Nick Clegg is at a joint press event with Greenpeace today presenting on the “compelling evidence that low carbon energy is deliverable now”.

The aspect the BBC have emphasised is the mooted possibility of offering rebates on business rates for businesses that make energy-saving improvements to their premises. This idea echoes the practice of some councils who offer council tax rebates to householders who make similar improvements to their homes.

Clegg rightly emphasises the importance of incentivising green behaviour as opposed to penalising pollution, noting that in the current economic climate, the prevailing feeling among both individuals and businesses is that “they cannot afford to go green”.

In other greeniness, Steve Webb fans will recall that last week he was co-operating with green bloggers to launch the shiny new Canvass Your MP campaign website last week to help people lobby their MP about the too-low proposed carbon reduction targets and I see that this has just been blogged on the Greenpeace blog today as well. Everything is holistically and harmoniously interconnected…

Kelvin MacKenzie’s phone must be in meltdown. Good! BURN him, BURN him! Ahem. The former Sun editor and fervent supporter of a 42-day detention limit has indicated that he will stand against David Davis in the forthcoming Haltemprice (how quickly we’ve all learned to spell that) & Howden by-election - putting many Lib Dems into the extraordinary position of not only hoping David Davis wins, but actively considering hitting the doorsteps to help him do it.

Yes, yes, Davis is a distinctly unreliable “libertarian” with some nasty socially conservative stances, but who can resist the idea of kicking Rupert Murdoch in the nuts? For myself, I’m glad I don’t live close enough to face this particular dilemma. MacKenzie’s decision is partly conditional on Labour not standing, it seems, but my feeling is that momentum - and strong-arming from his boss - will carry him into standing whether Labour field a candidate or not (and, increasingly as the hours tick by, it looks like not). Here’s his positive manifesto for a bright future:

The Sun is very, very hostile to David Davis because of his 28 day stance and The Sun has always been very up for 42 days and perhaps even 420 days.

The Tories v The Sun? Whatever next? How will Cameron play in the authoritarian redtops after he goes up to H&H to support Davis, as he has apparently promised to do? Naturally, the leftwing media scents blue blood on the carpet  and Mr Nick Robinson is in ever more danger of inflating with excitement like a great big bally balloon. But how is the right-wing media going to position itself in this bizarre stand-off?

No surprise that the Sun is gearing up its machine against Davis, whose perfidy is confirmed by the fact that “he quoted names from medieval history and ancient French”. A senior Tory aide is quoted as saying “We need this like a hole in the head. It’s an act of sabotage”. Worst of all “Mr Davis DID tell Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg on Wednesday night — hours before telling his own Shadow Cabinet colleagues. Furious Mr Cameron barely concealed his anger yesterday.” Consorting with the Lib Dems and discussing medieval etymology - it’s all an EU plot and YOU’RE paying for it!

The Sun does, however, appear to be at risk of diverging from a significant chunk of their own readership if the (approximately one-third-to-a-half supportive of Davis) comments on the issue are anything to go by. This tends to confirm my initial supposition, that any half-hearted belief people may hold on 42 days will be utterly swept away by the grand narrative of the Man Who Resigned On Principle.

The Hate Mail appears less certain, leading its piece with Davis’ challenge to “cowardly” Gordon Brown, but is nonetheless distancing itself from Davis’ “controversial” stance “amid claims that his shock resignation yesterday is backfiring.” And again, the comments at the bottom are along rather different lines. There’s a pattern here…

The Mirror, less invested in a Tory future, sees this as a leadership challenge, no more, no less, and characterises the split as follows:

And they [I dunno, the Wizards - AEM] predicted the Tories would be split into a pro-Davis camp fighting under the banner of preserving traditional British freedoms and Cameron loyalists who are terrified of being seen as soft on terror.

They’re all agreed on one thing - Cameron has been broadsided. This is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy coming from the right-wing press, because Cameron can now only play this one of two ways.

