Despite claims to the contrary from the Labour party, it is simply not true that the scrapping of Building Schools for the future was a breaking of a promise made by George Osborne not to cut the totals of capital spending. A casual glance towards the actual budget would make it clear: the Government will make no further cuts to capital spending compared with the plans that it inherited. It did make clear, however, that it would undertake a fundamental review of all capital spending plans to ensure they are affordable and to identify the areas of spending that will achieve the greatest economic returns. Michael Gove made it clear in his statement to the house that he was cancelling the approach of BSF because it was an expensive, long winded and inefficient way of building schools. He did not say he was cancelling all new schools building. According to the actual figures the Coalition government is going to spend as much on new capital projects as the outgoing Labour government, in that case they might end up building more schools than Labour for the same amount of money.

Looking at the cost of the programme in February 2004, the DCSF said that 200 schools would be built by 2008. In fact only 42 (just under a quarter) were ready in that timescale. The National Audit Office estimates that the overall cost of the programme has also increased by 16-23% in real terms, with delays being more and more frequent over the years it has been in place, in 2007, in a memorandum to the Select Committee for Education and Skills, the Government admitted: “There has been significant slippage in BSF projects in waves 1-3, with the majority of projects behind the ideal project timelines, an understatement given the actual number of these schools that have been opened , and recently Nottinghamshire county council spent £5 million on the scheme without a single brick being laid, another report by the Public Accounts Select Committee found that “the Department and PfS has wasted public money by relying on consultants to make up for shortfalls in its own skills and resources.” Has the Labour obsession with stocking up on masses of consultants been the driving factor around high cost and low results? The current approach isn’t good for school buildings, this isn’t good for the public finances, and it isn’t good for the both the children and teachers in any school across the country. Nor is it good for the people in the local area who object to some of the proposals made , a number of schools that local areas wanted to keep open or refurbish have been demolished. The Victorian Society says that a number of fine Victorian schools have either been demolished or taken out of use as a result of the programme. Many local authorities as well as a large number of other senior figures working on BSF have expressed concerns about the role of Partnerships for Schools (PfS) – the quango charged with delivering the BSF programme. One described them as “marching round the country in their jackboots, telling local authorities what to do” One example of which being that schools that were using BSf funds had to use 10% of the sizeable budget for computers and other technology, despite the spurious evidence it improves standards, and not being clearly taught how to use it (A common feature of all my old lessons.)

Why should we persist with an expensive bureaucratic programme which tramples on any concerns that don’t correspond with the wishes of Ed Balls? Some headteachers have said they had feared that their funding might be jeopardised if they were critical publicly of a programme representing such powerful interests, no-one denies that we need to build more schools, no-one denies that some schools need to be refurbished, but we can do this in a much better way, which some Tory MPs should attempt to understand.

As well as stamping out the message that has been blared out in the media that there will be ‘no new schools’ the coalition need to also quash the outlandish claims from the Labour party that BSF improved school standards, BSF is a bit like buying a new TV – the new set looks great when you put in the corner of your sitting room, but it’s the programmes that actually make you want to keep coming back for more – and after a while, you forget that you have even got a new telly! If the programmes haven’t improved in the meantime, everything goes back to how it used to be. The Labour party have repeatedly said that BSF is not just a “bricks and mortar programme” and that the buildings programme should act as a “catalyst” for wider scale “educational transformation”, they’ve attempted to define “educational transformation” many times, yet its definition has always been unclear. One senior advisor and former headteacher felt that the coupling of new buildings with “transformation” meant we might be erecting the 21st century equivalent of Victorian follies, saying: “I think there is a danger that we will build chrome and glass edifices to the egos of certain headteachers.” (Which judging by the treatment given to a local headteacher that lent a lot of support for the Labour party in exchange for a glass palace may well be true.)

