Shadow Chancellor George Osborne will set out the Conservative Party’s strategy for rebuilding the UK economy in an exclusive Thomson Reuters Newsmaker at 11 a.m. on Monday, October 26.

We will bring you full coverage of Osborne’s speech, including a live video feed and blog, after which we will conduct a short social media interview with him.

We want you to send us your questions to put to him.

This is your chance to grill the man who, according to the latest opinion polls, looks set to inhabit Number 11 Downing Street after the upcoming general election.

Be it on bankers’ bonuses, tax havens or the Conservative Party’s plans for leading us out of a recession, send us your questions now using the form below or via Twitter using the hashtag #askosborne.

On Thursday night, BNP leader Nick Griffin will appear on the BBC's leading current affairs programme "Question Time", an appearance that has provoked much anger and debate.

Griffin is no stranger to the airwaves or TV screens, regularly appearing this week alone after four leading former generals attacked his party for using military imagery as part of its campaigning

But to some politicians, including Home Secretary Alan Johnson and Cabinet minister Peter Hain, the BBC's decision to allow him on Question Time was totally wrong, giving a much higher profile platform to Griffin and his far-right views.

They also say that a recent court decision to order the BNP to open up its membership to non-whites meant the party broke race relations laws and was therefore unlawful.

One academic has said that a similar TV appearance by French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1980s led to a huge increase in support for his Front National party, generating concern that Question Time will do the same for Griffin.

There is no doubt that support for the far-right is growing in Britain at the moment, although it remains very much at the fringes of mainstream politics. The BNP has dozens of councillors across the country, a seat in the London Assembly and most notably won two seats in European Parliamentary elections earlier this year.

BBC bosses argue that for that reason it is only right that Griffin is invited onto the flagship politcal show to answer questions about his party. They say it is for parliament and not for the broadcaster to censor political parties.

However former London mayor Ken Livingstone has warned that the BBC would bear moral responsibility for any rise in racial attacks, saying the presence of the BNP always led to a rise in such incidents.

Community relations experts have also expressed fear about the impact a rising far-right will have, especially in the run-up to what is predicted to be a tense election. However many say that trying to muzzle the BNP was counter-productive, and that the group should be challenged head on.

"I think we've got to have a more sophisticated approach to the far right where we do use reasoned arguments to defeat them because there's no doubt in my mind that those reasoned arguments will work," said Ted Cantle, who led the government's review into the 2001 race riots for which the far-right was held partly responsible.

"I do feel they have to be taken on and defeated in the public eye. For the most part, their arguments are completely ridiculous and people have to see them for what they are," he told Reuters. He said the unwelcome truth for mainstream politicians was that there was a "grain of truth" in some of the things the BNP said, and censoring them gave the impression this was being covered up.

However the Unite Against Fascism group said the BNP should not be treated like any ordinary political party because its views were racist (it campaigns for a halt to immigration, voluntary repatriation of immigrants and Britain's withdrawal from the European Union).

"Griffin isn't interested in impressing people with his arguments - he just wants to build the BNP by using Question Time as a platform to whip up race hatred and bigotry," the group says.

Griffin himself says the "hysterical" furore over his appearance has already been a shot in the arm to his party. "I thank the political class and their allies for being so stupid," he told the Times. "Thank you, Auntie."

Reuters UK will be live blogging Griffin's appearance on Question Time at 22.35 BST.

Do you have a question you would like to ask Chancellor Alistair Darling? Now is your chance.

At 1:30pm British time on Wednesday, October 21, Reuters is hosting an exclusive Web 2.0 interview with Darling and we want you to send us your questions to put to the top man from the Treasury.

From the crippling global recession to the debate over bankers’ bonuses, it has been a tumultuous year at Number 11 Downing Street. You may want to quiz the Chancellor on one of these topics, ask him about the government’s plans to prevent another downturn or how Labour plan to defy the polls and win the upcoming general election.

During the interview we will put as many of your questions as possible to the Chancellor and will be running a liveblog of the event, much like we did during this social media interview with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.

