• David Chaytor, Jim Devine and Elliot Morley say the workings of parliament should be dealt with by parliament
• Tory peer Lord Hanningfield also pleads not guilty

Three Labour MPs and a Conservative peer facing charges over expenses claims appeared in court today to argue that their cases should be dealt with by parliament rather than the criminal courts.

Elliot Morley, David Chaytor, Jim Devine and the Tory peer Lord Hanningfield answered summonses at City of Westminster magistrates court to be charged with false accounting under the Theft Act.

Their cases were referred to Southwark crown court after lawyers for the men said the case was of "high constitutional importance" and they would be arguing their right for it to be heard by parliament.

Morley, Chaytor and Devine appeared together in the dock of court No 1 as their lawyer, Julian Knowles, said that they "unequivocally and steadfastly maintain their innocence of the charges against them".

Knowles told Chief Metropolitan District Judge Timothy Workman: "They also maintain that to prosecute them in the criminal courts for their parliamentary activities would infringe the principle of the separation of powers, which is one of the principles which underpins the UK's constitutional structure."

He continued: "They would argue: 'The workings of parliament should be dealt with by parliament.'"

He said the subject matter of the prosecutions was covered by parliamentary privilege conferred upon them by article nine of the Bill of Rights 1689: "Article nine provides that proceedings in parliament cannot be impeached or questioned in any court or place outside parliament."

He said: "My clients should not be understood as saying they are above the law. That would be quite wrong. Parliamentary privilege is part of the law, and it is for parliament to apply the law in their cases."

He added: "The issues raised by these three cases are of high constitutional importance."

Morley, a former agriculture minister and MP for Scunthorpe, faces two charges relating to £30,000 mortgage claims to which, it is alleged, he was entitled.

Chaytor, the MP for Bury North, faces three charges relating to claims of £1,950 for IT services and £18,000 relating in rent.

Devine is alleged to have claimed £3,240 for cleaning services and £5,505 for stationery using false invoices. All three entered not guilty pleas.

A move to allow them to remain in the main body of the court and not to stand in the dock was refused by the judge. All three were granted unconditional bail.

Hanningfield appeared separately to plead not guilty to six charges relating to dishonestly claiming for overnight stays in London on nights when he was at home in Essex. His lawyer Rupert Bowers indicated he too would be arguing that his case was covered by parliamentary privilege.

The former Essex county council leader, who appeared under the name of "Paul Edward Winston Lord Hanningfield, previously White", was also granted unconditional bail.

The judge declined jurisdiction of the cases.

The parliamentary privilege argument will now be argued at Southwark crown court.

The three MPs have been barred from standing as Labour candidates at the forthcoming general election.

They left court without commenting to journalists.

They got into a waiting black cab accompanied by their lawyers and escorted by police officers.

There was a brief crush around the vehicle as protesters hurled abuse, shouting "pigs" and "oink, oink".

After the brief hearing, Hanningfield issued a statement saying he was "devastated" by the affair.

His spokesman, Mark Spragg, said: "Lord Hanningfield has devoted the last 40 years of his life to public service including both as leader of Essex county council since 2000 and as a member of the House of Lords since 1998."

The charges in full

David Chaytor, the MP for Bury North, is accused of providing false information on an allowances form under the Theft Act 1968.

The charge states he falsely claimed rents between September 2005 and August 2006 for 152 Hide Tower, Regency Street, London, from Sarah Elizabeth.

It added that he claimed £12,925 by lodging a claim for £1,175 a month in rent when he was in fact the owner of the premises.

A second charge stated that on or about 19 May 2006, he dishonestly filed two invoices for computer IT services worth £975.

The court document added that they purported to show the services had been provided in February and March 2006 by Paul France.

A third charge stated that between November 2005 and September 2006 he dishonestly made use of a short-hold tenancy agreement in a claim form.

This showed that between August 2007 and January 2008 he rented Delph Cottage, Castle Street, Summerseat, Bury, from Olive Trickett for £775 a month plus a month deposit.

The charge added that Trickett was his mother and it was not permissible to lease accommodation from a family member. The total sum claimed was £5,425.

Jim Devine, the MP for Livingston, is accused of falsely claiming costs for parliamentary duties in March 2009.

The charge sheet alleged he submitted two misleading invoices worth a total of £5,505 for services provided by Armstrong Printing Ltd.

A second charge alleged that between July 2008 and May 2009 he dishonestly claimed allowances for repair, insurance or security.

The document alleges he intended to gain by submitting false invoices for services, cleaning and maintenance worth £3,240.

The services were allegedly provided between April 2009 and March 2010 by Tom O'Donnell Hygiene and Cleaning Services.

Elliot Morley, the MP for Scunthorpe, is accused of falsely claiming a furnishing allowance between March 2006 and November 2007.

The charge sheet alleged he submitted a deceptive mortgage application.

This showed £800 mortgage monthly interest was charged by the Cheltenham and Gloucester when in fact the mortgage was paid off. A total overpayment of £16,000 was made.

A second charge alleged that between April 2004 and February 2006 Morley made a further false mortgage interest claim.

Again he is accused of claiming £800 a month, a total overpayment of £14,428.67.

Lord Hanningfield, also known as Paul White, faced six charges.

The offences are alleged to have taken place in March 2006, May 2007, April 2008, July 2008, May 2009 and April 2009.

One charge stated that on or about 1 April 2009, at Westminster, he made a dishonest claim for travelling allowances.

It stated that Hanningfield "purported to show that you were entitled to be paid expenses when the conditions entitled you to payment of such expenses had not been fulfilled".

There are exactly eight weeks to go before 6 May – the probable date of the general election. As polling day approaches, hardy perennial issues such as the economy, crime and education will get plenty of attention. But what of the issues we won't be hearing about?

Michael White explores the topics that candidates will be sidestepping on the doorsteps.

Meanwhile in the studio Seumas Milne, Polly Toynbee and Deborah Orr provide their own examples.

Leave yours in the comment section below.

Also on this week's show we hear from Conservative frontbencher David Willetts. He appeared at an event at Guardian HQ this week to argue that a breakdown in trust between the generations has helped to bring about what his party calls a "broken society".

Why has the phrase resonated above all others for the Tories – and is it backed up by evidence? Polly Toynbee, who took part in the debate, disputes the premise of the Tory argument.

