Politics live blog – Monday 23 May

Join Andrew Sparrow for coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen 11.34am: David Cameron is delivering his “big society” speech now. By some counts, it is the fourth time he has tried to launch the idea. If you want to know why he’s having problems generating public enthusiasm for the idea, read these comments from two commentators broadly sympathetic to Cameron. Lord Ashcroft recently published Project Blueprint, a report based on detailed polling of Conservative voters and potential Conservative supporters (pdf). He suggested that, in campaigning terms, the “big society” is a non-starter. However commendable the idea of encouraging personal responsibility and relinquishing state control, the Big Society, the theme that is intermittently claimed as the government’s guiding philosophy, shows no sign of resonating with voters. The very few who mentioned it during the course of our research usually did so in tones of bemusement. Most people still do not understand what it is supposed to mean, or find the concept too nebulous to get to grips with. They do not connect it with any of the government’s more concrete policies, whether they support them or not. And David Brooks, the American columnist whose new book, The Social Animal, is widely admired in government circles, said much the same thing in an interview with the Sunday Times (paywall). Politically the big society is a damp squib; it’s a hard sell for the Tory base. They like things which are hard and vigorous; the big society is a bit soft and squishy and a bit upper middle class. It doesn’t have much to say to your immigrant or aspiring working-class person who doesn’t get home till 10pm, who has no time to volunteer. 11.21am: Lord Prescott has won the right to a judcial review of the Metropolitan police’s handling of the phone hacking affair. 10.48am: If you’re only going to read one Ed Miliband speech today, read the one that he delivered to the Progress conference at the weekend. The Promise of Britain one – which isn’t on the Labour website yet, but which should be there later – doesn’t have the same breadth as the Progress one. But it’s still got a big, clear message and it lays down a challenge to David Cameron. Here are the main points. • Miliband says that “for the first time for more than a century, the next generation will struggle to do better than the last”. He claims that this is “one of those unspoken truths that people know about – but somehow politicians seem to refuse to discuss”. • He says that this means the young will become “the jilted generation”. Some people have called us the Jam generation because of the music we grew up with. But our generation is on course to totally fail in meeting our duty to the next: to uphold the promise of Britain from which we all benefited, which we all took for granted. The current representatives of the Jam generation are on course to create a jilted generation. As examples of the problems facing the “jilted generation”, he mentions youth unemployment, higher tuition fees, longer working hours – Britain is the only country in Europe with longer working hours than 25 years ago, he says – global warming and rising house prices. • He suggests that become a father has strengthened his determination to address this problem. I suppose every father says this, but becoming a parent really does change the way you think about life. The love you feel overwhelms you. Like most fathers I was unprepared for that. It broadens your perspective … As a parent, like all parents, I judge myself on the opportunities my children will have – and the happiness that can provide. • He accuses the government of having no plans to address this issue. The Tories are just obsessed with deficit reduction, he says. I am not just criticising their deficit strategy, I’m criticising them for having a pessimistic, austere vision for the country. They have no ambition, no national mission. • He says that as prime minister he would concentrate on improving opportunities for the next generation. This is what he means by “the promise of Britain”. He has used the phrase before, to refer to the idea that progress will enable children to have better opportunities than their parents, and in his speech he makes defending “the promise of Britain” the key aim of Labour policy. When people ask me what our task will be, inheriting from this Conservative-led government the kind of country it is creating, my first answer, our first challenge, our greatest task, must be to take head on the decline in opportunities for the next generation. As examples of his commitment to this, he says that he has already proposed using a bank bonus tax to fund jobs for young people, an alternative approach to tuition fees, action to tackle the long hours culture at work and a home building programme. Labour’s policy review is looking at ways of stopping “the inexorable rise in the average age of home ownership”. • He says he will expect young people to contribute to Britain too. The promise of Britain is not just about the promise we make to [young people], but the promise they must make to themselves and our country to be good citizens. 10.40am: I’m not sure we’ll be seeing much of either Ed Miliband or David Cameron on BBC News or Sky this morning. President Obama in Ireland is hogging all the attention. Never mind. I’ve got their speeches. Summary of the Miliband speech coming up soon. 10.25am: Ed Miliband will be giving his speech at the Royal Festival Hall in about five minutes. It’s called “the Promise of Britain” and the text has just landed in my inbox. David Cameron will be setting out his own version of the promise of Britain within an hour. I’ll summarise both speeches, cover anything Miliband and Cameron have to say if they speak to reporters and compare the arguments they are both making about the challenges facing Britain. 