Leave your question in the comments box below or via Twitter (using #askdarling) and join us on Wednesday for our Web 2.0 interview with the Chancellor.

The Conservatives might be wishing they could have held their party conference before Labour.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown's address to his party conference in Brighton on Tuesday has thrown down a flood of new ideas, policies and initiatives from faster cancer diagnosis to choosing how Britain votes in what read more like an mini-election manifesto than a speech.
Brown played to his strengths (policy) and avoided trying to overcome his well-known weaknesses (not much of a political entertainer) in public. Trying to be someone else could have been a disaster for a man way behind in the polls to the Conservatives.
Whether it will be enough to make any difference to the polls remains to be seen -- Labour needs a miracle there after all.
But, for now, going for the policy jugular seems to have done the trick -- giving his browbeaten party something to get excited about and hitting the Conservatives where it hurts.
David Cameron's Conservatives have been accused of not giving enough detail on how they would govern the country if the polls are correct and they are to win power next year.
They will have to start showing their hand soon if they are going to convince voters that they have the ideas to run the country and aren't just a vote for change for the sake of it.

- Hugh Robertson is the opposition Conservatives’ Olympics spokesman. The views expressed are his own. -

With three years to go, it is remarkable that London 2012 is going so well.

London’s Olympics were launched with a massive government miscalculation that resulted in the budget having to be increased threefold, were based on a plan that required us to build two Terminal 5s in half the time and have had to contend with the worst economic recession in living memory.

Despite this, the construction process remains on time and nearly on budget, the organising committee have raised more than £500 million in sponsorship and our athletes have given London 2012 a considerable boost by winning a record haul of medals in Beijing.

However, among all the plaudits, it is sensible to sound a note of caution.

The construction process is only just over one third complete and much remains to be done to a tight and immoveable deadline. Many of the major operational challenges for The organising committee lie ahead such as balancing the budget, finalising the venues, ticketing and the content of the opening and closing ceremonies. Finally, it is a considerable challenge to get our athletes to replicate, or exceed, their performance in Beijing.

In short, if you were writing a school report, you would probably conclude that London 2012 has started well but much remains to be done. You would also warn against too much self congratulation!

The major outstanding issue is legacy. It is a worry that neither the main stadium nor the broadcast and media centre have key anchor tenants and there has been little progress on delivering the promise, made when we won the bid, to use London 2012 to reengage young people in sport.

This is important for one simple reason. If we transform the area around Stratford but leave no more people enjoying the opportunities available through sport, we will have missed a once in a lifetime opportunity.

- Lord Lester of Herne Hill QC is a leading constitutional and human rights lawyer. The views expressed are his own -

Almost alone on the democratic world, we British have no written constitution protecting our basic civil and political rights. We have no constitutional charter defining the scope of the powers of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government or the relationship of these branches with the European Union (EU). Parliament struggles to assert its power while the government uses its ancient monarchical authority — that is the prerogative power vested in the Queen — to exercise its executive powers.

There is now widespread discontent with our system of government, and a massive loss of confidence in politics and politicians.

The early days of the “New Labour” government were times of promising reform. Major changes such as devolution for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, removal of most hereditary peers from the House of Lords, abolishing the role of Lord Chancellor and creation of a Supreme Court were accompanied by measures directly empowering individuals, in particular the Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act.

Since then, despite much talk of further reform, the government has only tinkered round the edges. As the House of Commons Justice Committee’s recent report noted “’unfinished business’ has been the enduring motif of many of the strands of constitutional renewal” during the lifetime of this government.

Why has the government failed to complete its ambitious constitutional reform programme? The Blair government was half-hearted and bogged down in controversies over the Iraq war and concerns about security and terrorism. When Gordon Brown took over in 2007, he seemed keen to invigorate the constitutional reform process with the launch of the Governance of Britain agenda.

