I received an email from my local MP Richard Graham which starts

All of you want this government to succeed where the last one failed and get a grip on immigration. We cannot again have a situation where a government predicts 14,000 immigrants (from Eastern Europe) and gets 444,000 instead.

We’ll leave alone the “All of you” it’s not true and what are those brackets around Eastern Europe for? Anyway Graham then goes on to describe how the Tories deal with immigration.

1. The first ever annual work visa limit of 20,700 has been introduced
2. 1000 extra visas for people of ‘exceptional talent’
3. Crack down on bogus colleges and student visa regulations tightened
4. Backlog of 500,000 asylum cases cleared with 36,000 sent home so far
5. Every passenger on non-EU flights will be checked before travelling by April next year
6. Exit checks at all borders to be introduced by 2015

Whatever your views on immigration these won’t make on jot of difference to EU citizens from Eastern Europe – maybe that’s what the brackets are about a subconscious admittance that he’s speaking rubbish.

The Institute for fiscal studies reports Education spending ‘falling fastest since 1950s’.

The independent financial researchers say spending will fall by 13% in real terms between 2010-11 and 2014-15.

In England, the deepest cuts are in school buildings, higher education, 16-to-19 provision and early years. BBC.

And the Tories response?

“The government had to take tough decisions to reduce the deficit.” BBC.

No the Tories aren’t making any difficult decisions they’re doing exactly what they did the last time they were in power hit those in society least able to speak up for themselves, the poor, the sick, the young, the old and the disabled.

And you know the saddest thing of all? If opinion polls are to be believed almost 40% of the voting public agree with them!

The Robin Hood Tax it’s worth revisiting – lest we forget!.

Chris Huhne told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme that the government would be on the consumers’ side to ensure they got a better deal.

He said the government’s prediction, and that of virtually everybody else, is that bills were going to go up in the medium term. But while the energy companies were not “the Salvation Army”, and expected to earn respectable returns, Huhne continued, they needed to operate in a fair and competitive market.

The energy secretary said the long-term aim was to stop Britain being so reliant on fossil fuels from “volatile parts of the world” by developing domestic sources from renewable and nuclear, but in the short run, a more competitive UK market was key. The Guardian.

A respectable profit? When providing necessities like energy, morally, there isn’t such a thing as respectable profit.

And the idea that we can replace our reliance on volatile supplies of fossil fuels with nuclear isn’t thinking clearly at all, whilst Canada and Australia supply 50% of the worlds Uranium the remainder is shared amongst some pretty volatile parts of the world. Uranium won’t be any more secure a source of energy than fossil fuels and we mustn’t continue to labour under such an illusion.

Young people today would rather have the latest smartphone than a flashy car. And the number of them who can drive is plummeting. Is Britain’s love-affair with the car really over?

Liz Parle can’t drive. “I did try to learn,” says the 24-year-old, Birmingham-born cafe owner, “but I failed my test a few times.” Then she moved to London, where running a car can be a nightmare. Instead she cycles everywhere. “It’s cheap, keeps me fit, and is of course better for the environment.”

Parle is by no means atypical. In Britain, the percentage of 17- to 20-year-olds with driving licences fell from 48% in the early 1990s to 35% last year. The number of miles travelled by all forms of domestic transport, per capita per year, has flatlined for years. Meanwhile, road traffic figures for cars and taxis, having risen more or less every year since 1949, have continued to fall since 2007. Motoring groups put it down to oil prices and the economy. Others offer a more fundamental explanation: the golden age of motoring is over.

“The way we run cars is changing fast,” says Tim Pollard, associate editor at CAR magazine, “Car manufacturers are worried that younger people in particular don’t aspire to own cars like we used to in the 70s, 80s, or even the 90s. Designers commonly say that teenagers today aspire to own the latest smartphone more than a car. Even car enthusiasts realise we’ve reached a tipping point.”

As hi-tech research and development budgets source to keep pace with the iPhone generation, Pollard says carmakers are also coming to terms with less possessive buyers. “Towards the end of the 20th century, manufacturers cottoned on to the fact that we were owning things for shorter periods.”