Next week Politics Weekly will be recorded live at Manchester University. For details of how you can get tickets for the event on Tuesday 16 March click here.

• Conservatives publish document based on technology manifesto Barack Obama used in his presidential campaign, which paved the way for a 'right to data policy' in the US
• The Conservative technology manifesto

The Conservatives today promised to publish online every item of central government and quango spending worth over £25,000 – including the detail of contracts.

The plans are part of a "right to data" policy that the Tories believe will promote public accountability on issues such as "fat cat salaries" .

The UK government has already set up an online data store, which includes information on big spending by policy area, including some information on contracts.

The Conservatives want to go further by putting online the Combined Online Information System (Coins), which contains the Treasury's detailed analysis of departmental spending under thousands of category headings.

The Conservative document is based on the technology manifesto Barack Obama used in his presidential campaign, which paved the way for a "right to data policy" in the US.

It claims that access to government data would unleash innovative new applications and services that could lead to an estimated £6bn in additional value for the UK.

The "radical transparency agenda" would result in every item of central government and quango spending over £25,000 being published. From next year, if the Tories won the election, government contracts for goods and services worth over £25,000 would also be published in full, including details such as break clauses and penalty measures.

Details of UK projects that receive over £25,000 of funds from Europe will also be displayed. It is not the first time that the Tories have announced the £25,000 figure. However, it has been suggested that the policy will cost more to introduce than it would save.

All procurement tender documents for contracts worth over £10,000 will also be put online to allow small and medium businesses to bid for contracts.

The Conservatives also promise to publish detailed information on the salaries of the country's 35,000 most senior civil servants, alongside the names and salaries of all central government and quango managers earning £150,000 a year or more.

The remuneration packages of local council officials earning more than £60,000 will also be available in full, as well as councillors' expenses.

The party, which has publicly committed itself to giving local councils more say over their own affairs, intends to make town halls up and down the country publish every item of spending over £500, including contracts.

Many councils already publish spending online though this is down to local discretion.

The wide-ranging document also includes plans to create the fastest high-speed broadband network in Europe, which would generate 600,000 additional jobs and help set Britain up as a "European hub" for the digital and creative industries.

In a foreword to the document, George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said the manifesto proposals presented "the most ambitious technology agenda ever proposed by a British political party", which would provide a boost to British business and help create "highly paid new jobs across the country".

He added: "We will make the British government the most technology friendly in the world, and meet our ambition that the next generation of Googles, Microsofts and Facebooks are British companies."

Other proposals include creating a level playing field for small and medium businesses seeking lucrative IT contracts by breaking up larger projects into smaller components.

• Supermarket customers duped in two-year, £3m scam
• Lawyer claims client is far from industry's only bad egg

A Midlands businessman was jailed for three years today after admitting making a fortune by fraudulently passing off battery farm eggs as free range or organic.

Around 100m mislabelled eggs sold by Keith Owen ended up on the shelves of supermarkets including Sainsbury's and Tesco. That the fraud was able to carry on for two years while he made a £3m profit raises questions for the food industry about the provenance of goods.

Owen, 44, from Bromsgrove, in Worcestershire, ran Heart of England Eggs Unlimited, which supplied eggs to major packing companies that in turn supplied them to supermarkets and smaller retailers.

He pleaded guilty at Worcester crown court to three charges of fraudulent accounting, relating to altering his records to disguise the fact he was buying in eggs laid by caged hens and selling them on for a profit after relabelling or "misdescribing" them in paperwork.

Prosecutors said Owen had "dishonestly and systematically passed off millions of battery farm eggs as free range/organic eggs".

Amanda Pinto QC said: "The victims of Keith Owen's false accounting were not only the direct customers of Heart of England, but also the public, as well as the legitimate egg producers.

"The ultimate customer, a member of the public buying these eggs, would have received inferior eggs – sometimes even eggs not fit for sale to the public – or eggs produced by hens kept without the stringent welfare schemes from which they were said to benefit."

Owen's barrister, John Kelsey-Fry QC, suggested his client was far from the only one creating what he described as "mischief" in the egg industry.

"It's not the case that all those who Mr Owen supplied eggs were concerned to ensure that the provenance of the eggs was as described," he said, adding it would be "inappropriate" to elaborate.

At the time of Owen's fraud, between 2004 and 2006, farmers could expect to receive a price of around 90p per dozen for organic eggs, 70p for free range and 35p for cage eggs. As a "middleman" wholesaler, Owen would normally make a few pence profit per dozen, but by passing off cage eggs as free range he could make an extra 35p profit for every 12 eggs he sold.

The court heard that Owen not only bought in cheap battery hen eggs, he also bought in huge quantities of so-called "industrial eggs". These do not meet the quality requirements for sale to the public, and instead are meant to be used only in processed foods.

The fraud came to light in 2004 when allegations began circulating in the egg industry that there were vastly more British free range and organic eggs being sold in shops than could ever possibly be laid in UK farms. At the same time, investigators from the Egg Marketing Inspectorate noticed during routine checks that eggs coming from Heart of England were not at all what they purported to be.

Because all eggs look the same to the naked eye, the law requires that each egg is stamped with a unique number indicating where the egg was laid and in what conditions. Paperwork must accompany eggs transported through the supply chain to indicate their origin and type.

When inspectors checked a selection of Owen's allegedly free range eggs using ultraviolet light, the shells bore telltale wire marks – a sure sign that they had been laid not on a bed of straw or even Astroturf, as farming regulations stipulate, but in a metal cage.

There were also complaints from lorry drivers who arrived at Owen's farms to drop off consignments of caged eggs and then to pick up free range or organic eggs. A number of drivers reported to their trade union that they were made to wait hours to pick up their deliveries and suspected that the same eggs they had delivered were being relabelled and then sold back to them the same day.

All of Owen's major contracts were to supply British eggs bearing the British Lion hallmark. But investigators from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs discovered that he was regularly buying eggs from the continent and passing them off as home-grown.

He used another of his companies, Owens Eggs, to disguise the accounting fraud. Owens Eggs was a legitimate business selling organic eggs laid in a barn, on the same site as the Heart of England egg-packing business. Owen tried to mask the fraud by selling organic eggs from Owens Eggs to Heart of England at an extremely inflated price – £10-£40 per dozen at a time when other producers were selling a dozen for no more than £1.

