Where can you get the cheapest pint in London? In a bar in parliament, according to David Cameron.

Cameron said a pint of Fosters in bars sells for only 2.10 pounds in Westminster, little over half of what you would pay outside the confines of parliament.

But it will be farewell to cheap beer and subdisided salads if Cameron gets into power.

That may go down well with voters but is unlikely to win Cameron many new friends among MPs, officials and, dare I say it, journalists working at Westminster.  

Ministers’ salaries will also be cut by five percent and then frozen and the number of MPs cut from 650 to 585 if the Tories get their way. 

Cameron himself conceded that the measures he plans are trifling when compared with the size of the government defict of 175 billion pounds. But he reckons it is vital for government to set the tone for the new era of austerity we face.

The whole debate on public spending has an air of phoney war about it. We all know there will be spending cuts — but neither Labour nor the Conservatives are really nailing their colours to the mast.

So are the Conservatives setting the right tone with their planned assault on Westminster’s pay and perks, or is just cheap populism masking the failure to tackle the real issues?

- 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.

Television host, journalist and reality TV star Esther Rantzen is to stand as an independent candidate in the Luton South constituency at the next election.

Rantzen’s interest in running for office was sparked after the seat’s Labour MP Margaret Moran was caught up in the parliamentary expenses scandal.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Moran claimed 22,500 pounds for dry rot repairs for her second home in Southampton, nearly 80 miles from her constituency.

One small snag for Rantzen is that Moran has already said she plans to stand down.

“If you’re going to stand as an anti-sleaze candidate surely it would make more sense to stand against an actual wrongdoer,” said the Conservative candidate for Luton South, Nigel Huddleston.

Rantzen, 69, insists she is standing because of the local support she has received in her attempt to take advantage of a “new wind blowing through the world of politics and maybe bringing some fresh air with it”.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper, former independent MP Martin Bell warned Rantzen to expect a rough ride in the coming months.

“She can expect to have her record gone through with the finest-toothed of combs,” said Bell.

“I hope that she joins the handful of independents - most of them local heroes rather than celebrities - who have an unusual chance of being elected to the Commons. Our dishevelled politics needs them.”

What do you think of Rantzen’s decision to stand? Will it help clean up our “dishevelled politics”? Can independent candidates make an important contribution to the running of Parliament? Or is she jumping on a publicity bandwagon?

At 27, the Conservative candidate in the Norwich North by-election Chloe Smith becomes the youngest MP in the Commons.

She turned Labour’s 5,000-plus majority in the seat into a 7,348-vote winning margin and keeps the Conservative bandwagon rolling. The election had been forced by the resignation of Labour MP Ian Gibson, who claimed almost 80,000 pounds in second home expenses on a London flat which he later sold at a knock-down price to his daughter.

What do you make of the result? Was this a clear message to Labour about its policies and its leader Gordon Brown or a protest against the ruling party in the wake of the MPs’ expenses scandal?

Vows by Labour and the Conservatives to protect the NHS from spending cuts will require tax hikes or cuts to other areas, a new report shows.

Promises to “ring-fence” health spending in the lead-up to the next election — to be held before June — might lead to cuts of about 8 percent in other departments over the next six years, say researchers at the King’s Fund and the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Alternatively, sizeable tax hikes could be in store as the next government tries to tackle the largest public deficit since the Second World War.

The deficit, forecast to rise to 175 billion pounds this year, has put public spending at the forefront of political debate.

In its equation, researchers posit that the government would have to raise the equivalent of 340 pounds for each family in the country if it were to restrict spending cuts to other departments to 2 percent, while freezing the NHS budget.

Despite being in the midst of a deep recession, the two main political parties have said they will “ring-fence” most spending.

Does this make sense in the current economic climate? From which departmental budget would you cut public spending?

Gordon Brown is counting on a swift economic turnaround. It’s probably his Labour Party’s only hope of avoiding a humiliating electoral defeat to the Conservatives next year.

The latest news on the economy has certainly got people in Downing Street smiling. The housing market is stabilising and some commentators are even talking about Britain becoming the first major country to pull out of the recession.

Treasury forecasts of reasonable growth that were derided just two months ago suddenly don’t look so bad.

