3.59pm: Jenny Jones, the Green party candidate, is calling on her supporters to give Ken Livingstone their second-preference vote in the mayoral election:Voters make up their own minds, but we're hoping that once ppl have voted Green for Mayor, we recommend Ken as greenest of the others.— Jenny Jones (@GreenJennyJones) March 28, 2012'Granny tax' is the least of the baby boomers' worriesThe chancellor's "granny bashing" raid on pensioners' incomes continues to draw negative headlines two days after the budget. Many papers, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail, have chosen to highlight that as George Osborne's major budget crime. But is that response perverse after everything we have seen and heard about inter-generational unfairness enjoyed by the baby boomers in recent years of recessionary anguish?By freezing age-related personal allowances with a view to aligning them with working allowances – the word was "simplification" not "theft" – and other grey tweaks Osborne has taken ￡3-4bn out of the grey economy, an average loss of ￡84 a year, according to the Guardian's front page.
(See 1.25pm and 1.30pm.)? Voters have been going to the polls in the Inverclyde byelection. As Severin Carrell reports, officials and senior figures in both the Scottish National party and Labour believe that the battle to win what was is traditionally a rock-solid Labour seat has gone to the wire, with the SNP on the brink of snatching it.? A European commissioner has told the British government to "stay out of polemics" on the subject of the EU budget. Viviane Reding was responding after the government said the EU's call for a 5% budget increase was "unrealistic". The government was "wrong", Reding said. (See 10.04am.)? George Osborne, the chancellor,
marc jacobs outlet, has said that the royal household will be funded from a new sovereign grant.
He says the government is committed to enhanced capital allowances.12.02pm: Richard Drax, a Conservative, asks about search and rescue helicopters being axed.Cameron says effective search and rescue facilities are important. The government is looking at how to deliver those services best.12.03pm: Ed Miliband gives his own tribute to the dead solidier.He says in June Cameron praised a headteacher in Redditch for not going on strike. Today she is on strike. She says she has no faith in the government any more. Why is that?Cameron says people are going on strike because they object to the government's proposals. But those proposals are essential. Lord Hutton said: "It is hard to imagine a better deal than this.
10.18pm: The House of Commons has now passed the Lords' amendment to the health and social care bill by 324 votes to 236, giving the government a majority of 88 and bringing an end to the health debate for today at least.Vince Cable and the Merkel-Borgen connectionHave you been following the drama over Germany's non-executive presidency? The one in which Christian Wulff was forced to resign over a "favours" scandal? What about the subsequent row in Angela Merkel's coalition over their choice of the "Stasi hunter" Joachim Gauck as his successor?Probably not, we're all busy. Though not as busy as Merkel, who must have cursed her bad luck and judgment – we'll come to that – as she tried to focus on the more serious question of Greek debt and the existential crisis it poses for the eurozone.
I want to see riot louts punished and, if punishment also helps them turn around their otherwise futile lives, then good.Unfortunately,
kate spade bags, another R-word (rationality) is rarely far behind. When it catches up it reminds me – as Alan Travis explains – that four years in prison for trying to organise a riot in Northwich or Warrington (no one turned up) is a bit excessive. You normally have to kidnap someone or run them over while drunk to attract that sort of attention.Yet I'm not sorry at the thought that Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan (we must blame the parents for that name, but a non-custodial sentence is appropriate) and Jordan Blackshaw woke up in the slammer on Thursday remembering that,
cnnhkids, no, it's not all a bad dream.
'" She suggested trumpeting the Lib Dem policy of increasing the income tax threshold more.Lord Adonis, the former Labour minister who used to be a Lib Dem, said that at the "macro level", he said, cooperation between Labour and the Lib Dems was difficult: "It's a bit like trying to conduct Ostpolitik at the height of the cold war", a reference to the attempts at reconciliation between West Germany and East Germany led by former West German chancellor Willy Brandt - "and neither me nor Gisela are Willy Brandt."But there were specific issues they could collaborate on, for example Lords reform and media regulation. Labour and the Lib Dems needed to "seize the opportunity we now have because [Rupert] Murdoch is laid low by this huge crisis".
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