It isn’t just speculation that pours cold water on the claims that BSF drastically improved standards. An exhaustive report for the Design Council found “clear evidence that extremes of environmental elements (for example, poor ventilation or excessive noise) have negative effects on students and teachers and that improving these elements has significant benefits. However, once school environments come up to minimum standards, the evidence of effect is less clearcut. Our evaluation suggests that the nature of the improvements made in schools may have less to do with the specific element chosen for change than with how the process of change is managed.”. PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for the Government in its first evaluation of BSF in 2007.following a review of the literature in the US and the UK this report concluded that, while there was a clear negative impact of poor design on attainment, the claim that good design brings benefits needed to be tested further in the BSF programme because the causality could not be proved. Other factors affecting attainment are, unsurprisingly, school leadership, pedagogical factors, socio-cultural factors and the curriculum. Its second evaluation, published in January 2009, reinforced this view: “In the statistical analysis of the impact of capital expenditure on pupil attainment, our results mirror the existing literature in not finding a strong correlation between the two. The results as a whole suggest a positive impact of capital on attainment, but the magnitude is likely to be very small. We also found evidence for considerable diminishing returns to capital investment.”.

The coalition must stress that pedagogical factors that were mentioned in the PSC review are going to be tackled through the introduction of ‘Free Schools’ and the expansion of the Academy programme which will allow for different styles of teaching to thrive, rather than focus on school buildings like the Labour party will insist on doing as it is the most obvious thing to attack , it’s key to highlight that Ofsted recently failed one of the first schools to be built through the BSF programme, Sandon High, in Stokeon- Trent, to give weight to the idea that other things must be tackled other than buildings, and can achieve emphasis on different style of teaching through holding up examples like Toby Young’s grammar comprehensive, and Lord Young’s technical colleges . We must stress the waste of money and the use of consultants, the crippling of autonomy of teachers, and constantly remind as to what what benefits these new schools can bring.

We base our results on what our children learn, not the number of glass palaces we claim (And fail!) to build, and as for Gove’s delivery when he announced the policy? Well, there may well have been some stichup on the way….

It turns out David Laws has resigned, being replaced by Danny Alexander.

I very much hope he returns. He was able and competent, and possibly the only outwardly libertarian Cabinet member.

I have no opinion of Mr Alexander as yet, but I very much hope he rises to the occasion. He’s got some massive figurative shoes to fill, even if they were left by a physically small man.

With his resignation, Laws will have sought to retain some of his integrity and moral standing. To many, he should not have resigned at all, so his reputation will only increase. His noble political self-sacrifice will ensure that the perception of “new politics” will remain intact. He is the Coalition’s first martyr. Hopefully he will remain its last.

Edit: It turns out both the Prime Minister and his Deputy have indicated that they hope David Laws will be back in government at some stage in the future. I can’t wait until the next reshuffle.

So, it turns out David Laws may have had some expenses complications. It also turns out he’s gay. Frankly, I don’t care.

The man is able, competent, and should remain as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. His private life is none of my business, and it has no bearing on his suitability for the job. It may be interesting as gossip, and some may find his expenses reprehensible, but he’s bloody good at his job and ought to stay.

Once upon a time our politicians could get away with just about anything. Lloyd George apparently sold peerages, Henry Temple, the 3rd Viscount Palmerston apparently seduced the young wife of a journalist at the age of 78, as well as having numerous affairs, and George Canning and Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh fought each other in a duel. Even Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington fought a duel as Prime Minister, and William Ewart Gladstone is said to have invited prostitutes into Number 10 for “correction”. These were all great men who did great things.

I said only a few days ago that Laws was one to watch. He still is.

The Future Jobs fund was broadly speaking a gimmick, and it has been condemned by a number of organisations that work with young people, including Rathbone. It ‘churns’ the NEET numbers rather than reducing them, and gets them trapped even more in a “low pay, no pay” cycle, which goes on into their 30’s. At best it’s a patchy solution to direly run careers services and not getting people the GCSE’s (Level 2 qualifications) earlier on, which stop people from getting onto the apprenticeship courses, A levels, or the basic skills they need to progress. When the money saved from cutting such waste is funding 50,000 new apprenticeship places, FE, and social housing, there shouldn’t be an outcry from the left – the goal is to get people into long term sustainable employment.

Apprenticeships are highly sought after, very competitive, and few and far between as it stands. Young people who are NEET have highly specialist needs. The ability to provide genuine, successful support to them does exist, and we believe the issue is as much about the sustainability of interventions as it is about getting the overall number of young people who are NEET down at any one time. Hopefully, we can have support from all parties for that, as well as embracing the need for Welfare reform as pointed out by that Labour blogger Hopi Sen.

