8.21am: With PMQs, a student protest, and an important white paper on education, it’s going to be a busy day at Westminster. And those are just the highlights. Here’s a full list of what’s coming up:
9.15am: David Willetts, the science minister, gives evidence to the Commons science committee about the spending review.
Midday: David Cameron and Ed Miliband at PMQs.
Midday: Students hold a rally at Trafalgar Square as part of a day of protests and sit-ins about the tuition fees increase. Later they will protest outside the Lib Dem HQ and Downing Street.
Midday: Chris Grayling, the employment minister, launches the OECD review of welfare reform.
12.30pm: Michael Gove, the education secretary, unveils his schools white paper, The Importance of Teaching, in a statement in the Commons.
12.30pm: Len McCluskey, the newly-elected general secretary of Unite, holds a press briefing.
3pm: Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, gives evidence to the Commons transport committee about the spending review.
Gove has been doing a round of interviews about his white paper this morning. I’ll post a summary shortly. As usual, I’ll also be covering all the breaking political news throughout the day, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web.
9.04am: Michael Gove has given at least three interviews about his white paper this morning. There’s a good preview of what the white paper is going to say on the BBC’s website. Here are some of the main points he’s been making in his interviews. Some of the quotes are from PoliticsHome.
• Gove identified two key aims for his education reforms.
[First], is our education system holding its own internationally? Are we doing as well as other countries, like those in Scandinavia, North America and Asia? And the second test is, are more children from poor homes getting into top universities? We’ve just discovered that the number of children eligible for free school meals going to Oxford and Cambridge. It was 45 a couple of years ago. It’s now just 40. That’s a stunning indictment of the lack of social mobility in this country.
• He said that he did not like to label schools as “failing”.
I don’t like the f-word, I have to say. I think it’s underperformance. You might say that’s a euphemism but I think it’s important to recognise it.
• He defended his plans to get more former members of the armed forces to train as teachers. The white paper will include proposals making it easier for them to get into the profession.
We know that discipline is a problem in some schools, I can’t think of anything better than getting people who know all about team work, self-discipline and a sense of pride into our schools to compliment the already huge number of great teachers than we have at the moment.
• He defended the decision to scrap ringfenced money for school sport. “We’re giving teachers the money that was previously ringfenced so that now they can decide how to spend it,” he said. “It’s important that we also ensure that schools do it [spend money on sports] in their own way and that we don’t have me or any other tsar sitting in the centre of Whitehall saying this is precisely how you deliver sport.”
9.05am: Andy Burnham, the shadow education secretary, has been on Sky and the BBC commenting on Michael Gove’s proposals. He’s particularly worried about Gove’s plan to overhaul league tables, so that schools will be assessed on how many pupils get at least a C grade at GCSE in maths, English, a language, a science and a humanities. This is designed to stop schools using supposedly “easy” subjects to boost their “five good GCSE” ratings. According to PoliticsHome, Burnham said this could entrench divisions within education.
I’m worried that [Gove’s] white paper cements the divide between academic qualifications on the one hand and vocational qualifications on the other … By measuring schools on five core academic subjects, I am worried that the message we are sending to children who want to pursue a more practical, vocational route, that they are somehow second class.
9.06am: Good news for David Cameron. He may not have managed to persuade everyone that the “big society” is a terrific idea. (Interestingly, Nick Clegg did not use the phrase once in his Hugo Young lecture last night.) But the dictionaries team at Oxford University Press like it. They’ve just named it as the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year (even thought it’s actually two words, but never mind). This is from the Press Association story about this:
Organisers said they chose “big society” because of the level of interest it has attracted in the last 12 months as a reflection of the current political and economic climate.
Every year, the dictionaries team at Oxford University Press – which tracks how the vocabulary of the English language is changing – comes up with a word or expression deemed worthy of the honour.
Oxford Dictionaries spokeswoman Susie Dent, who appears on Channel 4′s Countdown, said: “Big society was for us a clear winner because it embraces so much of the year’s political and economic mood.