This has led to a proliferation of different ownership and rental schemes such as Streetcar, Zipcar and Whipcar. In response, the latest deals from the big carmakers are very unlike your usual forecourt deal.

“Peugeot, for instance, has launched a European project called Mu,” says Pollard. “You become a member and can then rent whichever Peugeot best suits your mobility needs that day. So you can borrow a van to move house at the weekend. Then get into a 308 for the school run, Monday to Friday. Then hop into an electric car to scoot silently around town. Then borrow a Peugeot bicycle to cycle to the pub in the evening. It’s an attempt to second-guess how we’ll run cars in future, and a pilot scheme at present, but you can do this today in London. Other car manufacturers are studying similar ideas.”

Stefan Liske helps shape these ideas. The German entrepreneur once worked as a car designer and mechanical engineer, but now runs PCH, a company that models and plans new developments for companies entering choppy waters – their clients include Mini, Audi, Volkswagen and Daimler. Liske presents a picture of an industry that is being forced to confront major changes at every level: batteries that are so heavy the rest of the car must become lighter and use new materials; environmental pressures that mean current models, in which only 10% of a car is made from natural material, will be junked in favour of parts and interiors using “rattan, coconut wool, bamboo, recycled plastics”.

The most radical change is that “in big societies, there is a huge status shift happening, where we are losing the idea that you use a car to define your status. So the industry needs more flexible leasing, financing and car-sharing models. And second, they have to find new revenue streams.”

The near future that Liske describes echoes the computer industry’s earlier shift from a business model based on hardware to one based on software. “Audi and Toyota have just invested $1bn in wind energy. If you’re leasing a car from them, they can sell you the energy – or they go in a different direction like BMW, who just invested $100m in start-up companies offering transport-related mobile services.”

Underpinning all these innovations and ideas is what Liske sees as a major behavioural shift among the generation of “digital natives”. “They don’t care about owning things. Possession is a burden, and a car is a big investment for most people – not just the vehicle, but the permits, the parking space.”

He points to BMW, which in mid-July announced its investment in parkatmyhouse.com, a UK-based online parking marketplace that matches local drivers with homeowners who have empty garages and driveways. “Really,” Liske says, “it was obvious a long time ago that something had to happen.”

Crucially, these ideas aren’t forming in the ether of maybe/if science fiction, but are based on proven technology that is ready to be rolled out.

“Cities such as London will, in 10 years, [have these vehicles] going along autonomously and you can hop in and out of them,” he says.

A vehicle such as the one Liske describes is operating on the edge of the capital. The ULTra system consists of 21 electric vehicles running on a 4km elevated guideway from Heathrow’s Terminal 5 to two stations in the business parking lot. It replaces shuttle buses, which still serve the airport’s other parking lots. Passengers first boarded the ULTra pods in April, but was it officially launched last week. It’s the first commercial Personal Rapid Transport (PRT) system anywhere in the world, and, as it drifts off from its bay in the terminal, it brings to mind both the Docklands Light Railway in London and Legoland’s Sky Rider train.

“I think it’s terrific,” says David Metz, visiting professor in UCL’s Centre for Transport Studies, as we glide to the parking bays. “It’s obvious. Really, it should be here. Though the big question is what are the long-run costs and what is the feasibility of putting it on to other environments.”

BAA, which helped develop the system and now owns a 70% stake in the company, says it cost £30m, which was spent over six years. While the ULTra cars themselves are simple – using the same tyres and wheels as a Ford Ka – the control-and-command system represents the most costly. This is housed in a single-storey building in the car park’s compound and staffed by ex-Network Rail employees, erstwhile RAF air traffic controllers, as well as a mechanic from the Australian navy.

Though the operation is small, Mark Griffiths, its head, says it is ready for expansion at Heathrow; it is tendering for a project at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, and have had interest from the local councils in Bristol and Bath. So could a set-up like ULTra slip into an ancient spa town? “As long as there are planning regulations,” says Griffiths. He outlines a number of scenarios that are currently within their reach: if, for example, a newly arrived passenger wanted to hire a car or book into a hotel, ULTra could present travellers with options on a touch screen, make reservations, and drive them straight into the lobby, where their room key will be waiting. “Zero emissions, you see.”

