Verbal

What are you getting into such a confused frenzy about? If you'd asked anyone who's reasonably informed about post-Gaddafi Libya, they'd have brought up the failure of the West to implement post-war reconstruction policies, repeating the mistakes made in Iraq. Why is it suddenly 'cynical' for Miliband to raise it as an issue? Yes, he voted for war, but the issue was, and remains, not the war itself but what do to afterwards. Those in government, rather than opposition, clearly bear the responsibility for the failure to address this, and therefore laid the conditions for what we now see in the Med. There is in fact quite a lot known about how to go about post-war reconstruction, and while it's far from a perfect art, it's been applied reasonably successfully elsewhere, in west and central Africa, for example, and in the Balkans. By making this an issue, I hope, as I'm sure you do, that when Miliband forms the next government he addresses this issue early on and urgently. Or are you just making a silly, partisan point from your kipper island?

The biggest miscalculation of the whole campaign. The Tories thought all they had to do was wait for Miliband to self-immolate, and it never happened. No need to have policies even worth discussing (witness on here - even the Cameron sycophants and further Right like Lords Duck-Tender-Trousers don't discuss anything out of the Tory campaign - all they want to do is debate Milibandisms). This has been the most incompetent campaign I've witnessed from a major political party since Michael Foot in 1983. Cameron's "I'm leaving" is the shortest political suicide note in history.

You seem to have fixated on this idea that £2m is comparatively not much in London, that somehow there will be millions of people caught up in the mansion tax. Try going on to Zoopla with a top limit if £1.9m and see what you can buy in London. Basically an awful lot. To repeat, the mansion tax will not affect 99.5% of the UK population. What it will do is address the ridiculous situation where council tax bandings stop at a point where someone one owning a £200 million mansion pays the same in council tax as someone in a £1.5m house. To call this 'grandstanding' as a policy is woeful - a measure of the depths to which the Right have sunk in a craven defence of the indefensible. And as the mansion tax is proving popular, it's also a measure of how far out of touch the Right has become. All they're really left with is whinging about the diminution of some substantial tax advantage (the council tax top limit and inherited non-com status to name two glaring ones) to the rich, and if that doesn't work, playing the race card. It's all so desperate and reeks of the kind of flailing around that comes from failure and political exhaustion. There's no equivalent of Rand Paul on the British Right - someone with whom I profoundly agree but at least has some ideas! The best you can do is Boris ****ing Johnson and a race-card-dealing dimwit with a dodgy suit and a short fuse. So come up with a better idea to deal with this - or tell us who among the swivel-eyed might have one. Otherwise, good luck with the wagon you're fatally hitched to.

Again, you seem unaware that the mansion tax was originally, and remains, a Liberal Democrat policy. They are remarkably similar still - both raising a shade over £1bn and affecting a tiny one-half percent of the population. So to be accurate you should be screaming: Liberal Democrats! Class Warriors! Or some such nonsense. Anyway, the good thing is that when the party with the most votes emerges from the election, which will be Labour as you say, the most likely alliance will not be the SNP but with the Lib Dems. A chance to redeem themselves after getting into bed with the fatuous Cameron. And the mansion tax will be on the statute book within months. I like your comparison with Hollande - it demonstrates a continued underestimation of Miliband. The kind of underestimation that has given him what can only be called a good election, with your betters floundering with any damned thing they can come up with. It is, if nothing else, the funniest election in years.

Labour's projections are roughly the same as the Liberal Democrats who, remember, were the first to propose the mansion tax. This will affect 0.5% of properties in the UK, and will cost those with houses between £2m and £3m an extra £250 per month. In London, which is choc-ful of 'low-tax' councils, and where the owners of the absurd Candy Brothers' properties in Knightsbridge for example have bought large bling flats for up to £200 million, council tax can hit a ceiling of just slightly over £2,000 per year. And that's if they pay any council tax at all (most in 1 Hyde Park do not). Remember also that London is as solidly a Labour city as any other in the UK. The mansion tax proposal has not only not dented that support; it's increased it. I do find it actually quite weird that the abject forelock-tugging to the rich on this thread (see the amusing Wes Tender for further details) extends to thinking that almost non-existent property taxes for the rich are a good idea. And it's just as odd to describe as "soaking the rich" the curtailment of the one-person tax havens known as non-dom status - a status which, in truly British-Uriah-Heep style, can even be inherited, for heaven's sake! I suppose virulent objections to the mansion tax sit well with slavish support for the bedroom tax - never has such a contrast of policies concerning property, poverty and wealth highlighted the ignominious bigotry of the Bullingdon Tories and their obsequious acolytes who fall for such crap from their betters.

You do realise that London is overwhelmingly a Labour town, right? And I can promise you that's not because all the oligarchs were Ed Miliband fans. Why more 'exclusive'? Two million is still an awful lot of money even in London. The mansion tax, incidentally, has already had an effect. London house prices have fallen sharply - just on the prospect of its introduction. So far from making London more exclusive, it's actually make it more affordable. Why a reduction? And why would it have a bad effect on the poorest? The 'poorest' are not queueing up to buy two-million-pound houses. London is a city where the difference between Labour and Tory administrations makes a HUGE difference (as I see in my borough of Hammersmith and Fulham). If Tory regimes are in power, working class people have their houses and flats demolished for 'luxury' flats (actually little more than a bit of hotel-chic wallpaper-thin gloss, and amounting to what one London town planner called 'rich slums'). If Labour regimes are in power, social housing tends to be protected, including a great swathe of housing association homes near me, in Fulham and - surprisingly - Chelsea, that have been around since the 19th century.

