It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Gordon Brown setting out a plan to overhaul MPs’ unpopular allowances and announcing it on YouTube too.

A week later the plan has unravelled in the face of opposition protest and internal Labour party misgivings. The upshot is more bad press and the feeling that Brown’s authority has been further undermined.

Throw in a budget in which the government has been forced to admit to the worst economic performance since World War Two and it has been a few days to forget for Brown.

Commentators are increasingly writing about the Conservatives as a government-in-waiting, a focus that carries risks because it exposes their policies plans to closer scrutiny.

His visit to Pakistan on Monday also brought reports of a snub after he appeared at a press conference with  Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani rather than President Asif Ali Zardari.  

So is the game up for Gordon? Well, it certainly is hard to see how Labour can overhaul their deficit in the polls. But Brown was being written off in 2008, with rumours of his impending removal, but  emerged stronger when the credit crisis hit.

It’s been a bad week for Brown, but a year in politics is an eternity.

Even the report’s authors say the idea may sound barmy.

But the Policy Exchange, a right-wing thinktank, says it was serious when it called on the government to stop spending money trying to regenerate struggling northern cities and use the cash instead to help their residents relocate to the southeast.

Its report says it is unrealistic to expect cities like Liverpool, Hull and Sunderland to ever regenerate properly. 

They are too isolated and the source of their original wealth — ship-building, ports and other heavy industry– have disappeared.

It would be better to help people to move to places like London, Oxford and Cambridge, the report says.

“Places that enjoyed the conditions for creating wealth in the coal-powered 19th-century often do not do so today,” the report says. “There is no realistic prospect that our
regeneration towns and cities can converge with London and the South East.

“There is, however, a very real prospect of encouraging significant numbers of people to move from those towns to London and the South East.”

Critics say the idea makes no economic, political or social sense.

The southeast is full. Its roads, public transport and services are overcrowded. House prices are sky-high and not enough new homes are being built. The area’s infrastructure, including water supplies, couldn’t cope, they say.

And anyway, why should people uproot their families and move to an alien part of the country?

What do you think? Is it time to admit that some northern towns and cities should be left to fall into decline, while the southeast should get more investment?

Gordon Brown has woken to some unhappy headlines during his year as prime minister but the verdicts on newspaper websites following Labour’s shock defeat in the Glasgow East by-election were probably the worst he has faced.

“Disaster” was the description of the Daily Mail and The Independent after one of Labour’s safest seats fell to the Scottish National Party. The Daily Telegraph called it “Humiliation for Brown” while “Catastrophe for Labour” was The Guardian’s verdict.

The latest terrible poll result, coming after Labour lost its deposit in Henley, left David Cameron clamouring for a general election and the focus once again on Brown’s future, with speculation once more that he will face a leadership challenge.

Is it all over now for Brown? Do you think it’s time for him to step down or be replaced? Send us your comments.

Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell wants long-term job-seekers to work for their state benefits.

If they have been jobless for a year, they will have to do four weeks of community work with a government-backed private or public body. After two years, they will have to take a full-time job.

People who abuse the system could also be made to work in return for benefits.

Purnell says the welfare system needs a radical overhaul to force people to take more responsibility for themselves.

“One of the reasons Labour lost the trust of the country and the chance of power for 18 years was that we convinced ourselves that you help the poor only by handing out more and more in benefits,” he wrote in the Guardian. “We left individual responsibility - so important to the founders of the welfare state - out of the equation.”

The minister also wants to get one million people off incapacity benefit by 2015.

The Conservatives have welcomed the proposed reforms, but say Labour has stolen some of its key ideas. Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Chris Grayling said the government has wasted billions of pounds by failing to reform the welfare system sooner.

Do you support the government’s welfare reforms? Should jobseekers be made to work for their benefits?

Leader writers applauded the shock value of David Davis’ resignation but were divided over his motives and predicted the potentially shambolic by-election to come would damage the Conservative party.

With the LibDems already having said they will not field a candidate on July 10 and Labour still mulling the options, the papers raised the spectre of Davis campaigning alone against fringe parties like the Monster Raving Loonies and a motley crew of publicity-seekers.

“Yesterday he slashed his own party’s jugular instead of Gordon Brown,” said the Sun. “He will win praise from many voters glad to see a politician standing on a point of principle but in truth his vanity has led to an act of incredible selfishness.”

The Daily Mail also praised his principles but questioned his judgement. “At the very least it deprives the Conservatives of a recognised big hitter ..,” it said. “More worryingly Mr Davis leaves his party leader … exposed to accusations of internal division.”