“Taken to mean many things, it has begun to take on a life of its own, a sure sign of linguistic success.”
Big society was picked ahead of a shortlist of words including double-dip, vuvuzela, Tea Party, preloading, upcycling and showmance.
9.20am: William Hague, the foreign secretary, has issued a statement expressing “immense sadness” about the deaths of the 29 miners at Pike River mine in New Zealand.
9.37am: My colleague Jeevan Vasagar, the Guardian’s education editor, has filed a fresh story about the forthcoming schools white paper. Among the many other points he makes, Jeevan says the white paper will cast teachers as the guardians of the country’s intellectual heritage. “I think it’s important that teachers feel part of the intellectual fabric of the country,” Gove says.
9.49am: Andy Burnham is urging David Cameron to reverse Michael Gove’s decision to end ringfenced funding for sport in schools. This is what Burnham told BBC News just now:
Sport is crucial, particularly in the toughest schools. For the kids who aren’t necessarily academic, it gives them a bit of hope. The day they go to school with their boots in their bag, they feel better about themselves, they are more ready to learn and play a part in the life of the schools. I am worried that the cabinet does not seem to appreciate the importance of sport in building rounded young people.
10.00am: For the record, here are the latest YouGov GB polling figures:
Conservatives: 42% (up five from the general election)
Labour: 40% (up 10)
Lib Dems: 10% (down 14)
Government approval: -7
10.35am: Students are already occupying buildings around the UK in protest against the decision to raise tuition fees. There’s also a heightened police presence around Westminster where students will be marching later. My colleague Adam Gabbatt has all the details. He’s writing a student protests live blog.
10.42am: Oxford Classics has a Twitter feed. Someone has used it to explain why “big society” is word of the year, even though it’s actually two words (see 9.06am):
@AndrewSparrow It is indeed two words, but one lexical item. If it were in the dictionary it would be a single headword, like “food chain”.
Oxford Classics
OWC_Oxford
10.58am: You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here. And all yesterday’s politics stories, including some in today’s paper, are here.
As for the rest of the papers, here are four stories worth noting:
• George Parker and Andrew Ward in the Financial Times (subscription) say that David Cameron is going to host a meeting for the leaders of Nordic and Baltic countries.
Downing Street … laughed off suggestions that Britain now considered itself to be a Nordic country, although the London summit is an unusual attempt by Britain to formalise links with its neighbours to the north and east …
The summit will be viewed with interest elsewhere in the EU. The summit’s participants tend to favour free trade and budget discipline in Brussels and often find themselves on the same side in EU votes. Iceland and Norway are not in the EU.
However, Downing Street insisted the meeting had nothing to do with European politics and was a chance for Mr Cameron to discuss ideas, including learning how Finland and Sweden escaped from financial meltdown in the 1990s while maintaining social cohesion.
• Michael Gove in the Financial Times (subscription) says he will not allow new grammar schools to be set up.
Speaking at a reception held last month by pro-grammar school activists, Michael Gove seemed to suggest that there could be a way back for grammar schools. As the education secretary put it, “my foot is hovering over the pedal” …
Mr Gove clarified there would be no new grammar schools. “If your foot is hovering over the pedal, it has not yet connected,” he said.
• Joanna Sugden in the Times (paywall) says teenage pregnancies have fallen to their lowest number for more than a decade.
The number of under-16s becoming pregnant dropped by 7.5% year on year from 8,200 to 7,586, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics. It is the biggest decrease for more than 10 years and compares with a reduction in the conception figures among all women in England and Wales of just 0.8% year on year to 888,600.
Family planning campaigners said it was a victory for the strategy introduced by the Labour government in 1998, which comes to an end next month. The £285m programme aimed to reduce teenage pregnancies by 50 per cent over the decade by appointing local teen pregnancy co-ordinators of health, education and social care services.
• The Daily Telegraph has a picture of David Cameron wearing a full-length tracksuit as he went on an early-morning run in St James’s Park, accompanied by a celebrity trainer. “It wasn’t that chilly in London,” a Met Office spokesman told the paper.
