Clik here to view.
• Lunchtime summary
• Afternoon summary
Here's an afternoon summary.
• David Cameron has chaired a meeting of ministers to discuss plans for Wednesday's strike. "Part of that contingency planning is working with different bits of the public sector to make sure people are aware of likely disruption," the prime minister's official spokesman said.
• Sir Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has told MPs that the eurozone crisis is largely to blame for the Bank downgrading its growth forecast for this year and next year. "The bulk of the downward revision can be attributed to news since August about what is happening in the eurozone," he said. "It is the bulk of it. Beyond the one year horizon we have not made significant changes to our growth rates."
• John Bercow, the Speaker, has said that he is "gravely concerned" about the way so many details of the autumn statement have already been released. When Labour's Angela Eagle raised this on a point of order in the Commons, Bercow said: "I have been gravely concerned about these matters and I can tell the House I have had conversations with senior members of the government on the subject. I would like at this stage to await events. The House will look forward with interest and respect to hearing the statement by the chancellor tomorrow, but I remain alert to the concerns raised and I shall be looking further into the matter." Government announcements are supposed to be made to the Commons before they are made to the press.
That's it for today. Thanks for the comments.
Here's a short afternoon reading list.
It was at the end of the session that Gordon came over to ask if there was anything in particular that I would like to raise. "Actually, there is," I said, noticing him look alarmed that I might be about to launch into a long speech. "I'm really worried about knife crime." It was still a big concern in Tottenham and was showing the signs of morphing from an inner city problem to a nationwide concern. More and more mothers were turning up at my weekly advice surgeries and telling me that they felt scared and helpless to stop their sons drifting into trouble. "What are we doing for these women?" I asked. "Often the father isn't around, and their own parents might be on the other side of the world. They're not coping and we've got to find a way of helping them." Gordon looked at me quizzically while I spoke, as if I was missing something obvious. "Tax credits," he responded, as soon as I finished. "If they're single parents and they're working, they'll be entitled to them." With that there was a pat on the arm. "Thanks, David." On to the next conversation.
When I was young, the ideal Friday night was Pot Black, 9 til 9.25, One Man and His Dog, Pro Celeb golf and then HSB. It was just top TV. Jim'll Fix It was great in the early evening slot. Final Score; Doctor Who or Jim'll Fix It, but after 7, 7.30 it really fell apart. Strictly is more in the teatime slot. X Factor: that's filled a slot which has been pretty awful over the last 20, 30 years. It was good fun. I wrote to Jim [Jimmy Savile] many times. I wanted to conduct an orchestra; never got that. Can I be a drummer? Probably "Can I be the mascot for the England football team?" More or less the same as everybody else. I didn't think I was ever quite quirky or innovative enough. Never occurred to me to be. I never got it, I never got the call. My sister did get a Blue Peter badge. For a picture. A very exciting moment. I was very, very jealous.
Given [what Ashcroft's report says], the economic themes articulated by Ed Miliband in his recent speeches make a lot of sense: avoiding any suggestion of increasing public spending but instead talking about changing the economic rules to make the system work for the hard-working majority and ensuring we don't have another financial crisis; criticising top pay abuses and excessive energy company profits as well as benefit fraud; speaking up for the "squeezed middle" who are hit by stagnant pay and rising prices.This report says to me that as a party we need to be campaigning as hard on prices and pay as on cuts.
Ed Miliband is not supporting the public sector strike on Wednesday, but he's not condemning it either. (See 1.20pm.) Lady Warsi, the Conserative co-chairman, isn't happy about that.
She's put out this statement.
If Ed Miliband doesn't back this irresponsible strike, then he should do the right thing for our economy and tell his union paymasters to accept the government's generous pensions offer and call it off.
Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, is giving evidence to the Commons Treasury committee now. My colleague Graeme Wearden is covering it on his eurozone debt crisis live blog.
Michael Gove's speech this morning about "militants" organising Wednesday's strike (see 10.00am) has not gone down very well with the teaching unions.
This is from Christine Blower, general secretary of the National of Teachers
This dispute has been created by a government which is determined to steamroller through pension reform that will irreparably damage teachers' pensions. The issue has united the teaching profession, as will be demonstrated on November 30.
This strike has nothing to with 'militants' but everything to do with teachers and headteachers who do not believe the government is being fair or reasonable.
And this is from Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers
ATL members are among the least militant union members in the country. They don't want to strike, and they have never wanted to strike.
