Just at the moment when the Lib Dems' former elections maestro Chris Rennard was hoping to resume his seat in the House of Lords, his party announced that his membership has been suspended pending a new "disciplinary procedure". Here's the statement in full: 

Nick Clegg made clear last week, and again this morning, that it would be inappropriate for Lord Rennard to resume the Liberal Democrat whip unless he apologises. Lord Rennard has refused to do so.

The Regional Parties Committee, which oversees disciplinary procedures under the English Party membership rules, today decided to suspend Lord Rennard’s membership of the party pending a disciplinary procedure. As such, he cannot return to the Liberal Democrat group in the House of Lords.

Lord Rennard will now be investigated for bringing the party into disrepute on the grounds of his failure to apologise as recommended by Alistair Webster QC.

Rennard had previously only had the Lords whip suspended but has now been suspended from the party itself. It looks like my source, who said that "hell would freeze over" before Rennard resumed his roles in the party, was right. 

Update: Here's the verbose response issued by Rennard.

It is impossible to describe how enormously distressed I am by this situation and I am certainly too ill to attend the House of Lords today.

In the interests of my party and all concerned, I will now release a statement that I have prepared:

In 2009, I was the subject of a smear campaign in relation to House of Lords allowances. The timing of this campaign was clearly chosen as it was in the middle of major election campaigns, for which I was then responsible. I warned Nick Clegg how I considered that the party might be damaged in those elections as a result of those allegations. I said that I would bring forward my planned resignation as the Liberal Democrats Chief Executive on health grounds. I had not intended resigning until after helping Nick and the party through the 2010 General Election campaign.

I worked for the party professionally for 27 years, I helped it to recover from many crises, helped to win 13 parliamentary by-elections and triple the number of Liberal Democrat MPs at Westminster. But the lifestyle involved did great damage to my health. I was diagnosed as a diabetic in 1994, my control was very poor and by 2007 I was warned that I was entering a high risk zone for a stroke or heart attack.

I explained that health grounds were the reason for resigning. Despite having helped many of my friends in the party and all of the Leaders with ‘crisis management’, I could not handle my own. I was suffering severe stress, anxiety and depression as I have done much of my life. I did not cite this publicly as I considered this to be a private matter and I knew that it would produce very damaging headlines for the party. I know how much of the media behave, and there would have been ‘Stressed and depressed Lib Dem Chief Quits’ headlines in the middle of major elections. It was clear to me then that the smear campaign was run by people with personal grudges against me. I was exonerated by the House of Lords authorities in relation to allowances in October 2009.

During the 2010 General Election, I was again subjected to more personal allegations. The depth of depression that I felt and the consideration of self harm is difficult to describe so I will not do so. I was assured by the party that nobody was making any complaints against me. But at least two women were subject to some media pressure in an attempt to persuade them to make allegations. Immediately after the General Election, I offered to meet them with the Party President at the time, Baroness Scott, to understand what may have upset them and to seek some closure of any issue. I was given the response to my offer to meet. I was told that neither woman wanted to make any complaint or have any action taken. One woman refused to meet. One agreed to meet at a later date. When I did meet her in January 2011, I made it clear that I did not know what had upset her, but said that, “if there is anything that I have ever said or done that caused you any harm or embarrassment in any way, then that was not my intention.” We did not discuss what may have caused this upset at any point, but my expression in front of Baroness Scott, was clearly accepted. This acceptance was repeated later in the day when I received two text messages from the person saying “you are not a bad man” and that “I should not suffer any period of ‘purdah’ as a result of allegations made. We continued the friendly relationship that we have always had.

I had been told by the party previously (2008) that there were questions by some of the media about inappropriate behaviour’ being made. I was never given any names of potential complainants by the party, or told of any complaints (indeed I was assured then that nobody wanted to complain). I said that I had never acted inappropriately and would certainly not want to cause anyone any embarrassment. I felt, however, that the ‘whispering campaign’ from those bearing personal grudges against me meant that my role in the 2010 General Election was limited (at some cost to the party) and I did not help the AV referendum campaign in any significant way.

I heard no more until autumn 2012 when it appeared that a parliamentary by-election in Eastleigh was a distinct possibility. I was involved in some of the essential preparations for the campaign. Shortly after Chris Huhne resigned, I was told that people from Channel 4 were investigating allegations against me and it was clear that I could not help the campaign any further. A broadcast was made on February 21st 2013, which was exactly a week before the most important parliamentary by-election of the Parliament. One of the people featured went to the police with her allegations on the eve of poll of the by-election. I was subjected to a humiliating trial by media and a ‘lynch mob’ mentality from some in the party who knew none of the facts. I tried to protect my party by making only the short, written statements that crisis management required and giving no interviews. Ann and I stayed in hiding for some weeks whilst family friends, and in particular, Alex Carlile QC supported us.

The only communication to me from the party was simply to send me a copy of a complaint form showing that two women were now seeking my expulsion from the party. This was soon overtaken by news that the party were talking to the Metropolitan Police, who would undertake an investigation to see if any ‘criminal activity’ had taken place. At no stage did the party, or anyone from Nick Clegg’s office, ask me for any of my evidence or comments on these matters.

I was shocked to have become the subject of a seven month police inquiry. Whilst I was never arrested, I had to be interviewed under caution. My discussions with the Police provided me with the first opportunity I had ever had to refute the basis of the allegations against me. I was interviewed in June and had to wait until late September when I was actually told by the BBC that there would be no charges. The Police had confirmed with my solicitor Richard Cannon that there would be no charges, that this was a Police decision and that no file of evidence had been given to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The party headquarters did not communicate with me about the Police decision, seek to ask why the Metropolitan Police had come to such a clear conclusion, or even express any relief that I would not be charged with a criminal offence. Before I could make a press statement, the party issued their own saying that their internal investigation into whether I should be expelled would now resume. The party had issued a series of e-mails to all party members saying that I was accused of ‘serious allegations of sexual assault’.

Fortunately, I was familiar with the rules of the English Party’s complaints procedures which were introduced in 2008. There were various attempts to change these rules, but with the help of Alex Carlile, I was able only with the threat of legal action to say that the inquiry should begin as prescribed in the rules.

I formally offered mediation in October 2013 as a route forward via the Independent Investigator. This was completely rejected by the ‘complainants’.

I then felt threatened and bullied by wild rumours that there were many people who would complain against me. I felt that I was being urged to resign my party membership of 40 years on the basis of these rumours.

Following public calls for evidence, when the deadline for receiving complaints passed (November 22nd 2013), I was made aware of complaints from three women (including the woman who had accepted an apology two years previously). This was of course a smaller number of complaints than the number of women who gave interviews to Channel 4 News last February attacking me All the publicity did not result in a single complaint, other than those featured in the Channel 4 programme.

I submitted my evidence which strongly refuted what had been alleged. I had many very powerful evidential and character statements in support of my case. I then waited for the conclusion of the Independent Investigator. Under the rules only two possible conclusions are allowed at this stage. Either the investigator must say that there should be ‘No Further Action’ (as the Metropolitan Police did) or charges must be listed and then subjected to a hearing. The report must be given to just two people, the chair of the party body responsible, and to the person complained of.

I waited for the report to which I was entitled. Alex Carlile QC on my behalf consistently pressed for disclosure of the report to me, as the affected individual. I waited for two days to see it. Then I was informed indirectly by telephone that the party had decided not to accept it, which is against the rules for an independent investigation. I believe that that report concluded that ‘there should be no further action’ and it should have been given to me. The party decided to allow a further complaint to be admitted after the deadline had passed and which had been extended already. I then responded with my evidence to the fourth complainant (who had initially refused to assist the inquiry). Alex Carlile described some of my evidence obtained by research to be ‘devastating’. The party should have done this sort of research a year ago. Assessing the fourth complaint clearly did not change the outcome of the independent inquiry’s conclusion as it was again a ‘No further action’ conclusion.

Last Wednesday, I should have been given a copy of the report. Instead I was told that the party had advice that they could not do so under the Data Protection Act. This is strange since the rules have been in place since 2008; many bodies including Parliament publish reports of this kind and any personal data could have been redacted. I did not ask for the report to be published. I simply asked to be given it, as required by the rules. I have been advised firmly that there is no legal basis for refusing me a copy of the report in appropriately confidential circumstances.

I was informed by Alistair Webster QC at 11 am last Wednesday morning that the conclusion was ‘No Further Action’. He went on to say that there would be a press statement accompanying this saying that I should consider an apology and that some of the evidence against me was credible. He told me that the words accompanying the ‘No Further Action’ statement were not his responsibility and that if I objected to them, then I had to take this up with the party and not with him. I had made the offer to the party to co-ordinate and agree responses to the report’s conclusion (whatever it was) in advance. This offer was not taken up. Mr Webster was advised that the proposed press statement in his name was entirely inappropriate.

I immediately rang Lord Newby, the Lib Dem Chief Whip in the House of Lords, and told him that there would be a major problem if I was asked to do something that I could not do. My legal advice was that, apart from anything else, any apology would leave me defenceless in a future civil action. I believed that this would follow and could then result in my being expelled from the party after all. In any event, I made it clear to Lord Newby that any apology for something that I had not done was not appropriate and could not be accepted by me.

I explained this carefully to Dick Newby who said that there was little that he could do to persuade anyone to change the wording. It then emerged that both Nick Clegg and Tim Farron would issue further statement along similar lines. I did everything that I possibly could in the short time available to say that I should have the report, that I could not apologise and it would be most unwise to demand this.

I did however at the end of the meeting confirm that I was resuming the Lib Dem Whip in the House of Lords at that point, having in the interests of the party voluntarily stood aside from it, pending the conclusion of all inquiries. Dick confirmed that I was re-admitted and we shook hands.

I made my statement last Wednesday, which criticised nobody at all, and there the matter should have rested.

On Friday, I offered the party a way out. The four complainants announced that they would appeal against the conclusion of the inquiry. I suggested that the party should simply recognise that you cannot be expected to apologise when an appeal has been launched.

I am a Democrat, as well as a Liberal, and I believe that Conservative attempts to change parliamentary boundaries in their favour and change the voting registration to deny many people the vote could have resulted in permanent Conservative government for this country. I was happy to work with Nick Clegg to prevent this. My work for the Liberal Democrats over many years helping to win seats for the party, together with Nick Clegg’s brilliant performance in the General Election, prevented a Conservative majority in 2010.

I have not spoken to, met with, or heard from Nick Clegg in eleven months. I would ask him, now that he has more knowledge of the facts, to ask for any threat to me to be withdrawn and to insist that I see the report, to which I am entitled, and to let me help him and my party again in future.

I very much regret the wounds that have opened up within my party because many people have acted without being aware of the facts. I am particularly grateful to my friends and colleagues in the Liberal Democrat group in the House of Lords for much personal support.

I would advise my friends in the party to let the matter rest, as it should have done, with the simple conclusion of the Independent Investigator that there should be no further action.