Owen agreed under a confiscation order to surrender £3m of the profit he made from selling the misdescribed eggs, and will not be allowed to be a company director for seven years.

Paul Martin enters Israel following his release from captivity four weeks after arrest in spying case

A British journalist held by Hamas for nearly four weeks on suspicion of spying for Israel has left Gaza after being released by his captors.

Paul Martin, a 55-year-old film-maker arrested in the Gaza Strip last month, is the first foreign journalist to be detained there since Hamas took control of the territory almost three years ago.

Martin had entered Gaza to testify on behalf of a Palestinian accused of collaborating with Israel, but when he began to speak the prosecutor ordered that he be arrested, saying he was wanted in connection with the case.

His family said he was now in Jerusalem and was expected to fly back to London at the weekend. His wife, Anne, said he had told her in a letter that he was "physically, mentally and spiritually fine".

"We are extremely relieved that Paul has been released and pleased that the authorities responded to our appeals," she said.

"Paul is an experienced and highly regarded foreign correspondent with 30 years' experience. He is an innocent man who went into Gaza to testify in the trial of a Palestinian whom he had interviewed for a documentary."

His daughters, Laura and Suzy, added: "Our dad is a brave and dedicated journalist, whose passion is to give an objective and informed picture of events in conflict zones around the world. We are thrilled to know that he is safe and he is coming home soon."

Martin had reportedly been working on a documentary about Mohammad Abu Muailik, a former member of the Abu Rish Brigades, a Gaza militant group linked to Hamas's political rival, Fatah.

Last month, the Foreign Press Association, which represents international journalists working in Israel and the Palestinian territories, said it was "deeply concerned" and called for Martin to be released.

"We expect Hamas, as we do all parties, to respect the rights of every journalist on assignment to work without fear of being arrested," it said.

Leftwing MPs, trade unionists, and economists call for further investment to nurse economy back to health

Alistair Darling was today urged to use his impending budget to introduce "a second fiscal stimulus" to help secure economic recovery.

A coalition of over 80 signatories including leftwing MPs, trade union leaders and economists seized on a speech delivered yesterday by Gordon Brown in which he signalled a resistance to spending cuts while the economy was still in "choppy waters".

Brown said yesterday: "We are at a turning point, a crossroads, for our domestic economic recovery where we have to choose now to maintain the stimulus until recovery is assured or cut it and at a crossroads for the global economic governance that will shape the next decades for us and our children, and for families and children all across the world."

A letter in today's Guardian signed by MPs including Jon Cruddas and Colin Burgon, as well as the general secretaries of the heavyweight affiliated trade unions, called on the chancellor to introduce a "second fiscal stimulus" to nurse the economy back to full health.

The letter, designed to put pressure on Darling in the run-up to the budget on 24 March, noted that, despite leading economists pointing out that the fragile nature of the recovery means that investment is still required, "Britain is one of only two G20 countries not currently planning any such fiscal stimulus in 2010".

They called for such a stimulus, particularly in areas where investment has fallen most, notably housing and transport.

The letter said: "A programme of government investment would not only stimulate the wider economy in the short term but would increase long-term growth, thereby lowering the debt levels through a higher tax take."

Brown said yesterday that he would not rule out using money from the higher-than-expected bonus tax on banks, or a windfall from lower-than-expected unemployment claims, to spend on further recovery stimuli, as opposed to cutting the deficit faster than at present.

He said: "We're not going to withdraw the stimulus until the recovery is assured. We're sticking to our four-year deficit reduction plan."

His speech came just a day after senior ministers discussed how to frame the debate on the economy at a cabinet meeting. One cabinet source said: "The debate is how we position ourselves when we have said we will cut the deficit within four years."

The name of the young cyclist who died near Guy's hospital on Tuesday has been released:

Friends of a medical student who was crushed to death in a collision with a tipper truck while cycling to lectures paid tribute to an "incredibly talented" young man today. Muhammad "Haris" Ahmed, 21, died instantly in the collision near London Bridge on Tuesday morning...Mr Ahmed was a fourth-year medical student at King's College and was on his way to the Guy's Hospital campus when he died at the junction of Weston Street and Snowsfields.

The piece in the Standard also quotes Jenny Jones AM. She refers also to the second cyclist to die this week:

Many of us feel a mix of sadness and anger at these latest deaths of cyclists in London. This summer the Mayor is encouraging thousands of inexperienced riders to use the cycling superhighways and share the roads with some of the main lorry routes through the capital. The most obvious action for him is to ban lorries from these cycling commuter routes at peak times. The least he can do is to re-engineer these routes to give cyclists priority.

The same comment appears here and Jones covers the waterfront of road safety issues in a piece for Progressive London:

Having spent nine years pushing for road safety to be taken seriously by the Met Police, I find that the previous slow incremental improvements are now being reversed with barely a guilty shrug from the Mayor's office.

First, there is a decline of 20 police officers, 5 PCSOs and 5 staff working on road safety. Secondly, cuts to the London Safety Camera Partnership mean the redeployment of 45 police staff, which means it's a way of letting off 280,000 speeding drivers and red light jumpers who would previously have been sent fines.

What is particularly worrying is that this cutback on enforcing the rules of the road is happening at the same time as the Mayor is promoting trials of the naked streets idea and the removal of traffic lights.

Now read on.

Watchdog says couple claimed money from the second home allowance to which they were not entitled because their central London property had in effect become their main home

The Labour MPs Alan and Ann Keen were today ordered to repay £1,500 after an investigation found that they had broken Commons rules in relation to second home expenses.

The Commons standards and privileges committee said that the couple had claimed money from the second home allowance to which they were not entitled because their main home was empty and uninhabitable.

But the committee said that they should not have to repay all the money they were deemed to have claimed wrongly because the Commons authorities told them twice their arrangements were acceptable.

In a report, the committee also said the pair had been the victims of "malign and sometimes false" reporting in the media.

Alan Keen, MP for Feltham and Heston, and his wife Ann, a health minister and MP for Brentford and Isleworth, own a house in Brentford. In 2002 they bought a flat near parliament, which they used when the Commons was sitting and which they funded using the second home allowance.

