Uk politics

Ed Balls has just told Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics that Labour will include pensions in their welfare cap. This opens up a major dividing line with the Tories who have been clear that George Osborne will exclude pensions from his spending cap. I suspect that Balls and Ed Miliband will now be badgered with questions about whether, if necessary, they’ll cut pensions — or not up-rate them — to meet the cap. Given the power of the grey vote in British politics (Labour estimates that one in every two voters in 2010 was over 55) they are going to come under massive pressure to rule this out. But, strikingly, Balls was not prepared to do this on  Sunday Politics. He even drew attention to the amount of welfare payments which go to the over-60s.

Tim Yeo was due to appear on Sky News' Murnaghan programme, and on the BBC's Sunday Politics this morning. But he's just pulled out of both interviews, where he would have been asked about the Sunday Times' story alleging that he coached a witness to his own select committee on the right answers. Yeo denies that he behaved improperly and told the newspaper that he had never offered parliamentary advice or advocacy. What will be interesting about the fallout from this latest round of allegations is whether politicians use it to advance their own pet theories about how parliament needs reform, or whether they examine what the particular allegations were.

Now that it has become commonplace for the press to entrap MPs and peers, why don’t our legislators try to turn the tables? I suggest that ministers sidle up to journalists (secretly filming them the while) and offer them honours. They should hint that the honour is conditional on favourable coverage, and agree to meet again in six months. In between, they should track what the journalists write, and then, when they have trapped their victims, expose the pattern. Another trick would be for politicians to get friends to pretend to be businessmen offering journalists money or freebies to place products in their stories and features. These tactics would get interesting results. The latest Sunday Times sting can be read here (£).

Ed Miliband thinks a contributory principle in welfare is the way to show voters that his party supports a 'something-for-something' approach. Yesterday he proposed to restore that principle, with higher entitlements for those with good records. This was at the heart of the Beveridge settlement, but has been diluted by successive governments, the current one included. Labour has to show that it can pay for this sort of system, though, and Miliband's answer is to raise the hurdle for contributory welfare, so that claimants must have worked longer than the current two-year period to qualify for the contributory benefit. The implication is that more people will go straight through the means test. Fewer people will be eligible, so the system can afford to be more generous.

Just because Labour has been taking a big dose of reality this week doesn't mean the party is now refusing to make the most of any botch job by the Coalition. So we've come to the funny situation where the Opposition party famed for its centralised approach to planning which failed to build enough homes in any year is taking the high ground on housebuilding. The Telegraph reports that Shadow Communities and Local Government secretary Hilary Benn now believes 'local communities should decide where they want new homes and developments to go and then give their consent in the form of planning permission' and that 'we have to make localism work'. Labour would tear up the Coalition's hated National Planning Policy Framework, Benn told the newspaper. This is extraordinary.