Metz’s account of underlying transport trends is simple: ultimately, we don’t want to travel more. “Look at the [Department for Transport's] National Travel Survey, an annual poll of 20,000 people, dating back to the early 70s. The average travel time has not changed over that period. The number of journeys that people make in a year hasn’t altered. It’s about 1,000 journeys a year, and about an hour’s travel per day.”

This figure for daily travel is remarkably consistent. Look at Tanzanian villagers in 1986 or Britons today, and we all seem to travel, on average, for about 66 minutes a day. What did rise, in Britain at least from the 70s through to the 90s, was the distance people covered. “In the early 70s, it’s about 4,500 miles per person per year, which includes all modes of travel except international travel by air, which is a different story,” says Metz. “It rose to about 7,000 miles per year by the mid 1990s, and it stayed steady at about that level since.”

Metz also thinks a general satisfaction with the number of places people can go has lead to this levelling-off; he calls this the saturation of demand.

“What is the benefit of travel?” he asks. “It’s about getting more choices of places to go – the choice we have of jobs, doctors, hospitals, schools for our kids. My hypothesis is that the growth of daily travel has come to an end because now we have quite good choice.”

Other analysts agree. “There are these models used by international agencies, and oil companies and the like,” says Adam Millard-Ball, assistant professor at the department of geography of McGill University, Montreal. “They say as we get richer, we’ll want to travel more. There’s no limit. Our hunch was that this might not be the case.”

Working with the late Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University, Millard-Ball examined travel figures dating back to the 70s, from as many industrialised countries as possible. “The data that we have shows fairly clearly that the growth in travel demand has stopped in every industrialised country that we looked at,” he says. Schipper and Millard-Ball published their work last November in the paper Are We Reaching Peak Travel? Trends in Passenger Transport in Eight Industrialized Countries, adding to a growing body of work, all drawing similar conclusions. If these trends continue, it is possibly foresee a decline in car travel and a stagnation in total travel per capita.

Though he doesn’t have any firm evidence to back it up, Millard-Ball thinks infrastructure plays a big part. “During the 70s and 80s we were building a lot more roads, allowing people to go further and faster. That era has come to an end, especially in Britain and America.”

He also suggests that a general satisfaction with travel options also plays a role. “Once there’s a set of places you can get to, it’s less useful to get to any more. If there’s a Sainsbury’s two miles from your house, are you really going to go to the Sainsbury’s four miles away?”

Break down the figures further, and other tendencies arise. Metz says the proportion of men in their 30s who drive has remained steady, while twentysomethings appear to be putting off getting behind the wheel until it’s absolutely necessary. “It’s partly the cost of ownership, the cost of insurance,” he says. “Other factors that are more speculative are that there are more people in higher education, which typically takes place in urban centres where the car isn’t part of the mix. Then people stay on in these urban centres.”

He also says retirees often give up driving once they begin to suffer from minor disabilities.

“If you retire to a place with high population density, then mobility scooters come into their own.” These electric vehicles haven’t been thoroughly researched, and mass production hasn’t quite brought automobile-industry standards. Yet he believes they could become a viable transport option for many people, even if they can only do 8mph, “and that’s a bit fast for pavements”.

Not everyone shares these rosy transport visions. Paul Watters, head of public affairs and roads policy for the AA, cautions against calling time on the car. “We are a small island with a very old road network, and a fairly complicated rail network. We haven’t invested enough in transport for generations. People driving less is good for the environment, but not good for the economy, and we’ve got to find a way to make the economy keep going.”

Though he is willing to admit that the AA might be “late to the party” on more progressive trends such as online car sharing or new hire schemes, Watters says car ownership still matters to its members. He also doubts whether major technological changes will make much difference within the next decade. “We might see bigger penetration of electric and hybrid cars, but it won’t be a shattering change by 2020,” he says.