Right on cue, the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror twisted the knife. Under the headline “Cracks in Cam’s Lot,” it praised Davis for his stand, but said he had thrown the spotlight on party leader David Cameron.

“His failure to show true leadership has left him with a thorn in his side that threatens to divide the Tories,” it crowed. “If Cameron can’t keep a grip on his party in opposition, how would he cope with the pressure of running the country.”

The Independent said Davis’ move “cannot be interpreted as anything other than an act of reckless egotism” which had indeed exposed divisions on the Conservative front bench about 42 days pre-charge detention. Like several other papers, it wondered whether Davis still harboured a grudge against Cameron for having beaten him in the party’s 2005 leadership election.

“The resignation is the first bit of luck Gordon Brown has had in many months,” it concludes.

The Financial Times said the forthcoming by-election “is more likely to be a damp squib than a national rallying point,” and added: “The Tories need fewer gimmicks and more gravitas.”

The Guardian said the Tories are “aghast” at Davis’ stand and echoed many papers’ suspicions that he had been carried away by the emotion of the moment after Wednesday night’s Commons vote in favour of 42 days.

“Everyone at Westminster yesterday thought his decision mad,” it added. “Mr Davis’ job now is to prove all of them wrong.”

The pro-Tory Daily Telegraph said the shock should act as a wake-up call to the Conservatives. “It is no secret at Westminster that the top of the party is run by a small clique of which Mr Davis was not a part,” it says, calling such cabalism unworthy of a government in waiting.

But for the Times, Davis has made a big mistake. Under the headline “From bruiser to Loser”, it said: “David Davis may hold sincere convictions but he has put them and his party at risk for the sake of a disastrous ego trip.”

“Courageous” is how Conservative Leader David Cameron described the decision by his shadow home secretary, David Davis, to quit his parliamentary seat and force a by-election over the issue of pre-charge detention.

Davis says he will contest the seat to take a stand on the erosion of civil liberties caused by the proposal to extend to 42 days the time police can hold terrorism suspects without charge.

The opposition Liberal Democrats — who also oppose the extension — have already said they will not field a candidate, leaving the by-election a clear contest between Davis and a Labour opponent.

But the high risk move has already lost Davis his shadow cabinet post — he has been replaced by shadow attorney general Dominic Grieve — and could backfire if Labour is able to portray it as a split at the top of Cameron’s party.

Is Davis being courageous? Or just foolish?

*For all the latest Reuters news, analysis, pictures and blogs from the campaign trail, visit our special London elections site*

The battle for London Mayor has moved 250 miles north to Gateshead, where Tory contender Boris Johnson has been sticking his rhetorical boot into the Labour incumbent.

Johnson won laughs and applause from party activists at the Conservative Spring Conference as he eased his political stiletto between Ken Livingstone’s ribs.

He was merely repaying the compliment after Labour dedicated an afternoon to bashing Boris at their spring conference in Birmingham two weeks ago.

But while Labour Minister Hazel Blears called Johnson a “nasty, right-wing elitist, with odious views and criminal friends”, Boris opted for a more subtle approach.

“I know I am facing one of the wiliest and most redoubtable opponents in British politics … a man equipped as if by millennia of evolution with a prehensile tail with which to cling to office,” he told his appreciative audience.

“He has said some wise things. For instance, he said that only a ghastly dehumanised moron would get rid of the Routemaster bus, a point he then proved by getting rid of them himself.

“Just as the dinosaurs finally ceded dominion of the earth after their interminable epoch, so it is dawning on us that Ken Livingstone is visibly being transformed into “Ken Leaving-Soon” and the great Newtosaurus Rex has finally had its day.”

The mutual exchange of invective shows how the political temperature is rising ahead of the May 1 election, with the two contenders neck and neck in the polls.

The contest is already being seen as a proxy for the next general election - due by 2010 but potentially coming as soon as summer next year.

Johnson says it would be “momentous” if Labour loses the London Mayoral race.

You can see Johnson telling me why he is standing for Mayor here, and explaining why Boring Boris and Old Boris are two sides of the same coin here.

Boris Johnson talks to Tim Castle at the Conservative Spring Conference in Gateshead.

The Tory candidate for London Mayor says he will give it 100 percent should he become mayor and focus on making the capital safer because “it’s central to making a wonderful city yet more wonderful.”

Click on the video below.

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Boris Johnson talks to Tim Castle at the Conservative Spring Conference in Gateshead about why he is running for London Mayor.

Click on video below.

[flv:http://int1.fp.sandpiper.net/reuters42/mojo/2008/03/14032008037.flv 314 235]