In May 2008 the Keens began to renovate their Brentford home. They began to spend most of their time living in their central London flat and in December 2008 they had their Brentford home boarded up. They did not stay there overnight again until October 2009 and in the summer of 2009, after their case was publicised in the press, the house was occupied by squatters.

John Lyon, the parliamentary commissioner for standards, launched an inquiry into a complaint that they continued to claim the second home allowance when their central London property had in effect become their main home.

Lyon said that, even though the Commons authorities approved the claims, the Keens were ultimately responsible for what they did and that they had committed "a serious misjudgment".

But the committee, which considered Lyon's report, said that it was taking "a more lenient view". It said the fact that the Keens' claims were approved by the Commons department of resources was "a very significant mitigating factor".

The committee said that the Keens should have stopped claiming the second home allowance between June and October 2009 and that they had therefore received £5,678 to which they were not entitled. But it also said they should only have to repay £1,500 because of the "exceptional factors" in the case.

Responding to the report, the Keens said: "We accept in full the verdict of the committee, and are grateful that the members acknowledge the strong mitigating circumstances in our case."

Neighbours say 64-year-old David Askew had been targeted by gangs at his home in Hattersley, Greater Manchester

A man with learning difficulties who died at his home last night was "tormented to death" by local youths, neighbours claimed today.

Police had been warned that 64-year-old David Askew was being targeted before he was found dead in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, nearby residents said.

They criticised police and officials, claiming they had not supported Askew, his brother, Brian, and his mother, Rose, who uses a wheelchair.

Officers were called to the family home last night after being told youngsters were causing "annoyance".

When police arrived, the youths had vanished, but officers discovered Askew, who was pronounced dead at the scene.

"This has been going on for about 10 years," Avona Davies, a 49-year-old neighbour, said.

"We have complained to the police and council, and they put cameras in their back garden about three years ago.

"They tormented David for money and cigarettes. They harassed him every night without fail."

Davies said she had stopped complaining to police because "nothing gets done", adding that yesterday's harassment, by people who were "about 18 or 19 years old", had begun at around 6.30pm.

"David had learning difficulties, and I think that is why they tormented him, because he would scream out of the window at them," she said.

"Sometimes it would be two of them, others it would be six kids or a big gang. David would throw money and cigarettes into our garden to get rid of them, but they would always go back. That's why they did it."

Another neighbour, who asked not to be named, said she had lived near the Askews for 39 years.

"Last night, I came out to talk to a neighbour and there was a body on the ground under a white sheet," she said.

"We didn't know who it was then. I said: 'If it is David, his misery is over.'"

The woman said she believed the gang had come from a neighbouring area to target Askew. "Not that many children live around here, so this gang comes from elsewhere," she added.

"They would come and bait David ... he was a harmless soul. They would wind him up something dreadful. Every year, the youngest brother would join in – the next generation.

"They always knew he would retaliate. It is tragic – like bear-baiting – tormented to death."

The case has echoes of the death of Fiona Pilkington, who killed her disabled daughter and herself by setting fire to her car after suffering years of abuse from youths.

It is unclear how Askew died. The results of a postmortem examination later today, but Chief Superintendent Zoe Hamilton, of Greater Manchester police, said he had not been physically attacked.

"My team and the neighbourhood team have been in daily contact virtually with David and his family to address the problems they have been having," she said.

"It's a sad fact that if people are different in a community, sometimes they end up being targeted.

"I think we have done everything we can. The level of personal involvement my staff and housing officers have had cannot be stressed enough."

Band objected to label providing downloads of individual songs from concept albums that were created as a single work

Pink Floyd have today won a high court battle to stop record company EMI selling single downloads from their concept albums.

The judge has yet to rule on how much EMI now owes the band but the label was ordered to pay Pink Floyd's costs, which are estimated at £60,000.

Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt accepted arguments by the group that EMI was bound by a contract forbidding it to sell its records other than as complete albums without written consent.

Pink Floyd alleged – and EMI agreed – that it had allowed online downloads from the albums and had allowed parts of tracks to be used as ringtones.

Pink Floyd are known for conceptual albums such as The Wall and Wish You Were Here in which individual songs often merge with others to form larger "song suites". The band argued that their music should only ever be heard as part of the full-length albums in which they originally appeared. They pointed to a contract signed in 1999 that stated their music could not be "unbundled" from its original context.

EMI's lawyers argued that this contract, which was signed before the emergence of digital music stores such as iTunes, referred to "records" and did not apply to online sales.

But the judge sided with the band, noting that the contract was designed to "preserve the artistic integrity of the albums".

Lawyers said it was the first time such a dispute between artists and their record companies had been heard in private.

Pink Floyd were pioneers of the long player format, with their 1973 prog-rock classic The Dark Side of the Moon notching up worldwide sales of 35m.

The ban signed with EMI in 1967 and became one of its most lucrative acts, their back catalogue being outsold only by that of The Beatles.

Roger Waters, who co-founded the band with Syd Barrett, Richard Wright and Nick Mason, has a fortune estimated at £85m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. The band last played together at London's Live 8 concert in 2005.

While British Jews are offered property in the West Bank, Palestinian refugees are still denied the right to return

The yearly drive to encourage British Jews to emigrate to Israel culminated last weekend in the Israel Property Exhibition in a north London synagogue. "Make your dream come true with your own home or investment in Israel," it urged. Although most of the property for sale is in Israel itself, some is in the occupied Palestinian territories. The Jewish Agency also placed ads in Jewish News and the Jewish Chronicle, which last month included a glossy pamphlet with programmes to "ease and speed up the process of immigration". Free flights and citizenship within 24 hours were on offer, together with generous financial and social benefits and tax exemptions.

The "community aliyah programme" shown in the pamphlet calls on UK Jews to "start a new life in a vibrant Israeli city" but of these, only three – Haifa, Modiin and Yad Binyamin – are within Israel proper. The other five are Jerusalem (evidently including the illegally annexed eastern part); Ariel, "located in the centre of Israel" (sic); Maaleh Adumim; Efrat (the capital of Gush Etzion); and the Gush Etzion bloc as a whole, which spreads south of Jerusalem into the heart of the West Bank. On YouTube, a Jewish Agency video shows a British family leaving their house in the suburbs, piling into their car and setting the sat-nav to "Home", eventually being raucously welcomed to Israel.