He can back Davis’ campaign, as he has implied he will do with a personal appearance, and risk the fury of the Murdoch empire. Or he can keep quiet, try not to draw attention to the fact that he and his front-bench team are, nominally, opposed to 42 days as well - and we get to go up to H&H, literally and metaphorically, and call him out.

If we don’t get him, the Sun will. Let’s hope it’s us, and that Clegg has some grave and head-shakey words to say about him over the coming weeks.

Liberty. We love it.

[Gets in from pub]

Somewhat belatedly, Question Time started on BBC1 at 11.35pm and is bound to be a lively affair after today’s events.

David Dimbleby chairs the weekly political debate from London, with panellists Baroness Williams, George Pascoe-Watson, June Sarpong, and MP’s Tony McNulty and Michael Gove.

If you’re watching, feel free to use the comments thread to sound off, Laurence.

[Goes to sleep on keyboard]

Nick was at IPPR today giving a speech on the future of education - and is that one Ms Linda Jack I hear asking the questions? Indeed it is!

This speech is partly reproduced in edited form at Comment is Free. Now, I know you’ve got dinner to eat and tv to watch but I do recommend you take the time to listen to the podcast version of the speech - it’s rather fuller and better.

It strikes me that our commitment to local decision-making doesn’t make for catchy soundbites. Labour and the Tories’ authoritarian policies make naturally good speeches. Beginning-middle-end. You can get behind a man who rants on about forcing everyone to wear school blazers. Maybe just to stab him in the back, but you can get behind him. Likewise, Labour’s polyclinics, while a total top-down one-size-fits-all disaster, are an absolute gift to speechwriters because they fit into a nice neat “Here is a problem, we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it” pattern. People are conditioned to respond to speeches like those.

A man who stands up and says he can’t possibly have all the answers for every school in the country, so he plans to devolve spending powers to individual schools so that they have the power to decide on their own answers, is a subtler proposition. It is, in my view, something that needs to be emphasised and explored in our speechifying more than the commitment to increase funding itself, laudable though that is.

For example, Nick really brings out the point about top-down control very effectively for me in the Q&As:

If you start trying to add all sorts of caveats and qualifications to how the pupil premium is used by teachers and heads in each particular school, you by definition end up repeating the errors we’ve seen over the last ten years, which is that funding becomes too conditional; it becomes too qualified; it often becomes short-term.

The refrain I hear in travelling round the country speaking to a lot of hardworking heads is not, “Oh, we wish we got better guidance on which are the most needy children to help,” it’s “We’re not helping the needy children because we’re not being given the flexibility to do it”.

This is proper liberalism and it’s unanswerable common sense, and I think it will find more of an audience than a spending commitment, which like all spending commitments, however important and however ingenious, runs the risk of inviting a chorus of “Oh no you won’t”s.

In a speech to the Policy Exchange yesterday lunchtime, Nick Clegg set out the party’s tax policy and indicated that a Liberal Democrat government would look at reducing the overall level of taxation as a percentage of GDP.

These are two different things, as James Graham points out. The bare bones of the tax policy “announced” in the speech are essentially the same measures agreed at last September’s Brighton conference. It’s the overall direction, the idea that the level of taxation might just be too high, that is new - although prefigured in Nick’s closing speech at spring conference.

While I can quite see the logic in talking about both policy and ultimate aim as part of the same overall approach, I am concerned that we won’t serve ourselves well if we allow the two to become conflated. As I argued over at Liberal Conspiracy a couple of months ago, it is perfectly possible to cut taxes for the vast majority of the population without reducing the overall tax take, and this is exactly what our current policy does. It would be a shame to have that misunderstood, as Andrew Grice does in the Independent’s Today in Politics blog, with the result that people take the policy less seriously.

Still, if the media want to give us extra coverage for “new policy” then who are we to complain I suppose. It is gratifying to have it recognised that, unlike the Tories, we actually have a tax policy.