We have been asking the government to negotiate a fair deal for teachers for over 10 months and are desperately keen to resolve the dispute. But the government has been dragging its heels. Instead of engaging in megaphone diplomacy, which is likely to annoy teachers even more than they are already, Mr Gove must be prepared for a bit more give and take in the ongoing talks with us and the other education unions.
The Lib Dems have appointed a new chief executive. He's Tim Gordon, a former researcher to David Steel who has done various jobs in business management, including, most recently, working as as group development director at European Directories, a large European media company.
Here's a lunchtime summary.
• The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has said that Britain will slip back into recession. As Larry Elliott reports, the OECD said output would fall in the final three months of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012. It said it expected the UK to grow by 0.6% in 2012 as a whole but the two consecutive quarters of contraction fulfil the technical definition of a recession. In its half-yearly healthcheck on the global economy, the thinktank cut its growth forecasts for all the west's major economies and urged policymakers to take urgent action to prevent the contagion spreading from Europe's sovereign debt crisis. George Osborne claimed that, although Britain faced "a challenge", the public supported the government's economic strategy. "They have had enough of politicians who think there is a quick fix solution who say you can borrow a bit more to get us out of debt," he said. "They know, the public, that this is not the answer for Britain and as a result actually I think the public is behind what the Government is doing." Ed Balls said: "The OECD remains diplomatic in its language, but both the OECD and the IMF were clear this summer that if the economy continues to underperform with slow growth then the pace of spending cuts and tax rises should be slowed down to support the economy."
• The inquiry into the summer riots has said rioting will break out again if urgent action is not taken to address Britain's underlying social problems. The warning came from Darra Singh, chairman of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel.
It is 30 years since the publication of the Scarman report. The panel is clear that the riots in August were very different disturbances to those in 1981. However, it is a sad fact that in some respects, the underlying challenges are strikingly similar. While deprivation is not an excuse for criminal behaviour we must seek to tackle the underlying causes of the riots or they will happen again.
The interim report, which also criticises the police's response to the riots, is available on the panel's website.
• Ed Miliband has indicated that he does not support Wednesday's public sector strike. "Strikes are always a sign of failure but I'm not going to demonise the people who are taking the action," he said on a visit to an Asda branch in south London. "I don't support strikes because they are always a sign of failure."
• Michael Gove, the education secretary, has urged public sector workes to ignore the "militants itching for a strike" who want them to stop work on Wednesday. In one of the strongest attacks from a cabinet minister on the union leaders organising the strike, he said in a speech: "They want families to be inconvenienced. They want mothers to give up a day's work, or pay for expensive childcare, because schools will be closed." Answering questions later, he named some of the "militants" he was referring to. "You have only got to look at the words of Len McCluskey in the Guardian today, consider the conduct of Mark Serwotka throughout this dispute or look at the political record of Mr Andrew Murray, who is a lead official in Unite, to recognise that 'militant' is a badge that fits for all those three," he said. Dave Prentis, the Unison general secretary, said Wednesday's strike could be "the biggest action since the 1926 General Strike".
• Christopher Jefferies, the retired school teacher caught up in the Joanna Yeates murder case, has told the Leveson inquiry that he was forced into a "hole-in-the-corner existence" by the hostile press coverage that followed his arrest at the end of 2010. At this morning's hearing, Leveson has also expressed concern about the fact that a draft of Alastair Campbell's witness statement was leaked to Paul Staines, who writes the Guido Fawkes blog. All the details are available on our Leveson live blog.
• Chris Grayling, the employment minister, has announced plans to exempt one million self-employed people from health and safety legislation.
• Official figures have revealed that the number of UK-born students who have applied to start university next year has fallen by 15%.
• Mike Penning, the shipping minister, has announced plans to end the Ministry of Defence's involvement in the provision of search and rescue services. He said the government was buying a new fleet of search and rescue helicopters, to be operated by civilians.
If the public do support the government over the economy (see 12.22pm), that might be because Labour is now perceived as a party that is anti-business. At least, that's one theory set out in a high-powered 90-page collection of essays published today called Labour's business: Why entreprise must be at the the heart of Labour politics in the 21st century. Edited by Alex Smith (a former adviser to Ed Miliband) and Luke Bozier, it has already received plaudits from John Rentoul. Here's an extract from the introduction.
In the end New Labour was considered too cosy to big business in particular ...