The Land Registry, I imagine. It wouldn't be difficult and is the kind of policy for which Big Data is an ideal source.

The funny thing is, the people who actually are saying this loudest are economists who see low interest rates as an opportunity for borrowing for public investment (which does, incidentally, include some Tory faves like HS2). One of the most fascinating things about this election campaign, though, is how Ed Miliband has on the one hand conceded ground on deficit financing and welfare spending (an argument he's concluded he can't win), and on the other, adopted strong redistributive policies like the mansion tax, an increase of 5p on the top rate of income tax and the clampdown on non-coms. This is Thomas Picketty economics (rather than Keynesian) and it's proving popular. Hence YouGov's conclusion that "British people give better marks to Labour's policy offerings." Hence, also, the non-implosion of Ed Miliband - which the Tories had so complacently and disastrously predicted.

Apples and oranges. The coalition was, for all its many faults, an actual coalition. Labour could never enter a formal coalition with the SNP, not least because to do so would mean Miliband entering a pact with the party that destroyed his north of the border. Such a pact would give Labour in Scotland no hope of revival - because if a Lab/SNP pact goes wrong, Scottish Labour cops the blame by association, and if it works, Scottish Labour (and therefore Miliband) also lose because the kudos goes to their nemesis. So if Labour find themselves in the position of a minority government they'll do deals issue-by-issue with the SNP (and possibly others), but Miliband will be very careful not to form any kind of pact with the SNP, especially one that gives SNP politicians cabinet positions in non-Scottish matters. It would be political suicide.

****. Does that mean you'll be on here even more? I'm voting Tory.

Lord Tender, your boy Farage has just committed hair kiri.

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There's a simple solution to this - extend right-to-buy to all tenants, including those in the private sector. This is perfectly logical and consistent as the government is again hell-bent on giving away what it doesn't own. If we can then extend right-to-buy to company employees we've really got something. Proudhon would be proud of Cameron.

Something tells me you're not black.

The bigger question is whether the BBC's response was the right one. As it stands, a very large and broadly based audience has lost a show it enjoyed; Oisin Tymon, the producer on the receiving end of the 'fracas' has lost a position on that now-cancelled show - a show he's said very clearly he loved working on; and Clarkson, along with Hammond, May and executive producer Andy Wilman find themselves without a home (for now at least) for TG. No one's a winner. Was there another way? Certainly. In my experience these incidents usually happen as a result of a number of things going wrong or because of other festering, often low-level grievances. A process of conciliation undertaken during a pause in the series, with an airing among the production staff and crew of all the issues they think need to be fixed, along with the introduction of some escape-valve procedures when things get bent out of shape, and some clear instruction on conduct, would have kept things on the road - probably. It would have needed an empathetic exec parachuted in to keep an eye on things once some mutual agreements had been worked out - but given the sheer money-spinning nature of the show that would have been no hardship for anyone. This didn't happen. And arguably it couldn't once it was leaked that Clarkson had called Danny Cohen to tell him about about the 'fracas' (Clarkson's phrase, I believe). I don't know who leaked that information, but my guess is that whoever did knew very well what the consequences would be.

You've confused a few things here. Three pre-recorded main items were made, not whole programmes. When the 'fracas' happened, they had not recorded the star in a car thing (the track race or the star's reaction in the studio) or any of the studio links. So without Clarkson, the decision was taken not to cobble something together with the other presenters alone. This decision would have probably been influenced by, among other things, Hammond and May refusing to do the studio links in his absence. So trying to make some distinction between non-renewal and sacking is needless hair-splitting I'm afraid. It doesn't really matter what you call it - it amounts to the same thing.

Nope, still hopelessly confused. This may get convoluted - responding to you point by point has the effect of making everything hard to read...but here goes: I know you weren't saying the investigation was incomplete - I never suggested you said it was. You said the report was incomplete, which I said is a nonsensical remark. See above for the reasons why - it doesn't help to repeat them. DPA and confidentiality do NOT 'have a major role in this sort of investigation', only in what's made public, if anything, about such an investigation. You use the word 'incomplete' as if it can possibly mean something to you as someone who has no information about what's omitted. They made public what was necessary to make public in order to explain that a major BBC star will not be having his contract renewed. No vaguely credible organisation goes around publishing the full (or in your words 'complete') details of internal disciplinary hearings And how many times do you need to have to spelled out that in this case there are NOT 'two sides to every story'. Repeating the cliche does not make it true. There is precisely zero evidence that anything of substance has been disputed.

George Osborne doing his best Natalie Bennett impression of utter uselessness in the face of a simple question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94hdq5iX9m8 Thankfully neither is going to be anywhere near power after 7 May.