But, the failure to drive forward this agenda with any speed or sense of purpose or imagination meant that ministers became lukewarm or hostile to any further meaningful reform. They lost any appetite for radical change until the scandals about MPs expenses and dodgy peers became part of a media frenzy. These scandals have resulted in a further public loss of confidence in our political system while reviving the debate about constitutional reform.

Rather than using rushed and inadequate legislation, it is surely time for a proper debate about our constitutional future and for coherent and enduring constitutional reform. We should put in place a modern democratic system of government in which ministers are made accountable in practice to Parliament and a new constitutional framework is enacted with the consent of Parliament and the people.

The best way do this would be in a fully comprehensive written constitution setting out the relationship between the different branches of government, between the devolved administrations and Westminster and our relationship with the EU. It would specify the composition of the Upper House combining democratic legitimacy with expertise. The constitution would place the source of prerogative powers firmly in Parliament and make the exercise of executive powers subject to parliamentary control.

Following the South African constitution, it could also specify the basic values and principles underlying good governance and administration. It would need to combine parliamentary and popular sovereignty and the process of securing widespread consent would call for careful consultation.

A written constitution would also contain a Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms expressed in the language of a constitution rather than a treaty, building on the protection given by the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act 1998, but adding additional protection against the misuse of public powers.

Meanwhile, there is no reason why we could not have such a Charter without waiting for a new constitutional settlement.

- Rupert Darwall is a guest columnist. The views expressed are his own. A London-based strategist, he is author of Reluctant Managers, a study of Whitehall performance (KPMG, 2006) –

If April is the cruellest month, then July can be awful for people using Heathrow. Business travel is still humming and the holiday season is getting into full swing.

Even with Terminal 5, Heathrow can’t take the strain. Its two runways are used at 98.5 percent capacity and there are simply not enough gates and stands. A ten-minute delay is programmed into Heathrow’s schedule. Because there’s no spare capacity, when things go wrong, the slightest change — even in the weather — can lead to aircraft being held in stacks and flights being cancelled

You’d have thought that the UK government’s review of the way Heathrow is regulated, consultation on which ended last month, would want to root out what causes Heathrow to be so congested, but you’d be wrong.

Although the Competition Commission believes that the way the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) regulates Heathrow stifles competition and contributes to the airport’s poor performance, the government seems reluctant to do anything about it.

Perhaps it feels that enough is already being done by forcing BAA <FER.MC>, which owns London’s three main airports, to sell two of them. But that on its own won’t make life any easier for the millions of passengers who are forced to endure Heathrow misery each year.

Heathrow is congested because incentives in the system reward congestion. BAA is paid as a toll collector, not for delivering a punctual and reliable schedule, so it makes more money the more passengers are pushed through Heathrow’s overloaded terminals and runways.

Another perverse incentive is the way BAA’s returns are linked to the size of its regulated asset base. Because the charges it can levy on airlines are capped below market rates and linked firmly to the size of the airport’s regulatory asset base, it encourages the operator to add to its assets to the maximum extent possible, irrespective of the value for money of the new investment. Hence the incredible costs it runs up on new investments. Terminal 5 cost 5 billion pounds and the third runway and terminal 6 are projected to cost 10 billion pounds.

Rewarding BAA for building high cost capacity means the only way for airlines to contain the rise in passenger charges is by sucking in huge increases in transfer passengers to keep passenger charges within the bounds of affordability. The perceived environmental nuisance makes it much harder for Heathrow to get planning approval for new runway capacity needed to reduce congestion.

BAA can’t be blamed for responding to incentives set by the CAA and Heathrow is now better managed than under the old BAA.

Unfortunately all the signs are that the government is blowing the opportunity to get regulation right. The review has focused on the irrelevant area of the CAA’s legal duties. It did not, as the Competition Commission suggested, analyse how the CAA’s regulatory approach has caused Heathrow’s poor performance.