Under Ed Miliband's leadership, that perception has swung too far back the other way. The Labour Party has once again gained a reputation, fairly or unfairly, for being anti-business. After Miliband's 2011 party conference speech, in which he made a distinction between "predatory" and "productive" enterprise, the Labour leader found it necessary to explain and re-explain his remarks to the national media after criticism from the Confederation of British Industry and the Federation of Small Businesses that he was "kicking" and "clobbering" business. A few weeks later, some Labour MPs jeered as one Conservative MP spoke about her success in the private sector during Prime Minister's Questions, allowing David Cameron to go on the attack ...
Labour has so far been unable to communicate an effective counter-argument. If it is to be the party of government again in the coming years, it needs urgently to do so. Developing a more cohesive, more central offer on enterprise, and improving the relationship with business, will be a vital step in the right direction.
George Osborne, the chancellor, claims the public supports the government's economic strategy. According to PoliticsHome, this is what he said in a TV interview at a building site.
I think the public understand that Britain has huge debts that it has built up. Those debts need to be dealt with. The public also understand that the eurozone makes that more difficult, but what they want the Government to do is stick to the plan that will take us safely through the storm and invest for the long-term future.
They have had enough of politicians who think there is a quick-fix solution, who say you can borrow a bit more to get us out of debt. As a result, actually I think the public is behind what the government is doing.
Is he right? Only up to a point. If you look at these YouGov figures (pdf), you'll see that a majority of voters believe that cutting spending to reduce the defict is necessary rather than unnecessary. But on other measures, such as whether the cuts are too deep, whether they are being imposed unfairly and whether they are bad for the economy, the polling numbers are against the government. On the overall question as to whether the coalition is handling the economy well or badly, some 57% say badly and only 34% say well.
Incidentally, I see that Osborne was wearing a workman's fluorescent top when he gave his interview. That's the second time he's appeared in Bob the Builder garb recently to speak about the economy. Presumably he thinks it conveys the impression that Britain is awash with construction.
Chris Grayling, the employment minister, has announced that around one million self-employed people will be excluded from health and safety legislation. He has published a report from Professor Ragnar Löfstedt called "Reclaiming health and safety for all: An independent review of health and safety legislation" (pdf) and, in a news release, he says he is accepting its recommendations.
Grayling also says that he is going to cut the number of health and safety regulations by a third over three years and that he is going to make it easier for businesses to challenge the decisions taken by health and safety inspectors.
From the beginning we said getting the regulation of health and safety right is important to everyone. By accepting the recommendations of Professor Löfstedt we are putting common sense back at the heart of health and safety. Our reforms will root out needless bureaucracy and be a significant boost to the million self employed people who will be moved out of health and safety regulation altogether.
We will also ensure our reforms put an emphasis on personal responsibility. It cannot be right that employers are responsible for damages when they have done all they can to manage the risk. Fundamentally we will ensure the health and safety system is fit for purpose through streamlining the maze of regulations and ensuring consistency across the board.
I'm back from the lobby briefing. Here are the main points.
• Downing Street have welcomed the OECD's call for Britain to stick to its deficit reduction plan. Asked about today's OECD report predicting a double-dip recession, the prime minister's official spokesman said: "It's a forecast. There are lots of forecasts. There will be another forecast [from the Office for Budget Responsibility] tomorrow." But he said the OECD was backing the government's approach to deficit reduction. "They are very clear that it's important that the UK sticks to the approach it has taken on fiscal consolidation." He went on: "We are doing everything we can to protect the UK from the eurozone debt crisis and that includes sticking to our plans to deal with our debts and it also means taking some decisions on structural reforms to to ensure that we are laying the foundations for economic growth." Asked about a line in the OECD report suggesting that the OECD expects quantitative easing (QE) to be extended beyond the levels formally announced, he said ultimately decisions about QE were a matter for the Bank of England's monetary policy committee.
• An Anglo-French summit planned for this Friday has been cancelled. David Cameron will still be going to Paris, but he will just be having a bilateral meeting with President Sarkozy. Other joint ministerial meetings have been cancelled. Cameron and Sarkozy want to focus on the eurozone, the prime minister's spokesman said.
• EU ambassadors in Iran will be meeting today to discuss Iran's decision to expel the British ambassador, the prime minister's spokesman said. EU foreign ministers will also discuss this at a meeting on Thursday.