This drive to increase Jewish emigration has accelerated in recent years. One organisations, Nefesh B'Nefesh ("Soul by Soul"), says its core mission "is to revitalise aliyah [migration to Israel] and to substantially increase the number of future olim by removing the financial, professional and logistical obstacles that prevent many individuals from actualising their dreams". It adds: "We aim to educate and inspire the Jews of the diaspora as to the centrality of the Jewish state to the Jewish people and its desirability as a Jewish home."

The Jewish Agency is part of the parent World Zionist Organisation. It promotes and manages aliyah to Israel, purchases land in Israel and the West Bank through the Jewish National Fund, and plays a key role in establishing and funding the settlements there. The pamphlet shows the increasing aliyah figures from the UK (853 in 2009, a 37% increase from 2008). In effect, UK citizens are being encouraged to live in Israel and also in illegally-occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, whose settlements have been established and enlarged in direct violation of international law.

Although Israel is most keen to welcome Anglo-Saxon Jews from the US and UK, Jews from "lost tribes" such as the Bnei Menashe (Children of Menasseh) in India have also been fast-tracked in to subvert the settlement freeze. Even Peruvian Indians were brought in (provided they converted immediately to Judaism) and sent to West Bank settlements. Jewish people throughout the world have an automatic right to Israeli citizenship under Israel's "law of return", though many in the US, UK and Australia now are rejecting this right.

Today there are more than seven million Palestinian refugees around the world. Israel denies their right to return to their homes and land – a right recognised by UN resolution 194, the Geneva convention, and the universal declaration of human rights. Further, "an occupier may not forcibly deport protected persons... or transfer parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory" (article 49).

The Foreign Office emphasises that the UK's "policy on settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is absolutely clear: Israeli settlements activity is not only illegal under international law, it is also in contravention of Israel's obligations under the Road Map to Peace and detrimental to the peace process. The prime minister made this point most recently in a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu of 5 January."

The Israeli government continues to expand these settlements and encourage immigration in order to consolidate its hold on the occupied territories. The new Jewish-only settlement towns being built by the Jewish National Fund within Israel, in the Negev and Galilee, also continue Palestinian dispossession, by displacing Bedouin in "unrecognised villages". While Palestinians are being continuously dispossessed, imprisoned in enclaves, and prevented from building to house their families on their own land, Jewish people from any part of the world can be housed anywhere they choose within Israel and West Bank. Precious water resources are used lavishly in the settlements, while drastically limiting Palestinians' access. Use of the super-highways linking settlements to Israeli cities is denied to Palestinians, and sewage from the settlements is discharged into Palestinian villages and agricultural areas. The settlement freeze is a joke, and is ignored by Israel. It is more a settlement frenzy.

So far, the British government, while issuing protests to the Israeli government, has not taken proper measures, together with the Quartet, that would stop the settlement construction. Arguably, British citizens who settle in Israel may be accessories to a crime if they move to these illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, contravening the 1977 additional protocol and the International Criminal Court Act 2001, which the UK has ratified. Unless Britain acts firmly to end Israel's impunity to international law and agreements, hopes of establishing a lasting and just solution for peace in the Middle East will be indefinitely delayed.

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Minister says building work on 250mph route cutting journey times between London and Birmingham could begin in 2017

The government today unveiled plans for a £30bn high-speed rail network, with the first phase between London and Birmingham opening in 2026.

Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, said building work on the 250mph route could begin in 2017 once a formal public consultation has been completed.

The route linking the capital and England's second city, which will cut journey times from 84 minutes to 49 minutes, will originate at London Euston and pass through Old Oak Common, in west London, where a Crossrail interchange will transport passengers to Heathrow airport.

Controversially, the line will then run through the Chiltern hills in Buckinghamshire, past picturesque villages such as Wendover, before arriving at an intermediate stop near Birmingham airport. There will be a new terminal in Birmingham city centre, and the main body of the line will sweep through the Trent valley to join existing tracks north of Lichfield, where journeys will continue to Manchester and Scotland at conventional speeds.

"The time has come for Britain to plan seriously for high-speed rail between our major cities," said Adonis. "The high-speed line from London to the Channel Tunnel has been a clear success, and many European and Asian countries now have extensive and successful high-speed networks. I believe high-speed rail has a big part to play in Britain's future."

In a nod to Tory objections over the Heathrow proposal, Adonis said the case for a station would be examined by the former Tory transport secretary Lord Mawhinney. "A complex decision of this nature should not be taken in a knee-jerk fashion but after a full analysis of the facts and opinions," Adonis said.

The first phase will cost up to £17.4bn for 128 miles of track from London to the west Midlands, with the full 330-mile network costing £30bn.

The transport secretary also unveiled the blueprint for a wider network, with a Y-shaped route splitting off from Birmingham to go eastwards to Manchester and westwards to Sheffield and Leeds. Journey times between London and Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield would come down from about two hours 10 minutes to 75 minutes when the new network is in place.

Formal planning for the route from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds will be completed next summer, with a consultation to follow in 2012. The route to Scotland would be completed on existing lines under the current proposal, even when the Manchester and Leeds sections are completed.

Despite the Mawhinney gesture, the Conservatives attacked the detailed proposal. The Tories have pledged to build a high-speed network instead of a third runway at Heathrow, and to start construction in 2015.

Theresa Villiers, the shadow transport secretary, said: "Labour have betrayed the vision we set out three years ago for [high-speed rail]. In leaving out Heathrow and setting out plans that give no firm guarantees north of the Midlands, Labour's plans are flawed both by lack of ambition and undermined by their inability to grasp the basic truth that high-speed rail should be an alternative to a third runway, not an addition to it."

The government-backed company that drew up the plans, HS2, believes there is no business case for a direct link to Heathrow airport and some industry experts argue that the Old Oak Common interchange provides an equally good link.

Ralph Smyth, of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, described elements of the plan as "a major concern" and called on the government to listen to local people.

"By using existing and disused transport corridors as well as tunnelling, the impact on the Chilterns is less than feared," he said. "But the impact on the Warwickshire, where the line is proposed to run through open countryside, is a major concern.

"There is a strong need for more than just fine-tuning. The firm commitment to community consultation made by Lord Adonis must be backed up by real engagement and flexibility. As with the Channel Tunnel rail link, local people's contribution can help turn a contentious route into something that works both national and locally."