Courtesy has always been an essential part of my moral compass. If ever I have hurt, embarrassed or upset anyone, then it would never have been my intention and, of course, I regret that they may have felt any hurt, embarrassment or upset. But for the reasons given, I will not offer an apology to the four women complainants. I do not believe that people should be forced to say what they know they should not say, or do not mean.

Ann and I have both been members of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats for over 40 years. Ann has also made great personal sacrifices for the sake of letting me help my party as much as I can. I am of course most grateful to her for sustaining me through this difficult period, together with our families and very many friends in the Liberal Democrats and elsewhere.

Finally, I would like to re-iterate my most grateful thanks also to Alex Carlile QC, who has acted for me as a friend on a pro-bono basis throughout the last year.

I hope that the matter will now be closed by a response to this statement and all threats withdrawn.

The Co-operative Group has announced that it will not to sell the general insurance arm of the business. We answer five questions on the group's decision.

Why has the Co-operative decided to pull out of selling the general insurance part of its business?

The group has reportedly decided it no longer needs the money the sale would have generated. It was originally initiating the sale to fill the bank's £1.6bn financial black hole. The Co-op management is said to have thought the bids they were offered undervalued the business, in light of its potential for growth.

How much is this side of the Co-op business said to be worth?

According to the Telegraph, analysts have valued its worth between £250m and £600m. Legal & General and private equity house AnaCap are believed to have made second-round bids.

What has the Co-operative said about its decision to halt the sale?

Co-operative’s chief executive Euan Sutherland, in a statement, said:

Having considered the sale process, and in light of the changed requirements on us under the Bank recapitalisation process, we believe it is in the best interests of our members, customers and colleagues, that we retain this strong business and develop it further.

What were the Co-operative's original plans before it decided to cancel the sale?

Originally, the group had planned to part with the business in March 2013, in a bid to boost the Co-op Bank’s capital position. The life insurance arm of the group, which was sold to Royal London for £219 million, and the general insurance arm, were intended to be used to safeguard the future of the bank.

The discovery of a £1.5bn capital shortfall at the bank last summer intensified the need for capital. Under the original recapitalisation plans, the bank was due to find part of £1bn with £500m from bondholders. However, the groups funding needs reduced from £1bn to £462m after a redrafting of those plans in November resulted in distressed debt funds opted to inject a greater amount of funding.

What other changes is the group making in a bid to get its finances in order?

Over the weekend, the Telegraph reported that the Co-op Group will cut its £850 annual donations to the Labour Party. Lord Myners, who is carrying out a review of the group's corporate governance and relationship with third parties, told the newspaper: "The scale of giving to others cannot go unaffected by the change in the Co-op’s economics.”

“It’s got less money to spend on everything,” he added.

Manon is opera’s ultimate problem-child – a heroine who refuses to offer any charm, any softness, any humanity to mitigate her ferocious social scramble of self-interest and ambition. She’s bad enough in the delicate elegance of her original eighteenth century. Update her to the glitz and gloss of the Belle Epoque as director Laurent Pelly does in this Royal Opera House production, and you risk losing any kind of aesthetic sympathy for this rapacious beauty.

Which is a shame, because this revival (originally seen in 2010) boasts some seriously fine singing – singing, if anything, too good for this voluptuous romp. If the sex is there then it doesn’t really matter about Massenet’s music. But if the music’s excellent then it raises the work to a level its flimsy substance simply can’t sustain.

We see teasing ankle-flashes of greatness here as Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho’s Manon effervesces into easy virtuosity for the Cours-La-Reine gavotte. The writhing “N’est-ce plus ma main?” is as indecent as ever Manon’s own creator Abbé Prévost could have hoped, and the tinkling, titillating strains of Poussette, Javotte and Rosette (Simona Mihai, Rachel Kelly and Nadezhda Karyazina) are vividly realised. It’s enough to make you wish that this fine cast were tackling La traviata or at least Puccini’s Manon Lescaut instead. Massenet is all very well for the foreplay, but can’t quite deliver the musical climaxes this protracted work requires.

Jaho tends to divide critics, and although by all accounts her opening night performance had its issues (no lower register to speak of, wayward intonation) this second night saw her vocally at her best. Nothing could have been more inevitable, more precise than her tuning, hitting her show-notes with the certainty of a DiDonato or Florez. Her light, filmy tone lends itself well to the earlier phases of a heroine required to move from teenage convent-bound ingénue to blowsy courtesan over the course of the evening, and matures into an appropriately brittle brilliance by the end.

Dramatically however there’s still a problem. Warmth is lacking, and the pairing of Jaho and American tenor Matthew Polenzani as the Chevalier Des Grieux feels correct rather than urgent or unbridled. Polenzani’s is a beautiful, flexible instrument, but built for delicacy rather than all-out belting passion. That’s no criticism, and in the big nineteenth-century roles would be a refreshing delight, but here among Chantal Thomas’s rather clinical sets and against the dramatic odds we could have done with just a little less understated beauty.

The supporting cast, led by veteran William Shimell as De Brétigny and Christophe Mortagne as Guillot de Morfontaine, are impeccable and the ROH chorus (especially the ladies) are on finest form. Conductor Emmanuel Villaume coaxes a deft, poised performance from the orchestra which matches Thomas’s designs for coolness, and stops just short of the vulgarity demanded by Pelly’s staging of the Saint-Sulpice scene, where even the pillars of Thomas’s set topple dangerously from their pure vertical.

There’s so much to like here, and had the production’s original star partnership of Anna Netrebko and Vittorio Grigolo returned with it there would have been much to adore. As it is, Manon certainly offers a good evening at the opera. But at four hours long the stakes are high, and all the ballet dancers, choreographic punchlines and fine singing in the world still struggle to ignite a romance that isn’t quite sure of itself.

“I don’t know who that is,” says a young man on Tottenham Court Road when I ask about Ed Miliband. The Labour leader, I say as he waits impatiently at a bus stop. “Oh - yeah, I’ll probably vote Labour,” he replies, leaping onto a bus before I can catch his name.

Announcing policies is worth little if nobody is listening. Round the corner at University College London (UCL), Miliband had just given a major speech on his plans to shake up the banking market. Labour’s biggest challenge for 2014 may be less a matter of winning the arguments than convincing the electorate that its arguments are worth listening to. It cannot be confident of winning an election on the votes of people who cannot name its leader.

The responses of passers-by to Miliband’s speech on Friday suggest he must deal with profound public grievances over broken promises, immigration and uninspiring leadership before he can win support for new ideas. Especially when the ideas are about subjects as unsexy as the bank lending market.

Charmain Stanley, a jobseeker trying to set up a juice bar, may benefit from banking reform – but thinks little of Miliband.

“Getting funding for it is an absolute nightmare. I’ve got a business proposal, I’m passionate and I’ve done my research but banks aren’t willing to fund me coming off benefits,” says Charmain, a former waitress.

“I don’t like Miliband as such, but maybe more competition would make banks help a lot of people out there like me who are trying to get ideas off the ground and get off benefits," she says. Why does she dislike Miliband? “He’s not very honest - though I tend to rank them all the same. There’s a lot of hypocrisy in politics. It’s why I don’t vote. But if they stuck to their word, I’d happily vote, and encourage other people too as well.”

Mark Toovey, a retired engineer, is not convinced Miliband’s proposal will work.

“I wouldn’t have thought it would make any difference, to tell the truth. There’s quite a few banks out there anyway, and a new one, Metro,” he says, pointing to HSBC and NatWest branches along the street.

He is more impressed by the Labour leader’s cost-of-living agenda, but shares Charmaine’s deep mistrust of politicians. “Capping energy prices – that’s a good idea. But whoever’s in opposition, they’re always saying we’re going to cap and cut this or that. It’s just a ploy to get your vote, isn’t it? They don’t mean it.” Can Labour do anything to gain his support? “No.  I don’t like Miliband. Labour let too many people into the country.”

 Paul Belisle, a demolition worker from Newcastle,is also more concerned by immigration.

“Miliband’s just another w***, like the rest of them,” he says bitterly. “Look at the state the country’s in now. We can’t accommodate all these foreigners – I don’t mind the culture, but wages are getting lower and lower, all the time. They work for next to nothing, and it starts to affect us.” Such anger suggests Labour have some way to go in convincing the public they are sorry for past mistakes, and serious about dealing with them.

“It doesn’t interest me,” Paul says of Miliband’s new banking policy. “I don’t vote, or pay a great deal of attention.” Could anything persuade him to vote? “Well there is one thing. Throw all the foreigners out. None of the politicians have done enough.”

Students Isaac Qureshi and Lizzy Hughes think the policy is ridiculous, and the Labour leader even more so.

“People would rather Miliband sorted out the pickle the big banks are in, rather than creating more smaller banks,” says Isaac, a languages student at UCL. ”I don’t think anyone really gives a monkeys what he says, especially a speech on the fine details. He’s a bit of a laughing stock to be honest, and he’s too non-descript to hold your attention.”

 Lizzy adds: “When someone mentions Cameron, it’s usually with a negative or positive opinion. But at least it’s an opinion. I actually can’t remember what Miliband looks like.”

Isaac and Lizzy look back blankly when I ask what they make of Labour’s cost-of-living agenda. Had they heard about plans to cap energy prices? Both of them shake their heads. Fewer than 500 metres away, Miliband won a standing ovation as he rounded off his speech. “We can only do better if the conversation in politics catches up with our country,” he had told the loyal Labour crowd. Better get running then, Ed.

The final count was 115, plus the ENB to spruce up the visuals and the SKSE to enable the more complex scripts, bringing the total to a nice round 117 mods. Somehow they all work together, until they don’t and the game crashes, but for the moment this build is stable enough. A unique Skyrim build; constructed over many hours of equal parts grabbing fistfuls of freely-available player generated content from the internet and careful testing to make it all work properly. A library of everything from high resolution texture packs and town overhauls to new weather patterns and game mechanics for hypothermia, new species of butterflies, moths and songbirds, to new islands and an array of massive hungry fish. The list keeps growing.

While many PC games maintain modding communities and most PC games can be modified in some way, nothing has ever really come close to the torrent of player-made content that has been blasting from the Skyrim community like a broken fire hydrant these last two years.

Skyrim remains sixth on the most active games by player numbers list on Steam, which is a spectacular achievement for a two-year-old single player game. The nearest single player only game to it on the list is Fallout: New Vegas which, like Skyrim, can also be modified. It is notable that because Skyrim is a single player game that doesn’t demand an internet connection. It is unknown how many more people play either outside of Steam or with Steam offline; what the Steam data provides is a bare minimum player count.