11.12am: A student has pleaded guilty to throwing an empty fire extinguisher off the roof of 30 Millbank during the tuition fees protests outside the Conservative HQ earlier this month. This is from the Press Association:
Edward Woollard, 18, was arrested five days after the clashes in central London on 10 November and charged with violent disorder.
Appearing at City of Westminster magistrate’s court today, his solicitor Matt Foot said: “Mr Woollard is pleading guilty and I make it very clear he is very sorry for his actions.”
11.21am: Ken Livingstone, Labour’s candidate for London mayor, has put out a statement today backing the Save EMA campaign, which is trying to stop the abolition of education maintenance allowances, the means-tested grants paid to encourage 16 to 19-year-olds to stay on at school. Livingstone said this:
Four out of five of the kids getting this grant in London were living in families earning less than £21,000 a year and it made the difference between them being able to stay at school and get their qualifications and get the chance to move on up through further education, and a better job.
11.38am: The Electoral Commission has published the figures showing how much political parties received in donations between July and September. There’s a very clear and comprehensive analysis on the commission’s website. The Tories received £3.7m and Labour £2.3m. The Lib Dems received just £351,000. ToryPressHQ has been posting on Twitter about the fact that 34% of Labour funding came from Unite. Unite’s donation was worth £818,000. But it was not as large as the £1.1m donation to the Conservative party from David Rowland, the financier who was appointed as party treasurer in the summer but who resigned before taking up his post.
11.47am: Michael Gove has said he wants to make it easier for former members of the armed services to become teachers. Apparently he has been inspired by an American programme, Troops to Teachers. There’s more on this in a pamphlet about the initiative that the Centre of Policy Studies published in 2008.
11.59am: Prime minister’s questions is starting very soon. Labour’s Michael Connarty is down to ask the first question.
David Cameron at PMQs today. Photograph: PA
12.01pm: David Cameron starts with a tribute killed to a soldier killed in Afghanistan last week, Guardsman Christopher Davies. He was the 100th British soldier killed this year.
12.03pm: Michael Connarty asks about restaurants that do not pass on tips to staff. The Unite union is running a campaign on this.
Cameron says tips should be distributed to staff. They should not be used to top up the minimum wage, he says.
12.04pm: David Tredinnick (Con) asks about the protesters who camp in Parliament Square. Will they be removed by the time of the royal wedding next year?
Cameron says he does not see why people should be allowed to sleep in Parliament Square. He hopes this issue will be resolved by then.
12.06pm: Ed Miliband starts with a tribute to the dead servicemen, and condolences to the miners killed in New Zealand.
He thanks MPs for their congratulations on the birth of his new son, Samuel. He thanks Cameron and Nick Clegg for their presents.
Then he asks about the funding for school sports.
Cameron starts with a joke. He congratulates Miliband on the birth of his son. He says he knows what it’s like: the noise, the mess, trying to get the children to shut up. Miliband must have enjoyed having two weeks away from it.
On sport, he says school sport went down under Labour.
12.09pm: Miliband says Cameron will regret that answer. Cameron should not believe what Michael Gove tells him. Miliband reads out some figures showing sport on the increase. That sounds like the big society, he says. Why is Cameron undermining it?
Cameron says only two out of five children play competitive sport in school.
Miliband reads out a quote from a school sports coordinator. “This is frankly a daft decision,” Miliband says. It sums up Gove: “high-handed, incompetent and unfair.”
Cameron says last year the number of pupils of a certain age playing school sport went down. The government is taking a different approach.
12.10pm: Jackie Doyle-Price (Con) asks if anyone at the G20 said the government should cut the deficit more slowly.
No, says Cameron. He quotes Miliband as saying the Labour policy review starts with “a blank page”. That would not be much use at the G20, Cameron says.
12.12pm: Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Con) asks about the Irish bailout.
Cameron says everyone in Ireland spends more than £3,000 a year on British goods and services.