If Heathrow is ever going to be an efficient airport, the place to start is with regulation:
– Give BAA responsibility for defining and managing Heathrow’s current capacity
– Pay BAA for running a punctual airport and penalises it for not doing so
– Replace the incentive for BAA to bloat its investment programme with ones that are better aligned with its customers’ interests

Changing the CAA’s legal duties to put the passenger first without changing the detailed mechanics sounds nice but is a formula for gridlock. The cure for Heathrow hassle lies in a better system of regulation. It isn’t too late for the government to change tack and address the problems of London’s main airport. But if it just leaves the CAA to muddle on under the current system, Heathrow’s passengers face many more summers of misery ahead.
(Edited by David Evans)

-Jill Kirby is author of “The Reality Gap” and director of the Centre for Policy Studies. The opinions expressed are her own. -

In the midst of an economic crisis, we have a crisis of trust in politicians. But it is not through their lack of activity. Over the last ten years, layers of government have multiplied, more regulatory bodies have been put in place, thousands of new laws have been passed and greater powers of surveillance have been accorded to the State.

Yet as government activism has increased, so public confidence has fallen. High levels of regulation co-exist with extreme regulatory failure. From the banking crisis to Baby P, Labour had introduced elaborate new systems of governance which, far from preventing disaster, appears to have contributed.

How has government become so big and yet so ineffective? Five techniques have been used to disguise failure as success. First, moving goalposts - changing the criteria for measurement. In the dilution of education standards, in the selective us of targets and statistics, in the manipulation of public finances and Gordon Brown’s flexible use of the so-called Golden Rules, the Government has relied on bending the rules of the game in order to claim success.

The reality gap widens; public disbelief and disillusionment set in. The media begin to challenge the Government’s version of events. And ministers cast around for new ways ] to convince us that life has got better – like putting targets into law. This is technique number two.

Having failed to meet all its (redefined) intermediate targets to abolish child poverty, the government is now legislating for its abolition. No-one seriously believes that this – or the targets in last year’s Climate Change Act - can be met, but opposition politicians are unwilling to challenge them.

The third technique is to treat governing as a public relations exercise. Every department publishes a stream of glossy brochures in the guise of departmental reports, consultation papers and “business plans.” The Treasury’s Budget Report used to appear in plain covers.

Now it’s called “Building Britain’s future.” The Home Office alone has ten documents listed on its website as “Corporate Publications.” We are not told how much all these brochures cost the taxpayer – but the figure would dwarf the 400 million pounds officially spent last year on government advertising.

Technique number four is the collection of vast quantities of data. Another form of virtual activity by government and its agencies, it places a huge burden on social workers, school and NHS staff, the police and probation service. The fact that data has been collected does not mean it is used effectively; it simply creates the appearance of compliance. It also crowds out human contact and common sense.

The fifth and final technique, overlaying all the rest, is complexity – of systems and language. From the elaborate structure of our tax and benefits system to the maze of procedure in children’s services, with its “multi-agency partnerships” and “consensual decision-making.” With benchmarks and beacons, learning pathways and person-centred planning, most government documents require translation into plain English before their significance can be assessed.

This Government has proved that more means worse. The only answer is a serious reduction in State activism: cutting the size of government and its departments, abolishing targets, freeing up public services and charities, axing databases. If a new government can disavow the five techniques outlined here (and learn to live without them) the age of spin will truly be over. But learning to let go will not be easy.

– Peter Thal Larsen and Paul Taylor are Reuters columnists. The views expressed are their own –

Sir Win Bischoff appears to relish a challenge. His brief spell as chairman of Citigroup was spent resisting regulators who wanted to break up the bank. If the veteran banker takes over as chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, his first fight will be with competition authorities in Brussels. This is one battle where it would be better if Sir Win did not live up to his name.

Neelie Kroes, Europe’s competition commissioner, says Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland could be forced to sell significant assets in order to win approval from Brussels for the vast amounts of government support they have received. Kroes has a track record in this area. Commerzbank and West LB have been forced to sell assets equivalent to about 40 percent of their balance sheets in return for EU approval of government recapitalisations.