Decisions by European court of human rights mean that more clarity needed on UK libel and privacy law, says Justice Eady

"Unpredictability and uncertainty" in media law have damaged freedom of expression in the UK, the leading media judge David Eady said yesterday.

Decisions by the European court of human rights in Strasbourg were increasingly affecting English law, Eady said, and more clarity was needed on how the English courts should approach different legal tests in libel law and privacy.

"Recently, there have been various developments governing freedom of speech that are directed towards the encouragement of greater flexibility," said Eady.

"To a large extent, this has been under the influence of the Human Rights Act and, along with it, Strasbourg jurisprudence. These developments undoubtedly have had an inhibiting effect on the exercise of our freedom of expression, and on journalists in particular."

Speaking yesterday at the launch of a new Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism at City University, Eady said greater clarity was needed because the courts had adopted separate approaches towards libel and privacy cases.

Libel law has traditionally been regarded as a "tort" or civil wrong in English law, and is usually defended on the basis that the otherwise defamatory material is true, or a product of responsible journalism in the public interest.

By contrast, the European convention on human rights required a balance between competing considerations of the rights to privacy and the rights to freedom of expression, and represented "a new creature deriving from the Strasbourg way of doing things". Eady said.

Interim injunctions were easier to obtain under privacy law, Eady said, because of a lower threshold for the person bringing the claim.

"At least for the time being, the position in English law is that it is easier to obtain an injunction to restrain an infringment of privacy than it is to restrain the publication of a libel," he said.

"That distinction is the result of a historical accident and it may not last indefinitely."

Eady's comments, made at the launch, come amid increasing pressure on the government to reform libel law.

Last month a report by the House of Commons select committee on culture, media and sport made a number of recommendations that the law be changed to make it cheaper for the press to defend libel cases, and harder for people with little connection to the UK to bring cases in the English courts.

Yesterday Eady accepted concerns raised by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger that uncertainty surrounding the law on libel was inhibiting responsible reporting.

"[The defence of responsible journalism] seems hardly ever to be used in litigation," Eady said. "Perhaps the main reason is the one given … by the editor of the Guardian. It was said that to avail oneself of this defence is time-consuming, expensive and uncertain of outcome.

"Thus, in order to take advantage of it, a defendant would need the resources of a wealthy media organisation (assuming such things still exist). It would be beyond the reach of a local or regional newspaper."

Eady also questioned the willingness of the Strasbourg court to find in favour of privacy, particularly in cases of celebrities "popping out for a pint of milk," but said reports of the effect on the English press were exaggerated.

"Most applications in privacy cases concern sexual shenanigans of one sort or another whether there is no public interest argument available," he said.

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Professor was arrested in London after extradition request from Serbia over alleged war crimes

A former Bosnian president who was arrested in London last week has been granted bail by the high court.

Ejup Ganic, who served as vice-president and president of Bosnia and Herzegovina after it broke from the former Yugoslavia, was arrested on 1 March after an extradition request from Serbia.

He had been in the UK for several days before being detained by police at Heathrow. The Serbian government has accused him of being responsible for the deaths of 42 Bosnian-Serb soldiers in May 1992 , a month after the start of the Bosnian war.

Ganic's bail request was adjourned last week to give the Serbian authorities more time to submit evidence to back their war crime allegations and oppose bail.

Lawyers for Ganic say moves to make him face trial in Serbia are politically motivated and his arrest is illegal.

Lord Justice Laws granted the former president bail today on what he described as "stringent" conditions.

Under the conditions Ganic, who is currently being held in Wandsworth prison, has to live at a specified address in London, and must remain "within the confines" of the property between 10am and 7pm.

He is not allowed to apply for a passport or travel document, and must report daily to a London police station.

Laws said £300,000 had been provided as security by a well-wisher who was, the court understood, "a lady of substantial means".

Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, paid a further £25,000 surety to be retained if Ganic breached the bail conditions.

Ganic is president of the Sarajevo school of science and technology (SSST) and had been in the UK attending events at Buckingham University, which is partnered with the SSST.

"Prof Ganic was visiting Buckingham to attend the graduation ceremony of the second cohort of SSST students to have graduated with a degree from Buckingham," a spokeswoman for the university said.

A Foreign Office spokesman said David Miliband, the foreign secretary, had met Haris Silajdzic, chairman of the joint presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, this morning.

"They discussed a range of issues including the UK's strong support for Bosnia and Herzegovina's European perspective," the spokesman said.

"The foreign secretary underlined that the arrest of Dr Ejup Ganic in London on 1 March is a judicial matter, which in no way amounts to a diplomatic or political statement by the British government or any UK point of view on past events in the western Balkans.

"The foreign secretary confirmed that the UK takes its obligations towards foreign nationals in detention very seriously, and that officials will continue to look into any concerns raised by the Bosnian authorities in this regard."

British libel law is being used by corporations from around the world to suppress legitimate reporting of bad science

Last year, I had mumps. I blame the libel laws.

The recent case of Simon Singh being sued by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) is one example of the out-of-control libel laws in this country, and how they can stop people telling good information from bad. This week is Libel Reform Week and there is no shortage of cases bringing the health risks of such lawsuits to light.

Public discussion – journalism included – involves freely debating topics in the public interest. It is similar to what scientists do in peer-reviewed journals. But because most people don't read those, we depend on trusted sources such as Singh to bring the facts and arguments to us.

Libel laws have good reason to exist – to stop irresponsible reporting. However, British laws so favour one side that they can be used to intimidate journalists in other countries: "libel tourism". A US citizen can write for a US paper and be called up before courts here. Hence the likes of the Wall Street Journal considering not selling papers in the UK.

Nor is libel simply a concern of big business and Brangelina.

The international nature of collaboration and publication makes scientists particularly vulnerable. A British cardiologist, Peter Wilmshurst, is being sued by US company NMT Medical after he had questioned the effectiveness of a heart implant. NMT Medical says he accused the firm of research fraud; yet the company is based in Boston, and it was a report on a US-based website that triggered the libel action, Wilmshurst is being sued in the UK.

I can understand his frustration. As an employee of the NHS, research requires a mountain of paperwork. Patient confidentiality must be guaranteed and ethics applications approved. I once spent five months of a year-long project on the paperwork alone. You could be tempted to think if the Trust R&D department eventually green-lights your project, there won't be any further liability problems.