He also cautions against abandoning the road network. “It’s going to be very hard to maintain the road network over the next few years. As the economy picks up, we could see horrible growth in traffic and horrible congestion.”

Neither the blue-sky visions of ULTra nor the jam tomorrow predictions of Watters are inevitable. Social trends can lead to change, but our travel habits are shaped by government policy too: by road, rail and airport building, most obviously, but also by planning regulations. Greenfield development, or the construction of housing on undeveloped land, is favoured by developers because it’s cheaper to build and easier to sell. Yet this is often low-density, suburban-style housing that is poorly suited to public transport and more or less requires homeowners to drive. Brownfield building, though less profitable and less popular, often raises population density, making public transport more viable.

Metz is unimpressed by the new National Planning Policy Framework, which makes little reference to transport issues, while removing the national priority for brownfield development. There’s nothing wrong with wanting a little house in the country, and a car to get you to and from it. Yet there is something reckless in restricting new buildings to a particular form of transport, especially if that form of transport shows signs of decline.

“There’s this idea of a green metropolis, where land values are high so there’s less space to heat, and where electric vehicles are viable, because the trips taken are shorter. If we’re living in a world that is urbanising globally, this is worth considering.”

It remains a compelling idea, though not everyone agrees its time has come. The car could be reaching the end of the road, or it could idle on for some time to come.

Additional reporting by Justin Quirk

Dramatic implications of individual voter registration spelt out to members on constitutional reform select committee

As many as 10 million voters, predominantly poor, young or black, and more liable to vote Labour, could fall off the electoral register under government plans, the Electoral Commission, electoral administrators and psephologists warned .

The changes will pave the way for a further review of constituency boundaries that will reduce the number of safe Labour seats before the 2020 election.

MPs on the political and constitutional reform select committee only realised the implications of the plans following three evidence sessions with election experts over the past week to examine the white paper which proposes to introduce individual electoral registration rather than household registration before the 2015 election.

The committee chairman, Labour MP Graham Allen, said they were “genuinely shocked”. Even Tory members such as Eleanor Laing expressed surprise.

The policy has been described by Jenny Russell, the chair of the electoral commission, as the biggest change to voting since the introduction of the universal franchise.

Ministers have unexpectedly proposed that it should no longer be compulsory to co-operate with electoral registration officers (EROs) when they try to compile an accurate register, in effect downgrading the civic duty to engage with politics.

Russell warned: “It is logical to suggest that those that do not vote in elections will not see the point of registering to vote and it is possible that the register may therefore go from a 90%completeness that we currently have to 60-65%.”

John Stewart, chairman of the electoral registration officers, said the drop-off was likely to be 10% in “the leafy shires” but closer to 30% in inner city areas. He said there would be an incentive not to register as the list is used for jury service and to combat credit fraud. He said he expected large numbers of young voters would not register.

The Cabinet Office, overseen by Nick Clegg, which had already decided there would be no household canvass in 2014 to save money, is introducing individual registration before the 2015 general election. The Electoral Commission said the change would mean 10% of the electorate could fall off the register in as many as 300 local authority areas.

The full effect of voluntary individual registration will be felt at the 2020 general election because the constituency boundaries for that election will be based on a voluntary individual register compiled in December 2015.

The projected 30% fall off in registered voters, weighted towards poorer voters, would require the boundary commission to reduce the number of inner-city Labour seats because the Boundary Commission is required to draw up constituencies with the sole objective of equalising the size of the electorates and not to take into account natural or political borders.

It is already estimated that as many as 3 million people currently eligible to vote do not register even though it is compulsory to co-operate with the compilation of the registry.

Although individual registration will be introduced before the 2015 general election, ministers have said the names on the existing household register can be carried over on to the election register, so reducing the impact.

Tristam Hunt, a Labour committee member, said: “These plans show how little this government really cares about democracy or fairness. If they get away with it, the effect on the 2020 general election will make the chaotic boundary review published this week look minor. This is designed to wipe the poor and the young off the political map.

“We are moving from a notion of registering as part as a civic duty to something akin to personal choice like a Nectar card or BA miles.”

Russell said the government’s plans had “unforeseen consequences”.