It is impossible to know exactly how many Skyrim players have modded the game, however looking at the Pure Waters mod on the Steam Workshop for example, as it is one of the highest rated files there, that has nearly 450,000 subscribers. Again, that’s a bare minimum number, all we can say is that 450,000 users run that one mod from that one source. As bare minimums go it is a very substantial number. While modding games may once have been a niche, in the case of Skyrim it is looking more like a fjord. Pure Waters may seem like an odd example, but the reason a mod like that will have more subscribers than, for example, a new island or an epic suit of armour, is its simplicity. A little mod that makes the water look better? There is nothing not to like about it.

More, and better, Skyrim screenshots are available here.

The popularity of modifications for a game like Skyrim helps to explain why so many people have turned to building modifications for the game rather than just playing it. We live in an age where intelligent, technical and creative people are all around us and many, for any number of reasons, are not finding an outlet and appreciation for those skills through their jobs, if they even have one. Building game mods is not just good clean creative fun but there is also a social element to it as teams form and projects are organised. Plus sharing your work provides an opportunity to hone and show off your skills. Writers, designers, coders, actors, they can all find something to contribute. Behind the colossal catalogue of Skyrim mods is an entire army of skilled individuals working to make nice things for other people without looking to make any money off them. That’s kind of a beautiful thing amid the Monetise All The Things world of modern media.

For some modders, such as Alexander Velicky, the creator of Falskaar, the rewards are more tangible. His work on the Falskaar mod helped to land him a job as an associate designer at Bungie. This is not a random act of charity from Bungie either as there are few better ways to show that you can walk the walk in games development than modding and Falskaar is an incredible piece of work. As a showcase for a person’s games design talents a successful, high-profile Skyrim mod can serve as a very good platform.

In many ways Skyrim is a perfect storm for a modding community. Skyrim is one of the easiest games to work with both for people making mods and for players putting them into the game. Also, as a follow up to Oblivion and Morrowind, the fan base and experience with modifications was already there waiting for the new game. Lastly, the arrival of the Nexus websites and their accompanying mod manager software along with the Steam Workshop meant that the infrastructure was there for players to get the mods they wanted easily as well as the updates that these mods would inevitably need. Manually installing and uninstalling modifications on the sort of scale now possible with these new systems, let alone keeping them up to date, would be absolutely impossible.

The Skyrim Nexus website carries approximately 30,000 mods, the Steam Workshop carries about 20,000, with some crossover naturally but these are just the two most obvious sources. The common trend to Skyrim mods also is that unlike many mod projects that serve to stand on their own and modify a game completely, mods for Skyrim have usually been more tightly focused, allowing many to be used at once without crossing wires. The bigger mods will tend to be set on new land masses so that a creator has control of everything and can keep everything neat and contained. Mods that play well with others are mods that people will hang onto.

So what can be done with Skyrim? Well the first thing most players will want to do is fight an army of Spiderman-skinned crabs while a squadron of flying Thomas The Tank Engines rain trucks down from on high, obviously.

Past that, the usual plan for any mod build of Skyrim is to turn Skyrim into your own perfect version of the game. Alas some of the core weaknesses of the game engine are effectively insurmountable, so we will never see the games combat improved to a par with The Witcher 2 or Dark Souls, or the complexity of the levelling and inventory systems from the older games in the series. This does not mean that the game can only be modified on a superficial level, though, nor does it mean that the game cannot be made challenging.

There are many guides to how to mod Skyrim and the process is not remotely difficult to start with. At a basic level you can simply install Skyrim on Steam, go to the Workshop and subscribe to a big pile of mods, as simply as that you have modded Skyrim. Taking things to the next level is perhaps best done using the Nexus Mod Manager and looking for tutorials on that.

Some rules of thumb that have served me well modding Skyrim and its predecessors over the years are firstly to try to avoid overlaps as much as possible, and secondly to avoid potentially unhappy combinations.

When mods overlap the results can be unpredictable, but in bad cases the game will crash a lot, if it even starts at all. Even a best case scenario means that one of your mods will be redundant. What an overlap means is having two mods that are tinkering with the same aspect of the game. So if I have two mods that influence the crafting system that could be trouble. You can mitigate problems with overlapping mods by changing the order that the mods are loaded by the game, mods later in the list will overwrite those before, however this is no guarantee of success. The safest route is to pick a mod that you like to cover a specific area of the game mechanics and forsake all others.

Unhappy mod combinations are the things that look good and work well one at a time but cause havoc when they are together. For example maybe you’ve got a mod that adds lots of new NPCs and monsters to the world, but you’ve also got a mod that makes all the texture resolutions much higher. This is going to increase the performance demands of the game exponentially. Or perhaps you have a mod that makes dragons more powerful and you’ve also got a mod that changes the dragon AI to make them smarter. Either mod on its own might improve the challenge of the game to a welcome extent, but pair the two together and suddenly your dragons become self-aware, hijack your computer and start writing Game of Thrones/Hobbit dragon slash fiction.

Skyrim owes much, arguably most, of its continued popularity on the PC to the modding community, but this is not an accident and it is not something that Bethesda happens to have by chance. As a developer Bethesda has always encouraged modding by making their games easy to modify and by releasing tools with which to modify them. Mistakes have been made in the past - the horse armour DLC for Oblivion springs to mind - but lessons were learned. This shows a level of respect for the player base that we don’t so much see now, especially not among multiplatform or AAA titles, where the modifications to PC games can so easily put console versions in the shade. Many developers actively discourage modifications, through making games that are deliberately difficult to mod or that try to remove any modifications that have been made to them. XCOM: Enemy Unknown for example needs to be told to stop trying to phone home if you want to monkey around with its files or it resets itself on start up.

Such a defensive attitude from developers is foolish because a modding community is actually a very good thing for a developer to nurture for its games. In simple terms modifications improve the lifespan of the game for the players meaning that players are having more fun with a product for little or no extra work on the part of the developer. This ought to be a win-win, particularly when it becomes time to decide what game to buy next and yet still many developers still seem reluctant to let people loose on their creations.

With the flow of Skyrim mods continuing and some of the bigger projects nearing completion there will be plenty to keep fans of the game busy for the foreseeable future. Which is just as well since we are not due another proper Elder Scrolls game for about another two years. Yes, I know what you’re thinking and no, it doesn’t count.

1. For all Lord Rennard's supporters: a guide to sexual harassment, and why it matters (Guardian)

Sexual harassment is all about who has the power, writes Polly Toynbee. And what women hear from the Lib Dems – yet again – is "not you".

2. Miliband’s mysterious aversion to public sector reform (Financial Times)

The Labour leader’s case for competition just happens to stop at the boundaries of the state, writes Janan Ganesh. 

3. Who are the new middle classes around the world? You'd be surprised how poor some are (Guardian)

The International Labour Organisation has identified a rapid growth of 'the developing middle class' – a group earning between $4 and $13 a day, writes Paul Mason.

4. Geneva II is the only hope for Syria – and Iran should have been part of it (Independent)

A long-term peace deal will have to take place, and it will take place with Iranian involvement, writes Kim Sengupta. 

5. All of England should become a bit Scottish (Times)

If Yorkshire, the Midlands and the South West want to be free of London’s domination they should emulate Holyrood, says Hugo Rifkind. 

6. Rennard won’t budge. The world moves on (Times)

Public opinion has become more enlightened about gender equality, as the Lib Dem fiasco unintentionally shows, says Rachel Sylvester.

7. George Osborne’s Whack-a-Mole tactic is denying Labour any advantage (Daily Telegraph)

The Conservative high command is focusing its 2015 campaign on neutralising the enemy, writes Benedict Brogan. 

8. Get ready, the indispensable Americans are pulling back (Financial Times)

The rest of the world is adjusting to an emerging political and security vacuum, writes Gideon Rachman.  

9. Nick Clegg can’t sack Lord Rennard, and Lord Rennard can’t apologise. It’s just another day of lose-lose politics (Independent)

The term "sexual harassment" is part of the problem with this saga, writes Steve Richards. 

10. Don’t mislead us about our medical records (Daily Telegraph)

The NHS wants us to hand over our personal health details – yet it cannot guarantee anonymity, writes Philip Johnston. 

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Obviously it is bad for the Liberal Democrats. But how bad? The handling of sexual harassment allegations against Chris Rennard has been disorderly from the beginning of the saga. Decoding exactly when senior figures knew there was a problem and unpicking what they did – or failed to do – about it hasn’t been easy. When the story first emerged last year there was a palpable tension at the top between the desperate hope that such a substantial figure in the party machine might turn out not to be a serial sleazebag and the awkward realisation that, to some extent, he was.

The disciplinary process has now magnified that tension into an institutional crisis. The party’s inquiry found, in summary, that Rennard was not guilty of anything that a court might deem criminal but was responsible for something unspecified warranting an apology. For failing to supply that apology, Rennard is now judged to have brought the party into disrepute and has been suspended. They couldn’t take action over the fire so they’re doing him for the smoke. Now he is reported to be considering suing.

When the scandal broke last February I wrote this blog, concluding that the episode damaged the Lib Dems by making them look ridiculous when their whole strategic offer was predicated on having become a party of mature professionals. The same applies today. Lack of principle and weakness of will are two of the stains that Lib Dem strategists have toiled hardest to scrub from the tarnished brand of their party and, crucially, their leader. Nick Clegg badly needed the Rennard case to be resolved in a way that left him looking resolute, liberal and democratic. So far it isn’t playing out that way.

It is worth remembering that the original allegations about Lord Rennard and Clegg’s handling of them were fashioned by some newspapers into an aggressive campaign against the party with an undisguised agenda to sabotage their chance in the Eastleigh by-election. Yet the Lib Dems held the seat. A Force 10 tabloid gale didn’t blow them off course. It is quite possible that this time too, the impact outside Westminster will be limited. Not many people beyond SW1 will have heard of Chris Rennard or care who he is.

I suspect the political damage will be subtle and insidious rather than immediately catastrophic. The whole episode is demoralising for activists who have already suffered countless doorstep indignities and electoral beatings as a result of coalition, without the compensating glamour of ministerial offices. (As George points out, it is also a reminder of how monolithically male the Lib Dem parliamentary cohort is, which isn’t a great look for a party wanting to sell itself as guarantors of equality and opportunity.) Then there is that lingering sense that the Lib Dems have been exposed as a bunch of amateurs when their proposed election campaign pitches them as the go-to guys for steady-handed centrist government. It is also a reminder of how small the party is – Rennard loomed large, seems to have known everyone and was, by all accounts, irreplaceable – and how few friends the Lib Dems have in the media.

In coalition the Lib Dems have amplified their power by ramping up conflict with the Tories. The Conservatives have played along by complaining that the junior partner has too much influence. Clegg’s team has recently begun celebrating success in rebutting the idea that they are mere hostages in a Cameron administration. The "poodle" metaphor is losing its currency (despite efforts by Labour to keep trading on it).