And coverage there is, at the BBC, the Telegraph, and an abridged version of Nick’s speech appears as a a Comment is Free piece at the Guardian, where the CiF punters are, on the whole, moderately impressed, and I run around like a form prefect with a great big pile of policy links as usual.  The Spectator’s Coffee House blog, of course, hopes that Cameron will profit from Clegg’s stance (perhaps by copying his homework?)

And in neat juxtaposition to all this, there’s further bad news for Labour in several of the papers as the IFS releases a report on the likely implications of Darling’s last-minute budget change in raising the personal allowance. As many of us suspected, it ain’t pretty.

And finally, a bit of parallel universe hopping, as an Irwin Stelzer piece in the Torygraph entitled “Lower, simpler, fairer” turns out to be not analysis of Lib Dem tax policy (the name of the party’s original tax paper was Fairer, simpler, greener) but a rather gloomy thousand-word ricochet between the non-ideas of Labour and the Tories which rightly asserts that “there is a gap in the market for ideas about tax policy”. Er…

… will kick off at 11.35pm on One this Thursday, and will feature a regular bloggers’ spot on the programme itself and an accompanying minute-by-minute blog of results, news, anecdotes, pictures, groundless speculation and, please god, a few laughs.

Your present correspondent will be in the yellow corner, diametrically opposite to, and equidistant from, Iain Dale and Luke Akehurst. Part of the premise is that we, El Bloggers, are going to try to beat the Beeb on getting results in. Our blogs will be syndicated to the BBC blog and because we don’t have to get it right wait for confirmation, we can get results up as soon as we hear about them from our own sources.

And in my case that means YOU, LDV eggs. If you’re going to be propping your eyelids open at a count, or you know someone who is and don’t mind blearily transmitting some news in the small hours, the Beeb wants to hear from you. It can be exit polls, early indicators, unconfirmed results, unexpected developments, rumours, amusing pictures, breaking news on the tea and coffee facilities… All suitable disclaimers will be in place and you can let me know if you’d rather not be named as a source (as if, you shameless attention-seekers). Choose your weapon:

Comment below. I’ll keep the page open throughout the night. I’m sure there will also be a sounding-off thread on the night which I’ll also have open.

Facebook message or email me. Details on my blog.

Comment over at my gaff. There’ll be an entry there soon.

Twitter at me. @AlixMortimer. My mobile will be switched on and my parents are under strict instructions not to call me and tell me I’m on TV.

If you have a blog and rattle off any posts of your own over the course of the night, please drop me the link on any of the above, likewise if you see anything good on someone else’s blog.

The Guardian reports on the growing rebellion among Labour MPs as the full impact of the removal of the 10% tax band in last year’s budget becomes clear:

In what were described as tense exchanges, the prime minister was challenged over the issues when he addressed backbenchers in private at the regular meeting of the parliamentary Labour party this week.

Now 26 Labour MPs, including former ministers Janet Anderson and Gisela Stuart, have signed an early day motion saying the tax changes will have “a disproportionate impact on people who can ill afford to be made worse off”.

An IFS economist, quoted in the same article, says that of the 5 million households who will lose out by the changes, “a fairly large number” will not be compensated for the losses in the form of tax credits.

People earning below about £18,000 will see their take-home pay decrease from next week.

UPDATE: And it’s a double whammy of dismay as licensing minister Gerry Sutcliffe says the publican trade is “right to be upset” by the recent budget’s increases on alcohol taxes.

…it appears from this report in the FT that the Prime Minister didn’t so much provide correct figures in answer to Nick Clegg’s questions as, er, provide made-up ones:

Mr Clegg said house prices were falling faster than at the start of the last property crash.

He quoted Ministry of Justice figures showing that more than 95,000 orders to repossess properties were made last year - a fraction below the 103,000 orders made in 1990 at the start of the last housing crash.