The Number 10 dream scenario is that the economy recovers strongly, Brown takes the credit and the polls turn in time for a May election.

But what happens if the economy does turn around by the end of the year and the polls don’t get any better?

If that happens, some party strategists are wondering whether that might be a good time for Brown to step down, say in January.

He could say he did what he set out to do — get Britain through the recession — and it was now time for a new face.

The honeymoon bounce could end up being Labour’s only hope.

Among the surprises last week, as one cabinet minster after another stepped down, was Gordon Brown’s appointment of Sir Alan Sugar as the government’s Enterprise Tsar.

Was this a sound decision, several analysts wondered, or was it a possible case of Brown seeming to confuse the worlds of politics and show business, hoping perhaps that what works in the studio would work just as well in the real world?

The star of the BBC show “The Apprentice” was to be offered a peerage and would take a role as an adviser on matters affecting small and medium-sized businesses.

But the Conservatives are objecting. They say Sugar should not be working for the government and front a TV show at the same time, particularly when the next series of the Apprentice goes out early in 2010 just a few months before a general election. The appointment, they contend, breaches BBC rules on political independence and impartiality.

Sugar himself insists there is no conflict of interest. ‘It’s very simple - all I am is an adviser, I’m not a policymaker,’ he says. ”I have been loyal to Gordon Brown and the Labour Party for quite a while, but I also have my loyalties to the BBC.”

Do you believe Sugar should have been appointed? Or is Gordon Brown perfectly entitled to have who he likes in his government of all the talents, especially someone with such proven business acumen?

“All I can do is advise those that are in charge of making policy from a business point of view … what’s right and what’s wrong,” he told Sky News.

The scandal engulfing British members of parliament over their often startling expenses claims has started to bring down some prominent victims: the speaker of the House of Commons, two Labour Party MPs and four from the Conservatives at time of writing.

The Daily Telegraph, which obtained a disk containing unexpurgated details of claims for moat dredging, floating duck houses, plasma screen televisions and reimbursement for mortgages long paid off, is now on Day 19 of its unremittingly lurid revelations.

It’s hard to imagine that there can be much more of this, at least as far as the House of Commons is concerned, yet there probably will be.

Some political commentators are now beginning to wonder where else this story will lead.

One group of lawmakers has long been the target of stories about their expenses — members of the European Parliament.  As this clip from RTL television shows, some of them are not too happy to be held up to scrutiny.

In what turned out to be something of an anti-climactic announcement, House of Commons Speaker Michael Martin has said that he will step down on June 21.

Martin has been heavily criticised for his handling of the scandal over MPs’ expenses that has tarnished the reputation of the “Mother of Parliaments”, triggered outrage across recession-hit Britain and led to opposition calls for an early general election.

The Speaker is the chief officer and highest authority of the House of Commons and is there to chair debates, call MPs to speak and generally keep order. The holder of this office is an MP, but must remain impartial at all times.

“In order that unity can be maintained, I have decided that I will relinquish the office of speaker on Sunday, June 21,” Martin said. A new Speaker will be elected the following day.

Potential successors include former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell, Labour MP Frank Field and Conservative MP Sir George Young.

Who do you think it should be? Is there anyone who can bring unity back to the House and begin the process of restoring the public’s faith in our political system?

Britain’s anti-sleaze chief Sir Christopher Kelly, Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, has said the MPs’ expenses scandal is worse than the infamous cash for questions affair that did so much damage to the John Major adminstration in the 1990s.

In that celebrated scandal, which fatally undermined Tory MP Neil Hamilton’s political career, Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed alleged he had paid two MPs to table parliamentary questions on his behalf.

Then, the envelopes stuffed with cash became the enduring symbols of Westminster sleaze. Today the equivalent in the expenses furore would probably be what? The garden horse-manure? The rented porn movies? Or maybe the most delicious of all: the moat. (Well - we’ve all been there, haven’t we, with the blocked moat misery. Why does it always seem to happen at the weekends?)

MPs squirming under the spotlight now have all said they acted within the rules. Some have even insisted they acted within the spirit as well as the letter of them, however much it might look from the outside that they have been milking the system for all it’s worth.

Who do you think is at fault? The MPs or the rules?