It emerged today that the Home Office is considering implementing a plan under which those dependant on drugs and alcohol would have their benefits removed if they refused to receive treatment. The move was originally proposed by the Labour government, but it was scrapped when the Social Security Advisory Committee warned that it could lead addicts into crime and prostitution. However, with its re-appearance in a consultation paper today, it appears the coalition government are once again considering the contentious idea.

The move certainly seems in keeping with Cameron’s iron-fisted clampdown on benefits, and there are many who would argue that in our new-found ‘age of austerity’ , substance-abusers should have to feel the pinch like everyone else. 

Indeed, if there is any social group the prime minister can play hardball with and probably avoid too much criticism, is is drug addicts. His good friends in the tabloid media – who so revel in demonising almost anyone reliant on welfare – are hardly sympathetic when it comes to more liberal approaches to tackling drug problems.

However, a leading figure at a major UK drug charity – arguably the sort of group best placed to comment on the potential effectiveness of any given scheme – has reacted with apprehension and dismay to the news that this move is being considered again.  Martin Barnes, chief executive of charity DrugScope, said on Radio 4 this morning:

“The benefit system can and indeed does have a very important role in terms of advice and support to encourage people both to access treatment and employment. But we seriously question both the fairness and the effectiveness of actually using the stick of compulsion – benefit sanctions – to link a requirement to undergo medical treatment with a condition of receipt of benefit.“

Barnes drew attention to the fact that the NHS constitution requires that “medical intervention should be therapeutic, consensual, confidential”, and stated there is “absolutely no evidence” the scheme would have any positive effect upon drug-users, who he labelled a “vulnerable and often marginalised group”.

In this light, it is hard not to question whether the coalition’s reviving of this untested scheme is a wise move. When experts are  heavily questioning the impact it will have, and when the proposal comes only months after the Social Security Advisory Committee canned the idea first time round because they concluded it would cause “significant harm” and have “negative economic and social impacts”, one wonders why the government has decided it is an idea worthy of consideration again.

However keen Mr Cameron is to save billions of pounds, he must surely recognize that all the evidence suggests this is a scheme which will do little more than exacerbate an already awful problem. Many hold true the maxim that ‘a society is ultimately judged by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members’, and if this plan is followed through on, and the result that all the available evidence suggests will occur, does occur, then it will reflect damningly upon the coalition.

Perhaps, if the prime minister really wants to tackle Britain’s drug issue, he will move away from plans to try and coerce addicts into receiving treatment through arbitrary financial sanctions, and consider a more fundamental review of the country’s drug laws – as repeatedly called for by leading doctors and analysts, and advocated by Left Foot Forward earlier this week.

Another day, another round of worrying headlines for the deputy prime minister, barely 100 days in office, effectively running the country in David Cameron’s absence and now facing one of his most sustained periods of pressure – from the press, Opposition and, as Left Foot Forward reported yesterday, his own backbenchers – over the issue of tax avoidance, which he had pledged to crack down on.

Labour leadership candidate Ed Miliband entered the fray today, demanding to know what happened to the Liberal Democrat leader’s committment to raise more than £4.5 billion by clamping down on tax avoidance. In a letter to Mr Clegg, he writes:

During the election campaign you made much of the Liberal Democrat commitment to tackle tax avoidance. You said, if in government, you would raise £2.4bn by attacking income tax avoidance, £1.4bn by halting abuse of corporation tax and a further £750m from stamp duty through tackling offshore registration by non-doms. You claimed that your plans to clamp down on tax avoidance meant that you would not need to raise VAT.

However, since the election you have had a very different message for the country. You have claimed that there is no alternative to the VAT rise, produced no credible plan to make progress on tackling tax avoidance, and we now hear from the Financial Times that HM Revenue & Customs is to soften its stance on avoidance in order to make cuts to its legal budget…

Will you explain to the country why you no longer feel it necessary to tackle tax avoidance? And will you publish a detailed timetable showing the timescales on which you expect to make progress? Those who hear you say there is ‘”no alternative” to your proposed tax rises on poor and middle income earners and to deep spending cuts beyond those you supported during the election campaign, expect nothing less.

The FT report cited by Mr Miliband revealed HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) was planning to adopt:

“…a less combative approach to resolving tax disputes with businesses in a move designed to cut a mounting legal logjam and unlock billions of pounds tied up in court battles over avoidance. Dave Hartnett, permanent secretary for tax at HMRC, said there had been examples of officials being too “tough” in disputes over tax assessments.

“HMRC is packed full of very intelligent people, but we are sometimes too black-and-white about the law,” he told the Financial Times.

The move, part of a drive for greater efficiency on the part of the cash-strapped department, could produce what Mr Hartnett called a “surge” in revenue over a couple of years, on top of extra money being collected in cases of individual tax evasion.

All of which prompted Tax Research UK’s Richard Murphy to blog:

So Hartnett, the man who just a few years ago said that he’d make sure tax avoidance was ‘no longer worthwhile’ is now going soft on it in the week Nick Clegg said that the coalition is considering the introduction of a new rule “to ensure that wealthy individuals pay their fair share of tax” and a week or so after Cameron says he’s going to make the fight on benefit fraud his number one priority…

…the messaging is dire. What this says is the Coalition is happy for the rich to abuse, will be soft on their abuse, will not be seeking to enforce tax law (that’s explicitly what Hartnett has instructed his staff not to do) and does not care that it was a lack of tax income, not a loss of control of spending, which gave rise to this crisis.

And the Treasury is also using a senior civil servant to snub the deputy prime minister.

As fiascos makers go this mob are proving themselves masters of the art.

The storm surrounding Andrew Mitchell continues to grow, with the Financial Times today reporting that Whitehall officials were drawing up plans to reclassify energy department programmes as aid. Aid for climate change is a controversial  issue, with many in the NGO community long demanding that aid to help poor countries adapt to the impact of climate change must not be taken from rich countries’ existing aid commitments – to do so would see poor countries effectively paying for a problem they did not cause.

That is why Labour imposed a cap on climate finance spending by the Department for International Development, which from 2013 will prevent the department spending more than 10 per cent of its budget on carbon reduction. As reported by Left Foot Forward, the Coalition Programme made no such commitment, leaving open the option of either transferring the Department of Energy’s £250m annual budget for international climate finance to DfID, or redefining the spending as overseas development aid.