Is the Labour Party thinking seriously about becoming the BNP-lite? No, probably not, but the leadership candidates are still floundering around trying to outmanoeuvre each other on how badly Labour made mistakes on immigration, although still missing out the fact that most people are angry over how they were misled, rather than it all being about the numbers. Job security is important to people, being able to support your family through the recession is key, and the only candidate who wants to shy away from using immigrants as scapegoats is Diane Abbot (Not that I like agreeing with her!) – the fact is, none of them really have much of a clue about the situation, or the solutions for these (so often their core vote) working class communities.

The number of NEETs has risen to around a million yet employers expect a continued shift towards higher skilled jobs. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – reforming education, and providing the skills that we need are the cures to solving concerns about immigration. What these young people describe is a period over years of churning between jobs, schemes, courses and unemployment; that is sometimes referred to as the “low pay, no pay” cycle. The current trend of interventions typically give young people six months’ training e.g. the Future Jobs Fund, “churning” the NEET numbers rather than reducing them – these were gimmicks to improve Brown’s election prospects, not solutions to our skills crisis – there is is nothing in place for these people to make the transition to the skills that they need for the way the jobs market is going in the future. The North East has a lower proportion of adults qualified to Level 3 and 4, and of those without qualification, than is the case for England and Wales as a whole. Only half of young people across the country currently leave school having achieved the benchmark of an A*-C grade in English and maths GCSE. Investing in the employability skills of young people and developing the occupational skills of everyone in the workforce are essential to support the country’s economic recovery and long term growth, and none of their candidates have the ideas, or the drive to tackle these problems. The pushing through of the BSF programme just before the election again shows how they’ve clung to gimmicks over solid policy.

We will need more flexibility in the exams systems so that state schools can offer qualifications like the IGCSE, which currently only private schools take on, giving them that ability to acquire the skills asked for by businesses.

We need to improve the quality of vocational education, including increasing flexibility for 14–19 year olds – 70% of firms want reform to focus on making the content of qualifications more business relevant, the same proportion would welcome the flexibility to mix and match different qualification units , and also the creation of new Technical Academies to diversify provision.

We need more schemes like Teach First, to build on the Graduate Teacher Programme, and seek other ways to improve the quality of the teaching profession to get the best teachers to the children that need it the most early on, as well as supplying them with the money they need to carry this out.

Most importantly we need to give parents, teachers, charities and local communities the chance to set up new schools, as part of our plans to allow new providers to enter the state school system in response to parental demand, the experiences in Sweden and America showing that it can transform the lives of those on the bottom rung of society.

All of these things I’m proud to say are in our coalition agreement. These are our answers to transforming education and tackling the concerns of immigration: if all that the Labour Party want to do is make noises about the problems we face without remedies, they may as well take the accolade of being the “BNP-lite”.

Back in 2003, then chancellor Gordon Brown changed the target the Bank of England used to measure inflation, stripping housing costs from the main measure and excluding the cost of housing, which even now makes up about a third of total spending! It’s absolutely misleading to not take it into account. More importantly, the idea that housing costs were not even considered makes sense given the data: if non-housing costs were relatively stable yet house prices were booming, it would make perfect sense for the BofE to keep interest rates relatively low rather than raising them to curb the boom. And of course this is what they did, with the predictable results – the housing bubble, and then the crash. Yet again we had simply a case of fudging the statistical backdrop to make the situation appear different to reality for short term electoral gain, or incompetence, or both!

Peering through the new Programme for Government under Banking we have this gem:

We will work with the Bank of England to investigate how the process of including housing costs in the CPI measure of inflation can be accelerated.

It goes to show that the smear campaigns against George Osborne have been untrue; he is not a chancer, he is a chancellor. (To use that old Labour pun.)

Opportunity? Nope, I don’t just mean being in government. I mean being accused of a political malfeasance (claiming Opposition money whilst being in government, even if in coalition – you may have watched Crick and Paxman skewer the poor Lamb on Newsnight!)… and also being in government.

“Wait? What?! Anton, you’re saying Clegg could use this to his advantage?”