Mr Brown replied that there were only 27,000 repossessions made last year, against 200,000 in the first two years of the 1990s.

But the Lib Dems said the latter figure exaggerated the extent of the last crash. Just fewer than 120,000 homes were removed from mortgage-holders in 1990 and 1991 combined, 80,000 less than the prime minister claimed.

The figure for repossession orders, at 95,374, is at its highest since 1993.

This is where the two questions limit really begins to bite.

The more I read LibDemVoice, the more convinced I am that we could usefully direct more of our incredible online energy outwards.

There are - as we know all too well - plenty of small-L liberals out there, but there are so few big-L Liberals taking on the crazed adherents of NuTory that even comment threads on a relatively centre-ground site like the Beeb can descend into mud-wrestling matches to determine who can be rudest about the Lib Dems.

“Useless”, “a joke”, “opportunistic” are three of the less offensive turds that regularly get dropped into our waterpipe. The last one always puzzles me - how can a party that is, by the lights of these same howling detractors, so far from actually holding power be called opportunistic? The other gem, of course, is “What is the point of the Lib Dems?”. Probably best not do what I do, which is to respond “What is the point of [name of poster]?”

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A senior policeman at Scotland Yard has suggested that the DNA of children as young as five could be stored on a database for future crime detection purposes, the Observer reports.

Gary Pugh, the Yard’s director of forensic services who was recently appointed DNA spokesman of the Association of Chief Police Officers, said:

If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the longer term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large. You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find out who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.

Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty and the National Primary Headteachers’ Association have both denounced the proposal.

This is not the first time the issue of children’s potential criminality has come up. In June 2005, the Guardian reported that a leaked Home Office paper suggested that nursery teachers should be trained to identify potential criminality in children as young as three. Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes then acknowledged the dangers of criminalising children and said:

I don’t think you can tell whether a three-year-old is likely to become a criminal.

Wonder what she’ll say this time?

Following LVT fringe on Saturday I want nothing so much as a nice hot cup of tea and a sit down, but instead I slouch along ten minutes’ worth of regenerational dockland to the Crowne Plaza, where I gather with other bloggers to guzzle free wine and get congratulated in public by impressive people until I go all red and gruff and shuffly. My trophy isn’t really big enough to drink wine out of with any conviction but it does look damnably like it would take a large boiled egg just perfectly, and that’s the important thing.

James Graham warns me and the People’s Choice category winner, my very own homebody MP Lynne Featherstone, that our opinions will now forever be measured against our status as award winners. I don’t think this bothers the board-sweeping Hornsey & Wood Green contingent too much. Lynne’s point of view is already public property anyway, and mine is generally so fractal that there are few opinions I will not painstakingly obfuscate with detail and caveat to the point where people inevitably lose track of why they objected to them in the first place.

No, I am far more concerned, this being the Campaign for Gender Balance, about my hair, which I have not brushed properly for the whole of the five hours up to the point where I have to have my picture taken, and my general appearance, which is located somewhere on a given 3D matrix between “hungover”, “beige” and “dead”. It’s not easy hitting the big time without warning. Or a hairbrush. James Graham, of course, is used to all this and has been swept into town in a cloud of stardust (albeit with an hour’s delay at Crewe) to sit on the panel of a fringe-meeting, present an award, and then be whisked off back to celeb-land (or at least Warrington).

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Our Vince Cable the Able was the main event of a lot of people’s Saturday conference. It will therefore surprise precisely no-one to see that the Red Box is desperately attaching electrodes to the equine corpse of the “Should Vince have stood?” non-issue. The giveaway in such tedious toilet paper coverage is that it actually devalues Cable - the man supposedly being praised - as much as Clegg, as if the shadow chancellor’s function is limited to providing a compare-and-contrast exercise for the media.

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Continuing in the little-known twenty four hours later school of live-blogging, we come to the moment on Saturday morning when I unglue my eyelids just in time to hear Brian Paddick deliver his London setpiece.