Appearing before the international development select committee last month, Mr Mitchell refused to clarify if the 10 per cent cap would remain until after the Comprehensive Spending Review and his discussions with the climate change secretary. Today’s FT article gives the surest indication yet that those discussions will result in the scrapping of that cap.

As the FT points out, the template for reclassifying projects as development aid could be replicated across Whitehall, expanding Britain’s aid programme to include various Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence programmes.

This potential raiding of DfID’s budget again raises key questions of leadership; firstly, of Mr Mitchell himself: is he strong enough to stand up for DfID and its budget in the Cabinet?

If he can’t defend the budget from DECC, how will he stop his more senior Cabinet colleagues in the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence? When David Cameron announced in June £200m of support for Afghanistan through the DfID budget, Labour argued that some of this could have come from other departmental budgets – a sign of things to come?

Secondly, questions will be asked of the Liberal Democrats and Nick Clegg.

As Left Foot Forward reported previously, the Lib Dems have gone AWOL on their manifesto promises on international development. Specifically, their pledge on climate aid went further than Labour’s, promising a complete cap on climate aid so it would be 100 per cent additional.

Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Moore, previously the Lib Dem spokesman on DfID, even warned during the electon of the Conservative Party’s plans for raiding DfID, saying:

“One thing that we will need to look very carefully at is that we don’t see DfID’s budget being the recipient of a lot of resources only for it then to be funneled back to the FCO or the MoD.”

So where are the Lib Dems now? Only weeks away from a key UN summit on the Millennium Development Goals in New York at which the deputy prime minister is due to appear, instead of clear red lines and objectives we have only a leaked documents showing plans to abandon over eighty key international committments.

Shadow DfID minister Gareth Thomas has written to the Lib Dem leader to call on him to intervene to reverse the proposed DfID cuts whilst he is at the helm:

“I am calling on Nick Clegg to step up to the mark while he is in charge and step in to reverse this dossier of cuts to show leadership in advance of the UN Summit.”

On Wednesday Mr Clegg found himself red faced when it emerged the children’s centre he was visiting was being cut by his coalition partners; if he doesn’t intervene to stop the development secretary’s proposed cuts, he may find himself singing the blues and waking up to greater embarrassment in New York.

Something odd has been happening at the Department of Work and Pensions. There have recently been a plethora of stories about the 250,000 households in the UK ‘where no one has ever had a job‘.

Yet the DWP have not made this analysis available to the general public via its website – as is the case for the vast majority of DWP’s statistics – despite the Coalition’s commitment to ‘throw open the doors‘ of public bodies.

But the DWP has confirmed to Left Foot Forward that they did brief the press, and have provided a copy of the press release (which is still not listed in the DWP’s newsroom). As well as being secret, the figures provided to journalists appear to contain errors.

Press reports make clear that the DWP said that adults in 250,000 households had never had a job. However, by the time Left Foot Forward recieved the figures the estimate had changed to 325,000 households, as a result of an ‘error’ in the original analysis.

This also means that DWP’s correction in City AM to Chris Grayling’s additional error (when he first stated that there were 71,000 households in London who had never worked, comprising 23 per cent of the population, which was then revised to 61,000 and 7 per cent of the London population) is also incorrect. The most recent figures provided by the DWP to Left Foot Forward suggest that they now believe there are 95,000 households in London in this position, who comprise 4 per cent of the population.

But the real problem goes beyond the secrecy and the statistical mistakes. It is beginning to look as if DWP ministers are insisting that officials put a party-political spin on what should be a straightforward release of statistical information.

Many of the households included in the analysis are likely to be made up of people the Government does not expect to work and has committed to protecting – severely disabled people and single parents with very young children. DWP statistics show that around 10 per cent of people who undergo the Work Capability Assessment are placed in the Employment and Support Allowance Support Group, which means that the Government does not expect them to seek work or undertake work-related activity.

Even using this contentious measure of severe disability, a minimum of 260,000 disabled people nationally are in this position – some will never have worked.

Similarly, there are around 1.9 million single parents with dependent children in the UK, of whom around 57 per cent are in employment.  It is likely that around 200,000 of those single parents who are not in work have very young children, and that a proportion of these people may never have had a job. The Government only believes that only single parents whose oldest children are over five should be in paid work, so using these people as evidence of persistent worklessness seems disingenuous.

In addition, the analysis published by DWP is not broken down by age – meaning that young unemployed people and student households are included in the analysis. However, ONS analysis suggests that around 39 per cent of households where no one has ever had a job are households aged 16-24. Workless student households are not a key government concern. On the other hand high levels of youth unemployment definitely are – but these young people need support, not criticism. With youth unemployment at 17.5 per cent, it seems hard to see how any Government could hold young workless households responsible for their predicament.

Of course, there are people included in the data who have never worked and are not young, disabled or parents with childcare responsibilities – yet this does not mean that they can all be written off as feckless.

While the Government states that: “the problem isn’t down to a lack of jobs” there are close to 2.5 million people who are unemployed,  2.3 million economically inactive people who want to work and less than 500,000 vacancies across the economy.

In addition, many of these vacancies are for posts that long-term unemployed people are unlikely to be qualified to undertake (for example 62,000 are in health and social work, 31,000 in financial services and 35,000 in professional and scientific activities) and positions are not spread evenly around the country – in many areas of the country where there are even fewer jobs than the national figures suggest.  Between June and July, the number of vacancies available fell.

Any objective analysis of these statistics would acknowledge these points, yet they have been presented in a way that encourages the media to blame those who are out of work for their predicament.

Long-term worklessness is not a lifestyle choice – it is a debilitating, stressful and difficult existence. Prolonged periods out of work have significant negative impacts on health and wellbeing for individuals as well as damaging the economy.

Research by the Prince’s Trust has recently shown the impact that growing up in a workless family can have for children. According to their report one in five (20 per cent) of young people living in workless households said that seeing their parents out of work made them anxious about finding a job, one in four (25 per cent) said their parents didn’t have the knowledge to help them find employment and two-fifths (39 per cent) of those living in communities with high levels of unemployment said they worried that they would never find a good job.

The Government are also wrong to imply that benefit levels are too high.  It cannot have escaped the DWP’s attention that Jobseeker’s Allowance levels in the UK are now worth less than they were in the 1980s. If households are receiving high benefit payments it will be a consequence of them being in significantly greater need – for example parents caring for disabled children or large families or families where adults are disabled are entitled to higher levels of state support.