Labour’s Jim Sheridan asks why the government is getting rid of agricultural wages board, but not tackling bankers’ bonuses.
Cameron says some quangos had to go.
12.13pm: Bill Cash (Con) asks why the government is “acquiescing in more European integration, not less”.
Cameron says Cash is wrong. The previous government would have caved in to demands for a 6% EU budget increase.
12.17pm: Miliband asks another question. Isn’t it right to require banks to disclose how many salaries and bonuses worth more than £1m are paid?
Cameron says he agrees. But David Walker, the expert who recommended this to the last government, says the government should impose transparency when other countries do. Cameron says he would rather listen to Walker, an expert, than Miliband, who does not know anything about this.
Miliband asks again about transparency.
Cameron says he will take lectures from Miliband about many things, but not about the banks. Miliband was in the Treasury when they gave Fred Goodwin a knighthood.
Miliband says he will compare his record in the Treasury any time to Cameron’s. Cameron was there on Black Wednesday. He says Cameron promised a “day of reckoning” before the election. “Why doesn’t the prime minister just show a lead and get it done?”
Cameron says when Miliband was in the Treasury, Labour built the biggest boom and bust. Miliband has “nothing to say about the deficit”. He is “the nowhere man of British politics”.
12.20pm: Snap verdict: Many of Cameron’s qualities are appealing, but his high-handedness and tetchiness aren’t among them. It seemed like a score-draw on sports statistics, but Miliband’s questions on sport and the bankers were good and Cameron’s response sounded unduly haughty.
12.21pm: Cameron is back on the subject of sport now. He says Labour’s record was one of “lots of money spent”, but failure.
12.21pm: Gavin Williamson, a Conservative, tries to ask about “bullying” among Labour’s frontbench, beginning to read out a quote about Ed Miliband’s team being “terrified” of Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper because they think they are going to come and “kill him”. John Bercow, the Speaker, interrupts angrily and rules the question out of order.
12.23pm: Dennis Skinner (Lab) suggests Cameron is guilty of “hypocrisy” because he wants to let Turkey into the EU but cap immigration.
Cameron says Skinner is wrong. The net immigration is caused by immigration from outside the EU.
12.24pm: Asked about Len McCluskey, the new leader of Unite, Cameron says he is concerned that a supporter of the Militant Tendency is now the leader of the union that contributes most to Labour.
12.25pm: Asked about whether the 50p tax rate should be temporary, David Cameron says he agrees with Alan Johnson, the shadow chancellor, who also thinks it should be temporary. But Ed Miliband does not agree with Johnson on this or the graduate tax (which is also opposed by Johnson).
12.26pm: On the abolition of the education maintenance allowance, Cameron says it will be replaced with something “more targeted” that will be better at persuading children to stay on at school.
12.27pm: Asked about the removal of the mobility component from disability living allowance, Cameron says the Labour party supports these changes. But the Labour frontbench do not seem to agree with this.
12.29pm: Labour’s George Howarth says the pupil premium and the withdrawal of the education maintenance allowance could deter people from staying on in education.
Cameron says Gove will be happy to meet with Howarth to discuss this.
12.30pm: On charity funding, Cameron says the government has a transition fund to help charities that lose out through loss of funding.
12.31pm: Cameron says Labour don’t like to hear about the mess they left. But he will be talking about it, not just in five months’ time, but in five years’ time too.
12.32pm: PMQs is over now. Michael Gove is about to make his statement on the schools white paper.
12.39pm: Michael Gove says England has “so many” great schools and great teachers.
But he “cannot shy away from confronting weaknesses”. Standards have fallen by international standards. And the gap between children in independent schools and state schools has doubled under Labour. Social mobility went backwards under Labour. The coalition wants to reverse that, Gove says.
The white paper reflects the best ideas from around the world, Gove says.
Teacher training will be improved, with a new generation of teacher training schools modelled on teaching hospitals. There will be a programme to attract people from other professions into teaching. And there will be a Troops to Teachers programme (see 11.47am).
