The BBC’s fairly self-explanatory report – Darling ‘using Lib Dem air tax’ – can be read here.

For those who’d like to enjoy Vince’s wise words in full here they are, brought to you thanks to the wonder that is the online Hansard:

Dr. Vincent Cable (Twickenham) (LD): I thank the Chancellor for an advance copy of his statement, but 12 of the 18 pages were blank. Is that a new signal of open government and transparency? I congratulate him on adopting our long-standing policy on aviation taxation. … May I also sympathise with the Chancellor for having obviously spent the past 72 hours rewriting a speech that was originally intended to be a chapter in the election manifesto, and for having only just recovered from the ignominy of being the first Chancellor of the Exchequer since 1866 to preside over a run on a bank? Not since Black Wednesday has there been such a collapse of confidence in the authority of Government.

First, came Yellow Saturday, when he ditched his plans to call an election

Then, yesterday, the Parliamentary ombudsman criticised the former Chancellor’s own invention, the bureaucratic and complex tax credit system, as being “unfair” to some of the UK’s poorest families.

As Danny Alexander, Lib Dem shadow secretary of state for work and pensions, commented:

“Gordon Brown is incapable of admitting mistakes. His callous disregard for the Ombudsman’s first report, as the title suggests, has led to continued incompetence in the administration of the system.

“Well intentioned policies for low income families are entirely undermined by mass means-testing, chaotic

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There’s nothing amateur psephologists and party hacks like more then feeding the latest poll figures into Martin Baxter’s Electoral Calculus seats predictor. Tonight, there’s a small ripple of excitement in the blogosphere as it shows the Lib Dems with zero (0) seats.

From which we can infer two possible conclusions:

1. The Baxter model is nonsensical for three party politics (which is what now de facto exists in the UK);

2. Or the Lib Dems are going to find themselves in a worse position than the Liberal Party in 1979, which retained 11 MPs even after Jeremy Thorpe’s resignation and the

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The list of the first 180 of the 2,500 post offices due to close within the next 15 months has been unveiled. They include:

The full list can be downloaded here.

The closures have been condemned by Lembit Öpik, Lib Dem shadow secretary of state for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform:

“These closures are completely unnecessary. It is obvious that there are ways of sustaining post offices without breaking the bank. What’s missing is the Government’s willingness to do so.

“What is the point in consultation if the views

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