The Commission has two objectives: to limit the duration of state aid, and minimise any competitive distortions that arise from public support. Typically, banks that receive state aid grow too big, too quickly, and have to shrink before they can stand on their own. The main question is how swiftly they should be forced to do so. Here, the Commission is prepared to be lenient. Commerzbank has apparently been given 2014 to sell its Eurohypo real estate division.

The Lloyds case is more complicated. The bank was created last September when the British government waived competition rules in an effort to prevent the collapse of HBOS, the troubled mortgage lender. Even though the government had to recapitalise the banking sector anyway, the Lloyds-HBOS deal still went ahead. The result is the worst of both worlds: a state-supported superbank, which has a third of Britain’s mortgage and current account markets.

The problem here is that forcing Lloyds to shrink dramatically would make it less, not more, viable. Reducing its balance sheet by 40 percent would not just involve selling peripheral assets, like its Clerical Medical pensions division or its Insight fund management arm. It could require Lloyds to offload core operations, possibly including part of its retail banking business and branch network or its corporate banking division.

Were it required to break up the core business, this would restrict Lloyds’s market power and limit the billions of pounds of cost savings the bank expects to generate from the deal. The government, which owns 43.5 percent of Lloyds and wants to sell at a profit, would presumably resist. Kroes would no doubt be accused of using state aid rules to meddle with a merger that was originally beyond the Commission’s remit.

Nevertheless, she should persist. Reining in Lloyds might not please the bank’s shareholders, but it would be better for customers for whom the reduction in competition would most likely result in higher prices for banking services.

(Edited by David Evans)

- Margaret Doyle is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own. -

The crisis at Northern Rock marked the beginning of Britain’s slide into large-scale state ownership of the banking system. Returning the mortgage lender to the private sector would be a sign that normal service is being resumed. But rumours that the British government is poised to sell Northern Rock, are premature. Suggestions the government could do so at a profit are even more far-fetched.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown is apparently keen to offload the Rock, ideally “at a substantial profit” before the general election, which must be held before next summer. According to the Times, the prime minister “wants desperately to avoid a Conservative government taking the credit”.

It would be lovely to think the government’s main worry is who might benefit from the “profits” from the banking bail-out, rather than the substantial losses it has underwritten at the state-owned banks. There are plenty of thorny matters to be settled before the Rock is sold.

The government itself has two conflicting objectives. As a shareholder, it wishes to sell its stakes as soon as it can, and to be able to dress up the sale as a profitable exit. However, as the guardian of the economy, it wants to moderate the rate at which the banks shrink their balance sheets, because that denies credit to viable businesses and would-be homeowners. Indeed, the government recently instructed the Rock to stop shrinking its balance sheet and to start lending again.

This is why the European Commission, which has to approve the bailout under its state aid rules, has demanded more information from the Rock. Given the tough stance Neelie Kroes took with Germany’s Commerzbank <CBKG.DE>, the EU competition commissioner is also likely to look closely at a Rock that is growing again thanks to its government backing.

Even if the Rock can negotiate this hurdle, the idea that the government could turn a quick profit on the bank is fantasy. The current plan is to split the Rock into two companies: a BankCo, which would hold the branches, deposits and new loans and AssetCo, which would hold the bulk of the legacy mortgage book. It is hard to see rivals falling over themselves to buy the Rock’s low-quality mortgage book. While there may be interest in the Rock’s branches and deposits, the price is likely to be minimal.

Santander paid just 150 million pounds for Bradford & Bingley’s 197 branches and 21 billion pounds of deposits. (The government took on the bank’s 50 billion pound loan book). The Rock has just 75 branches and though it has a similar deposit base, some of these savers would be likely to rethink their allegiance if the bank was returned to the private sector.

Any proceeds would have to be set against the money the Rock owes the government. This stood at 9.8 billion pounds as of March, and the government is expected to inject at least another 3 billion pounds to boost the Rock’s capital ratios, which are now below the minimum required by regulators. Gordon Brown can rest assured. No one is going to be turning a quick buck on the Rock any time soon.

(Edited by David Evans)