Politics live blog - Thursday 20 January
Rolling coverage of all the day's political developments as they happen
10.48am: Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, wants people keen to cut carbon emissions to learn lessons from the Britons who fought on the "home front" during the second world war. She is launching a report at the Imperial War Museum called the New Home Front which shows how families cut their energy use drastically during the war. Here are some of its findings.
In just six years from 1938 British homes cut their coal use by 11 million tonnes, a reduction of 25%.
By April 1943, 31,000 tonnes of kitchen waste were being saved every week, enough to feed 210,000 pigs.
Between 1938 and 1944, there was a 95% drop in the use of personal motor vehicles, while public transport use increased 13%.
The nation's health improved as diets changed and people become more active, while infant mortality fell.
A determination to enjoy life grew. Spending on "amusements" went up 10%, while suicide rates fell.
Lucas wants environmentalists to seek inspiration from this period.
While the nature of the threat we face from climate change is clearly very different from that which we faced in 1939, the level of the threat means we will need to mobilise on a scale not seen since the war. If we're to overcome the climate crisis, we must move onto the equivalent of a 'war-footing', where the efforts of individuals, organisations, and government are harnessed together - and directed to a common goal. In doing so, we can learn much from the creativity and boldness shown by the public in those years which we can re-interpret for today.
10.15am: A minister will answer an urgent question about control orders, Labour's Tom Watson has revealed on Twitter.
10.10am: Labour's Lord Falconer (pictured, left) has said the government has "absolutely no prospect" of getting the parliamentary! voting system and constituencies bill onto the statute book by 16 February. That's the deadline if the government wants to go ahead with the referendum on the alternative vote on 5 May. He said Labour was "keen to engage in serious negotiations" with the government.
Falconer made his comments as peers finished the 11th day of committee stage debate early this morning. In a 10-hour debate they got through nine groups of amendments. That was better than Monday, when they managed just eight groups of amendments in 21 hours. But there are another 49 groups of amendments to go. The bill then has to go through its report stage and third reading before going back to the Commons.
The government cannot impose a time limit on debates in the Lords, but a peer can try to bring a debate to an end by moving "that the question be now put". If this motion is agreed, it means that the debate on the amendment under discussion comes to an end and it goes to a vote immediately. A peer used this "closure" procedure on Monday. It was the first time it had been used in 20 years. It was used again successfully last night. Afterwards Lady O'Neill of Bengrave, a crossbencher, suggested that if this tactic continued to be used, the whole nature of the Lords would be changed.
The situation that we have arrived at, with the double use of the closure Motion, is edging us towards a guillotine. If this House introduces a guillotine, scrutiny will be impossible ... At the other end of this palace there is a guillotine. We know how much legislation reaches us undiscussed, undigested and unscrutinised. The function that we try to carry out is important. It is not the grandest function, but it is essential. Until things are changed, we have a duty to preserve that function. We will lose it if collectively we adopt tactics that either amount to a filibuster, even if they were not co-ordinated as such, or that amount to a guillotine, even if they are not so labelled.
9.53am: Sir George Young, the leader of the Commons, has s! aid the government will ask MPs to vote to block an automatic 1% pay rise that they were due to receive.
The Senior Salaries Review Body has said that MPs should get a 1% pay rise - worth 657 - in 2011-12. MPs currently receive 65,738. But the government wants to block this because public sector workers earning more than 21,000 are having their pay frozen.
You may remember that MPs were supposed to have given up the right to vote on their pay. In 2008 the Commons passed a resolution saying that the SSRB would decide what pay rise they should get, based on the average pay increase received by 15 public sector workforce groups, and that these increases would go through automatically. But the new system has lasted less than three years. The government is intervening because a 1% increase would have been politically indefensible.
9.31am: Sir Richard Dannatt, the former head of the army, seems to have won his battle to clear his name after it was alleged that he was in favour of soldiers being sent to Afghanistan to stop the size of the army being reduced.
The allegation was reported in the Times (paywall) last week. It said that Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain's former special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, made the comments in a written memorandum to the Commons foreign affairs committee.
Sir Sherard wrote that the escalating conflict in Afghanistan had presented the Army with a "raison d'tre" that it had lacked for many years, and the opportunity to demand new resources on an unprecedented scale.
In one of his most stunning claims, he said that Sir Richard, then Chief of the General Staff, had told him in the summer of 2007 that the Army would lose the battle groups that were leaving Iraq in a future defence review if it did not use them in Helmand. "It's 'use them, or lose them'," Sir Sherard quoted the former commander as saying.
Sir Sherard added: "In my view, the ! Army's ' strategy' in Helmand was driven at least as much by the level of resources available to the British Army as by an objective assessment of the needs of a proper counter-insurgency campaign in the province. Time and again, ministers were pressed to send more troops to Helmand, as they became available from Iraq."
Dannatt was quoted in the Times saying Cowper-Coles's comments were untrue. This morning, on the Today programme, Dannatt said that he and Cowper-Coles had spoken this week and that he had had an apology from the former diplomat.
Sherard Cowper-Coles has withdrawn that remark and has apologised to me personally and is trying to find a suitable place and time to do that publicly.
9.14am: Michael Gove, the education secretary (pictured, left) has been giving interviews this morning about the review he has launched of the national curriculum. Here, from the Press Association and PoliticsHome, are the main points he has been making.
He said he wanted the curriculum to contain more "facts".
One of the problems that we have at the moment is that ... in the history curriculum we only have two names. In the geography curriculum the only country we mention is the UK. We don't mention a single other country, continent, river, city ... I'm saying that we need to have facts in the curriculum ... I want there to be core curriculum content, facts, knowledge.
He said he would be telling teachers what to teach, but not how to teach.
He said he was inspired by what was happening in other countries.
The decision that I've made is not to say 'I know what's best' but to ask myself, 'well what do they do in other countries'? We've been falling behind other nations in the last few years, quite dramatically. The latest survey shows us slipping down in the core areas, lite! racy, ma ths and science. Now I've asked myself 'what do they do in these other nations'?
They have a very elegant and powerful lesson for us and that is you need to devolve operational power down to the head teacher level. So the head teachers or principals have control over staffing, timetabling, resources and so on. But you also need to have rigorous accountability. One of the ways that you do that is by having a national curriculum which can act as a benchmark.
8.42am: We thought the Lords were planning another all-nighter, but when I arrived at Westminster this morning they had all gone to bed. The debate on the parliamentary voting system and constituencies bill finished at 3.04am, an early night by comparison with Monday. The debate saw the the government being defeated at one point - by a majority of 74, peers voted in favour of the Isle of Wight remaining as a single constituency - and there were concerns about the way the Tories and the Lib Dems used a rare procedural device to wind up a debate on one amendment. I'll post more on this later.
As for today, here's what's on the list.
10.30am: Lord Taylor of Warwick is due to give evidence in his trial. He denies making false expense claims.
12pm: Ed Miliband is holding a "New Politics, Fresh Ideas" Q&A event in Wolverhampton.
12.15pm: Michael Gove announces the national curriculum review.
1.30pm: David Cameron hosts a plenary session as part of the Nordic/Baltic summit.
We're also getting an announcement from Sir George Young, the leader of the Commons, about MPs' salaries, an announcement from Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, about health research and an announcement from Grant Shapps, the housing minister, about social housing.
As usual, I'll be covering all the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the we! b. I'll also post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm. I'll be finishing early afternoon.
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