To make teaching more attractive, the government will make it easier for them to impose order. They will be able to impose detention without having to give 24 hours’ notice.
The curriculum will be simplified. “Clutter” will be removed. Teachers will have more freedom.
GCSEs will become more rigorous, through modules being stripped out. Spelling, punctuation and grammar will count for more in exams.
The number of national leaders in education will be doubled.
Some £110m will be available to turn around underperforming schools.
Local authorities will be the government’s partners. They will be parents’ champions. They will be “energetic champions of excellence”.
12.41pm: The need for reform is “urgent”, Gove says. Other countries are accelerating their drive to excellence. “We cannot afford to be left behind.” In the last three years of Labour, reforms went into reverse.
One new academy is being created every working day, he says.
No profession is more “noble” than teaching, Gove says. The white paper gives this country the chance to be a world leader in education, he says.
12.48pm: Andy Burnham, the shadow education secretary, complains that details have been released to the media before parliament.
He says he has two tests: will the measures help every pupil, and will they help every school? He says the plans fail these tests. They will create a new generation of failing schools.
Burnham says he supports some of the moves in the white paper, such as some of those on discipline.
But he says there is a “huge danger” that Gove is cementing the divide between academic and vocational qualifications.
Burnham quotes from an IPPR report saying schools will focus on the children who are good at academic subjects.
Gove has “very little” to say to the 50% of children who won’t go to university, he says.
Some improving schools will “plummet” down the league tables as a result of Gove’s plans to make league tables more academic. This will have a terrible effect on moral, Burnham says.
Burnham asks why Gove is ending university-led teacher training.
Gove “talks a good game on standards”, Burnham says. But on other days he says schools will be free to do what they want.
Gove has not learnt from the “mayhem” he caused with the botched announcement of the cancellation of Building Schools for the Future projects.
Gove is abandoning a school sport system described by the Australians as one of the best in the world.
The pupil premium is “a con”, Burnham says. It is not additional money.
Gove brings “a lethal mix of incompetence and ideology” to his brief, Burnham says. Just because he believes in the teaching of history, he does not need to live in the past.
Gove has a plan “for some schools and some children”, but not for “all schools and all children”.
12.54pm: Michael Gove starts by thanking Burnham for his “performance”. At Burnham’s school, drama was obviously “well taught”, he says.
Gove says schools in challenging circumstances will be given extra support.
Gove says he is surprised that Burnham thinks children on free school meals will not be able to do well at science, history and languages. Isn’t “the soft bigotry of low expectations” (George W Bush’s phrase) alive and well and beating in Burnham’s heart, he says.
Gove says he is investing in technical education.
On sport, says there should be more competition in team sports.
Gove says Burnham went to what Burnham has described as an ordinary comprehensive on Merseyside. That school has now applied for academy status. Given that Burnham’s teachers have embraced the academy programme, Burnham should too, Gove says.
12.57pm: The full text of Gove’s statement is now on the education department’s website.
1.04pm: David Blunkett, the Labour former education secretary, accuses Gove of being inconsistent, because he is trying to centralise and decentralise at the same time. Gove dodges the question, but pays tribute to Bunkett. He says Blunkett was an “oustanding” education secretary.
1.05pm: Labour’s Liz Kendall asks on what basis Gove is saying that social mobility went backwards under the last government.
Gove says he was referring to the fact that the number of children entitled to free school meals going to Oxford has gone down.
1.05pm: Richard Fuller, a Conservative, asks for an assurance that the white paper will support the work of teacher training programmes. Gove says it will. They will have new opportunities.
1.10pm: Mark Durkan from the SDLP says Gove wants to improve punctuation. Yet Gove’s 10-page statement contains only 16 full stops. How would it be marked?
Gove seems to get the giggles. In a reference to Lynne Truss’s book, he says his approach is to “eat, shoot and leave”.
1.11pm: Gove says teaching combines “IQ and EQ [emotional intelligence]“.