That’s right, I am. Here’s how:

A conversation with a LibDem staffer helpfully revealed why Short money (that’s the state funding allocated to Opposition MPs) was so helpful. Not only is it extra cash, but it allows MPs to spend that money on researchers to help them hold the government to account. Well, it’s supposed to, in any case.

Now, I’d always thought it was part of an MP’s job description to be doing the researching themselves. Hec, that’s why we pay them isn’t it? Which brings me onto the opportunity. State funding of political parties is just plain wrong. But what about the Union and rich donor money the big two get (I hear the LibDems amongst you cry out in anguish)?! Well, Clegg’s already promised a cap on donations, so why not simultaneously ban the Short money?

Result? LibDems emerge on a higher horse than ever for getting rid of something unjustifiable, but which they thought they needed. Labour has its funding cut, and the Tories get away alright as they’re now in government. Sorted… aaaaathankyouverymuch! *Applause*

The snag? Oh dammit, I thought you wouldn’t bring that up!  Well, we don’t really know what the secret agreement between the parties is. Heck, the Tories may quite like the Short money (although I can’t quite see why they would nowadays as abolishing it damages Labour more), and well, we don’t really know if they were using it properly in opposition. Heading off scrutiny however would be perfectly done by just getting rid of it. Hard as I try, I can’t actually see a proper snag. Gwooon Clegg, show us a flash of political genius!

International law binds us to our treaty commitments – and that includes the ECHR. We cannot simply go back on that and “withdraw” from that Convention. If we were to remove the ECHR from our domestic law by repealing the HRA, then the effect would not be greatly different: we would still be bound to the European Court of Human Rights, and would thus have to act in accordance with the ECHR anyway.

A lot of the justice and home affairs ‘pillar’ is dependent on a mutual recognition of rights and liberties between member-states, and this is effectively what the ECHR has become – a minimum standard for all member states. To withdraw would create, effectively, a constitutional crisis in the EU. (Not that the ECHR orginates from the EU, it comes from the Council of Europe)

I don’t think that anyone is representing the Conservative Party position correctly here, a British Bill of Rights has been suggested for a long time, and even when the European Convention on Human Rights was being made it was suggested as a possibility for the future. Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights have been considering this issue at length, Gordon Brown has expressed interest in this policy – indeed, it was accepted by the Labour Party back in 1997 that the Human Rights Act was not the final word when it came to rights in the UK.

It was accepted therein as clear that any British Bill of Rights would have to build on the ECHR, and could not be a step backwards in that regard. That is most likely what will happen, not necessarily even to give us new rights, but simply to make the whole thing more palatable to the public, which is why Cameron wants to create a British Bill of Rights to legitimate the culture of human rights in the UK and to build upon it, making the HRA  redundant.

If anyone, including Cameron, ever suggested (and some of the grassroots of the party have, sadly) that taking away ECHR rights was a realistic possibility, then they’ve either not considered it properly or are talking rubbish. People have either fallen into this trap, or are purposely exploiting the public’s ignorance on the matter in the name of political gain. The ECHR is one of the greatest documents on freedom ever written, now it’s time to make it legitimate, and even more refined.

So we still, for now, have the Human Rights Act. This secures, in law, certain ‘rights’ from the State which are:

• Right to Life
• Prohibition of Torture
• Prohibition of Slavery and Forced Labour
• Right to Liberty and Security
• Right to a Fair Trial
• No Punishment without law
• Right to respect for private and family life
• Freedom of thought, conscience and religion
• Freedom of expression
• Freedom of assembly and association
• Right to marry
• Prohibition of Discrimination

In many respects the Human Rights Act is a fundamentally depressing law – one that was felt necessary because it catalogues the list of abuses of State power that can and do happen, but in some places it goes too far and in others not far enough.

What seems to have specifically upset Conservatives (and others) about the Human Rights Act is that it prevents the deportation of certain individuals who are likely to be murdered and tortured – even when those individuals are terrorists and show no regard for the Human Rights Act in so far as it applies to other human beings. I suspect the Prohibition of Discrimination and the Right to Education aren’t very popular either.

