ToryDiary: Should the Tories be the party of reassurance or rescue?
Alan Duncan MP on Platform: How a Conservative Government would not only reform prisons but also address the underlying causes of our broken society which lead people to offend in the first place
Local government: Warning that Laming proposal could put more children at risk
Michelle Donelan on Seats and candidates: Labour's Housing Minister may think repossession can be the best option but in standing against him I want to highlight Conservative plans to encourage home ownership
Neil O'Brien on CentreRight proposes 'The Renewal of Government':
- We need to phase out national pay bargaining...
- We should end automatic annual promotion up national salary scales...
- We must make it possible to remove under-performing workers...
- We should stop loading secondary objectives onto public services...
- We need to improve industrial relations in the public services...
- We need to reform public sector pensions...
- We should review the growth of management positions...
- Public sector staff are striking fifteen times more than those in the private sector
- 'Poor people need civil liberties too' says Damian Green
- Jon Moulton, Lord Salisbury and Irwin Stelzer join CPS board
Paul Goodman on CentreRight: How Parliament should confront anti-Muslim hatred and violence
ToryDiary: Owen Paterson refuses to be diverted from the task of building a party that represents the everyday concerns of people in Northern Ireland""We have had a bit of a battering in the past few weeks but we hope the polls have now bottomed out," one Tory source said last night. The Tories point out that the three polls of marginals suggest they would have more MPs than Labour, allowing David Cameron to head a minority government, and do not measure their battle with the Liberal Democrats in their other target seats. Feedback from the front line is said to give Tory officials cautious optimism for winning an overall majority." - Independent
William Hague confirms that a Conservative government wants to avoid confrontation with the EU "William Hague said on Tuesday that the Conservatives had made “a strategic decision” not to pick a fight with Europe if they won the election, insisting that a Tory government would be “highly active and activist in European affairs from day one”. The UK shadow foreign secretary said the priority was to sort out Britain’s fiscal crisis, which he claimed had diminished the country’s standing in the world, adding: “We have enough on our hands without an instant confrontation with the EU.”" - FT
"Chris Bryant, Europe minister, claimed Mr Cameron had “failed to change the DNA” of his party and that his MPs were “still the same old Europhobic, dogma-driven obsessives that they have always been”... “Cameron is not in charge of his own destiny in relation to Europe but in hock to his backbenchers,” Mr Bryant said in a speech to Progress, the centre-left pressure group. “Even if they had a majority of 60 – which looks very unlikely – there are at least 30 Tories who would scupper any vaguely sensible policy on Europe.” - FT
"Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has raised the prospect of new EU treaty only months after the Lisbon Treaty took force. Mrs Merkel said that a new EU accord would be required to create a new European Monetary Fund able to bail out crisis-hit members of the euro like Greece." - Telegraph | Guardian leader
Conservatives promise new National Security Council will end blight of 'sofa government' - Telegraph
Hague: Ashcroft has never tried to influence Tory policy"“The really important point is that he, and others like him, the donors to the party, have never in all my experience tried to influence a policy,” Mr Hague said. “I’ve never in the more than 10 years that I’ve know him found him trying to change a policy.” He refused to be drawn further on the matter, saying: “I’m not going into all of that again.”" - William Hague quoted in the FT
In an interview for The Express Mr Hague warns that Britain will be "ruined" if Brown stays in power.
The contract between the generations is broken - David Willetts in The Telegraph
Patrick Cormack MP raises questions about Tory-UUP alliance - Guardian
David Cameron's environmentalism will succeed where Labour's failed - Ben Caldecott and Gavin Dick in The Telegraph
Sir Trevor McDonald to make hour-long, behind-the-scenes programme about David Cameron"Sir Trevor McDonald is preparing to gain unprecedented access to the life of David Cameron as he works to uncover the public and private man who hopes to lead the next Government... Sir Trevor will follow the Conservative leader over the coming days and observe the politician in his day-to-day activities in the run-up to the General Election." - STV
Home Secretary attacks Chris Grayling's new crime statistics "The home secretary, Alan Johnson, today tried to escalate the political row over "broken Britain" by urging the UK Statistics Authority to censure the Tories for new claims that violent crime has risen since Labour came to power. Johnson dismissed unpublished Conservative-commissioned calculations by the House of Commons library showing violent crime has risen by 44% since 1997 as a "concocted deception"." - Guardian
> Yesterday's ToryDiary: Chris Grayling vindicated as independent evaluation concludes violent crime has risen by 44% under Labour
"Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, claimed the Tory leader was more interested in civil liberties than catching and punishing offenders. He criticised Conservative positions on the DNA database and CCTV cameras and joked that prisoners would be more likely to back the Conservatives if they had the vote." - Telegraph
Jonathan Freedland: The Tories haven't really changed"For all the new packaging, the Conservatives are the "same old Tories" after all – from the expected 50 Tory MPs in the next parliament to be drawn from the City or the financial services industry all the way to the "no entry" signs on country estates their families have owned for more than 500 years." - Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian
Tories think that the job of changing their party’s image is complete. It isn’t — and complacency could be fatal - Daniel Finkelstein in The Times
Brown set to warn economic 'storm' is not yet over - BBC
Reacting to a new warning from a rating agency that progress on the deficit needed to be more rapid, George Osborne said: “Here is the clearest possible warning from a credit rating agency that the government’s plan is not enough to protect Britain’s credit rating. The red light is flashing over the British economy.” Quoted in City AM.
Dyson's Tory innovation plans are 'too narrow' says CBI - Telegraph
Public sector pay has risen 15% more than private since Labour came to power - Daily Mail
And yet... Public sector staff are striking fifteen times more than those in the private sector
And finally... Craig Brown in The Daily Mail ridicules George Osborne's evasive answers to questions.
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