We cannot even assume that everyone in the DWP’s analysis will be claiming benefits: the Labour Force Survey will include exceptionally wealthy people who do not have to work as well as workless households that are not entitled to welfare payments (e.g. students). In addition, households that are entitled to benefits but are not claiming them (unclaimed benefits save the Treasury around £16 billion a year) are counted in the Government’s workless household figures.

Of course the Government should be doing all that it can to support people who are out of work to move into jobs. But implying that everyone who is not in work should and could be in employment, that people facing long-term worklessness are somehow to blame for their position and that overly generous state support is preventing people from entering jobs is not borne out by the evidence. Of course there is nothing to stop politicians making those claims, but they should not expect DWP officials to do so on their behalf.

Here are my top five most influential contemporary UK lefties.

David Blanchflower:

George Bernard Shaw remarked: “If all economists were laid end to end they would still not reach a conclusion”; well, Professor Blanchflower has. He is consistent and persistent in arguing that the scale of the economic Armageddon we face requires unprecedented action.

As the leading “dove” on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee until last June, Blanchflower’s was the leading voice warning of the risks of deflation and unemployment. He now issues his analysis and call for action through the pages of the New Statesman. We should simultaneously pray he’s completely wrong on his predictions; but that his prescriptions are heeded if not.

Tony Blair:

Why I hear you howl? He is influential precisely because he is not trying to be influential. Following the election defeat there has been a noticeable lack of “I told you so’s”. ‘Sources close the former PM’ have been quiescent. His low profile in UK politics will allow Labour to move on and ensure that, unlike Mrs Thatcher, his memory does not become a death cult for his followers.

Indeed, we do not hear much talk these days of Blairites at all – and that is much to be welcomed. Labour’s brand of ‘personality politics’ was responsible for its long periods in opposition: first in the 50s with Bevan and then with Benn in the 80s. Mr Blair serves his party well by concentrating on his second career.

Bob Crow:

There was a time when trade union general-secretaries were household names. Those days are long gone. But there is one that still manages instant name recognition, usually preceded, it has to be said, by a profanity. Bob Crow, the tabloid bête noire and leader of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union is a defiantly unreconstructed militant. As a Millwall football club supporter, he revels in the club’s motto: “Everyone hates us, we don’t care.”

Yet he’s the only general secretary I can think of who’s been on Have I Got News for You. His extreme left politics may be primordial, but Crow never claims to be more than he is: a tribune of his members and he is undoubtedly effective in pursuing their interests. With a membership that has increased by 40 per cent on his watch, Crow is a powerful reminder to theorising progressives that if you make a practical difference to ordinary peoples’ lives they will support you. Regardless of what anyone else thinks.

Demos:

They seemed to have dropped off the radar in recent years, but have come bang with a bang with two moves that put them in the centre of the action. First, their Progressive Conservatism project provided David Cameron with some intellectual detergent to wash out the ‘nasty party’ stain by making a daring foray into the left’s territory, particularly around social and welfare policy.

Second, their Open Left project which is looking at ‘renewing the thinking and ideas of the political Left’, may help to flesh out just how we can win back ground that should never have been lost to the right in the first place.

Mark Littlewood:

The former director of communications for the Liberal Democrats and founder of the anti-ID card pressure group ‘No2ID’is now director-general of the right-wing Institute for Economic Affairs.
Littlewood is important because he shows the coalition is not just a marriage of convenience, but also of ideas. This pact is not just an aberration. The right of the Lib Dems have far more in common with the Conservatives than they do with Labour.

Littlewood personifies that unholy alliance. Understanding that this coupling between Orange Book free market Lib Dems and the Tories is true love is perhaps the most valuable lesson progressives can learn from 2010. Only by understanding it can it be overcome.

• Email your list of the most influential left wingers of 2010 to shamik@leftfootforward.org

A OnePoll survey of 3,000 Newsnight viewers out today has revealed that Nick Clegg is the politician they would most like to see grilled by Jeremy Paxman. Seventeen per cent of those polled want the deputy prime minister put under the spotlight, followed by shadow education secretary Ed Balls (8%), home secretary Theresa May (7%) and shadow energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband (6%).

The figure for Clegg rises to 25 per cent for the north east, 23 per cent for the north west and 21 per cent for Scotland. The Liberal Democrat leader is the overwhelming choice among Labour voters (31%), with Tory voters most wanting to see Balls grilled (17%) and Lib Dem voters opting for May (20%).

So what kind of performance can we expect from Clegg? And to which question can we hope to see a ‘Michael Howard’ - maybe if Paxman asks him “at what point did you and your eight-year-old change your mind on the deficit?”

Any more ideas for questions to Clegg?! Enter them in the comments section below and we’ll try and get Paxo to ask them…

As young people collect their A-level results today a double whammy of failed policies has left them in a precarious position. Top-up fees, that threaten to be raised yet again, leave many feeling unable to mortgage their future on the hope of higher earnings whilst cuts to funding and places mean that those that chose to take the risk may miss out a place regardless of their ability or aspiration.

More than 650,000 people have applied for a place on university course this year, more than ever before, and this is being used by apologists for top-up fees, such as the Russell Group of ‘elite’ universities, as a demonstration that they do not deter young people from going university.

Clearly these people haven’t spoken to any students recently. If they did they would hear story after story of young people at the beginning of their working lives saddled with £20,000 or more of debt and terrified about what the future brings.

The same people say that this means that a further doubling, or even tripling, of fees would bring in the money that universities desperately need and not affect the numbers of young people who apply for a university course.

Once again they are ignoring clear evidence that the doubling of fees demanded by vice chancellors would put a significant proportion of students off going to university and that the prospect of debt affects those from lower-income families significantly more than others.

Even if fees were no deterrent to those from poorer backgrounds going to university, further widening the gap between rich and poor, they would still be deeply regressive.

A sticker price placed on a degree that asks a teacher to pay the same for their degree as a corporate lawyer, both professions that require a university education, unfairly punishes those who gain least financially from their degrees. The system is broken and must be replaced with one that asks graduates to contribute based on their real earnings.

That graduate contribution should be paired with recognition from the government that a well educated work-force is beneficial to society in general, and that this requires better investment. Public investment in higher education in the UK is below the OECD average, 20% less than France, and 10% less than the US.

