James Forsyth

John Rentoul rightly flags up the story in this morning’s FT that about 100,000 NHS patients have gone private and had the state pick up the tab, the private hospitals have had to agree to do the work at the NHS price. For those of us who would like to see the NHS move towards a model where the state pays for healthcare but it is provided by a whole panoply of providers, this is an encouraging step. This kind of consumer-focused reform is hard to reverse. The story, as John notes, hasn’t got as much coverage as it should. John blames this on the press’s lack of interest in policy stories. But it is also the case that the Brown government, which is currently slowing down if not reversing Blair’s NHS reforms, hasn’t chosen to trumpet this story.

It is being hailed as a diplomatic triumph that Hamid Karzai has agreed to a run-off in Afghanistan’s presidential election. (Who is getting the credit for Karzai relenting is, as Daniel notes, fascinating). But as Dexter Filkins points out in The New York Times, the second round of the Afghan election could be as marred by fraud as the first one. It is hardly reassuring that the chairman of the supposedly independent election commission is already saying that “Karzai is going to win.” The question is how much Karzai is prepared to rein the levels of fraud in to try and maintain Western support. It has long been suggested that the solution to the legitimacy problem of the Afghan government is a post-election government of national unity.

With the recession and Afghanistan, Iran often drops off the new agenda but the nuclear issue hasn’t gone away. The Washington Post’s article today about the recently revealed nuclear facility at Qom shows that the plant was almost certainly part of a nuclear weapons programme. The paper reports that communication intercepts revealed that Iran only planned to place 3,000 centrifuges in the plant. It would take that number of centrifuges twenty years to produce enough low-enriched uranium for a civilian power plant. But 3,000 centrifuges would produce enough weapons-grade uranium for two to three bombs a year.

We can debate the rights and wrongs of the BBC’s decision to invite Nick Griffin on Question Time. But having invited him on the BBC shouldn’t have devoted almost entirely the whole programme to the BNP’s agenda. This must have been the first Question Time ever where there was no discussion of the economy, health or education. Rather than a question on postal strike, we got a navel gazing one on whether Question Time was right to have Griffin on. The other thing that struck me as bizarre was that at 10.30 at night and on a programme with someone as vile as Nick Griffin on, the BBC felt obliged to beep some swear worlds. If the audience is grown up enough and mature enough to deal with Griffin, then it is able to handle a swear word or two.

Any attempt to use legal measures to keep the BNP off Question Time will only have one winner: the BNP. The more of a fuss that is made about the BNP appearing on Question Time, the better for the BNP—it means that Griffin will get more publicity and if he is clever enough to disguise his vile views when on the programme then he could make some progress. Using the law is particularly foolish as it plays right into the BNP’s narrative that there is an establishment conspiracy to prevent any debate about immigration. The BBC, the political parties and the media have handled the BNP’s appearance on Question Time appallingly. The actions of all three groups have combined to create huge amounts of pre-publicity for this edition of Question Time.

Back in early September Coffee House reported that the Tories were considering including repeal of the hunting ban as part of a broader civil liberties bill. Nick Hebert seems to confirm that this is what the party is planning in his Sunday Telegraph piece. He writes that “the Act sits with ID cards, the attempt to introduce 42 day detention and the removal of trial by jury for fraud cases as an affront to civil liberties. It is but one of Labour's laws that have overridden individual rights and asserted the power of the State.” The Tories are right in both principled and political terms to offer parliamentary time for repeal of the ban. The ban was a small-minded piece of legislation which failed to look at the evidence.

The MPs who are most likely to defy Legg are those who are standing down. They have little to lose in saying that they won’t abide by the retrospectively imposed caps on various things. The question of whether they could be compelled to pay this money back looks like it could turn into a major row. In an interview with Andrew Neil to be broadcast tomorrow Harriet Harman seems to have no concrete idea of how this process might actually work: Andrew Neil:  What would happen to an MP of any party, what would happen to an MP who decides that he or she is standing down at the next election and refuses to pay up? HH:  Well, I think that we haven’t got to that situation.  I think that... AN:  What would happen?