1.11pm: Labour’s Nic Dakin says sensible teachers would not want to impose detention without 24 hours’ notice.
Gove says there is a philosophical difference between his approach and Dakin’s. Allowing something is not the same as saying it should happen, he says. He says that he believes in freedom and treating people as adults.
1.17pm: Labour’s Tristram Hunt says modules work well at A-level. And he makes a similar point to Durkan. (See 1.10pm.) He says Gove misspelt “bureaucracy” in his statement.
Gove says that might be because, when he sees the word “bureaucracy”, a “red mist” descends over his eyes.
1.18pm: Joan Ruddock asks about the abolition of the education maintenance allowance. Gove says he wants to ensure the money is focused on the poorest.
1.18pm: Labour’s Clive Efford asks if schools that want money for smaller class sizes will get that money, in the way that academies do. Gove suggests that schools that want that funding should apply for academy status. He says that under the government class sizes are coming down.
1.25pm: Gove says it is wrong to assume that children from poor backgrounds can’t pass GCSEs in science, a language and history or geography. Labour should be on his side of the argument on this, he says.
1.25pm: Labour’s Ben Bradshaw asks Gove to reconsider his decision on school sports. Gove will destroy the renaissance there has been in school sport, Bradshaw says.
Gove says he wants to encourage more competitive sport.
1.30pm: Labour’s Meg Munn says removing the rule requiring 24 hours’ notice before children have detention could put children at risk. That’s because children who are being groomed for sexual abuse could tell their parents they have been in detention when they have actually been spending time with someone trying to abuse them. She urges Gove to reconsider this proposal.
Gove says he does not think giving schools more freedom will encourage abuse.
1.31pm: Gove says he wants teaching to rank alongside medicine or the law as a profession for aspiring graduates.
1.32pm: The white paper, The Importance of Teaching, is now available on the education department’s website.
1.33pm: My colleague Toby Helm has just posted a blog about the government’s plans for school sports. He thinks that Gove is making a terrible mistake, and that the government is going to have to change its mind.
1.40pm: Jonathan Lord, a Conservative, says you can pass a GCSE without reading a novel. Gove says he wants more people to read fiction. He says that he expects Andy Burnham to use that quote against him in the future.
1.44pm: Michael Gove’s statement is over now. It was a marathon – almost 70 minutes. I’ll post a summary shortly.
Tom Clarke has just made a point of order, saying that David Cameron was wrong when he said that Labour was in favour of removing the mobility component from disability living allowance for people in residential homes. (See 12.27pm.) Anne Begg, the Labour chair of the work and pensions committee, has just made the same point on Twitter.
2.26pm: Here, a little later than usual, is a lunchtime summary:
• Michael Gove, the education secretary, has published plans designed to drive up standards and increase the quality of teaching in England’s schools. Unveiling his white paper, The Importance of Teaching, in the House of Commons, Gove said that he was taking ideas from “the highest-performing education nations” in the world. The document contains an abundance of reforms, most of which have been trailed in advance, that will supposedly raise the status of teaching, give teachers more freedom and introduce more academic rigour into exams and league tables.
In a forward to the document, David Cameron and Nick Clegg write:
The most successful countries already combine a high status teaching profession, high levels of autonomy for schools, a comprehensive and effective accountability system and a strong sense of aspiration for all children, whatever their background. Tweaking things at the margins is not an option. Reforms on this scale are absolutely essential if our children are to get the education they deserve.
But Labour’s Andy Burnham strongly attacked the elitist nature of the proposals. Accusing Gove of bringing “a lethal mix of incompetence and ideology” to his brief, Burnham said that this was “a plan for some children and not all children” and that there was “a huge danger here of cementing the divide between academic and vocational qualifications that educational professionals have worked so hard to remove”.
• Thousands of students who are protesting about the rise in tuition fees are being kept away from the Houses of Parliament by police. A police van has been attacked. My colleague Adam Gabbatt has more on his live blog.