Other countries recognise that higher level skills are essential for both economic recovery and the future employment needs of the country and continue to increase the number of places at university. The UK has slipped from third to eleventh placed in the OECD in its graduation rates, slipping behind countries like Japan, Sweden, and even Slovakia.

Of the 650,000 people applying for university this year, up to 200,000 will miss out on a place because the government has placed an arbitrary cap on the number of people that can go to university. This is not based on the number of qualified candidates – 3,500 straight A students weren’t offered a university place last year – but rather a lack of willingness from successive governments to fund places for every student with the ability and ambition to go into higher education.

Instead, the current government have compounded cuts made by their predecessor meaning that those students who do get a place at university will be entering institutions struggling to provide adequately for them.

For Ministers to decry poverty of opportunity while presiding over this current crisis is cheap talk, but to stand by and do nothing as young people are left to sink or swim is a dereliction of duty. Abandoning this generation of young people would cause permanent scars to individuals and their families, society and the economy.

More widely, there are clearly serious issues with a funding system that is unable to support the hundreds of thousands of applicants who have made the grade, and leaves a quarter of applicants without a place. The discredited system of top-up fees exploits applicants’ limited options by heaping £25,000 debt on top of the significant pressures they already face. Ministers must introduce a fair, progressive and sustainable alternative that supports rather than penalises students.

An educated workforce is the driver of a modern economy and a Government desperate to get the UK back on sound financial footing should recognise the transformative power of universities and students, and fund their future accordingly.

Today’s papers were once again filled with stories of Lib Dem anger at Sir Philip Green’s appointment as a government adviser, with The Times front page reporting demands from Lib Dem backbenchers that Nick Clegg – who is said to be privately “irritated” despite publically backing Sir Philip – instigate a review of his tax arrangements.

During the election campaign, the Lib Dems set out plans to raise £4.6 billion from “anti-avoidance measures”, while the deputy prime minister said that “those huge loopholes that only people right at the top, very wealthy people who can afford a football team of lawyers and accountants to get out of paying tax” should be closed; in November, he said the party’s tax plans would be “paid for by closing tax loopholes”.

It has been widely reported that Sir Philip’s primary means of avoiding tax, is by transferring control of the vast majority of his business empire to his Monaco-based wife, Tina. The arrangement is alleged to have saved the Green family £285 milllion in 2005 as she didn’t have to pay tax on the £1.2 billion dividend she received.

All perfectly legal, but what impact would that £285 million the government’s new efficiency adviser avoided paying have had in these straightened times? In 2009, annual gross median pay in the public sector was £22,405 – that’s 12,720 public sector workers employed for a year had he paid all his taxes.

In addition, according to the 2010 Budget red book, had the man now tasked with helping to cut public spending not been a tax avoider, the Government need not have had to do many of the following:

• Axing the baby element of the child tax credit (which is to be removed from 2011-12): £275m

• Cutting the child tax credit supplement for children aged one and two (which is to be reversed from 2012-13): £180m

• Extending the conditionality for lone parent benefits for those with children aged five and above (from October 2011): £180m

• Abolishing the health in pregnancy grant: £150m

• Reducing the tax credits second income threshold to £40,000 (from 2011-12): £145m

• Axing the Saving Gateway (which will not be introduced in July 2010): £115m

• Reducing housing benefit awards to 90 per cent after 12 months for claimants of Jobseekers Allowance: £110m

• Cutting the Sure Start Maternity Grant (which will now apply to first child only from 2011-12): £75m

• Cuts in the local housing allowance (with caps on maximum rates for each property size, with a 4-bed limit from 2011-12): £65m

• Cutting support for mortgage interest (set payments at the average mortgage rate from October 2010): £65m

• Not introducing video games tax relief: £50m

• Removing the 50-plus element of the working tax credit (from 2012-13): £40m

As Left Foot Forward reported last week, the coalition are making great play of their plans to crack down on benefit cheats, yet are silent on the problem of tax cheats, with HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) announcing they will no longer produce some of their key stats on enforcement – since May they stopped publishing information on “the number of prosecutions against taxpayers and the success rate of court actions pursued by HMRC”.

This despite Clegg’s pre-election bluster and the evidence that the UK tax gap is estimated at up to £120 billion, dwarfing the welfare gap. Failure by the Lib Dem leader to deliver on his anti-avoidance rhetoric and ease Green into the shadows could lead to a battle with his backbenchers, the New Statesman’s George Eaton reporting:

A number of Lib Dem backbenchers, several of whom voted against the VAT increase, have publicly criticised Green.

Andrew George sardonically remarked that Green would have been “more useful in terms of advising on tax avoidance .. than deciding on the future job prospects of, particularly, the poorest paid public servants”.

While Mike Hancock, the MP for Portsmouth South, said: “I’m all in favour of anyone who avoids tax to be tackled firmly and I’m surprised that Clegg would want to appoint someone like that to advise him.” Together with Roger Williams he has called for a review of Green’s tax arrangements.

Lord Oakeshott, the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, has encouraged the rebels, pointedly noting that: “Governments, like businesses, need to maximise their revenues. Tax cheats and benefits cheats both cost taxpayers dear.”

Conservative Home, meanwhile, has more on the significance of the developments, Paul Goodman explaining:

Nick Clegg said yesterday that the Government’s examining an anti-avoidance tax rule.  It was this remark that gave journalists reason to ring up Liberal Democrat MPs to seek their views on Green.

The Deputy Prime Minister had an obvious reason to make it: his Party’s seen by many voters as a captive of the Conservatives, and has consequently plummeted in the polls – which, furthermore, are turning against AV, the Liberal Democrat’s main potential gain from coalition.

Clegg has to try to prove that Liberal Democrat ideas have leverage in government.

A couple of days ago, Guido Fawkes revealed the shock poll that George Osborne is the “most popular Tory Chancellor ever”. What he failed to tell his readers is that Osborne is some way behind the popularity reached by two of Labour’s three most recent Chancellors: Gordon Brown in Labour’s first and second terms or Denis Healey in the late-1970s.

Although carefully avoiding any mention of Labour’s Chancellors, the picture used by Guido liberally used photoshop to remove the Labour data points. Left Foot Forward has gone through Ipsos-MORI’s fascinating slide pack on the Coalition’s first 100 days to dig out the full chart.

