Same again please

On Friday, I did a piece for Comment is Free, pointing out that the government was heavily - and inaccurately - spinning its housing market proposals as a new era for council housing. The main source of the spin was a Times article.

Today, the Times recycles an embarrassingly large amount of the same copy, adding news of an additional proposal for a new tax-free account for those saving for a deposit. But this proposal has been denounced as "half-baked" before it's formally been announced. And:

The Prime Minister is thought to have shelved a more radical proposal under which councils would have been freed to compete as mortgage lenders with access to a pot of £2 billion in government borrowing.

Is Alistair Darling behind this proposal and the claim that Brown has sat on it?