You could be wrong.

The implications of these cases mirror the MMR scare. While epidemiologists such as myself can read Wakefield's original publication and judge whether his conclusions regarding autism were justified, others rely on what is re-reported elsewhere. It was years before that paper was publicly retracted by the Lancet.

Even now, fresh suits threaten the dissemination of knowledge that is widely accepted among scientists. The damage can't be undone. In spite of the retractions, many people still believe a discredited study. This could have a devastating health outcome for a family.

Given the option, wouldn't you choose a treatment that works over one that doesn't? But when a face cream can claim to be "inspired by the science of genes" while real scientists are tied up in the courts, it's little wonder many people can't tell the salve from the snake oil.

Now, about those mumps: I had a full course of MMR as a child. When I moved to the UK, I had it again.

The MMR confers herd immunity – not everyone becomes immune, but the few unlucky people who don't (like me) are protected when most other people are immunised.

So when I moved to an area where many parents opted out of jabs, I fell ill. I was, after two courses of MMR, not immune to measles. I had follow-up jabs and am still not immune to rubella. If I become pregnant this could be a great concern.

At first, I was angry; and then sad. It costs £100,000 and more to defend libel suits. The sources we trust are being gagged because they can ill afford a case, even if they win. The costs are too high, the process too long, to risk it.

Nature abhors a vacuum, as does knowledge. Misinformation reigns.

These cases influence what the news tells us. If sources won't report facts established through scientific process, what is left to trust? It leaves a gaping hole that charlatans and manipulators will rush to fill.

• The Libel Reform Campaign's libel reform week culminates in the Big Libel Gig on Sunday 14 March 2010

Five-year-old boy from Oldham was abducted from his grandmother's house in Jhelum, Pakistan

New school figures out today show school choice across England. Find out the figures where you live
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The school admission figures are out - and with them a guide to the squeeze on school places across the country. How many parents actually get their first choice of secondary school for their child? Now we know.

In total, 83.2% of families were given a place at their highest preference school on national offers day earlier this month, which is unchanged from last year. But there were wide variations around the country – in London and Birmingham, 66% got their first choice school.

Some 94.9% of children got a place at one of their top three preferred schools, which is marginally up from last year.

This is the full list of rates by each local authority from the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Find out how yours does - and let us know if you can do anything with the data.

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The torture scandal shows how easily our intelligence services were led astray by US promises of an influence 'upgrade'

Vikram Dodd's elegant destruction of Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller's evasions over the torture by US intelligence of terrorist suspects should be the last word on whether our spooks knew about it or not. But there is another nagging question that is more difficult to answer and in a way more disturbing. Why did our senior intelligence officials not take a firmer stand? Could they not anticipate the damage it would do to the reputation of the intelligence services, particularly among our large Muslim minority? Keeping their loyalty, I would assume, is the key aim of our counter-terror strategy.

It is especially odd given that the formative years of just about every top official at Albert Embankment were spent pursuing the IRA – within the law and under a strict set of political riding instructions. It was a cardinal principle of both intelligence and military operations that the key to neutering the IRA was to undermine support for its message and methods among potential future sympathisers. That is part of the reason why IRA suspects were treated just like any other suspected criminals and subject only to routine police questioning. Most remained silent. However, in the long term our subtle approach worked enhancing the flow of actionable intelligence.

Ironically, the intelligence relationship with the Americans so dominant in every other sphere played very little part in helping us. The 1992 film Patriot Games, in which CIA analyst Jack Ryan (played by Harrison Ford) takes on the IRA, is pure fantasy.Ted Kennedy's view that the British were colonial oppressors in Northern Ireland ruled the roost in Washington. But at least this allowed us to deal with the problem using our own analysis and judgment. All this appears to have counted for nothing as the penny began to drop with MI5 in 2002 that the US-led war on terror was as much about old-fashioned vengeance as prevention.

To understand why seasoned British counter-terror professionals allowed so much experience to be negated so quickly, you have to understand the seductive power of the intelligence alliance with the Americans. It's not that our spooks are dazzled by their competence or particularly impressed by their vast resources. In private many are dismissive of both American intelligence practice and American culture – indeed Manningham-Buller was pretty rude about both in her lecture. Many of them despised George Bush and the shine is off Barack Obama particularly since his administration equivocated over the Falklands.

But the Americans offer something that few of them can refuse – the chance to play on the world stage, to relive the glory days when Britain really was a power to be reckoned with. By sharing everything we have with the Americans, by doing what Washington says every time without question, we win the right to an upgrade. We can postpone for a few more precious years the move to economy class where we really belong. The Foreign Office shorthand for this is "punching above our weight" – a phrase as filled with fantasy and wishful thinking as "Saddam's WMD".

But the price is high. The torture scandal has shown clearly that we are too polite, deferential or powerless to stop US interests trumping our own. The British intelligence services have achieved a great deal in keeping us safe in recent years, but because of their close relationship with a foreign country, the United States of America, they are often unable to pursue the British national interest. In effect, they have allowed themselves to become non-domiciled.

Welcome to the Northerner, guardian.co.uk's weekly digest of the northern press

It has been a difficult week for authorities in the north, to say the least. In a development that led the national news, the Sheffield safeguarding children board – along with its Lincolnshire counterpart – had to apologise to women who were sexually and physically abused by their father for 35 years.

The apology came as the findings of a serious case review acknowledged the family had contact with 28 different agencies and 100 of their staff during the decades of abuse.

The 56-year-old father is serving a life sentence for repeatedly raping his daughters, who went through 18 pregnancies between them. The man fathered seven children with the women. The Yorkshire Post published more harrowing details of the family's suffering.

Sue Fiennes, independent chair of the Sheffield board, said: "We want to apologise to the family at the heart of this case. It will be clear that we failed this family.

"This report will not make comfortable reading for any of the organisations concerned."

Meanwhile, Merseyside's police force reported itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission after a convicted sex offender it was supposed to be monitoring raped and murdered a Darlington teenager.

Peter Chapman could not be found at his home early last year but the force did not issue a national wanted alert until nine months later. The alert came a month before Chapman, as he admitted in court this week, killed Ashleigh Hall.

The home secretary, Alan Johnson, called on the police to "respond" and said lessons "needed to be learned" following the murder.