Gordon Brown’s popularity dipped into unsatisfied territory on only two occasions – once around the time of the fuel protests in 2000 and again as prepared to become Prime Minister – but he never hit the depths reached by Norman Lamont or Ken Clarke. The surprise finding is that Denis Healey was so popular despite presiding over the Winter of Discontent.

Some will argue that Healey’s popularity bodes well for George Osborne since he also undertook a period of fiscal consolidation. The difference, of course, is that the cuts in the 1970s were demanded by the IMF shielding Healey from some of the blame. And while Healey reduced the level of public expenditure from 49.7 per cent of GDP to 45.1 per cent, George Osborne is attempting to go twice as far by reducing the public sector from 48.1 per cent of GDP to below 40 per cent.

The eyebrows and piano playing helped too.

Last night’s Newsnight focused on the row between George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith over expensive changes to the welfare system. Cuts to universal benefits, such as the Winter Fuel Allowance, appear to be the compromise on the table. David Cameron famously referred to Labour literature during the election that warned of these cuts as “lies“. But Sunder Katwala has unearthed another unfortunate turn of phrase used by David Cameron to reassure voters.

Next Left today dig out David Cameron’s eve of election mimic of President George H. W. Bush. On May 4th, referring to pensioner provisions such as the Winter Fuel Allowance, David Cameron told an election rally:

“And let me say very clearly to pensioners if you have a Conservative Government your Winter Fuel Allowance, your bus pass, your Pension Credit, your free TV licence all these things are safe. You can read my lips, that is a promise from my heart. Don’t believe the lies you’re being told by the Labour Party just because they’ve got nothing positive to say.”

As the BBC’s Nick Robinson blogged at the time:

“It’s an unfortunate phrase given its history. George Bush Sr was the first to say “read my lips”. The rest of the sentence was “no new taxes”. It helped him win the presidency in 1988. He went on to raise taxes to reduce the deficit and “read my lips” became shorthand for broken political promises.”

Watch President Bush’s famous remarks:

Labour leadership contender David Miliband has launched a campaign calling for David Cameron to “come clean on Winter Fuel Payments”. You can join the campaign here.

The UK’s ‘War on Drugs’ has been resoundingly lost. It’s only demonstrable results have been the criminalization of thousands of users who are badly in need of better medical help, and the financial ascension of global crime syndicates. The Coalition government must consider a new approach.

Calls for a new approach to UK drug policy have been growing in recent weeks. The Observer’s recent editorial remarked – tongue firmly in cheek – that:

“If the purpose of drug policy is to make toxic substances available to anyone who wants them in a flourishing market economy controlled by murderous criminal gangs, the current arrangements are working well.”

In July, Stephen Rolles – senior policy analyst at Transform Drug Policy Foundation – produced a detailed study in which he drew attention to a growing consensus within the drug field:

“The prohibition on production, supply, and use of certain drugs has not only failed to deliver its intended goals but has been counterproductive. Evidence is mounting that this policy has not only exacerbated many public health problems… but has created a much larger set of secondary harms associated with the criminal market.

“These now include vast networks of organised crime, endemic violence related to the drug market, corruption of law enforcement and governments, militarised crop eradication programmes… and funding for terrorism and insurgency.”

Rolles’s meticulous study was based on evidence provided by a range of UK committees and think-tanks, as well as recent UN reports. Its demand for the debate on drug legislation to move beyond “populist politics and tabloid headlines” and onto a consideration of “a risk guided regulatory approach” which would provide “a more pragmatic public health model” and transform “a proportion of existing criminal profits into legitimate tax revenue” could not have been more clearly presented.

Indeed, just this week, the study was praised by Sir Ian Gilmore, former president of the Royal College of Physicians, who agreed that moving from prohibition towards regulation and taxation would “drastically reduce crime and improve health.”

In light of such evidence, it would appear that common sense simply demands that the coalition government rethink UK drug policy. Even if you ignore the fact that alcohol and tobacco together account for more deaths than AIDS, legal drugs, illegal drugs, road accidents, murder and suicide combined, all the while remaining perfectly legal. And even if you ignore the fact that the UK has completey failed to combat the health issues related to drug addiction, the financial implications of drug policy reform demand consideration.

A study undertaken by Transform in 2004 revealed that a regulatory approach to drug policy would have produced “a net saving to tax payers of up to £13.943billion”. The Independent Drug Monitoring Unit found that taxation on current levels of imported drugs would bring in anywhere between £3.4billion and £6.4billion in extra tax revenue per year.

Meanwhile, evidence from Portugal and the Netherlands reveals clearly that the decriminalisation of drugs has had very few adverse effects. On the contrary; in both countries, the amount of drug-related infections and deaths has plummeted, and overall usage has declined among teenagers. In Portugal, a detailed study concluded that:

“None of the fears promulgated by opponents of Portuguese decriminalization have come to fruition, whereas many of the benefits predicted by drug policymakers from instituting a decriminalization regime have been realised.”

Facts such as these are irrefutable, and for a government that is so hell-bent on saving every last penny, cannot be ignored. When David Cameron (with the aid of his running mate, The Sun) is so desperate to claw back £1.5billion from “benefit scroungers,” it would be sheer stupidity for him not to examine the possibility of legislative reform – the blueprint for which already exists – that could potentially save ten times that amount of public funds, and which has the backing of numerous authoritative voices.

A major review of drug policy is due in December of this year. At a time when other European countries are already reaping the benefits of a regulatory approach, Latin American states such as Mexico are beginning to move in a similar direction, and even American legislatures are considering legalising cannabis, it would be foolish for the UK not to seriously look at the option of decriminalization.

It is high time that Cameron and the rest of the coalition recognised that the ‘War on Drugs’ has been lost, and that a new approach is desperately needed. If this government is truly concerned with the economic and medical health of this nation, it will take steps to reform our drug laws. Rational science and simple common sense demand it.

Last weekend the Mail on Sunday broke the news that MI5 had vetoed Baroness Pauline Neville Jones’ appointment as Cameron’s National Security Advisor over concerns about her links to two dubious Russian oligarchs. Essentially, MI5 were apparently worried that, amongst other things, she has sat on the Executive Council of an American security think-tank, the International Intelligence Summit, which is heavily sponsored by Mikhail Chernoy.