The Lib Dem leader has survived longer than many commentators and MPs expected. If opinion polls continue to show stalemate between Cameron and Ed Miliband, he stands a decent chance of negotiating his way back into government in another coalition. In recognition of that resilience, the Westminster media pack had recently started showing him and his party some grudging respect. The Rennard shambles has now provided an outlet for the kind of Clegg-bashing that comes more naturally to Fleet Street.

It is notable also that the Lib Dems have taken alternate rounds of abuse from different directions in recent years – from the left as collaborators in Tory austerity; from the right as obstacles to more carnivorous cuts – but are not often pilloried simultaneously from both sides. They hope in a general election campaign to enjoy ad hoc tactical alliances with one side against the other. Clegg could gang up with Miliband to denounce Tory hard-heartedness and with Cameron to deride Labour profligacy. But it is also possible, of course, that the two main parties collude in presenting the Lib Dems as a jumped-up gaggle of self-serving chancers who were lucky enough to blag their way into power for one term and now really ought to be consigned to obscurity. In that respect, the Rennard case is a warning to the Lib Dems. If they want to campaign as a serious party of government they can’t afford these episodes of sustained ridicule. 

While the baleful effects of the bedroom tax and the benefit cap have been well documented, far fewer have noticed the other large welfare cuts that was introduced last April: the abolition of Council Tax Benefit (CTB). Until that month, those households deemed too poor to meet the monthly charge received CTB to cover all or part of their bill. With 5.9 million recipients, it was claimed by more families than any other means-tested benefit or tax credit.

But last year the coalition scrapped the payment and transferred responsibility for the new regime from central government to local councils. At the same time, it cut the fund for support by 10 per cent. Councils in England were left with the choice of either maintaining current levels of support and imposing greater cuts elsewhere, or asking those who received a full or partial rebate to make a minimum payment. They were required to protect pensioner households, leaving the working-age poor to bear the burden of any increase. 

New research published today by the IFS shows what the results have been. Seventy per cent of English local authorities have introduced minimum council tax payments (forcing many poor households to pay the charge for the first time), with more deprived areas more likely to introduce them owing to a larger reduction in funding. Of the two million working-age households that could have claimed full relief under the previous system, 70 per cent (1.4 million) are liable to pay some council tax in 2013–14, with half liable for at least £85, a quarter liable for at least £170, and 10 per cent liable for at least £225. The new system led to an average increase of 30-40 per cent in the number of people seeking help from the Citizens Advice Bureau in relation to council tax debt between July and September 2013. Last October, Labour found that up to 500,000 vulnerable people had been summonsed to court for failing to pay the monthly charge. 

Labour-run local authorities were more likely than others to introduce minimum council tax payments, although the IFS notes that "this seems to be a reflection of the characteristics of LAs where Labour has a majority rather than a result of political preference". Once these factors were accounted for (most notably, the size of the funding cut and the number of low-income pensioner households), Conservative-majority councils were found to be more likely to introduce minimum payments: 14 per cent more likely than Labour councils and 25 per cent more likely than Lib Dem ones. 

Stuart Adam, a senior research economist at IFS and the co-author of the report, said: "Localising council tax support has, of course, led to considerable variation in the level of support available. Low-income working-age families are now likely to receive more help with their council tax if they live in a better-off area without too many low-income pensioners among their neighbours. Conversely working-age people living in poorer areas and in areas containing more low-income pensioners receive less help."

In response, Brandon Lewis, the local government minister, said: "Spending on council tax benefit doubled under Labour and is costing taxpayers £4bn a year - equivalent to almost £180 a year per household. Our reforms to localise council tax support now give councils stronger incentives to support local firms, cut fraud, promote local enterprise and get people into work. We are ending Labour's something for nothing culture and making work pay." But the steep rise in council tax is one reason why, for too many, work still isn't paying. 

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I knew it in pieces long before I could bear to recognise the central, howlingly obvious fact. I knew that I had gone two months without a period. I knew that my last bleed had been a vague and unconvincing thing. I knew that there had been an interval when I wasn't covered by the pill, and I knew that I'd had sex during it. I knew that I'd been sick when I took the morning after pill and I should have gone back to the doctor – but then, there'd been that bleed (in retrospect, probably a sign of an embryo implanting rather than the reassuring all-clear). I knew that I felt tired, and my breasts were swollen, and my stomach was growing round and distended in a way that no quantity of sit-ups seemed able to arrest.

I knew all of these things, but I did not know I was pregnant. And so I proceeded as a not-pregnant woman of 20 would, starting her second year at university. I did my reading and went to lectures and seminars, and in the evenings I went to pubs and gigs with my boyfriend and our friends. I had a plan, and no doubt whatsoever that my life would accord with it: two more years of studying, a First at the end of it, a year of travel with my boyfriend, then jobs in journalism which would probably mean London, a decade of career success . . . then, and only then, kids.

We were so sure that this was the plan that we discussed what we would do if an unplanned pregnancy intervened. “We couldn't have a baby now,” we would say solemnly to each other, “so we would have to get an abortion”. But to get an abortion, I would have had to know I was pregnant, and I couldn't let myself do that. I found out at an appointment to reissue my pill prescription. I handed over my urine sample for a routine pregnancy test, and watched my doctor perform it. Her mouth fell open – the proper jaw-flap of a person who was not expecting this – and she told me I was pregnant. At least 12 weeks pregnant, according to the internal exam.

This news, catastrophic as it was, came to me as a confirmation rather than a revelation: the breasts, the belly, the tiredness, the absence of menses. Ah yes, I was pregnant. I was also devastated. My GP sat me down, handed me a tissue, and told me all options were open. “But it's too late!” I cried – I didn't know the abortion time limit, but that summer the issue had been debated, and the idea of a first-trimester cut-off point had lodged with me. And then when my doctor reassured me that I had many weeks to make my choice, I snuffled,“And I've been drinking so much.” (Foetal alcohol syndrome had also had a moment in the news.) "That doesn't matter," said my GP, and she told me to come back the next day and discuss things further.

Before that conversation with my GP, I had no concrete idea what it meant to be pro-choice, although that's what I called myself. But by giving me that choice, my doctor gave me my life back when I felt it had just been taken from me irrevocably. Not every doctor would have done this. Some might have scared me with talk of how urgently I needed to make a decision. Some might have felt unable to offer me a choice, if they worked in a practice where that second signature was hard to come by. And some might have looked at me through their own religious or moral scruples, seen my case as the definition the ever-maligned “social abortion”, and refused to make it easy for me. I was lucky, and with that luck, pregnancy was no longer a thing so final that I was afraid to even acknowledge it: I could still decide.

I went to tell my boyfriend: we cried and cried. I told my mum, and my mum did not cry: my mum listened carefully and then said: “Whatever you decide to do, me and your dad will support you.” There was good fortune in that statement too. For example, I was fortunate that my parents could support me materially as well as emotionally – a spare room when I needed it, extra money for better food, the petrol money to come and get me if everything felt too much. But I was also fortunate that the emotional support was profound, and totally impartial of my choice. I knew that my parents would walk me into a termination appointment if I needed them to, and I knew that they would look after me at every stage of pregnancy and beyond. I knew it, because they had always trusted and cared for me like that.

I thought about the decision that was mine to make. And surprisingly, solidly, I realised what I would do: I would have this baby. At the time, I didn't know that there is a critical difference between unplanned and unwanted. At the time, I would barely have described myself as “wanting” children. I had never felt that cooing hunger which teenage girls called "broodiness", the longing to put their arms around a baby – even when small, I preferred reading to playing with dolls. And I will never feel the ravenous grief that older women call broodiness, either, the anguish of love with no object. But I did want a child, and specifically I wanted a child with the man I was with. It was ten years premature, but this was that child.

So I told my boyfriend, again, knowing that there was a terrible unfairness in what I was telling him. “I’ve chosen this,” I said, “but I’ll understand if you want to walk away”. It felt like the only choice I could fairly give him, but later he said it didn’t really feel like a choice at all: if this baby was to be born, he knew he would stay with me and look after it. And he did, unfailingly. One day, at about six months pregnant, I rang him up in tears about an essay mark. Incoherently upset, I choked out that I was “by the hospital”. He ran round to get me, and when I saw him he had a look of terror that suggested he was expecting something much worse than a low grade. “When you said you were by the hospital, I thought you were having a miscarriage,” he said, relieved that this pregnancy we hadn’t wanted would not after all be lost.

I cried a lot, actually. I knew I wanted this baby, but I didn't know if I would be able to finish my degree. (My department stretched every deadline to make it possible. I was lucky, again.) I knew that even if I did, the Big Plan with the travelling and the graduate traineeship on a national title was over. I'm ambitious, but I'm not an idiot, and I grieved for it. And added to that, I simply found pregnancy hard. The tiredness was hard. The transformation of my body was hard. I did not have a beautiful bump. I had stretch marks and sore patches where my non-maternity Levi's rubbed. The things people said were hard: the older woman at the bus stop who openly inspected my left hand for rings and snorted when their absence confirmed my fecklessness; the rugby lads who watched me struggle with my shopping bags and shouted, "Shouldn't your boyfriend be helping you?"

Sometimes, I would resentfully hope that the baby was a girl. “Because then you might know what this is like one day,” I would think, with the bitterness of someone who had never had to think very much about the material fact of being a woman before now. I had understood sexism in the abstract, but always believed that what was true for other women didn't have to be true for me. The brute fact of pregnancy and what it was doing to my life changed that: suddenly my sex was inescapable. But sometimes I would sing to my bump. I sang “We're Going to be Friends” by the White Stripes, one of the last bands I'd seen before my life had changed (“Fall is here, ring the bell / Back to school, show and tell … I can tell that we are gonna be friends”), and then I carted myself and the small stranger inside me to a seminar.

Getting pregnant was easy. Becoming a mother came slowly, and becoming a family likewise – these are things that must be learned, and sometimes the learning is error-strewn and painful. Sometimes it was harder because I wanted so badly to be perfect, to have the kind of pregnancy and motherhood that would show the invigilators of my ring finger that I was more than competent. (I wasn’t, of course. I needed all the help I could get.) The baby bucked my expectations in one more way and turned out to be a boy. But the plan went on: me and my boyfriend both got firsts, and in a fitful, scratchy way our careers began. Now our son is 11 and his sister is seven, and after years when it seemed dreadfully possible we might become stuck, we’ve started to discuss the travelling that we might do as four rather than two. Life multiplies and branches to its own logic. We stand beneath the trees, look up and see the light, and think how lucky we have been.

One day at the end of October last year, Mohamad Hussain went to a café in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Aksaray to meet a smuggler. The smuggler said that, for €400 each, he would drive Mohamad and his family to Edirne, a city close to Turkey’s north-west frontier. From there, the smuggler said, he would find them safe passage into the European Union.