• The spokesman would not say whether any Downing Street staff would covering for border agency staff going on strike on Wednesday.
You can read all today's Guardian politics stories here. And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today's paper, are here.
As for the rest of the papers, here are some stories and articles that are particularly interesting.
[Angela] Merkel can get her fiscal union, but in return she will now have to accept a eurobond. If both can be agreed, the problem is solved. It is the first intelligent official proposal I have seen in the entire crisis.
I have yet to be convinced that the European Council is capable of reaching such a substantive agreement given its past record. Of course, it will agree on something and sell it as a comprehensive package. It always does. But the halt-life of these fake packages has been getting shorter. After the last summit, the financial markets' enthusiasm over the ludicrous idea of a leveraged EFSF evaporated after less than 48 hours.
Italy's disastrous bond auction on Friday tells us time is running out. The eurozone has 10 days at most.
At the moment, the Chancellor is pulling off a brilliant confidence trick: persuading the markets that Britain remains a triple-A creditor, able to borrow on the same terms as Germany, while managing an economy with an inflation rate 66 per cent higher than the eurozone's average, and a national debt that is forecast to hit £1.32 trillion in 2015, nearly 40 per cent greater than today.
Common sense suggests that this will not go on indefinitely. As Mr Osborne puts the finishing touches to his Autumn Statement, he knows that he must deliver much more than illusory savings. With Britain's debt interest forecast to rise by 13 per cent in this financial year to £50 billion (25 per cent more than the defence budget), there is no scope for a loss of nerve.
Ministers have been forced to spend millions of pounds hiring more than 80 new judges to tackle a costly backlog of welfare claimants appealing against the loss of their benefits.
The bottleneck threatens the Government's pledge to reduce the welfare bill, because thousands of claimants continue to receive their payments — in some cases for more than a year — until a ruling is made on whether the removal of their benefits was fair. It is the first time that extra posts have been needed since 2007, when only ten Social Entitlement Chamber judges were recruited to oversee welfare appeals. In recent months 84 have been hired to help to deal with the caseload, at a pro-rata salary of £101,000 per year.
David Cameron has called in senior ministers to Downing Street
to ask them to explain why their departments missed key performance
targets – which they themselves had set.An analysis of departmental "business plans", which outline what Whitehall bodies will do and by when they will do it, reveals that most failed to achieve almost a quarter of their targets. Embarrassingly it was the Cabinet Office – which has responsibility for the scheme – which missed the most goals overall with 38 actions overdue for a month or more.
Now The Independent understands that Mr Cameron has spoken to ministers from the worst-performing departments to press them on why they were unable to meet their self-imposed deadlines and how they intend to improve their performance.
Unions won majorities of three or four to one for strikes. But those such as the FDA (formerly the First Division Association), representing senior civil servants, the National Association of Head Teachers and Prospect, another traditionally moderate union representing professionals, achieved turnouts of 53 or 54 per cent – well above the 29 to 33 per cent for big unions representing lower grades.
I'm off to the Number 10 lobby briefing now. I'll post again after 11.30am.
I haven't seen the report from the Riots Communities and Victims Panel yet, but Sky News have just posted this on Twitter.
Report says riots would not have spread across country if police response in Tottenham had been more robust
The OECD has published its new forecast for the UK economy. As reported over the weekend, it is saying that the UK economy will slip back into recession. Here's the top of the Press Association story.
The economic think-tank said the UK's GDP will shrink in the final quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012 - the first time it has predicted a double-dip recession for the UK.
It believes the UK's faltering economy will grow by just 0.5% in 2012, down from its previous estimate of 1.8% in May, as it is hit by weak demand for exports, the Government's austerity measures and the squeeze in consumer spending.
The OECD also said unemployment, which currently stands at 8.3% - its highest since 1996 - will rise to 9% in 2013 as jobs figures take a worse hit than in the recession following the banking crisis.
It said more economy-boosting quantitative easing measures from the Bank of England are "warranted", adding that it expects the stock of asset purchases to rise to £400 billion early next year from £275 billion currently.
The Leveson inquiry is now underway. You can follow all the action on our media live blog.
Michael Gove, the education secretary, is accusing some union leaders of being militants "itching for a fight". I've just seen an extract from the speech he's giving this morning and, although he makes it clear that he is not attacking all union leaders, he accuses some of them of wanting to spread misery on Wednesday.
Here's the key extract.