It is currently an offence, liable to a maximum fine of £1,000, to fail to comply with a request for information from an ERO or to give false information.

The Cabinet Office white paper, published in the summer said: “While we strongly encourage people to register to vote, the government believes the act is one of personal choice and as such there should be no compulsion placed on an individual to make an application to register to vote.”

Roger Mortimore from pollsters Ipsos Mori warned: “It is a very dramatic change and I am opposed to it. So far there is a political effect, it is most likely to disadvantage Labour”, because “people that are least engaged in politics — the poor, the young and the ethnic minorities and all those groups, when they do vote at all are more likely to vote Labour”.

Police forces in England and Wales plan to cut 34,100 officers and staff over the next four years in a move that will trigger a fresh rise in crime, according to the first authoritative survey of their plans.

The first reliable estimate by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary is far higher than the previous claims of 28,000 officers and staff to go by police staff organisations.

HMIC says that the 43 police forces plan to cut 16,200 officers, 1,800 police community support officers and 16,100 police staff – a reduction of 14% in the police workforce. The reduction in uniformed police officers represents 11% of the 140,000 constables in the country.

The HMIC report will also infuriate Home Office ministers who have been arguing there is no direct link between falling police numbers and levels of crime. The report contradicts this by saying recent research, using more robust methodologies, has demonstrated a clear link and that a 10% fall in officers will lead to a 3% rise in crime. The Guardian.

Now I’ve no love for the police but if the Tories in the past have always been staunch supporters of the police – which begs the question what on earth are they going to do to services they despise – time to say goodbye to the NHS.

There’s nothing to celebrate about Prince Philip’s 90th Johann Hari explains:

Is there a more consistently hilarious sight in Britain than the endless parade of slavering monarchists trying to convince us the Windsor family is the embodiment of virtue and hard work? Today is the 90th birthday of Philip Mountbatten. Ordinarily, I would wish him a happy day, as I would any other 90-year-old, and then let the event pass in silence – if only the monarchists were not so relentlessly using the event as yet another propaganda tool for their snobbery-soaked institution. But we can’t let yet another bout of their myth-making pass without answer.

Today, you are being encouraged to celebrate a man who merrily visited a genocidal dictator and used the occasion to sneer at British democracy. A man whose political interventions even prompted complaints from the far-right Enoch Powell. A man who, at the height of mass unemployment, mocked the unemployed, while complaining his own family of multi-millionaires was financially deprived. A man who has shot countless examples of endangered species – and then sought praise for his protection of wildlife.

But let’s start with the myth. Monarchists feel the need to claim that the Windsors are somehow more worthy than the rest of us, but this is difficult, since they consist merely of whoever randomly emerges from a royal womb, and whoever that package of DNA and unearned privilege then chooses to marry. Windsors are thrown up by chance, and must have imaginary merits thrust upon them. You can see how hard this is by reading the moist panegyric written by the conservative commentator Peter Oborne last week. He said Philip is “colossally important” because… um… Well, he said, he represents continuity. That’s true. If you gave my father a job for life from which he couldn’t be fired and a slew of golden palaces to live in, he’d represent continuity too. So would yours. So would literally anyone in Britain.

The pickings then got even slimmer. Oborne claimed Philip should be lauded because he has “never once caused… embarrassment”. And “there has never been the slightest hint of scandal”. No, really. He wrote that. So let’s look at the things Oborne and the monarchists believe are not embarrassing or scandalous in any way.

Alfredo Stroessner was one of the most vicious dictators of the 20th-century. He seized power in Paraguay in a coup d’état, and set about kidnapping and torturing anybody who objected, ending up facing charges of genocide from the UN. At the height of the terror, Philip visited the country – paid for by your taxes – and told the beaming tyrant: “It’s a pleasant change to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.” The torture chambers were crammed and screaming less than a mile away. This wasn’t seen as a joke by Stroessner. No wonder that – as Francis Wheen’s fascinating history Strange Days Indeed shows – when far right-wingers and establishment grandees responded to instability in Britain in the 1970s by mooting a military coup, they intended Philip to be the figurehead of their junta. (Nothing is known of his feelings about this.)