The Hussains were Kurds, from Qamishli in north-east Syria. Twelve of them – Mohamad, his mother, brother and sisters, and their cousins – had travelled to Istanbul together, and although it may not have felt so, they were among the lucky ones. Mohamad, a 24-year-old engineering student at university in Homs, had been lucky to escape injury when the Assad regime fired a rocket at the building next to his dorms. He was lucky that when, at the end of term in August, his bus back to Qamishli was ambushed by Islamist rebels, they only pretended they were going to cut off his head with a sword. When Mohamad’s mother insisted that this threat to her youngest son was the last straw, the family was lucky to sneak unnoticed across the Turkish border, even though it entailed wading through an open sewer.

The Hussains had relatives over the border, and so they could avoid being sent to one of the vast refugee camps Turkey operates on its south-eastern edge and where, they were told, “you’re stuck until the war ends”. They made it to Istanbul, where they rented a cramped apartment in Aksaray.

In this, too, they were lucky: just a few hundred metres away from where Mohamad met the smuggler, other Syrians were sleeping on camp beds under the arches of a Byzantine aqueduct. Since the autumn, thousands have been appearing destitute and starving in Istanbul’s parks, faster than the Turkish aid agencies can find them.

And the Hussains were lucky the smuggler didn’t simply steal the €400 per person he’d asked for; instead, he drove them to Edirne, then to a forest along the Bulgarian border, and said: “Walk that way.”

It was 3am when the Hussains arrived at the forest’s edge. They were joined by other refugees; there were 73 of them in total. At each stage of their journey they had been stripped of possessions, first their homes, then their savings, then all but the few clothes they could carry with them through the forest. The long walk through the wet autumn night would even destroy many people’s shoes. But the Hussains told themselves the sacrifices were worth it, because on the other side of that border lay Europe.

****

It was more than a month after that trip through the forest when I first met Mohamad. In early December, I had travelled to Turkey, and then Bulgaria, to find out what was happening to Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe. Of the two million who have fled abroad, the vast majority are living in three of Syria’s neighbours – Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. But the number reaching Europe has been increasing steadily since summer. Bulgaria, which estimates it had received up to 15,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2013, has been placing new arrivals in hastily opened “overflow” camps. It was at one of these, just outside the town of Harmanli, 30 miles north of the border with Turkey, that Mohamad approached me.

He had been at the camp, with scant access to the outside world, for 45 days by this point. Dressed in jeans and leather jacket, with neatly gelled hair, Mohamad had walked up to me and begun asking questions. Were Arsenal still top of the Premier League? Did I know that their attacking midfielder Mesut Özil was Kurdish? Was I a fan of Taylor Swift, the singer? Did I know how Mohamad could contact his uncle in Germany? Was Britain accepting any refugees? And most of all, did I know a way his family could get out of the camp? “You didn’t see here when it was raining,” he said. Around us, the wild, hilly countryside of southern Bulgaria was lit sharply in the winter sun. “A river of water. I would rather go back to Syria and be killed than stay here.”

We were standing on the steps of a dere­lict building at a Communist-era army base, now repurposed as a refugee camp. Inside, staff from Médecins Sans Frontières were busy setting up an emergency clinic. Outside, in front of us, stretched rows of canvas tents and metal shipping containers. At least 1,500 people, with more arriving daily, were crammed into a space no more than a few hundred metres square. Groups of children played, piling up and smashing the blocks from rubble that littered the ground, jumping back and forwards over broken wire fences, or hanging from rope swings strung between the few trees that hadn’t been chopped down for firewood. The camp was bordered by a concrete perimeter wall: low enough to hear passing cars and pedestrians, but not to see them.

It’s not easy to find your way across the forest that separates Bulgaria from Turkey. After wandering lost in the woods for hours, the Hussains’ group was found by border guards. “We knew we were in Europe,” Mohamad said, “because one of them had a flag with yellow stars on his shoulder.” Details of the procedure for receiving refugees arriving in Europe differ from country to country, but in essence the process is the same: they should be registered and interviewed, have their fingerprints taken and be given temporary documents while their claim is assessed. In theory, it should take only a few days.

Instead, Mohamad and his family were taken to a detention centre where their passports were confiscated. Syrians aren’t the only undocumented migrants who cross Bulgaria’s southern border; at the detention centre, said Mohamad, “They separated us into groups: the Syrians, the Afghans, the black Africans. Like animals.” The same seg­regation seemed to have taken place at Harmanli. Syrians, the largest group, occupied the tents and containers at the centre of the camp; a hundred or so Afghans lived in an old schoolhouse, smoky with fumes from wood-burning stoves and whose toilets leaked; a smaller group of African men – the ones I met were from Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Mali – was in another, smaller building. It had bars on the windows.

All points north: Mohamad Hussain with his mother, Kaziban, at the Harmanli camp. Photo: Eirini Vourloumis/eiriniphoto.com

After seven days in detention, the Hussains were moved to Harmanli’s closed camp, its entry and exit controlled by the local police. When they arrived, there was no running water or electricity. Food deli­veries were sporadic and the only medical care was an emergency visit by an ambulance. “If people wanted to leave to buy food or see a doctor,” Mohamad said, “the police asked for money.” Some of the refugees were sold bogus contracts by men who arrived at the gates posing as lawyers. The “contracts” promised accommodation in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia: those who handed over their money found they were driven there and dumped on the street. The Hussains wanted to leave and try a nearby camp where conditions were rumoured to be better, but their savings were running out and, without passports, they couldn’t be wired money by friends or relatives.

“Do you want to see the camp?” Mohamad asked me. It was late afternoon as we set off from the steps of the new clinic, and the winter sun was beginning to dip. Even in daylight, the temperature had barely risen above zero, and now people were lighting fires outside their tents to keep warm. The fires mark time here: lit once at sunset, they are rekindled in the early hours of the morning as people’s legs begin to freeze and they wake up. In the final hours of daylight, I saw people scavenging for tree stumps, fallen branches, cardboard boxes – whatever combustible material remained.

In mid-November, the refugees had protested, piling their mattresses outside and setting fire to them. Some of the women went on hunger strike. Now, conditions have begun to improve. A local catering firm, run by Syrians, provides one hot meal a day to the camp; the food is distributed swiftly and efficiently by the refugees themselves. Slowly, families were being moved from the tents into metal containers, which have electricity, water and heating. But when I visited, many were still stuck with just canvas and a wood-burning stove to protect them from the elements.

As we walked along a row of tents, Mohamad stopped to chat to a family huddled around a brazier for warmth. They were Kurds from Syria, too, but unlike the Hussains, who are Muslims, they followed the Yazidi religion, distantly connected to Zoroastrianism. A father-of-three – still so frightened that he asked me not to use his name – described how he had brought his children and his 75-year-old mother to Bulgaria after their home village was ethnically cleansed by Islamists of the Nusra Front, a branch of al-Qaeda. He suffered from diabetes; his mother had heart disease. “The pain is like a snake in my stomach,” said the old woman, complaining that the cold was making her condition worse.

Here, where until a few days before my visit the only contact with doctors was a single, urgent visit by the local ambulance, such common medical conditions can become dire emergencies. “This is more than just a health situation,” Stuart Zimble, the Médecins Sans Frontières head of mission who was in charge of setting up the clinic at Harmanli, later explained to me. “Health problems are being aggravated by the shortfall of the registration process at the border. The Bulgarian government were just not prepared.” There are women in their ninth month of pregnancy and cancer patients who can no longer get access to treatment, not to mention people afflicted by the psychological traumas of those who have fled war. When Eirini, the photojournalist who had come with me to take pictures of the camp, offered a sweet to one of the Afghan children, he just stared at her blankly.

****

When the Hussains left Istanbul at the end of October, their journey would have taken them along the highway that runs beside the Sea of Marmara and then up into the region of south-eastern Europe still known by its ancient name of Thrace. Today, it is where the Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian borders meet, marking the scramble for land that occurred after the collapse of the Otto­man empire. From 1945, it was where the Soviet and western spheres of influence collided. Now, another kind of struggle takes place: between migrants in search of refuge or a way to earn a living – or both – and an EU that increasingly wants to keep them out.

A few days before visiting Harmanli, I had travelled the same route as the Hussains from Istanbul, stopping off at Edirne, a capital in the Ottoman era whose centre is still dominated by three imposing medieval mosques. It has long been a last stop in Turkey for migrants but until recently their preferred destination was Greece, over the border formed by the River Evros. Most people would cross by night in inflatable boats; some would even swim. It was the most popular choice of route into the EU.

One evening I took a taxi from Edirne to the Evros border crossing a few miles outside town. It was dark when I crossed the no-man’s-land between the two roadside checkpoints, but just light enough to spot a few sandbagged gun encampments and a forbidding wire fence on the Greek side, stretching off into the distance. The road was empty, my passage held up only by a line of three geese that waddled through passport control before me. Waiting on the other side in an ageing blue Toyota was Panos, a resident of the nearby town of Orestiada whom I’d phoned earlier that day.

Panos, a young sales rep whose job takes him all around the region, is one of a handful of local people who openly opposed the construction of the fence I’d seen at the border. Six miles long and equipped with thermal sensors to detect movement, it was announced with much fanfare in August 2012 when Greece “sealed” its border with Turkey. “Most people around here support the fence,” Panos said, once we had found our way to a bar. “They aren’t affected by immigration themselves, but they see the migrants come, they hear on the television that immigration causes problems, then they see the fence and think: ‘This is dealing with the problem.’”

Many of those who crossed the Evros in recent years haven’t looked to Greece as their final destination; for them it was a first step towards refuge, work or family members in the wealthier northern European economies. For well over a decade, southern European countries have been asked to shoulder the burden of dealing with irregular migration: the 2003 Dublin II Regulation, for instance, made asylum claims the responsibility of the state through which the migrant first entered the EU. For the most part, that has meant Spain, Italy, Greece – and now Bulgaria.

Since the eurozone crisis of 2009, as European governments have grown ever more panicky about immigration, the pressure has intensified. Hundreds of officers from the EU border agency Frontex have been sent to patrol the Evros in the past few years. In August 2012, the Greek government redeployed almost 2,000 of its own police officers to the region. But the surge came at the very moment when the numbers fleeing Syria began to increase. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees believes there are now 838,000 in Lebanon, 567,000 in Jordan, 540,000 in Turkey, 207,000 in Iraq and 129,000 in Egypt, apart from the 6.5 million Syrians who are internally displaced.

The heightened security along Europe’s borders hasn’t stopped them coming but it has led to more deaths: many now choose to make a perilous crossing by boat from Turkey’s Mediterranean coast instead, and the trip is often fatal. Those who still attempt to cross the Evros find a harsh welcome.

Panos told me that on 12 November his group of activists received a call from someone in the border village of Praggi, saying that about 150 bedraggled Syrian refugees had arrived overnight. “By the time one of our group arrived they had gone,” he said. “The villagers said that the police had taken them away.” Nobody knows what happened to them after that; on 24 December the London Guardian quoted a local human rights lawyer saying the group had “lost all trace” of the refugees.