10.06am: It looks as if Lord Prescott may have won his phone hacking judicial review application. Chris Bryant, the Labour MP who is one of the people seeking a judicial review alongside Prescott, has just put this on Twitter. Some good news coming in a few minutes. #metgate 10.03am: The banks have missed their Project Merlin lending targets. According to the BBC, figures from the Bank of England show the “big five’”loaned £16.8bn compared with a de facto target of £19bn. 9.33am: And Ed Miliband has been doing breakfast TV too. He was on BBC Breakfast. Here are the highlights. Again, I’m using quotes from PoliticsHome. • Miliband said that if he became prime minister his “central mission” would be to ensure that the next generation has better opportunities than the last. He calls this the British promise. The central mission of my government will be to ensure that we get the next generation to have better chances than the last, because that is under threat in this country and unless we make that the focus – unless we make that the mission of the government – I fear the situation will get worse. • He said that he was wrong when he said the Labour fightback would start in Scotland. He said Labour failed in Scotland because “we didn’t set out a clear enough sense of a national mission”. (This is exactly the argument set out by Douglas Alexander recently in an interview with Progressonline.) • Miliband said he was looking forward to his wedding on Friday. I think we’d always planned to get married and this feels like the right time for us. And I always said that I’m not going to get married for political pressure, I’m going to get married at the right time for me, and it feels like the right time for us. • But he also said that he did not have quite the same faith in marriage as David Cameron. I’m pro-commitment but I think that, unlike David Cameron, I’m not going to say that those families that aren’t married are automatically less stable than those families that are. Marriage is a good institution – it’s right for me and Justine but the thing that really matters to people is stable families and they come in different forms. 9.07am: David Cameron was on ITV’s Daybreak this morning. Being a Today man, I missed it, but PoliticsHome were monitoring. Here are the main points. • Cameron said the current law on privacy was “unsustainable”. It is rather unsustainable, this situation, where newspapers can’t print something that everyone else is clearly talking about. But there’s a difficulty here because the law is the law and the judges must interpret what the law is … It’s not fair on the newspapers if all the social media can report this and the newspapers can’t and so the law and the practice has got to catch up with how people consume media today. Cameron said he wanted parliament to have “a proper look at this”. But there was not “simple answer”, he said. • He said he accepted that some people did not understand his “big society” concept. That was because it was “not simply one thing”, he said. It involved devolving power and encouraging more volunteering and giving. • He said that he had given interview training to young people as part of his own contribution to the “big society”. Downing Street was linked with a charity called Street League and everyone at Number 10 was contributing some time. They do a lot of football training, which I’m not very good at, but they also do interview training and so I helped a bit with that and gave some interview practice to a couple of young people who are going for a job. It was fascinating. • He said that he had a genuine partnership with Nick Clegg. Clegg was doing an “excellent job”, he said. “This is not a sort of Conservative government with a sort of small Lib Dem annex,” he said. “It’s a partnership government. That’s the only way you can make a coalition work. You’ve got to trust each other.” • He said that he had a ‘try out” yesterday for the barbecue being held in the Downing Street garden for President Obama. “We’ve got a wet weather plan,” Cameron said. 8.48am: We’ve got two big speeches today. In a speech to the Progress annual conference on Saturday, Ed Miliband said David Cameron and the Conservatives were just offering Britain “a shrivelled, pessimistic, austere view of the future”. Cameron will seek to counter that today with a speech on the “big society”, his vision for the future that he presents as anything but pessimistic. Miliband will be setting out his own manifesto for the future in a speech at the Royal Festival Hall. It will be one of those relatively rare occasions when the leaders of Britain’s two largest parties go head to head over policy and vision. Those are the highlights – but there’s plenty of other politics around too. Here’s the agenda for the day: 9.30am : The Bank of England publishes figures showing whether the banks are meeting their Project Merlin lending obligations. 10am : Lord Hanningfield’s expenses trial continues. The Tory peer is expected to give evidence today. He denies fiddling his expenses. 10.30am : Ed Miliband delivers a speech at the Royal Festival Hall. He will warn about the prospects facing today’s young, a “jilted generation” because they will have to wait too long until they can afford to buy a home. 10.30am : Lord Prescott and others find out if they have won the right to a judicial review of the Metropolitan police’s handling of the phone hacking affair. Around 11am : David Cameron delivers his speech on the “big society”. As Nicholas Watt reports, he will describe the project as the project as being more than a “fluffy add-on” to the government’s agenda. He will also promote some of the ideas set out in the white paper on giving being published today. 1.30pm : Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, delivers a speech in London on Scotland’s constitutional future. He will also take questions from journalists. 3.30pm : Owen Paterson, the Northern Ireland secretary, publishes the report into allegations of police collusion in the murder of Rosemary Nelson. 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 web. I’ll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm, and an afternoon one at about 4pm. Ed Miliband David Cameron Labour Conservatives John Prescott House of Commons Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk

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