Philip has his own taste for killing, although on a thankfully smaller scale. Throughout his life he has taken great pleasure in slaughtering endangered species with highly sophisticated nervous systems and a strong capacity to feel pain, just for fun. For example, on one shooting trip alone in the late 1960s, he personally killed a tiger, a crocodile and a rhinoceros. Before anybody writes in to say that standards were different then, look up the press clippings: people were disgusted at the time. Yet in their list of reasons to admire Philip, monarchists always list his “commitment to protecting wildlife” as symbolic head of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). It’s enough to make a rhinocerous laugh – if only Philip hadn’t shot it first.

Philip doesn’t have much pity for the sentient beings he shoots, but he does have quite a lot for himself. In an interview in 1970, he complained that the Windsors were suffering unacceptable financial pressures, and warned of catastrophes to come. He might, he warned with a pained expression, have to give up polo. And – the agony only grows – “We may need to move into smaller premises, who knows?” He didn’t say which of the four massive palaces he occupies might have had to be downsized, or whether he might have had to abandon the fully stocked barbers’ shop reserved entirely for his personal use.

However Philip has also denied that anybody in Britain is poor. When unemployment surged in the early 1980s to levels not seen since the 1930s, he jeered: “Everyone was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.”

To be fair, in case anybody thinks this is snobbery, Philip extends this callousness to his own children. When Philip and Elizabeth’s youngest son was five years old, they abandoned him to nannies so they could tour Australia for six months, and when they returned, the tiny child was forced to wait in line to shake his parents’ hand.

But, wait. There is a sympathetic explanation for some of Philip’s horrible behaviour. There are many good reasons to oppose the idea of monarchy in the 21st-century, and one is that, by stripping them of any ability to make their own choices, it curdles the family at its core.

In 1993, Philip said: “It wasn’t my ambition to be President of the Mint Advisory Committee. I didn’t want to be President of the WWF. I’d much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly.” When Elizabeth became the Queen, he had to quit his job, and became depressed for months. The “gaffes” that keep being wheeled out suggest a man angry at the position he is trapped in, and at all of us for putting him there. In the Republic of Britain, he could have achieved his real ambition of being an admiral and led a much happier life.

That brings us to the one real reason why Philip deserves our respect and gratitude. Before the Second World War, his sisters all married supporters of the Nazi tyranny, including an SS colonel – but there’s no doubt which side Philip was on. He repeatedly risked his life in the Royal Navy fighting for the Allies, and took a heroic part in the Allied invasion of Sicily. People who glibly insult him today by calling him a “Nazi” are ignorant – he came close to dying to stop the Nazis. It’s much more than they, or I, have ever done.

That should point us, though, to a wider and deeper form of gratitude. All across Britain, there are 90-year-old men who engaged in that incredible act of collective heroism. One was my former neighbour, Elbert Hutton, who died last month. He fought in France and Italy, then returned and worked hard his whole life. But nobody ever gave him a palace to live in, and nobody ever wrote fawning articles about him in the Daily Telegraph. He got a small council house and no garlands. Yet Elbert was much more deserving than Philip. He never fawned over any dictators, or shot any endangered species, or complained about his lot, even though he had unimaginably less. I’d like to see a Britain where we assess Elbert and Philip on their merits – and don’t expect the better man to bow before the fool. Johann Hari.

So we’ve got a referendum on AV versus FPTP the trouble is it’s a sell out by Clegg as Paul Anderson points out

Clegg’s deal with Cameron to introduce an AV versus first past the post referendum was one of the lousiest opportunist Realpolitik sell-outs in living memory in Britain. His party stood for proportional representation, and the least he should have demanded last May was a multi-choice referendum on the electoral system in which PR was an option. I think he could have got it, but there is no evidence that he even asked. Gauche.

The only thing that’s making me think I’ll vote for AV in the end is the fact that I can’t put my cross in the same place as the Tories want me to – something’s got to be wrong if the Tories want you to do it – so a vote for AV it is.