Jon Bright (London, OK): It is, I suppose, a cliché to call Labour addicted to centralisation. The big, clunking, Stalinist hand of state socialism is an easy way to caricature Brown, but he's certainly a bit more nuanced than that.
Vivienne Westwood is also pretty easy to caricature - as a self-obsessed faux intellectual trying to moan about the state of the world having already made her money. Her new manifesto - "Active Resistance" - cries out for such a generalisation. I haven't read it myself - yet - but, watching her introduce it on Newsnight Review the other day, she certainly said one thing I agreed with: in politics 'left' and 'right' means nothing any more.
I think the Tories might hesitantly agree with her. Michael Gove, who happened to be on that epsiode of the review, was also speaking at a panel event last night - "Has Cameron changed the Tories for good?" It was full of people who had already taken political sides, and turned rather predictably into a debate on "Is Cameron any good?" A chance to think about a real question was wasted, but Gove at least alluded to it by saying something quite refreshing for a politician - the last Tory election manifesto (i.e. the one contested by Howard) was "wrong". Wrong, because (his words), it had essentially been about providing "lifeboats" for the middle classes to escape public services. Gove argued that the Tories had now changed, and recognised the value of services like the NHS and state schools. In the election that never was, you may recall, both Tories and Labour were promising the same levels of spending on public services.
So where does the division now lie in politics? One answer, which I think is becoming increasingly prominent, is that the new division is between the local and the central. Not whether to spend on public services or not, but how best to deliver them. This isn't a 'new' idea, of course - it just seems to be taking centre stage more and more.
Take Straw's announcement today on prison places. If we need more prison places, how best to make them happen? Labour's answer fits in with the Brown caricature - "super-size" prisons, "titan jails". Everything under one roof. Chief inspector of prisons Anne Owers provided the obvious rebuttal: "All of our evidence, and the evidence collected from recent inspections, show that small prisons perform better", she said. Cameron himself is talking more and more frequently about local empowerment - local referenda on council tax hikes, local co-operatives for schools, etc. Is this the new split in action? If so, what does it mean for the future of politics?
