leaves people who can’t identify Scottish or English routes rootless.

Mr Hannan’s remedies are as predictable as they are un-interesting (pulling out of the EU and ending ‘squalor of welfare dependency’.)  But that’s not to say that his initial observations are necessarily misguided.  

Also in the news today:

• http://www.electoral-vote.com/ – Dem 50, Rep 50 – New Jersey is looking safer for the Democrats again despite the massive media-buy the Republicans have lavished on the state.  Tennessee is looking more distant for them.

Tax is still head-lining the opposition parties' policy agendas.    Predictably, the FT goes into greatest depth (unless you go to the Conservative's website itself to read the whole thing). 

Even the FT likes to jazz up the story with a process piece about the material being released onto the Conservative's website too early, allowing Ed Balls to get his rebuttal in before the report had even been launched; The Independent focus's on David Cameron's presentation of the piece ("Cameron rejects party's call for £21bn package of tax cuts")

However, The Times manages to get everything into the one story:

"The detailed 176-page study, which was accidentally put on the party’s website the day before it was due to be published, shatters the Conservatives’ uneasy truce on taxation.

The party leadership has been rejecting calls from rightwingers for tax cuts in order to shed the party’s image of being obsessed with the issue and to re-establish its economic credibility. Fears about Conservative tax policies have cost the party dearly in the past two elections."

Anthony Browne - The Times

Also in today's news

• "Mystery over slurring Charlie" - The Sun
  Also covered in The Telegraph and The Mirror

• PMQs sketch - The Telegraph:
  "as far as Iraq is concerned, it is the Ming emperor who holds the moral high ground. Not for nothing has he spent the greater part of his life, after youthful frolics as an Olympic athlete, among the mandarins of the Foreign Office, joining them in their rapt contemplation of the higher truths of international relations.

  
  "These truths include the inadvisability of invading sovereign countries, even when they happen to be run by very nasty people. Mr Blair had no time whatever for the wisdom of the mandarins, which stood between him and his mission to make Mesopotamia a paradise on earth."
  

Some of the grandest fromages of the political blogging world are about to launch their new vehicle in order to opine to the world.

Doughty TV is the rather odd name for a new internet video chanel that promised 4 hours of original programming a night.

The blogging world will no doubt take an active interest.  Can they produce the same magic that worked so well for Conservative Home and YouGov?

Unlike Conservative Home - which was expressly linked to one political philosophy and one political party – Doughty TV's (stated) political purpose is much grander.  Even their name is as politically neutral as it be.  Named after nothing more than the address from which much of the output will be filmed. 

Their main enemy is the Media Establishment itself. Like the shock jocks of the USA, they want to change the tone of political debate.

Its an interesting proposition - and you can see why it is so attractive to the right wingers who are behind it.

Their main bug bears can be seen from their chosen graphic (above) which, in the words of Tim Montgomerie "More than anything else, it summarises - for me - what 18DoughtyStreet Talk TV stands for."

As you can see - the plucky hero, at home in a green and pleasant land, takes aim at the Iron Men (the UN/EU, The BBC and Consensus Politics) that threaten to crush him, with the aid of some pretty nifty satellite technology.

However, my Iron men would have different labels on the front.  The 27 minute slot; soundbite culture, Ya-Boo politics and Westminster centric outlook are all equally establishment and equally pernicious, if not more so.

Whilst tilting at their particular windmills I wonder how long they will be able to carry frustrated politicos of other political persuasions with them.  By framing the Media Establishment’s ills so narrowly, how long will they keep the liberals and left-wingers watching?

For a few alternative views - check out Dave Hill and Doughty TV itself.