Chernoy is banned from entering the US due to allegations of illegal business deals and links to the Russian mafia. It is worth noting that while she was apparently happy to be involved with a Chernoy-sponsored event, two former Directors of the CIA pulled out of the event and resigned from the Summit because of Chernoy’s involvement.

In May, Left Foot Forward reported more doubts about the Baroness, in particular her calls for greater military intervention in UK home affairs, while The Guardian has also delved into her past, investigating her involvement with former Serbian president and war crimes suspect Slobodan Milosevic, with members of the Serbian opposition believing a telecoms deal she had brokered “supplied Milosevic with the war chest for his Kosovo campaign”.

It now appears that the Baroness has attempted a remarkably ham-fisted cover-up of her involvement with the International Intelligence Summit and the dodgy Mr Chernoy; here she is on the list of Speaker and Organisers of the 2006 Summit on the original website, and here is how that page looks now:

Spot the difference? Given that she’s a former spook you would have thought that she’d do a better job of covering her tracks… Whatever next, spies losing laptops on the tube?!

George Osborne claimed in a speech yesterday that: “Employment is growing at the fastest pace for over a decade, confounding predictions that the economy cannot generate private sector jobs”.

In aggregate terms, this is true – in fact it could even be said to undersell the real situation. Employment in the latest three months (April to June) was 184,000 higher than in the previous three months. That is the biggest quarterly gain since 1989.

But the Chancellor failed to point out that somewhat less than half the increase in employment, 68,000, was accounted for by full-time employment, while part-time employment increased by 115,000. The gain in full-time employment is welcome, but not particularly noteworthy – larger increases were being recorded little more than two years ago. It is also, perhaps, not surprising given the number of jobs that were lost over the preceding two years.

This would not matter if people were choosing to work part-time, but this does not appear to be the case. Since the end of 2007 the number of part-time workers in the UK (excluding those on temporary contracts) has increased by 324,000.

But the number saying that they are working part-time because they cannot find full-time employment has gone up by 347,000, while those working part-time because they do not want full-time employment is virtually unchanged (up 3,000 – the numbers do not total because there are also people recorded as working part-time because they are disabled or students).

And, while he was fulsome in his praise for the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Chancellor also failed to mention its forecast that, as a result of public spending cuts and job losses in the government sector, employment levels in the UK will still be close to current levels in April 2012. This suggests that the present rate of private sector employment growth will not be sustained.

In other words, the private sector is not currently generating enough of the full-time jobs that people want and it is unlikely to do so over the next 18 months. As a result, unemployment will remain at a very high level and around 1 million people who want to work full-time will remain stuck in part-time jobs.

Speaking today on social mobility, Nick Clegg appeared to create a new front with his Conservative colleagues by openly discussing the need to reduce income inequalities. Only yesterday, George Osborne outlined that his focus was on equality of opportunity and not equality of income. A debate has been raging in recent weeks over the conclusions of ‘The Spirit Level‘ by Professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.

In his speech to the Lib Dem think tank, Centre Forum, Nick Clegg said:

“The goal of improving social mobility overlaps with other objectives for social policy, such as reducing poverty or narrowing income inequality.”

Although making it clear that social mobility and income inequality were not the same, he outlined his own commitment to tackling the problem.

In answer to a question by Sam Coates of The Times, Mr Clegg explicitly referenced the current debate over ‘The Spirit Level’ and, while dismissing the idea that Britain could ever be a perfectly equal country, outlined his view that income inequality was problematic and that “extremes of wealth inequality” were wrong especially when they became “stratified”.

The Deputy Prime Minister’s remarks appear to be at odds with those of Chancellor George Osborne just yesterday. In his speech yesterday, Mr Osborne referred to “equality of opportunity” rather than tackling income inequality. And as noted by Tim Montgomerie on Conservative Home yesterday:

“Mr Osborne used his Today programme interview to distance himself from the idea that greater equality of outcome should be a government aim. He said that he wanted to deliver equality of opportunity and that the Coalition’s reforms in education, welfare and health – as well as the reduction of the deficit – were part of his hope that a child born today would enjoy a better chance to succeed in life than a child born during the Brown-Blair era.”

Although David Cameron name checked the work of Wilkinson and Pickett at his Hugo Young Memorial lecture last year, Conservative think tanks such as Policy Exchange and the TaxPayers’ Alliance have, in recent weeks, been challenging the findings of the Spirit Level. Malcolm Clark has debunked these attacks on this website. Much to Mr Montgomerie’s chagrin, 11 Tory MPs have signed a pledge to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

In just a few days, more than 2,000 38 Degrees members have come together to share their stories of what they value about the NHS. They’re concerned about the Coalition’s plans for the health service, including privitisation of services and layoffs of huge numbers of NHS staff.

With media coverage of the NHS focusing on the negative, 38 Degrees members decided it was time to correct the balance with a view positive stories of their own. You can read the stories here – http://www.38degrees.org.uk/share-your-NHS-stories/

38 Degrees member Joanne explains:

“I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis at age 29, my local NHS have been simply wonderful supporting me through it all. We can’t let a fantastic service like this be eroded by back door privatisation.”

Others value the security that the NHS gives over a lifetime, like 38 Degrees member Gordon:

“I am 55, and I know that whatever happens to me in my last few decades, I will always be well cared for, and with no worries whatsoever about what it will all cost. And this applies to every single person in our country, not just those of us who can afford it.“

All over the map, which has comments drawn from almost every part of the UK, 38 Degrees activists are also clear about their political worries for the NHS. Paul, from London, says:

“I am very concerned for the future of the services provided as part NHS. The prospect of this current coalition government forcing through drastic ideologically driven cuts under the mask of ‘essential spending reduction’ is a real worry.”

The Coalition is planning to move fast – legislation is expected before the end of the year. But those opposing the plans are moving quickly too. With thousands of people across the country opposing the reform of the NHS, forcing through these changes to the NHS may prove to be a step too far for the new Coalition.

• Stand up for the NHS by adding your voice here:-

http://www.38degrees.org.uk/share-your-NHS-stories/

Today’s ICM poll for the Guardian puts the Labour party on level terms with the Conservatives for the first time since October 2007. But as noted by UK Polling Report’s Anthony Wells, “the Guardian’s report concentrates upon the findings on the economy”. The topline number is buried on page seven of the paper and appears in the tenth paragraph of their online story.

