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Chuka Umunna
:Ed's Google Speech and What It Means for Responsible Capitalism
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Jack Butler
:Miliband Talks the Talk on Tax Avoidance - But Can Anyone Walk the Walk
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Duncan Weldon
:Chancellor Should Heed IMF Advice and Increase Infrastructure Spending Now
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Alistair Darling
:Salmond's Default Position Bankrupts His Credibility
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Professor Ibrahim Sirkeci
:Turkish-Kurdish Peace: It Is Different This Time
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If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The most welcome element of Osborne's budget is the introduction of the Liberal Democrat policy to raise the personal tax allowance to £10,000 next year, taking the poorest earners out of income tax altogether. The rest, I'm afraid, fails to be sufficiently progressive to satiate the social liberal majority within the Liberal Democrat party membership.
So George Osborne has lost his treasured AAA rating. We are now heading for record consecutive quarters of stop-start growth. Youth unemployment is at an all-time high. Neither the deficit nor the debt is coming down and there's no money to do anything about it. If we want to spend more we have to borrow more, and even Ed Balls can't be sure we'll end up better off if we do.
After much toing and froing a deal has finally been struck between the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party regarding press regulation. Nick Clegg and Ed Milliband's proposal has been scrapped, and both have claimed a substantial victory.
Vince Cable is making the weightiest contribution on economic policy and theory by any serving government minister in years if not decades.
The flip-flop, the backtrack, the reversal, the U-turn; all terms that have entered public discourse to describe an intriguing catch-22: Reneging on policy commitments too often is seen as a surefire sign of a weak political will, yet slavery to principle whatever the weather is the defining characteristic of a political bigot in the eyes of the electorate.
They blew it all because of some little lie to avoid speeding points that the law affects to find super colossally important. They face life imprisonment. I am not making that up. It won't come to that but it is an indication of how monumentally seriously the law takes itself.
Nigel Farage was quipping that the Tories split the UKIP vote in Eastleigh - ouch. With the recent decline of the BNP and soon to be expired incarceration of the EDL leader Stephen Lennon - their masses of frustrated followers have found their mouthpiece in Farrage.
Nick's line was a rather desperate piece of nonsense which relied on an understandable lack of knowledge of how local government finance works on the part of the public and a lack of will or ability to investigate on the part of the press to make the council's cuts seem mean and unnecessary.
It's time for Labour to ditch the blue and take up its old red colours once again.
It is the people of Eastleigh, the constituency's voters who were the most important thing in the by-election. Not the by-election candidates.
The result entirely changes the public perception of Ukip. You have to be bold and you have to be brave to fight from the sidelines and come out swinging. The media, hugely loyal to their party of choice, will seek to destroy you. All the other parties will not hesitate to club together to attack. The underdog became a threat to them all.
The sensible advice to the Tories after Eastleigh is, of course, 'Don't Panic'. The problem, however, is they already have. Indeed, they've been panicking about Ukip for well over a year now - which is precisely why they've ended up in this mess in the first place.
Small political earthquake in Hampshire - that's that tone of much of the commentary about the Eastleigh by election on Friday. And it's fair comment too. So what are the key lessons from the poll? I believe there are four.
What significant numbers of voters in Italeigh have in common is a profound sense that conventional politicians have let them down. They lie, they cheat, they make promises that they have no intention of keeping - and, most seriously, they preside over a collapse in living standards that throws thousands of people out of work and creates real, palpable misery.
This week we have the opportunity to focus aid discussions on what really matters: quality not quantity.
A decade has passed since the eruption of brutal violence and conflict in Darfur. In these 10 years, 300,000 people died and three million people were displaced from their homes, fleeing horrifying atrocities.