But the real fault-line here is jurisdiction. The Human Rights Act applies to everyone, irrespective of their legal status in the UK. The Conservative Bill of Rights would likely apply to British (or perhaps EU) citizens only, not foreign nationals.

Foreign nationals – including illegal immigrants, asylum seekers and people on temporary visas would have no protection from our Government at all. Murder, torture, punishment without law, unfair trials – even preventing them getting married – all these options suddenly become available to the Government of the day.

I would argue that the Conservatives need to get their alternative, the “Bill of Rights”, drafted and scrutinised and let us judge which is preferable. Truth is we don’t really know what they intend to replace it with, so we’re playing a wait and see game.

The Human Rights Act isn’t perfect and certainly isn’t the last word in protecting citizens from the Government, and perhaps a Bill of Rights could be an improvement, at least for British nationals… but Lib Dem MPs are never going to vote in favour – or even abstain – on anything that will allow the British Government to commit acts that will result in torture or murder, no matter how reprehensible the individuals in question might be.

But if anything could break up this coalition, this could be it. This here is an example of an unreconcilable difference, one where there’s no reasonable compromise. You can’t have a ‘bit’ of torture, or a ‘bit’ or murder, as far as I know.

One of the nice things about coalition is the way it is forcing members of two very different parties to interact with each other in a civilised and constructive manner. For years, Liberals have criticised the more reactionary and moralising wing of the Conservative party, whilst Conservatives have mocked the Liberal Democrat party’s size, its equivocating stance on everything and, let’s be honest, its beards. Both used the ‘lunatic fringes’ to stereotype the more centre-ground members.

Now that the two of them are having to come together and work out their differences, the relationship between activists is having to change. Conservatives must learn to respect the party which called the Iraq war the right way, and has long been a champion of the ideals of freedom and liberty. Liberals are having to take a fresh look at the Conservative Party and consider that it has changed under David Cameron and can’t really be called ‘The Nasty Party’ any more (a phrase, incidentally, first used by our new Home Secretary Theresa May as she campaigned within the party for modernisation and a liberal stance on equalities).

This shift in attitudes and willingness to drop prejudices was demonstrated rather brilliantly by Lynne Featherstone’s account of speaking at the Liberal Democrat Special Conference on Sunday.

One of the amendments to the motion for coalition was to reaffirm our commitment to the Lesbian, Gay, B and Trans communities – so obviously – I put a card in and spoke to that. I made it clear – to the delight of the assembled ranks – that there would be no roll back of equalities on my watch.

What was interesting though, is that I read out four manifesto commitments:

- Change the rules for gay people fleeing persecution to be granted asylum

- fight for unequivocal support for gay rights around the world, and use international groups like the Commonwealth to put pressure on countries to tackle persecution of LGB and T people

- change the law to remove the requirement to disclose historical convictions for consensual gay sex

- tackle homophobic bullying including a new category of exclusion data specifically for homophobic abuse

The shocking thing about the above four manifesto pledges above – is that they come from the Conservative manifesto – not ours!

The thing is, those manifesto commitments are not all that shocking to those who have followed the Conservative Party’s modernisation process and already been willing to give David Cameron the benefit of the doubt. Until now, many Liberals have felt unable to use the words ‘modern’ and ‘Conservative’ in a sentence together without air-quotes.

In many ways, this really proves how horrifically unsuccessful the ‘decontamination’ strategy has been. It turns out, it really doesn’t matter how much you change your party or your policies if your reputation has sunk so low that no one will believe you anyway. The only way to convince anyone of anything is to forcibly thrust the fact that you’ve changed in their face – for the Liberals that moment may have been when Nick Clegg appeared alongside the other leaders in the television debates and showed that he runs ‘a proper party’ after all. For the Conservatives it’s finally coming with their decision to enter into a coalition with a truly liberal party.

To an outside observer, of course, all of this is like watching… Well, every rom-com ever, in which the two star-crossed individuals, though on the surface absolutely hating each other, are forced to go on a journey. A journey on which they will learn the true value of friendship – and learn to appreciate that it’s their differences which make them unique and special.  At the end of the film, of course, true love and a happily ever after beckons.

Well, perhaps it won’t quite be like that. Which is good, because I don’t really want to spend the next five years throwing up.