In a blog titled “ICM show Labour and Tories neck and neck”, UK Polling Report observes:

“There is a new ICM poll in the Guardian tomorrow that probably isn’t what David Cameron hoped for on his 100th day in power. Topline voting intention figures are CON 37%(-1), LAB 37%(+3), LDEM 18%(-1). This is the first time an ICM poll has shown Labour catching the Conservatives since October 2007 and the election that never was.

“Despite this rather striking finding, the Guardian’s report concentrates upon the findings on the economy, which is rather more positive for the government.”

In mentioning the finding towards the bottom of their online piece, the Guardian’s Larry Elliot and Tom Clark write:

“But despite some reasonably strong personal numbers for the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, when it comes to voting intentions there are clear signs that the first peacetime coalition in the era of universal suffrage is serving his Liberal Democrats less well than the Tories. Where the Conservatives are holding on to the 37% vote share which achieved in the election, a quarter of those who backed the Lib Dems have since switched sides, leaving the third party on just 18% – down one point on the month, and six on the election. Many of these deserters have drifted towards Labour, taking its standing to 37%, and allowing a leaderless party to run the Tories level for the first time in three years.”

The ICM / Guardian General Election prediction poll put the Tories on 37 per cent, Labour on 28 per cent, and the Liberal Democrats on 26 per cent.

Twitter sentiment for Nick Clegg is down sharply – while David Cameron’s rating has risen slightly, in another stark illustration of the unpopularity of the ‘sell out’ deputy prime minister in the three months since the general election. Sentiment for the Liberal Democrats is also down, though not by as much as for the party’s leader, who, for the next fortnight, is effectively running the country while the prime minister is on holiday.

The findings are revealed in Tweetminster’s analysis of five million tweets relevant to the coalition’s first hundred days, while there was further woe for the coalition, and the Lib Dems in particular, in the latest YouGov poll for The Sun, in which 59 per cent of respondents said the Lib Dems had sold out their principles in joining the coalition, 62 per cent said it was no longer clear what they stood for, and only 14 per cent believed the coalition would last more than four years.

Also today, Labour leadership candidate Ed Miliband published a list of the ten biggest mistakes the coalition has made in those 100 days, which he says have been marked “by a series of misjudgements and short-term decisions, which will take Britain backwards and fail to secure a fairer and more prosperous future… [and] by short-termism and repeated blows to our public services and British industry and jobs”.

The shadow energy and climate change secretary added:

“In such a short space of time, we have already seen the government waste NHS money on an unnecessary top-down re-organisation and scrap support to British businesses, such as the cancelled loan to Sheffield Forgemasters. We have seen them slash the school rebuilding programme, hammer working people with an unfair VAT rise, and put at risk the support in the country for voting reform by adding in a gerrymandering clause that helps the Tories to win seats.

“It is no surprise that David Cameron has chosen not to publicly celebrate these 100 days in office.”

The ten are: the deep cuts which risk a double-dip recession; the £389 per family VAT tax bombshell; the cuts to business support, from Sheffield Forgemasters to the abolition of the Regional Development Agencies; slashing the number of university places; axing the Green Investment Bank; abandoning support for clean coal; scrapping the Building Schools for the Future programme; abandoning the young people’s guarantee of work for the unemployed; the £3 billion top-down re-organisation of the NHS; and the gerrymandering redrawing of constituency boundaries bill.

The Tweetminster analysis showed that the prime minister is the most mentioned member of the government on Twitter – with 11,470 news related mentions – followed by Mr Clegg with almost 7,400, then Chancellor George Osborne, education secretary Michael Gove, work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, business secretary Vince Cable, energy and climate change secretary Chris Huhne, justice secretary Ken Clarke, communities secretary Eric Pickes, home secretary Theresa May, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, and health secretary Andrew Lansley.

In terms of topics, the BP oil spill, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, jobs, cuts, schools and the ‘big society’ were among the most trended, while NHS reform, immigration, crime, climate change and electoral reform had a smaller number of mentions than might have been expected. The top media influencers were BBC News, The Guardian and Reuters, with Alastair Campbell, India Knight and Krishnan Guru-Murthy the most influential journalists.

Alberto Nardelli, co-founder of Tweetminster, said:

“With this report we wanted to try something different. Over the past few months we’ve processed a lot of data and our aim was to present this information in a format that provides both a snapshot and insights into the issues that have framed the coalition’s first 100 days.

“And to do this comment-free – by visualising the topics and their link with the individuals, news stories, organisations and institutions that are shaping the issues and consequently influencing public opinion.”

Tweetminster’s chart of the coalition’s first 100 days can be downloaded here.

Our guest writer is Gareth Thomas MP, shadow minister for international development

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, returning from viewing the devastation in Pakistan for himself today has told the world to ‘wake up’ to the full scale of the disaster, now affecting an estimated 20 million people – including millions of children under threat from waterborne diseases.

I welcomed the government’s initial response to the terrible tragedy unfolding in Pakistan.

Along with the work of leading British humanitarian NGOs, in the short-term, UK aid will hopefully make a vital difference to the millions now affected.

But a series of revelations in recent days show that international development secretary Andrew Mitchell not only has a worrying lack of vision for reform of the global humanitarian system, but worse still is threatening the future ability of the world to respond.

Belatedly, he has finally taken to the airwaves criticising the slowness of the international response and the lack of funding for the UN appeal. I sincerely hope he has been backing up this media comment with actual phone calls and meetings with other donors.

But I could only listen with incredulity as Mitchell spoke in interviews about the work of the key UN disaster response fund, the CERF (Central Emergency Response Fund) and how the Pakistan disaster needed even more funds than the CERF was able to provide – at the same time as leaked proposals from his Department over the weekend showed that he planned to abandon Labour’s commitments to provide more funding for this vital mechanism.

Amongst a list of 100 projects earmarked to be dropped in a memo from DfID director of policy Nick Dyer is Labour’s promise to increase funding for key system-wide UN funds such as the CERF and the Millennium Development Goals Fund.

Questions are also raised by the leak about funding for individual UN agencies – likely to be those which the UK has traditionally supported like UNICEF and UNAIDS – and cynically earmarked for cuts under a category listed ‘unlikely to be noticed’ is support for the UN Peacebuilding Fund.