It is not an isolated incident. A report by the German NGO Pro Asyl, published in November, collected the accounts of 90 refugees who said they had been forcibly pushed back from Greece’s land and sea frontiers. Some of them said they had been forced back into the Evros. Pro Asyl argued this pointed to “systematic abuse of human rights” and estimated that 2,000 migrants could have been forced out in the course of a year. The Greek police deny that they operate a push-back policy; Frontex says it investigates reports of mistreatment whenever they arise. Soon, Syria’s Bulgarian border will be “sealed”, too. In November, the Bulgarians began building a fence of their own.

The village bar where Panos and I were sitting was empty except for a few old men reading newspapers. “This isn’t like a big city,” he said: “if I put my head up, everyone sees. When we protest outside the police station, the policemen inside are guys I went to school with.” He was growing angry. “But I can’t watch what’s happening and say nothing. Yesterday, they found a woman who had frozen to death in a field, just fifty metres over there.” He waved a hand towards the window of the bar. “How can I stay silent about this?”

****

Lazgin Musa sat back and took a drag on his cigarette while Mohamad translated for me. “And here is the paradise of Europe! We don’t even see any Europeans. We can’t leave the camp.” I was back for a second day in Harmanli and Mohamad was taking me to meet his cousins, then still living in one of the canvas tents. Thirty-one-year-old Lazgin, along with his younger brother Goders and their nephew Robar, were part of the group of 12 who had made the long journey here together from Qamishli.

Before the war the brothers had lived in Damascus, where Lazgin ran a clothing shop. Like many Kurds, whose culture and language have been suppressed for decades, they took part in the peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations that swept Syria in 2011. “We were protesting even before then,” said Lazgin, a little indignantly. “But when weapons got into this revolution, we said, ‘We are not with this revolution.’” As popular unrest tilted towards civil war, they held back.

Their fears were justified. First, Lazgin said, the conflict destroyed their livelihood. War drove his European customers away. The price of food shot up as the Syrian currency lost its value. Then, as fighting broke out between the Kurds, who wanted greater autonomy for their territory, and Islamist rebel groups, their lives were threatened on two fronts. “We escaped from Islamists, not from the regime,” Lazgin said, as he stoked the stove that sat in the middle of the tent, its flue poking out of a hole in the roof. “If Assad wins, he’ll kill everybody who was against him. If an Islamist group kills Assad there will be thousands of Islamist groups fighting each other. It will be like Afghanistan.”

Syria’s refugee crisis already compares in scale to that of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Millions who have fled their country are now resigning themselves to a long exile, looking not just for safe haven, but a way to earn a living. Yet by and large the doors of European countries have remained closed. Since the conflict started, only 10,000 refugees have been resettled formally in western countries – and that includes the United States. In December, a report by Amnesty International said the EU had “miserably failed” to provide support.

The excuses range in tone: some politicians, such as the Italian foreign minister Emma Bonino, say that harsh restrictions are necessary because there might be terrorists among the refugees. Bulgarian tele­vision channels have focused on the cost of accommodation – or on the dirt and chaos at the camps, implying that Syrians are bringing disease with them. And the British government, while pointing to the large sums it is donating to humanitarian efforts, says it thinks refugees would be better off in Syria’s neighbouring countries.

This last claim is questionable. It is widely accepted that Jordan and Lebanon, which have taken in more than a million refugees between them, are struggling to cope, but the pressure is also starting to show in Turkey, which claims to have spent more than $2bn on relief efforts so far. The Turkish government was quick to set up camps along the south-eastern border with Syria which are now home to roughly 200,000 refugees. But up to 500,000 more live elsewhere in the country. “There’s a perception that Turkey has less of a need because it’s spent so much money,” Oktay Durukan of Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, an Istanbul-based human rights group, told me. “That’s the wrong message to give.” UNHCR is calling on European countries to keep their borders open.

Bulgaria, one of the poorest EU member countries, complains that it has not received enough support to deal with the rising numbers of refugees. The economic downturn has sparked a political crisis there; in February last year the government was brought down by widespread street protests, and the unrest continues. A far-right party, Ataka (“attack”), is now the fourth largest in parliament, and it has been at the forefront of complaints about the presence of refugees. Other European states could help relieve the pressure. So far, they are largely choosing not to do so.

The refugees know they are being talked of as a burden, and it is something they find bitterly ironic. Mohamad wants to continue his studies in Germany, or even Britain. His brother has a degree in business management and his sister is a qualified psychotherapist. Another of his cousins, Jazia, works as a translator at the camp clinic, using the English she says she learned from watching American movies on TV. “Eur­ope needs people from the Middle East,” Lazgin said. “Europeans stay single; they have one, maybe two children. Middle East people are all married and have many children by the time they are our age. We are a young society.”

Lazgin was half joking, but the mention of children reminded him of something. Another of his brothers was at a camp outside Sofia, with a baby son. “If you go there, give his child a kiss from me.”

****

When systems fail, we have a choice: to accept the failure, or to take action. Many Bulgarians have been shocked by the images of refugees they have seen on television. A weekly delivery of clothes, toys and other supplies arrives at Harmanli – but it is not the usual donation from aid agencies. These are second-hand goods, gathered from around the country, collected in Sofia and driven down to Harmanli in battered old family cars.

It started as a Facebook group, Friends of the Refugees. Then an enterprising developer set up a website where you can track donations as they happen on a live map. But without the intervention of political leaders, will its efforts be enough?

After we left his cousins’ tent, Mohamad invited me back to his container. The metal box must have been no more than ten metres wide and five deep, yet inside it something approaching everyday family life was going on. In two cramped rooms, with a bathroom and a space for cooking, his mother fussed around, tidying up after two of Mohamad’s young cousins, both toddlers. It was warm and brightly lit. A friend knocked at the door. “He was our neighbour in Qamishli and now he lives in the container next to us,” Mohamad said. As I was getting ready to leave, another of Mohamad’s cousins joked that I should leave my passport behind. A UK passport, like those of the US and Finland, guarantees entry to the highest number of countries without any need for a visa. I didn’t know that – but then I’ve never needed to.

On 10 January, I spoke to Mohamad by phone. More containers had arrived and people were no longer living in tents. The Hussains had spent their first Christmas in Europe at Harmanli. On New Year’s Eve, someone had set up a PA system. “They played Kurdish and African dances,” Mohamad said. “But it was too cold to stay outside for long.”

After more than two months, the Hussains finally had their fingerprints taken. They are still waiting for their documents to arrive so they can leave the camp.

Daniel Trilling is the editor of New Humanist magazine

It's all change at the Daily Telegraph, with editor Tony Gallagher leaving Telegraph Media Group (TMG).

Gallagher, who has been editor since 2009, was previously Head of News at the paper as well as News Editor and Assistant Editor at the Daily Mail.

The Sunday Telegraph editor Ian MacGregor adds the Saturday paper to his responsibilities, becoming acting Weekend Editor.

In September 2013, the Guardian reported that TMG's new Chief Content Officer and Editor-in-Chief Jason Seiken was introducing a new structure and production process. It involved merging the weekly and Sunday operation and then re-dividing them into five "pillars". The traditional editorship of the print paper loses prestige under this arrangement, given equal footing with "Impact" and "Live" (whatever those turn out to be).

However, in November last year, media commentator Roy Greenslade reported that this plan had been "put in cold storage". With Gallagher's somewhat sudden departure, it now looks as if the plan was back out in the warm.

A clue to why Gallagher has left might be found in the fact that his successor is being described as "acting print editor for the Monday to Friday paper". Perhaps Tony didn't fancy sharing the glory with the "Head of Impact" . . .

The full statement from Telegraph Media Group:

Telegraph Media Group (TMG) announced today (Tuesday) that Tony Gallagher, the Editor of The Daily Telegraph, is leaving the company as the business moves to the next phase of its digital transformation.

Murdoch MacLennan, the Chief Executive of TMG, said: “Tony has done an excellent job for the newspaper and helped us to maintain our position as Britain’s leading quality daily. In particular he played a pivotal role in the investigation into MPs’ expenses. I would like to thank him and wish him every success in the future.”

TMG has decided to restructure The Telegraph titles in order to build a wider audience and revenue in the digital media world.

Chris Evans, Assistant Editor (news), has been appointed Acting Print Editor of the Monday to Friday editions of The Daily Telegraph.

Ian MacGregor, The Editor of The Sunday Telegraph, becomes the Acting Weekend Print Editor of the Saturday and Sunday editions.

Both will report directly to Jason Seiken, Chief Content Officer and Editor-In-Chief.

Murdoch MacLennan said: “While continuing to produce brilliant newspapers in print and maintaining The Telegraph’s character and quality, the restructuring is designed to build on the Telegraph brand in order to attract customers with the very best, digital products possible.

“Unlike our rivals, The Telegraph remains profitable but we face increasing pressure on circulation and advertising revenue streams. To protect the Company’s future we need rapidly to embrace and adapt to the new digital world in which our customers live.”

Jason Seiken said: “We must reinvent the way we work and move beyond simply putting news and information online and be an essential part of the audience’s lives. Our competition is no longer only newspapers and we must innovate to survive.

“Since I joined TMG I have been talking to the staff at all levels. There is great enthusiasm waiting to be unlocked and the restructuring will open up enormous opportunities for our staff.”

If it feels as if the Lib Dems suffer a lot of scandals for a small party, it's because they do. To refresh: in 1992, the party's first leader Paddy Ashdown was forced to disclose an affair five years earlier with his secretary Tricia Howard after the tabloids learned of the relationship (prompting the brilliant Sun headline "Paddy Pantsdown"). On 7 January 2006, Charles Kennedy resigned from the same position after announcing that he had sought "professional help" for a "drink problem".

Just two weeks later, Mark Oaten (who had been due to run Kennedy's campaign for re-election) quit as the party's home affairs spokesman after the News of the World revealed that he had an affair with a rent boy. Five days later (it was a surreal month), Simon Hughes announced that he too had had gay relationships despite running a homophobic campaign against Labour candidate Peter Tatchell during the 1983 Bermondsey by-election in which he was presented as "the straight choice" (for which he has since apologised). 

Since entering government, the party has seen one cabinet minister, David Laws, forced to resign for claiming expenses to pay rent to his partner, and another, Chris Huhne, imprisoned for perverting the course of justice by allowing Vicky Pryce to accept speeding points on his behalf. Last year, MP David Ward had the whip withdrawn after writing on Holocaust Memorial Day that he was "saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians", and, most recently, Chris Rennard, the party's former chief executive and elections maestro, was suspended after allegations of sexual harassment.  

Why do the Lib Dems, generally thought of as a dull but worthy bunch, produce such an inordinate number of scandals? Perhaps the most plausible explanation is the lack of scrutiny the party received before entering government. The Laws, Hune and Rennard scandals all have their origins in the years before 2010. Oaten memorably recounted how shocked he was when one of his rent boy's companions recognised him from TV and greeted him with the words "You're Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrat MP", prompting him to reportedly reply: "It can't be me, I must have a double. I'm not a politician". No senior Lib Dem frontbencher would attempt this defence today. Another theory put to me by one Westminster source is that "liberals tend to be very permissive and thus more prone to scandal." Whatever the truth, Nick Clegg will surely hope that his party's closet has now finally been purged of skeletons. 