He is as impressive as ever, and plays on his background in just the right way - “I’m not a politician. I don’t know much about talk, but  I do know a lot about delivery”. His main hitpoints are crime, housing and transport, and increasingly his speeches use his life experience as a personal sidelight on all of them, not just crime. I am immensely pleased about this, because I had begun to fear that all our publicity is over-focussing on crime, which is, er, understandable, but it’s also something that is put across without difficulty every time a picture of him in uniform gets into the papers.

It would be a shame if such a proper all-round liberal talent was misread as a one-trick pony, although, as Liberal Review says, at least it’s perfectly obvious that he’s got a trick, which already puts him one-up on the opposition. I like the practicality and the focus on delivery not talk, but I could do with a little more along the lines of “Briiiiiiiaaaaan! You da man! Yeeeeeeeeaaaaahhh!” which by a staggering coincidence is fairly much what I end up saying to him some hours later in the bar of the Crowne Plaza Hotel, fuelled by a heady cocktail of free wine and public congratulation.

Coming soon, another liberal all-star, Our Vince, but in the meantime I have just realised that you, poor deprived homebody, are still ignorant of the  very existence of the mighty SUPERLAMBANANA!

On Friday, I undergo the unwieldy registration process and persuade MatGB to take a new picture for my pass, because my last picture was taken in Brighton when I was both windswept and hungover, whereas today I am merely windswept. In fact this is not technically my first conference, but my only contributions to proceedings in Brighton last September were to hang around outside the conference centre leafletting and go to the Bloggers’ Drinks. I was going to call this column Diary of a Conference Virgin-sort-of-with-some-fumbling but decided that discretion should be the better part of valour.

We are joined by my friend familiar to LDV posters as Grammar Police, and we start Lib Dem-spotting in earnest. The bulky tourist families and bevies of French schoolchildren shuffling round the Albert Dock are now joined by small parties of worthy looking people clutching sheaves of paper. Sharp-suited aides (as sharp-suited as Liberal Democrats get) bark into phones and Tom Brake is reported to be sitting alone in Coffee Republic looking a little bit bored. You can’t move around the Conference Centre area without taking on at least one leaflet per minute, a thing I am happy to do partly because I feel sorry for the leafletters (we all do; it’s a leafletters’ self-made paradise) and partly because I am not organised enough to have brought a notebook.

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The People’s Republic of Mortimer is very much your modern, convenient lock-up-and-leave totalitarian state, so when this diary was suggested as a way of keeping homebodies in touch with the all-singing all-dancing excitement that is a political party conference, I had only to change the guard, cancel the milk and weaken the currency so that no-one would be popular enough to mount a coup while I was gone.

Our grand progress northwards was agreeably punctuated by a very kind man offering to buy us a sandwich (seeing that we were embarrassed for funds; it is an expensive business running a republic) and the most patriotically scouse train manager one could wish for: “This train will be calling at Watford Junction, Nuneaton, Stafford, Crewe, Runcorn and Liverpool - city of culture 2008 - Lime Street. Expected time of arrival in Liverpool - eight times European cup winners - is 12.47. On behalf of the driver, the crew, the trolley staff, the people in the shop and the fluffy mascot on the dashboard may I warmly welcome you aboard this Virgin Trains service to the greatest city on earth and assure you that we will be bearing you away from the dirty south as fast as humanly possible.”

Emerging from Lime Street station is a fine if disconcerting experience. Why, someone has picked up the Roman forum, rebuilt it at its zenith and plonked it down in the middle of a whirlwind of merciless relief roads! You can still sense, around Lime Street and along the docks in particular, the puffy pride of those Victorian grandees pretending they were Pericles, bolting on superbly extravagant civic buildings to what had formerly been a very ordinary if sprawling port city. The experience of sailing up the Mersey to dock at Liverpool must have been, to your average Irish famine victim for example, something akin to how arriving by ship at New York feels now. Read more »