• Len McCluskey, the newly-elected general secretary of Unite, has said he wants to lead “an alliance of resistance” against the cuts. In an interview with the Guardian, he said: “There is an anger building up the likes of which we have not seen in our country since the poll tax. I can feel something stronger than that building so it is the responsibility of the trades unions more than anyone else to give some guidance to that anger and put it in a manner that will hopefully make the government take a step back.”
• Ed Miliband has urged David Cameron to abandon his plans to scrap the ringfenced funding of school sport. At PMQs, Miliband said that Michael Gove was being “high-handed, incompetent and unfair” and that there was “deep concern” over the decision to end funding to School Sport Partnerships (SSPs). Cameron rejected this, saying that there had not been much progress on school sport when Labour was in power. Later they also clashed over bankers’ bonuses. After Miliband accused Cameron of going back on plans to enforce greater transparency in relation to bonus payments, Cameron angrily described Miliband as “the nowhere man of British politics”.
• David Willetts, the universities minister, has said that it is a “scandal” that some pupils are being given the wrong advice about what they should study at A-level. “There are lots of young people who want to be scientists or engineers, but nobody tells them they need to have an A-level in maths to get through to these subjects,” he told a Commons committee. “It is a scandal that there are schools who will rack up the A-level points with a mish-mash of courses which aren’t a coherent way into a particular discipline or a particular career or a way into a university course.”
• Donations to political parties plummeted after the general election, new figures from the Electoral Commission have revealed.
2.45pm: David Cameron was speaking at a press gallery lunch this afternoon. On these occasions speakers are expected to give a semi-humorous speech and then take questions. I wasn’t there, but a colleague has just given me a rundown. Here are the main points.
• Cameron said he was trying to run the government as a “chairman”, rather than as a chief executive.
• He said that he had received helpful letters from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when he became prime minister.
• He said the quality of MPs, on all sides, was better in this parliament than in the last.
• He said the government would have failed if it did not reduce the north/south divide. He said high-speed rail would play a crucial role in this.
• He said he hoped both coalition parties would benefit at the next election.
• He said he did not expect politicians to play a major role in the alternative vote referendum.
• He said he wanted David Laws back in government “soon”.
I’ll post more on this when I get the precise quotes.
3.09pm: David Cameron told the press gallery lunch that he had received a letter from Gordon Brown when he took office. (See 2.45pm.) But what did it say? Adam Boulton and Joey Jones have the answer in their new book about the election and the creation of the coalition, Hung Together.
The letter, in the famous Brown scrawl, was generous and heartfelt. David Cameron, he said, should know that the civil service staff he was inheriting were an exceptional group of people. And, from one prime minister to another, Gordon Brown told Cameron that this would be the most privileged role either of them would ever experience.
3.09pm: Godfrey Bloom, a UKIP MEP, has been ordered out of the European parliament after directing a Nazi slogan at a German colleague. Ian Traynor has the full story here.
3.15pm: Nick Clegg was on BBC Radio 2′s Jeremy Vine show earlier and it sounds as he had a fairly torrid time as listeners called in. “Of course I massively regret finding myself in this situation,” he said, when asked to explain why he was backing an increase in tuition fees even though he said during the election that he would vote against this.
I regret of course that I can’t keep the promise that I made because – just as in life – sometimes you are not fully in control of all the things you need to deliver those pledges. But I nonetheless think that when people look at the detail of these proposals [they will] realise that all graduates will be paying less per month than they do at the moment and the poorest quarter will be paying much, much less and we will be making it easier for some of the youngsters currently discouraged from going to university to go to university.
Clegg was also asked what it was like to see an effigy of himself being hanged (see picture below). “I’m developing a thick skin,” Clegg said.
A effigy of Nick Clegg is hung from a gallows at an anti-tuition fees protest at the Guardian’s office in Kings Place, London, last night. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA
3.58pm: Here’s an afternoon reading list.
• Patrick Wintour on his Guardian blog on interviewing the new general secretary of Unite, Len McCluskey, who has a drawing of Lenin in his office.