On Wednesday, TUC leaders will call on their members to bring Britain to a halt. Among those union leaders are people who fight hard for their members and whom I respect. But there are also hardliners - militants itching for a fight.
They want families to be inconvenienced. They want mothers to give up a day's work, or pay for expensive childcare, because schools will be closed. They want teachers and other public sector workers to lose a day's pay in the run-up to Christmas. They want scenes of industrial strife on our TV screens, they want to make economic recovery harder, they want to provide a platform for confrontation just when we all need to pull together.
Gove also says that his own experience of strike action - he manned an NUJ picket line when he was a trainee journalist on the Aberdeen Press and Journal - taught him that strikes could be counter-productive.
I lost my job. So did more than 100 others. I was lucky - young, unmarried, without a mortgage. I got another job soon enough.Many others didn't. They never worked again in the profession they loved. And the deal we were offered before the strike never improved.
So today I want to appeal directly to teachers - and other public sector workers - please, even now, think again.
Labour have released some extracts from the speech that Ed Miliband is going to give when he visits an Asda store later this morning to hold a Q&A with members of staff. He is going to accuse George Osborne of making the "wrong choices" in his autumn statement tomorrow.
George Osborne's duty tomorrow is to make sure he doesn't squeeze even further.
Instead he must try and make the burden on families easier.
There are reports he is going to pay for youth jobs not with a bank bonus tax as we recommend but by freezing tax credits for families in work.
What a symbol that would be of the wrong choices this government is making.
Finally waking up to the problem of youth unemployment and paying for it by hitting the lowest paid working families.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Instead, he needs to make choices to help ordinary families and help our economy.
Danny Alexander, the chief secretary to the Treasury, has given at least four interviews this morning. PoliticsHome have been monitoring them all.
Here are the main points.
• Alexander renewed his claim that most public sector workers will get a better pension when they retire under the government's proposals than they do now. This is contested by the unions, as the Observer reported yesterday. But Alexander said: "For most people, particularly on middle incomes, particularly for female workers, they will get a better pension at retirement than that which they can expect now."
• He said that the fact that the China Investment Corporation was considering investing in infrastructure projects did not mean China was buying the UK.
Just like British firms invest in infrastructure overseas, we're encouraging overseas organisations to invest in infrastructure in this country, and if the Chinese sovereign wealth fund is going to join that, then that is potentially a very significant boost to the British economy. This programme of infrastructure investment is immensely important; it's something that can make a difference in the short and the long-term.
It's a big week for the government, with the autumn statement tomorrow and a massive public sector strike taking place on Wednesday. I say the autumn statement is coming tomorrow, but it seems as if we have had it already, because so much has been trailed in advance. The Treasury has been briefing overnight on its £30bn national infrastructure programme and Danny Alexander, the chief secretary to the Treasury, has been giving interviews this morning about it. He said the decision to get pension funds to invest in infrastructure projects was partly inspired by Australian miners.
One of the things that I have found surprising in my time as a minister is that you visit, I visited Birmingham airport for example, a few weeks ago. Their runway extension is being paid for by the pension fund of Canadian teachers and Australian miners. We think that British pension funds should be able to invest and by signing the agreement that we are today, that will unlock £20bn of pension fund money.
I'll post more from his interviews shortly.
Otherwise, here's the diary for the day.
9.45am: The TaxPayers' Alliance and the Institute of Economic Affairs hold a briefing on the autumn statement.
10am: Michael Gove, the education secretary, gives a speech on industrial relations.
10am: The Riots Communities and Victims Panel, which has been investigating the August riots, publishes its interim report.
10am: The Leveson inquiry resumes. Today's witnesses are Charlotte Church, Anne Diamond, Christopher Jefferies, who was wrongly arrested on suspicion of murdering Joanna Yeates, former British Army intelligence officer Ian Hurst and Northern Ireland human rights campaigner Jane Winter. Paul Staines, who blogs under the name Guido Fawkes, has also been summoned to appear to answer questions about how he came to publish a draft of Alastair Campbell's witness statement on his blog.
11.30am: Ed Miliband holds a Q&A with members of staff at the Asda store in Clapham Junction, south London.
3pm: Sir Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, gives evidence to the Commons Treasury committee about the Bank's inflation report.
3.15pm: Richard Desmond, owner of the Express newspapers, gives evidence to the joint committee on privacy and injunctions.
As usual, I'll be covering all the breaking politcal 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.
If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm on @AndrewSparrow.