Politics Live blog – Monday 5 September

Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen 10.47am: I’ve now got the full text of Nick Clegg’s speech and I’ll summarise it shortly. In the meantime, it’s worth noting that the weekend reports about what Clegg was going to say – focusing on claims that Clegg stopped Michael Gove allowing free schools to make a profit – prompted some strong rebuttal from free school supporters. Here’s Toby Young on his Telegraph blog. Perhaps [Clegg's] going to claim he thwarted Gove’s plans to allow for-profit education providers to operate free schools during this Government’s term of office. But that would be a hostage to fortune because it looks likely that at least one of the free schools that will open in 2012 will be operated by a commercial provider. This is allowed under the present rules, provided the school in question is owned by a charitable trust. (From 2007-10, a comprehensive in Enfield was managed by EdisonLearning, a commercial education provider.) Or is he going to say he’s “wrecked” Gove’s plans to allow for-profit providers to operate and own free schools? Perhaps, but that, too, would be misleading since Gove has never had any plans to allow that. The Conservative leadership concluded long ago that to allow for-profit companies to set up, own and operate taxpayer-funded schools in the Coalition’s first term would be a step too far. When Gove and others are tackled about this by Right-wing Tory backbenchers, they sometimes say they would have gone further if it hadn’t been for those pesky Lib Dems, but that’s just a politically convenient excuse. The Conservatives wouldn’t have taken this step even if they’d won an outright majority. And here’s Fraser Nelson at Coffee House. The Lib Dem contribution to free schools is to introduce a “pupil premium” so kids from disadvantaged areas are worth more to teach. David Laws championed this, in particular. It means that profit-seeking schools – the type that exist in Sweden – would have a huge incentive to expand in the areas of Britain that most need them. Indeed, on Coffee House on Friday we ran an interview with a Swedish state secretary explaining how profit-seeking schools are the most socially just because they are programmed to go wherever demand is highest. If Clegg vetoes profit-seeking schools, then he will torpedo his own vision of free schools flourishing in high-deprivation areas. No one will be claiming the incentives his party so thoughtfully laid out. Clegg is blowing a potentially revolutionary Lib Dem policy out of the water, because he thinks he can dress it up as a Tory policy. 10.27am: Last week the Daily Telegraph launched Hands Off Our Land, a campaign against the government’s plans to change the planning rules. It doesn’t seem to be going too well. The secret of a good newspaper campaign is to pick a fight that you will win. But today, as my colleague Hélène Mulholland reports, George Osborne and Eric Pickles have written an article in the Financial Times (subscription) saying they are determined not to back down. “We say that sticking with the old, failed planning system puts at risk young people’s future prosperity and quality of life,” they write. “No one should underestimate our determination to win this battle.” Even more embarrassingly for the paper, Charles Moore, the former Daily Telegraph editor, has also come out in favour of the government’s plans. He wrote a column to that effect in the paper on Saturday. Moore – or “Comrade Charles”, as some people are calling him since he wrote his “why the left may be right” piece a few weeks ago – is always worth reading, but Saturday’s column was particularly good. Here’s an extract. In 1733, someone built Flatford Mill in Suffolk. About 80 years later, John Constable, whose father owned it, used it as the inspiration for the great paintings which, more than any other, encapsulate our view of rural England. I bet the mill would not have got past the planners if such things had existed in 1733. I bet the National Trust would have accused this “industrial unit” of being “out of keeping” with the rural scene. Someone would have slapped a noise abatement order on the hay wain as it creaked and splashed through the ford. The landscape we love, then, developed out of the normal human need to make a living. I cannot believe that its interest is best served by making future livelihoods almost impossible. The men who put up those rustic dwellings did so in the hope that their children would be able to live and work there. If they had been told, as they are today, that it was an anti-social act to build more houses to accommodate them, they would scarcely have understood what was being said. 10.22am: Nick Clegg is delivering his education speech now. I’ll post a summary once I’ve had a chance to read the full text. 9.42am: The best story around today is, of course, the revelation that Tony Blair has, almost literally, joined the Murdoch family. He is godfather to Rupert Murdoch’s nine-year-old daughter, Grace. As my colleague Dan Sabbagh reports, Blair “was present at the star-studded baptism of the child on the banks of the Jordan, at the spot where Jesus is said to have undergone the same ceremony”. (Does that put Blair in the role of God? Or was Murdoch himself standing in for the Almighty in this scenario?) Whatever, the revelation does suggest that perhaps Blair wasn’t being 100% honest when he addressed Labour’s parliamentary committee on March 25 1998. Chris Mullin writes about the meeting in A Walk-On Part, the latest volume of his diaries. Murdoch came up because the Financial Times had run a story saying that Blair had intervened on his behalf with the Italian prime minister. This is what Blair told the committee. My relationship with Murdoch is no different from that with any other newspaper proprietor. I love them all equally. Blair also said: “I have never discussed media policy with Murdoch.” (By the way, the Mullin diaries are good. I’ve posted a mini review here, on the Guardian Books website.) 