The Syrian government is responsible for the “systematic killing” of up to 11,000 detainees, according to a report compiled by three top international lawyers and former prosecutors at the criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone. The three legal experts have said their findings provide evidence that Bashar al-Assad’s regime is guilty of crimes against humanity.

Their findings are based on 55,000 photographs provided by a Syrian defector who was responsible for photographing bodies taken to a military hospital after they had died in detention. The defector, referred to in the report as Caesar, says he never witnessed the executions himself (which the authors say strengthens his testimony, because if he was lying he might be tempted to say he was an eye witness). He was asked to photograph bodies to confirm that execution orders had been carried out, and so that death certificates could be signed without relatives seeing the bodies of the deceased.

Caesar says he photographed up to 50 bodies a day, evidence that the killings were “systematic”. There are limits to the forensic value of the photographs, the authors concede, as they were taken quickly and there are few close-ups, but experts found evidence of strangulation and beating. A sample of 150 images of individuals showed that 62 per cent were emaciated, suggesting that starvation might be used as a torture method. The images were overwhelmingly of young men, aged 20-40, who were either naked or partially clothed.

The original report here includes some graphic and distressing images, which support the comment made by one of the lawyers, QC Sir Desmond de Silva, that the levels of starvation was reminiscent of Nazi death camps.

There will undoubtedly be some scepticism over the findings. The report was funded by Qatar, who commissioned the law firm Carter Ruck. Qatar is one of the biggest funders and supporters of the Syrian opposition. But the eminence and profile of the three lawyers who wrote the report – as well de Silva, there’s Sir Geoffrey Nice, the chief prosecutor of Slobodan  Milosovic, ex-President of former Yugoslavia, and Prof David Crane, chief prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone – suggests that the evidence was properly scrutinised. Three such high profile lawyers are unlikely to compromise their integrity for a Qatari pay cheque.

The sheer volume of the photographs provided would be a huge photoshop job, and there’s little to suggest that Caesar’s credentials as a genuine defector were not properly examined. The top lawyers interviewed him over three days and found him to be a "truthful and credible witness" who, despite his opposition to the Syrian government, was neither "sensational" nor "partisan" in his reporting of the facts.

The bigger question is how much of an impact this report will have.  Its release was timed just before the Geneva II peace talks, which start tomorrow, in the hope is that it will influence negotiations. Syria shock stories have influenced the international community before: the chemical weapons deal followed from horrific images of the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta. The chemical weapons deal may not have had the affect many hoped, the UN estimates around 100,000 Syrians have been killed in the conflict, mostly by conventional weapons, but it did demonstrate that co-ordinated international action and game-changing negotiations are possible, especially if Russia is willing to co-operate.

I hope today’s report will help focus efforts to find a diplomatic solution to Syria’s civil war, but perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

The communities in which we all live and work are facing enormous social, economic and demographic changes. It’s going to be harder for councils to keep services going, let alone cope with rising demand for social care as the number of older people increases, because they are bearing the brunt of the coalition’s austerity. Councils are having their government funding nearly halved and the poorest areas have unfairly been hit the hardest.

What this means is that we have to change the way in which public money is spent on the things we all value and rely on. We need to get money out of Whitehall and down to communities where it can be used to best effect. And we need to devolve to councils and groups of councils (like the combined authorities and city regions) more powers over transport investment, planning, skills, and finding jobs for the long-term unemployed. This is one of the ways in which we can radically change the way in which England is run to make it a much less centralised country.

But perhaps most important of all, we need to do this to address the crisis of confidence, and alienation there is in our politics. The global economic crash came as a great shock, we have a cost of living crisis, and parents think about pensions, housing or the environment and wonder whether the future for their children will be better than the life they have enjoyed. Many people feel that too many decisions are taken too far away from them.

And that’s why the only way we are going to rebuild confidence in the power of people working together to create something better – the thing we call politics – is to give people the power to do precisely that for themselves.

For too long, we have fallen prey to consumerist politics – people demanding of government and then sitting back to wait for things to happen. The changes I want to see are based on the idea of contributory politics – it’s up to all of us to put something in because by taking responsibility we can take back power over our own lives.

And that’s what Labour’s One Nation idea is all about. Reform of the market to tackle the cost of living crisis and vested interests. Getting finance to encourage and support innovation and a longer term view. Pushing power down to communities so that people locally can build the homes they need, tackle the payday lenders, and generate renewable energy. England’s big cities are already leading the way on this and showing what can be done – a wonderful antidote to gloom and despair.

At the end of this month, Jon Cruddas and I are organising a Policy Review symposium that will bring together council leaders, MPs, members of the shadow cabinet, policy makers, academics, and those working in the third sector to discuss all this and more. 

At a time when money is tight, how exactly are we going to change the relationship between central and local government, social institutions and the market?  How do we reorganise our public services around people, households and places rather than administrative structures? And how do we tell the story of what this will make possible? These are the questions informing our policy making so that we can win the election in 2015 and provide the groundwork for a radical, reforming government.

Hilary Benn is shadow communities and local government secretary, and MP for Leeds Central 

The last time I had dinner with Alistair Darling was in 1997. Sitting next to him, I suggested that tying your electoral fortunes to the economic cycle was foolish: better to make the Bank of England independent and set targets to deliver the revenue to be spent on ideological grounds. “Oh no”, Darling replied, “We’ve been out of power for thirteen years – we aren’t going to give that up so easily”. Four weeks later, and for the only reason they had planned it all along, the New Labour administration under Tony Blair made the Bank of England independent and inflation targeting followed.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached the “Better Together” dinner with the same Alistair Darling in London last week. Darling has been through the wringer since 1997, having been handed the poison chalice: sorting out the mess left by Gordon Brown in the wake of 2008, while simultaneously having to fend off attacks from his own side, who favoured Ed Balls for Chancellor at the time. Amazingly, Darling, to his credit, has come through the experience without becoming bitter. It is an object lesson in self-preservation – don’t let others in and you will be the stronger for it.

So taking on the task of putting the case against Scottish Independence comes as a sign of energy, and a desire to remain relevant. At the dinner, Darling said little that he hadn’t already said in public – no Chatham House rules need breaking here. But it was good to hear it from his own lips:

• The polls show an almost constant 30 per cent of Scotland in favour of independence, but 25 per cent of the population remain undecided.
• The SNP has a war chest of £7m to fight their campaign, while “Better Together” has managed to scrape together £2.5m.
• The SNP under Alex Salmond has a vice-like grip on the media in Scotland, where no opposition is tolerated and all “victories” are hyperbolically spun.

The “Better Together” campaign has had to confine itself to largely technical issues based on economic factors many of which fly over the heads of all but the most dedicated economics geeks. This makes it difficult to connect territory that Salmond, who refuses to debate with Darling, and the SNP have monopolised: the emotional level. It almost characterises the two men: Salmond the firebrand ideologist, all rhetorical claymore and political intelligence, versus Darling, the cool-headed technician who appeals to the mind. In a world where the phrase “The personal is political” has been raised to the level of a mantra, the emotional will always win.

But there are a number of tricks being missed here. The dinner coincided with Alex Salmond’s triumphal declaration of victory over the UK Treasury – they “blinked first” as he put it – when it announced that a devolved UK would stand by its existing debts. It is Salmond’s aggression and quickness to claim even the most minor victory that is his Achilles' heel. The gap between the evidence and reality increasingly makes Scotland look like a Celtic dictatorship, because, arguably, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander laid an economic trap that Salmond happily walked into.

When it comes to assuming part of the UK’s interest payments the only thing that a devolved Scotland can now do if negotiations about what “fair and proportional” means break down, is walk away. They already have form in being unable to reach any amicable compromise with Westminster - so it is not inconceivable. In that case, nobody will lend Scotland a penny to fund its commitments, except at a punitive rate and with the status of an Emerging Market.

Equally, Salmond’s flip-flopping on the newly independent Scotland’s currency is a red herring. Whether Scotland adopts the UK pound or not it should be made clear it matters nothing to the UK. In the same way that Hong Kong, Singapore and a swathe of Latin American nations peg themselves to the fortunes of the United States and follow their interest rate cycle, the Federal Open Market Committee sets interest rates with reference to its domestic economy. A devolved UK would be no different. “No change there then”, some might say. But in a broken Union it is conceivable the Bank of England will pursue an interest rate policy which is exactly contrary to the economic needs of a new Scotland.

Finally, neither the “Better Together” campaign, nor for that matter, the SNP have ever really answered the question of why Independence needs to happen. There are a series of “wants” on display, mainly those who want a place in history or increased political power for themselves, but need? That is yet to be demonstrated. The Scottish Assembly already has control of health, education, law and order and child care. Scottish independence will change nothing in those areas. It also has its own tax-raising powers – taxes that can be spent exclusively on Scottish priorities – but it has never used them. Scotland already has democracy in abundance – local, national, UK and European representation. How much more democracy and say in its own matters can Scotland conceivably need or tolerate? What is the need that Scottish Independence satisfies?

There is both hope and despair for Darling and the “Better Together” campaign: hope that the polls will hold and despair, like in the Canadian experience when there was a never-explained last minute 10 per cent surge in support for Québécois independence, that things could swing disastrously the other way. One thing is for sure: if there isn’t a decisive rejection of independence this time, the SNP will be back again in five years' time.

During the period when the economy was flatlining, Ed Balls used to respond to anaemic growth forecasts by calling on George Osborne to adopt his "five-point plan" to stimulate jobs and growth, including a cut in VAT to 17.5 per cent, a one-year National Insurance tax break for small firms, a repeat of the bank bonus tax to build 25,000 affordable homes and guarantee a job for 100,000 young people, accelerated infrastructure spending on schools, roads and transport, and a one-year cut in VAT on home improvments, repairs and maintenance. Had Osborne taken his advice, the UK would almost certainly be in a better position than it is now (output remains 2 per cent below its pre-recession peak and real wages, contrary to what David Cameron claimed at last week's PMQs, are still falling). 

But with a recovery finally underway (albeit the wrong kind of recovery), Balls's focus his shifted from short-term stimulus to long-term investment. In response to the IMF's upgrading of its growth forecast for the UK in 2014 from 1.9 per cent to 2.4 per cent, he said: 

After three damaging years of flatlining, any growth is both welcome and long overdue. But this is the slowest recovery for 100 years and working people are facing a cost-of-living crisis with real wages now down £1600 a year under David Cameron.

With business investment still weak and the IMF forecasting that UK growth will slow down again next year, it’s clear that this is not yet a recovery that is built to last. Simply to catch up all the lost ground since 2010 we need 1.5 per cent growth each quarter between now and the election.