VW, you seem awfully confused. First of all, I have taken part as a witness in grievance procedures in the BBC, so I do know the somewhat Byzantine rules. The Clarkson investigation was carried out under those internal BBC procedures. The thing you constantly forget is that there was in this case, quite rarely, no dispute between the parties as to what happened during the 'fracas'. Indeed, Clarkson was the one who alerted BBC management to the incident in the first place. I don't get how you can moan about people's DPA rights being infringed (which they were not because they were already in the public domain) and at the same time complain that the report is 'incomplete'. The full report would include names of other witnesses (McQuarry only took evidence from BBC employees not others who also witnessed the incident) - and so to release that report would achieve the breach of the DPA. They wouldn't consider redacting the names of the two involved because that would make them look silly. And the BBC wouldn't redact witness names for the simple reason that the detailed report itself would not be released except to the two parties involved - not even under FOI. With all your experience you should know that the details of internal investigations of this sort are simply not public property. Why should they be? The only people interested in this kind of detail are the prurient and the dangerously obsessed. So you seem to be both for and against a breach of the DPA, which is very odd. Your question about whether the investigation was under BBC rules or because he allegedly breached his contract is equally nonsensical. All contracts, whether employment contracts or loan-outs (as Clarkson's was), would have stipulations about standards of behaviour and not bringing the BBC into disrepute. The kind of contract has no bearing on the matter. On your last point, Clarkson did not say he had been given a final written warning - only that he had been given what he believed was a final warning. What that amounted to, and what kind of conduct was covered by it, is unclear - but, really, who cares?

The outcome of the hearing was not leaked - it was made publicly available. What WAS leaked was that Jeremy Clarkson himself had reported the fracas in a phone call to Danny Cohen, the BBC's director of television. That might seem an odd thing to have done, given that Cohen and Clarkson do not get on, and that Clarkson himself had said publicly that he was already on a 'last warning' from Cohen about his conduct. But in view of that - and because Clarkson is clearly a public figure, and Top Gear is a hugely popular show whose future is now at stake - there was never any doubt that the result of the hearing would be made public, though clearly it would be wrong to release the details of the hearing for all sorts of reasons. So I don't understand how you can criticise the 'deliberate leak' of the report's conclusions on the one hand, and then on the other, say you want to see the detailed report. The BBC can be attacked for many things, but they properly followed a procedure here. What's also odd is that we seem to have turned an incident about which there has been no known dispute between the parties involved into a Saintsweb unknowable mystery.

Seven.

Blacks are three times more likely than whites in the US to die in confrontations with the police. http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/aug/21/michael-medved/talk-show-host-police-kill-more-whites-blacks/

Only on a reductionist view can you conclude that the individual stories of gun mania have no connection to a larger picture. The death-by-cop incident yesterday, for example, is far from isolated – you watch the news, right? I’d say this thread has been a good one, and hasn’t on the whole resorted to unthinking USA-bashing (a favourite pastime of yours ironically). FWIW, I think a few things stand out: Part of the problem in the US is the fetishisation of guns. Too many Americans know too much, in a trainspottery way, about the minutest details and performance of this or that piece of annihilating semi-automatic weaponry. Another is an inoculation from the real, terrifying effects of this weaponry. I remember growing up watching Westerns on TV and thinking that bullets merely sting when they strike a cowboy’s hand and dislodge his revolver. Because in Westerns that’s how they always reacted – the gun flying out of their hands and their clutching a presumably lightly bruised wrist. The ludicrously simplistic good guys/bad guys dichotomy also rears its head in the proliferation of gun violence in the USA, fostered by POV shooter games and movies, frankly, like American Sniper, where even the language – ‘savages’ – is the same as in the old Westerns, dehumanising the supposed enemy and obscuring the real consequences of taking a bullet to the face. Having worked in conflict zones and seen a few things for real, I shudder to think of the pernicious effects of this nonsense when allied to a wider gun culture. And then there’s implicit in all this a kind of individuated MAD (mutually assured destruction) advocated by the American gun lobby, a Utopia in which the entire country is in a gigantic Mexican stand-off. You hear this rubbish after mass shootings like Sandy Hook, when the National Rifle Association argued that the way to avoid it would have been to arm all the primary school teachers so that they could just shoot anything that moved while they taught arithmetic. So there’s plenty of stuff to think about as a result of this thread. Odd to think otherwise.

Criminals do indeed get guns in the US. And then play cowboys and Indians with them. Or cops and black people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21T2F5WFPAw

Short-sighted, or rationally making an alternative choice? In London, which is in any case an overwhelmingly Labour town (BJ is an anomaly), people who voted for the Lib Dems in the 2010 general election are now split 35% each between the LDs and Labour. The Tories are the choice of only 15% of ex-LD voters, and the minor parties, including UKIP, are nowhere (YouGov/Evening Standard, 31 March). I'm sure you'll agree that this is excellent news. Not only do we get to be rid of coalitionists like Simon Hughes, but a good few Tories as well. With the collapse of the Labour vote north of the border, London holds the keys to No 10 and they're jangling in Ed's pocket. Thanks, Lib Dems!