9.28am: My colleague Polly Curtis has launched a new blog today. It’s called Reality Check, and she’s going to be using crowdsourcing to help her investigate policy issues. Today she’s looking at whether free schools will take funding away from other schools. 9.12am: Murdo Fraser (left), the deputy leader of the Scottish Conservatives, is formally launching his campaign for the leadership today. In an interview on BBC Radio Scotland, he has been talking about his plan to scrap the Scottish Conservative party and replace it with a new centre-right outfit. According to the Press Association, he said that the new party would not just adopt distinct policies on devolved issues. My proposal is more radical than that. Take fishing policy for example, which is a reserved matter [ie, a matter for Westminster, not Edinburgh]. I think the Common Fisheries Policy has been a disaster for the Scottish fishing industry. It used to be the policy of the UK Conservative party to pull out of the Common Fisheries Policy. I think many people in Scotland would welcome that. Sadly, that is no longer the position of the UK Conservative party. I think if we were successful in creating a new progressive centre-right party, that’s exactly the sort of cause we should be championing and fighting our corner in Westminster on that basis. Fraser also suggested that, although his party would normally support the Conservatives in the House of Commons, its MPs could vote against their English colleagues on some issues. “As in all situations where you have a coalition, you have a negotiation then based on your numbers,” he said. 9.03am: David Cameron is definitely making a statement in the Commons on Libya, I’m told. I presume he’ll be asked about the evidence suggesting that MI6 ran a “rendition” operation with Gaddafi’s security services. 8.52am: We’re going to be hearing a lot about police cuts over the conference season. Labour are making a signature issue and Ed Miliband has promised to force a Commons votes on the government’s plans to cut police numbers by 16,000. So ministers will welcome a report from the Policy Exchange thinktank, Cost of the Cops (pdf) saying that “total employment is not a useful measure of police performance and that the effective deployment of the officers that a force has available is the most important factor”. Blair Gibbs, one of the authors, was on the Today programme earlier. According to PoliticsHome, this is what he said. There has been for two decades at least a political obsession, a numbers game that basically says that the only effective measure of police performance is how many cops are on the payroll. No other public service really works like that: it’s all about how you deploy the officers you have, not how many you employ, and for that reason, it’s really important now that people in the police service and in government do start arguing the case for more effective, more visible policing that doesn’t have to be about hiring more officers. 8.36am: For the record, here are the lastest YouGov GB polling figures, from yesterday’s Sunday Times. After the phone hacking affair erupted, the Labour lead over the Conservatives grew (as you can see from the YouGov tracker figures [pdf], presumably because Ed Miliband was seen to handle it quite well. At the end of July and the beginning of August the Labour lead reached 9 points on several days. But since then it has shrunk. In the latest poll it is only 1 point (as it was on one day last week). Here are the figures from yesterday. Labour: 39% (up 9 points since the general election) Conservatives: 38% (up 1) Lib Dems: 10% (down 14) Labour lead: 1 point Government approval: -22 8.26am: Now, where were we? The economy stalling, the coalition parties squabbling, Ed Miliband doing okay, but not brilliantly, and surprise revelations coming out Rupert Murdoch’s relations with our political masters. The August riots changed things a bit – as David Cameron explained in an article in the Mail on Sunday yesterday – but in many ways the outlook is much the same as it was when I was last blogging daily before the start of the summer recess in July. Hope you all had a good holiday. Welcome back. The Commons is sitting again today. And we’ve got a couple of Lib Dem events coming up. Here’s a full list. 9.30am: Brian Paddick , the newly-elected Lib Dem candidate for London mayor in 2012, gives a press conference with Simon Hughes , the party’s deputy leader. 10.20am: Nick Clegg , the deputy prime minister, gives a speech on education. As Jeevan Vasagar and Allegra Stratton report in today’s paper , he is going to open up a new front in his disagreements with the education secretary, Michael Gove, criticising the recent decision by the Tories to heap responsibility for children’s development on to teachers. 2.30pm: Eric Pickles , the communities secretary, takes questions in the Commons. 3.30pm: David Cameron is expected to make a statement in the Commons about Libya. 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 after 4pm. House of Commons Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk

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