Instead of more complacency from George Osborne we need Labour’s plan to secure a stronger recovery and earn our way to higher living standards for the many, not just a few at the top. That means reforms to our banks and energy market, expanding free childcare to make work pay, a compulsory jobs guarantee and a plan to build 200,000 new homes a year.

The last paragraph is particularly worth noting. While Balls has pledged that there will be no more borrowing for day-to-day spending in 2015-16, he has left open the option of borrowing for investment (capital spending). Should Labour pursue this course, it is the areas Balls cites - childcare, jobs and housing - that will benefit. Shadow childcare minister Lucy Powell, Ed Miliband's former deputy chief of staff (and an MP to watch), has smartly redefined childcare as an "infrastructure priority" in order to bolster the case for investment. As she wrote on The Staggers last year: 

While early years education is vital for child development and early intervention, childcare should be seen by government as an issue for business and a key infrastructure priority to promote growth and get people back to work, linking in with BIS responsibilities for flexible working and shared parental leave. That’s why I’m proposing that a future Labour government should have a Childcare and Early Years Minister with cross-departmental responsibilities in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Education coordinating support for working parents across government including working with Ministers in the Treasury and Department for Work and Pensions. Support for families should be shaped by what parents need rather than falling between the silos of government. Ensuring good quality early years education and child development goes hand in hand with getting the quality parents want to have so they feel happy leaving their children to return to work.

When I asked Balls during my recent interview with him whether Labour would borrow for investment, he told me: "In the speech I gave at Reuters in the summer, I said, and Ed and I both said, that’s a decision we should make much closer to the election when we’ve got more information about what the state of the economy is going to be. So we’ve been very clear, no more borrowing for day-to-day spending, but on the capital side that’s something that we’re going to continue to look at. I’m not going to rule it out, but I’m also not going to say now that it’s definitely the right thing to do."

While Balls is likely to come under greater pressure to confirm Labour's intentions as the year goes on, it's worth remembering that Gordon Brown waited until the start of 1997 before announcing his fiscal rules. In less benign economic circumstances, Balls and Miliband may not show their hand until 2015. 

No one denies that Rachel Reeves, as Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary, has one of the toughest gigs in town. Fiscally, it seems a Labour government would cap spending on social security. Politically, at a time when highly punitive policies such as the benefit cap attract broad public support, Labour is sensitive to proposing any reform that could be spun as "soft on scroungers". Getting the politics and the economics right will not be easy.

Reeves’s long-awaited speech on social security yesterday was clearly a product of this highly constrained context. Insisting claimants must improve their basic skills looks sensible if implemented fairly, while the focus on contribution is palatable from both the fiscal and political point of view. Given the boundaries within which she operates, Reeves’s decision not to hive off 18-to-24-year-olds from mainstream social security provision and subject them to especial opprobrium has to be commended.

But what did the speech have to offer those of us who see poverty reduction as one of the key functions of a social security system? It’s great to see the political establishment finally recognise that we expect social security to do too much of the heavy lifting in the UK. High housing costs, low levels of parental employment, low and often sporadic wages all require the state to step in and help more than it has to in other developed economies. Without a doubt, addressing these structural determinants would both decrease poverty and drive down the social security bill in one fell swoop.

But international evidence also shows us that pre-distribution can never be the whole answer. The countries we look to as beacons of success - the Nordics, the Netherlands, Germany – still run poverty rates of over 20 per cent before their governments weigh in with taxes and transfers. Unpalatable though it may be, the truth is you can’t reduce poverty without an adequate social security system. 

So where does this leave Reeves and team? In a difficult place for sure. But is it as simple a choice as talk tough or commit political suicide? A public call to remember why we have – and should prize – our social security system is essential and one politicians have long neglected.  It should also be possible to make a case for building a new consensus around the objective of fairness and, crucially, tell us what response Labour can offer to the poorest families, who have borne the brunt of austerity to date. Hard tasks perhaps, but not impossible and they carry the potential to transform the lives of millions. As the evidence shows, without a sustainable settlement on working-age – and especially family – benefits, child poverty looks set to remain an enduring and shameful feature of the British landscape. 

Gymnast and Olympic medallist Beth Tweddle took part in a Twitter Q&A for Sky Sports News today.

All set for #sportswomen on @SkySportsNewspic.twitter.com/BIgMSxrNPy

— Beth Tweddle (@bethtweddlenews) January 21, 2014

What happened next was nothing short of horrific. Responses included things like this:

@SkySportsNews#Sportswomen On a scale of 1/10 how pig ugly would you class yourself?

— coco bald (@colmc71) January 21, 2014

This:

@SkySportsNews ask her if her fucking teeth can get ne bigger or if she can get any uglier

— stephen (@chronicblower) January 21, 2014

And this:

@SkySportsNews I just pushed my foreskin into my bum hole and now my finger smells like B.O. Are you well jel? #Sportswomen#askbethtweddle

— Anthony Bryant (@antbryant) January 21, 2014

The excellent Everyday Sexism project has documented more examples - it continued for quite a while. Tweddle is one of the few sportswomen who has maintained a relatively high profile after London 2012. It's a shame she has to wade through this kind of rubbish in order to do her job.

This week the long-delayed Geneva II peace conference will take place in Switzerland to try and secure agreement on a peaceful political transition in Syria. This conference is so vital to Syria’s future because ending the suffering can ultimately only come by ending the fighting. The conference marks the first time that representatives from the Syrian National Coalition and the Syrian regime will engage in official talks since the start of the conflict.

Yet the truth is that today, the warring parties in Syria still believe they have little reason to compromise and every reason to continue fighting. This is the dangerous dynamic that Geneva II must now seek to change. To do so, it is vital that the key actors are clear about what it is that the conference is aiming to achieve.

First, given the prospect of securing a comprehensive political transition agreement in Geneva looks increasingly unlikely, securing confidence building measures between the parties to the conflict would be a vital next step. Localised ceasefires could help relieve the immediate suffering on the ground, but they could also help create the conditions for progress on political negotiations in the future. So the international community must ensure that these confidence building measures are discussed as part of the main conference agenda, and that tangible and credible progress is made in implementing them once the conference is over.

Second, as well as focusing on localised confidence building measures, the conference must also seek to address the regional dynamics of this conflict. Labour believes that the path to de-escalation in Syria, and ultimately to a peaceful transition, will have to involve the support of key regional players who have themselves become parties to the conflict. The recent deal to rid Syria of chemical weapons, made possible by Russia’s participation in the process, has showed us that the role of key adversaries can prove decisive in helping to get Assad to bow to international pressure. 

That is why Labour has long called for the establishment of a Syria Contact Group which would bring together countries like the US and Russia, but also crucially involve Saudi Arabia and Iran. Despite Iran’s non-attendance, this week at Geneva there is the opportunity to get this kind of initiative off the ground.

Finally, within Syria itself, a lack of humanitarian access remains a key barrier to the effective delivery and distribution of aid to those most in need. That is why one specific aim for this week’s conference must be securing agreement on the implementation of the UN Security Council’s Presidential Statement on humanitarian access.

That would involve allowing immediate cross-border aid deliveries and calling on all parties to the conflict to agree on humanitarian pauses in the fighting, including along “key routes” for relief convoys. The onus lies on the Assad regime to now agree to the UN Statement. Given that Russia has already signed up to the statement, at Geneva this week they must be encouraged to use what leverage they over Assad to urge him to now comply.

Geneva II is a vital diplomatic step, but whilst the diplomats meet, the war will continue to rage. Already over 125,000 have died, and Syria’s humanitarian crisis continues to force millions from their homes, with 6.5 million people now displaced within their own country, and over 2.3 million refugees fleeing Syria altogether.

The UN’s António Guterres has warned of a terrifying situation where, by the end of 2014, substantially more of the population of Syria could be displaced or in need of humanitarian help than not. Last week’s pledging conference was undoubtedly a step forward, and the extra £100 million given by the British government is welcome, but we would like to see even more ambition This is a crisis of historic and horrific proportions, and not just for Syria. Lebanon has taken on almost 900,000, and the UN is predicting refugees could make up to a third of its population within a year.

A still under-reported effect of this social upheaval is the impact it is having on children. Syria used to enjoy a school enrolment rate of 97%, but today, if Syria’s refugees were a country they would have the worst enrolment rate in the world – five times worse than sub Saharan Africa. That’s why Labour have called on ministers to support plans to get Syrian refugee children in Lebanon back into the classroom, through a scheme allowing young Syrians to begin their day after Lebanese children go home.

Working towards agreement on a peaceful political transition remains Syria’s best chance of ending this bloody conflict. So it is vital that diplomatic momentum must not be allowed to wane while the suffering and fighting continue to worsen. The Geneva II Conference this week is a vital step, but for real progress to be made, countries like Britain must work to keep Syria at the top of the diplomatic agenda not just for days, but weeks and months to come. 

Douglas Alexander is shadow foreign secretary

Jim Murphy is shadow international development secretary 

1. The truth is we are all living on Benefits Street (Guardian)

Everyone is on the take, and whole industries are on white-collar subsidies, writes Simon Jenkins. Some of us are just smarter at concealing it.

2. Dave and Nick, time to prepare your divorce papers (Times)

The coalition must run right up to the election, but there is a danger of civil war unless a strategy is put in place, writes Daniel Finkelstein. 

3. Britain is educating its children for jobs that soon won’t exist (Daily Telegraph)

The fate of the 'Neets’ is tragic, but they aren’t the only ones being failed by the system, says Mary Riddell. 

4. 5 ways to cheer up the Tories (and kill off the 'nasty party') (Guardian)

Asking Conservatives to stop sounding negative may be naive but I agree with Nicky Morgan: they need a change of tone, says Melissa Kite.

5. This evil should shame us into halting Assad (Times)

Britain can no longer avert its eyes from the brutal reality of life, and death, in Syria’s Dark Ages, says Roger Boyes. 

6. It’s time to reject crony capitalism and embrace the real thing (Daily Telegraph)

The solution is to promote competition, tear up barriers to entry, unleash consumer choice, and eliminate subsidies and soft loans, says Allister Heath. 

7. Cost of living? What about the cost of being dead? (Guardian)

The spiralling price of funerals is a symptom of the triumph of the market and the accompanying poverty of civic life, writes Zoe Williams.

8. The very model of a modern central banker (Financial Times)

Ben Bernanke, outgoing chairman, deserves credit for the Fed’s handling of the crisis, says Martin Wolf.

9. There's optimism in the global economy - but only the wealthy are feeling the effects (Independent)

In the UK, it is ‘fat cats’; here in the US, it is Wall Street versus Main Street, writes Hamish McRae. 

10. For truth on immigration, look to the Bard not politicians (Financial Times)

The debate has not been changed by new facts so much as the complexion of the government, writes John Kay.