Oxfam has described the cuts proposals, if implemented, as:

“A desperately backward step for poor people.”

As the flooding in Pakistan has tragically shown, we need more global and coordinated funding read and able to be swiftly and effectively deployed – not less – instead of needing to pass round the begging bowl every time, when every minute and hour is key.

And not just in Pakistan.

Equally tragic, but nowhere near the headlines, is the ongoing food crisis across the Sahel belt of West Africa where drought and erratic rains have caused failed harvests and water shortages, devastating the lives of people across Niger, Mali and Chad.

More than 10 million people are now affected by the crisis, seven million of those in Niger where hundreds of thousands of children face starvation.

Yet as Oxfam have shockingly reported, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in Niger, the country worst-hit by the West Africa food crisis, has been forced to make an “agonising” decision to abandon plans to provide emergency food to families with children over the age of two because of a huge funding shortfall.

In government, I was proud to have worked on helping the UN improve its response to disasters, and that Labour campaigned for the CERF to be expanded from 50 million to 500 million dollars after the Tsunami and Darfur crises left the UN struggling to even start responding.

And as the likely impacts of climate change became apparent, we had pushed for it to double again to one billion dollars because of the increasing likelihood of a number of climate-change related disasters.

Climate change is another area in which commitments are rapidly being abandoned by this unprincipled coalition – with the same leaked document revealing that Mitchell has abandoned Labour’s pledge to ensure that additional funds were provided, and that no more than 10 per cent of the aid budget would be diverted to pay for tackling climate change, and its impacts such as climate related flooding.

Mitchell has so far refused to comment on the leaked drafts.

If he continues to do so, his words of concern about the ‘woeful’ international response to the Pakistan floods will sadly ring hollow.

He needs to tell the global humanitarian community urgently whether he plans to continue to strengthen this key emergency response mechanism, and other UN funds, or whether he plans to jettison them along with the other commitments listed in his dossier of cuts.

Dropping this pledge will only increase the likelihood of woeful responses to future Pakistans and Nigers.

And the cost will be measured in lives.

• Donate to the Disasters Emergency Committee Pakistan floods appeal by logging on to http://tinyurl.com/pak-floods

Lord Pearson has resigned as UKIP leader, saying he was “not much good” at party politics and that UKIP “deserved a better politician… to lead it”; he said he has “many exciting plans for the future”, spending more time on his “wider interests”, which include “the threat from Islamism and the relationship between good and evil” – and his dogs and family.

Left Foot Forward couldn’t let this historic occasion pass without our own tribute, so here it is, a reprise of Pearson’s priceless performance on the Campaign Show during the general election:

… dubbed the “worst campaign interview ever” in The Times and The Spectator, with one reader commenting:

“In an era when the likes of Clegg, Cameron and Brown are having to store an inhuman quantity of information, quotations and statistics in their short-term memory in order to appease all manner of potential fates on national TV, Pearson’s Cholmondeley-Warnerism looks really, really bad.

“The argument that the piffling details of UKIP policy fade into insignificance against the brilliance of the grand vision is hard to stand up given the grand vision is total nadgers too.”

There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s UKIP.

Yesterday The Guardian splashed with the news that the coalition’s promise to introduce an emissions performance standard (EPS) to stop the most polluting power stations has been ‘put on hold’ and wouldn’t be in the coalition’s first energy law, which is expected to come before Parliament later this year.

This prompted Left Foot Forward to ask:

“Is Chris Huhne about to approve new dirty coal stations?”

In a letter to today’s paper, the energy and climate change secretary has, in effect, confirmed that the emissions standard won’t be included in the coalition’s first energy bill. Instead, he uses the letter to reaffirm his commitment to bring forward the new green measure “as quickly as possible”.

His letter promises a consultation within six months of the election and a white paper within a year and adds:

“The view that this might raise the possibility of new coal-fired power stations “slipping through the system” is ludicrous.”

Let’s unpick what this means in real terms.

Right now Peel Power has a live application to build a largely unabated coal plant at Hunterston in Scotland and the company wants approval for this imminently. Under the rules Ed Miliband introduced, if this were to be approved this plant would be mandated to include only a small pilot of CCS technology. That is all. With their flagship green EPS policy, the coalition pledged to go further. Now we know this won’t happen for literally years.

So in the meantime, if Huhne gives the nod to Hunterston, this new power station will pollute more than eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year for the foreseeable – far in excess of the pollution levels from a modern gas plant – remember David Cameron and George Osborne pledged to set their emissions limit at the level of a modern gas plant or lower. Furthermore, without their promised emissions performance standard in this year’s bill, there’s also no provision to reduce emissions from a plant like Hunterston in future.

This is despite advice from the government’s own advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, that the power sector must be completely decarbonised by 2030 – and despite their recommendation that no coal plant should be operating in the UK without full CCS by 2025 at the latest.

Given all of this, let’s assume four new coal stations go ahead – each with a small scale pilot of CCS paid for by taxpayers – as outlined under the last government. Without an emissions performance standard agreed this year, this could lead to tens of millions of tonnes of carbon pollution, year in year out, indefinitely. This alone could destroy the UK’s chance of hitting the carbon targets set out in the Climate Change Act.

You have to ask why both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems were able to try and force an emissions performance standard into Ed Miliband’s Energy Bill – New Clause 15 – at the end of the last Parliament, which would have ensured the detail of an EPS would be before Parliament within 12 months of his bill passing, but now aren’t even considering putting something into their own first energy bill which would enable them to do precisely what they asked of Labour.

As the now energy minister, Tory MP Charles Hendry, said at the time:

“The critical point is that new clause 15 would put in place a time scale. It is a tight one, suggesting that proposals should be established for consultation within six months and confirmed and laid before Parliament within 12 months. In the time scale in which decisions would have to be made, businesses in Britain or elsewhere would know exactly what would be expected of them for some decades to come.

“That degree of clarity would be extremely helpful to them.”

Quite. But instead of providing such clarity, Charles Hendry and Chris Huhne are now kicking their totemic green pledge into the long grass by consulting into 2011 with the prospect of possibly putting an EPS into an energy bill some time after that – if indeed they even do another energy bill.

In the meantime, I understand Mr Huhne’s officials are busy preparing new measures to encourage Gulf-style offshore deep sea drilling in UK waters and that these new arrangements will be included in that same energy bill that won’t include their pledged EPS.