ConservativeHome: Thursday 13th December 2007

Columnist Louise Bagshawe: Heineken Tories

PlayPolitical: Fred Thompson leads GOP candidates in refusing to answer "raise your hand" climate change question

Out tough-loving each other

"Plans to ensure 140,000 more lone parents return to work will be unveiled today as Labour and the Tories outline "tough love" welfare-to-work policies. Peter Hain, the Work and Pensions Secretary, will say that 70,000 children will be lifted out of poverty by a shake-up designed to turn benefit claimants from "passive recipients into active job-seekers". He will contrast Labour's "carrot and stick" approach with a more hardline stance being floated by the Opposition, modelled on "workfare" schemes in US states such as Wisconsin." - Independent

"Lone parents will be expected to be available for part-time work once their child reaches primary school, and full-time work when the child is in secondary school, the Conservatives said yesterday as they moved to outbid Labour on welfare reform." - Guardian

Yesterday's ToryDiary: Grayling examines the problems with our benefits system

Playgrounds are too soft

"I am not positively advocating that we encourage our children to fall out of trees or get whanged off roundabouts moving at 200 rpm. But the scabophobic measures we have taken to protect our children have had consequences we could not have intended." - Boris Johnson in the Telegraph

Mockery at PMQs

""Calm down, dear," said David Cameron to the prime minister. Can it get any more humiliating? Now they're using Michael Winner's catchphrase against him. How incredibly patronising to deploy jokey patronisation against the Queen's first minister!" - Simon Hoggart sketch in the Guardian

ToryDiary: Yesterday's live blog of PMQs

Brown chooses solar panels for Fife, rather than "ostentatious" wind turbines

"The panels were installed in 2005. The references to “very quietly... rather than ostentatiously” can be seen as implicit criticisms of David Cameron, who has talked in public about his own green initiatives, including putting a wind turbine on his house in Notting Hill." - Gordon Brown interview in the Times

Equal Opportunities?

"Back in May, the Equal Opportunities Commission came under fire when Philip Davies, the Tory MP, established that it was paying its female staff less than the men. After answers came back to a series of parliamentary questions, it was revealed that the average salary for its female employees was almost £2,000 less than their male counterparts. Have lessons been learned from the episode? Apparently not." - Telegraph Spy

Government's "cavalier" attitude to personal accounts

"The Conservatives have called for a review of pension means testing to determine how many people will and won’t benefit from opting in and out of personal accounts." - CityWire

In it for the long haul

"Gordon Brown relaunched British strategy in Afghanistan yesterday, backing plans to split the Taleban leadership while sticking with a carefully crafted Anglo-American compromise on opium production." - Times

"Looking at the country as a whole, the hope must be that popular support for President Hamid Karzai and the presence of Western forces will be maintained as the indigenous army and central government institutions are strengthened. That will require long-term foreign commitment, flexibility in dealing with deeply rooted tribal structures and, above all, economic revival to meet the huge demand for jobs." - Telegraph leader

"Britain’s sensible targets for Afghanistan, officials say quietly, are to stop it being a shelter for al-Qaeda and to “take it off the worry list”, even if it is then left bumping along the bottom of the world’s development charts. Achieving even those pared-down goals could take decades." - Bronwen Maddox in the Times

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