You can't say you weren't warned

Meanwhile, the Indy's Andrew Grice says that David Cameron is determined to win a mandate for cuts to public spending by talking about the issue so openly now.

It's an interesting idea and an interesting position for the tories to take. I instinctively have more sympathy for political parties who tell voters the uncomfortable "truth", rather than what they want to hear. But as Grice points out:

"Vote for me, I'll freeze your pay" is hardly an election-winning slogan.

The other side of what Grice says is that if the tories come to power and take an axe to the public services, no-one will be able to say they weren't warned.

A good piece is spoilt by the common mistake of asserting what Labour and the tories "think" and "believe", with no objective evidence other than the line Grice was spun:

Labour ministers suspect that people may not necessarily translate their general view into a personal sacrifice.

The Tories ... want to be "honest" about the sort of medicine they know they would have to administer. The £158bn a year public sector pay bill cannot be immune, they judge.

Some senior Tories think they would get the benefit of the doubt for two years. Mr Cameron thinks he must hit the ground running, unlike Tony Blair who, the Tory leader believes, continued to act as an opposition candidate after becoming Prime Minister. The Cameroons think the first six months would be decisive.

The Indy wot dunnit

The Independent is claiming this morning that its story yesterday that Gulf Arab states are secretly planning to stop trading oil in dollars sent global markets into a "frenzy".

It certainly is an interesting development but perhaps they are overstating it.

It's no choke

This week's events suggest that air quality - or pollution - is likely to be the first stumbling block for Heathrow expansion, as I argue in a piece on Open House this afternoon.

But - as I said earlier - don't forget the noise nuisance.

Meanwhile, the five Plane Stupid activists who climbed onto the roof of parliament and unfurled anti-expansion banners have been found guilty. The activists were publicising the fact that the Department for Transport had colluded with Heathrow owner BAA to fix its figures. That was mentioned several times inside parliament on Tuesday.

Piffle

I've done a piece for the Indy's Open House today, asking if North Korea's announcement that it will restart reprocessing plutonium is one more blunder to add to the Bush administration’s counterproliferation record.

Dodgy poll makes headlines

The Indy leads on a poll from Labourhome website, claiming that 54% of Labour activists want someone other than Gordon Brown to lead the party into the next election. There's a lot wrong with this poll, of which you can read more here. The main problem is that if you add up the 46.2% of people who want Brown to stay on and the 53.8% who want him to go, it makes 100%. So don't knows have been excluded, either deliberately or by self-selection - not taking part in the survey.

So 54% of people who took part in an online survey and expressed an opinion wanted Brown to go.

Is the inquiry a mirage?

In my first piece for the Independent's Open House blog, I ask, "Is Gordon Brown’s promised Iraq inquiry a mirage?"

The government has been keen to spin expectations of a troop reduction from Iraq next year but won't say whether this will allow the inquiry to go ahead. The suspicion is that it will use the long term presence of a few hundred troops to delay the inquiry for as long as it is in power.

So this is permanance

The Independent continues to make the running with its story about how the US wants to maintain permanent bases in Iraq. Today it reports from Washington that George Bush is having to rethink his plans after the Iraqi government stood up to him.

Patrick Cockburn says "there is less to the American "concessions" than would first appear" and that Iraqi authority would be nominal.

Independent or what?

Stephen Glover in the Independent has another take on the departure of Observer editor Roger Alton and, perhaps more interestingly, criticism of the Indy itself for apparently reprinting a Foreign Office briefing note on Europe as a story.