David Blackburn

Tensions between Roma migrants and communities in Sheffield have risen this week, and the city’s most prominent MPs have voiced their concerns. Yesterday, Sebastian noted David Blunkett’s warning about the possibility of riots unless migrants change their behaviour. Today, Nick Clegg has echoed Blunkett by calling for migrants to moderate their ‘intimidating’ and ‘offensive’ ways. It is, of course, easier to say such things than to act on them; but it would be churlish not to accept that metropolitan Britain is beginning to talk more openly – and even honestly – about some of the deleterious social and cultural effects of immigration.

The energy debate is in stasis. Everything, it seems, hangs on the contents of the Autumn Statement. EDF has announced a price rise; bills will go up by an average 3.9 per cent, which is considerably lower than the rest of the Big Six. Yet the company made clear that maintaining low prices will depend on George Osborne. A spokesman said: ‘If the Government makes bigger changes to the cost of its social and environmental schemes than EDF Energy has anticipated, the company pledges to pass these savings onto customers. However, if changes to social and environmental programmes are less than anticipated, the company may have to review its standard variable prices again.’ That statement is even more nebulous than it first seems.

The parliamentary standards commissioner’s inquiry into Nadine Dorries’s appearance on I’m a Celebrity Get Me out of Here was evidently an eventful process. Here are the headlines from the report: 1). The standards committee, the cross-party panel of MPs which sanctions MPs after the standards commissioner has reported, ordered Dorries to apologise to the House of Commons for failing to declare earnings from the show. However, the commissioner said that Dorries's failure to register her shareholding interest in a media consultancy company called Averbrook until June 2013 was an 'inadvertent' oversight. 2). Dorries said that she had to undertake media work because she was facing bankruptcy.

Theresa May accepted her Spectator Politician of the Year award with the quip: 'It used to be a joke that I lock them up and Ken Clarke lets them out, now they say I lock them up and Chris Grayling throws away the key.' The right wing press, as Ken Clarke is given to calling it, is much enamoured with Grayling and May. ConservativeHome’s Mark Wallace describes them as the ‘dynamic duo’, and writes a long appreciation of their ‘increasingly strong message on crime’. There is, of course, as Wallace concedes, more to governing than messages. The Mail on Sunday carries a small item about reoffending rates under the headline ‘scandal of prisoners who strike again’.

There’s a rumour doing the rounds that Anna Soubry’s comments on immigration during Thursday night’s edition of Question Time did not come as a surprise to Tory High Command. Apparently, Soubry refused to take direction from the party machine and made clear that she would say, more or less, what she said. Coalition has certainly bred independent-minded ministers. The Lib Dems pick and choose which government policy to support in public, so it’s not wholly surprising that Tories sometimes follow suit. But, tough immigration policy is a key part of the Tories’ grand strategy and Soubry’s open disregard for the party line was striking.

listen to ‘Tony Hall on the future of the BBC’ on Audioboo Tony Hall, the Director General of the BBC, has just laid out his vision for the next 10 years of the BBC. He opened humbly, arguing that the culture of the BBC had to change in the wake of the Savile and pay-off scandals. The corporation had to serve the licence fee payer to justify the extraordinary privilege of public funding. The BBC must remember that it is publicly owned, he said. Warming to his theme, Hall said that managers had to remember that theirs was a 'creative job, an enabling job and an inspiring job', and that the corporation must celebrate creativity.