In the interview there is a lot of heavy breathing over the Blairites, neoliberals and general militancy, including the proposition that there is an alliance of resistance that he will put himself and his union at the head of.
Although he talks as if a furious British public are already a sprung coil ready to take the streets, he is also sensible enough to realise that as a precautionary measure he also needs to test the temperature of his union through regular polling.
He has hired a polling firm used by Ed Miliband to find out what his members are thinking, including whether his £96,000 a year salary needs to be adjusted in these days of austerity.
• Paul Waugh on his blog says David Cameron had a good line in John Bercow jokes when he addressed the press gallery lunch.
Mr Cameron revealed that health minister Simon Burns had one day backed his ministerial car into the Speaker’s own official limo in Speaker’s Court. An irate Mr Bercow came down and told Burns: “I’m not happy!” To which Burns replied: “Well, which one [of the seven dwarves] are you?”
• Jonathan Isaby at ConservativeHome on what David Laws and Rob Wilson had to say about the formation of the coalition when they appeared on a panel together. Laws and Wilson have both just published books on the subject.
• Lobbydog on his blog on what happened when he met Chris Bryant in the sauna at the House of Commons gym.
The conversation quickly moved on to the Andy Coulson phone-hacking affair, [on] which he was surprisingly forthcoming. He predicted that it would end with Coulson’s dismissal and at least two further journalists in prison. I suspect Coulson would reply: “In your dreams, Chris.”
Cameron and Obama. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
4.00pm: More on David Cameron’s speech at the press gallery. Silvio Berlusconi and Barack Obama featured in his anecdotes. Cameron recalled having a chat with Berlusconi during which Berlusconi told a joke that was “so filthy that the interpreter refused to translate it”. And he said that he had been with Obama at the Nato summit when Obama inadvertently headed into the ladies’ loo. “I had to fish him out,” Cameron said. He did not want Obama meeting any “Mama Grizzlies”.
4.13pm: Here’s an afternoon summary.
• Teaching unions have attacked Michael Gove’s plans for educational reform. Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, the largest teachers’ union, said: “We are witnessing a vicious assault by [Gove] on teachers’ commitment and professionalism to deflect attention from the coalition government’s policy of savage cuts to education, its elitist agenda and its free market ideology.” Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said: “[Gove’s] plans risk leaving every school an island divorced from the help and support of their local authorities. We are deeply worried by the total confusion, incoherence and blatant contradictions which run throughout the government’s education policy.”
• Gove said today’s protests had been “hijacked by extremists”. The attack on a police riot van was “outrageous”, he said. “We knew two weeks ago that the protests that were being organised in order to express the concerns that some people have over higher education funding had been hijacked by extremist groups. We know that there are some people from the SWP and others who wish to stage a deliberate confrontation.” At least two police officers have been injured in today’s protests in London. Adam Gabbatt has more details on his live blog.
• Nick Clegg has said he “massively” regrets having to break the promise he made before the election to vote against an increase in tuition fees. (See 3.15pm.)
• David Cameron has said that he wants to see David Laws back in government “soon”. Laws is currently being investigated by the parliamentary commissioner for standards for using his parliamentary expenses to rent a room from someone with whom he was involved in a relationship. Under Commons rules, MPs are not allowed to use their expenses to pay rent to a partner, but ministers are sympathetic to Laws’s situation and, provided that he is not subject to strong criticism, they expect him to return to office at some point after the inquiry is over. (See 2.45pm.)
• The Tories have claimed that new figures from the Electoral Commission show that the unions are “back in charge of the Labour party”. Lady Warsi, the Conservative chairman, said the figures showed that 82% of Labour’s money came from the unions in the third quarter of 2010. The same figures show that UKIP raised more money (454,000) than the Lib Dems (£351,000) between July and September.
That’s it for today. Thanks for the comments.
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2010/nov/24/pmqs-davidcameron
Category: Government Security Watch
Article source: http://nationalcybersecurity.com/?p=41242