The victim's mother, Andrea Hall, called for Facebook to introduce greater protection for its younger users. Chapman lured Ashleigh by posing as a fellow teenager on the website.

Unlike other sites such as Bebo and MSN, the Journal pointed out, Facebook had not installed a help button linking children the site administrators feel are at risk online to child protection experts.

Andrea Hall said: "Anything that can be done should be done to stop these monsters. No stone should be left unturned. I just can't see any reason why Facebook haven't installed this panic button."

Another mother of a murdered child, Denise Fergus, was seeking answers this week as the furore over the return of Jon Venables to prison continued. The mother of James Bulger, the two-year-old who Venables was convicted of killing in Liverpool in 1993, called on Jack Straw to reveal any occasions when Venables may have reoffended.

The secrecy surrounding Venables's new identity – at the heart of the justice minister's refusal to publicise details about why he was recalled to prison – has had a devastating effect on the life of one young man in Fleetwood, it emerged.

With Venables behind bars, David Calvert appeared in the media to try to put a stop to his mistaken identification as the Bulger killer. The father of four became the subject of an internet campaign claiming he was Venables – 2,500 people joined a Facebook group calling for him to be killed, the Blackpool Gazette reported.

The problem appears to have arisen when Liverpool-born Calvert told neighbours, when he moved to Fleetwood in 2003, that he had spent time in prison.

Calvert said he and his family had been forced to go into hiding. "People have been turning up at my neighbours' houses with pictures of the killers printed off the internet and saying one of them is me," he said.

"Now I hear threats are being made and I'm worried that someone will come for me or my girlfriend or hurt my kids."

Cheers for the ticket ... and one for yourself?

Council bosses have come under fire in Manchester, albeit on less serious charges than others that were being levelled this week. The city's motorists took umbrage at the prospect of being served tickets by traffic wardens who had not passed a driving test.

"It's like a high court judge with no legal qualifications giving out prison sentences," fumed a Didsbury driver after he caught a glimpse of an L-plate carried by one of a new breed of scooter-borne enforcers.

In a baffling outbreak of vagueness, a council spokesman assured the Manchester Evening News that "less than half" of their troop of two-wheeled terrors lacked full licences for their vehicles.

Sheffield derby of a different kind

Sheffield council found itself embroiled in battle with one of the city's football clubs. Sheffield United went to the high court accusing the local authority of bias towards their great rivals Sheffield Wednesday.

United feel that the council too readily granted Wednesday planning permission for a redevelopment of their Hillsborough ground that allowed them to enter the race to be a nominated host venue in England's 2018 World Cup bid. The council had also granted United permission to upgrade their ground for the same purpose.

Wednesday subsequently edged United out of the bid, but the Yorkshire Post reports: "The decision raised eyebrows in some quarters after United had seemingly spent significantly more time and effort developing the club's bid, including lengthy discussions with the council, while Wednesday, undermined by boardroom upheaval, had come forward with proposals at much shorter notice."

Court papers United submitted outline three areas in which the council allegedly "acted improperly and unreasonably in the exercise of its duties". They claim the council granted the permission without receiving necessary information about Wednesday's plans and failed to fully explain its decision.

The council called United's claim "apparently gratuitous and unsubstantiated".

Beer shampoo, Gordon and David?

Another politician in the firing line was Conservative MP Anne McIntosh, although the opprobrium dumped on her may have had a more pleasing flavour. The member for Vale of York thought it would be wise to get to know the voters down at the pub as she prepares to fight for the newly-created Thirsk and Malton seat. Her surgery at the The Three Tuns in Thirsk was brought to an abrupt conclusion, though, when an environmental campaigner threw a half-pint of John Smith's Extra Smooth over her.

Howard Keal, the Liberal Democrat candidate for the seat, produced the best soundbite: "Whatever the feelings on this I don't think a beer shampoo is the best way to advance an argument."

He may be right, although a radical restructuring of the forthcoming leaders' TV debate remains tempting.

Pills not preaching

While across the north, those who are supposed to be in control were struggling, one Sheffield chemist was taking flak for assuming too much authority.

Janine Deeley was "left gobsmacked", according to the Sheffield Star, when the female pharmacist refused to issue her with the contraceptive pills prescribed for her, on the grounds that to do so would compromise her religious beliefs.

Deeley told the Star: "The best bit of it is I've been prescribed the pill not for contraception but because I've got endometriosis – but that's not the point. I shouldn't have to explain myself to her.

"There's a lot of things in society you might not like or agree with, but you can't do anything about them."

The Northerner recommends

Jenny Holzer at the Baltic, Gateshead

The most extensive Holzer show ever in the UK presents a selection from the last two decades of text artworks in the form of LED installations, billboards, T-shirts, condom wrappers and paintings, writes Robert Clark.

Quietly, and with little fanfare, the shadow defence secretary has killed off ministerial ambitions of retired army chief

When you achieve victory – of the complete, earth-scorching variety – it is always best to avoid crowing. "In war: resolution; in defeat: defiance; in victory: magnanimity," is a handy bit of advice from Winston Churchill.

Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, has clearly been thinking of Churchill after achieving a complete victory over the Tory leadership.

David Cameron had planned to appoint General Sir Richard Dannatt, the former chief of the general staff, as a minister in a Tory government. That is now toast after Lord Guthrie, the former chief of the defence staff, told the Today programme this morning that it was a "great mistake" for Dannatt to have accepted a post as adviser to the Tories.

Gurthrie's remarks are significant because he has been highly critical of Gordon Brown over defence spending and was withering about Labour MPs who condemned retired defence chiefs in the Commons yesterday as Tories.

Guthrie showed why it is unwise to cross this former SAS commander. This is what he had to say about the attacks from the Labour MPs:

I thought it was rather a desperate act and actually rather cheap. I don't think everybody is a Tory. I certainly am a crossbencher and am quite prepared to criticise anybody.

And this is what he said about the planned Dannatt appointment:

I think personally it was a great mistake. I really do. I do not think serving officers should criticise publicly.

Guthrie's remarks will be welcomed by Fox, who has fought a clever under-the-radar campaign to sideline Dannatt after Cameron went over the heads of his shadow defence team to line up the former army chief for a ministerial post.

This is what Cameron told the Tory conference in October:

When the country is at war, when Whitehall is at war, we need people who understand war in Whitehall. That's why I'm proud to announce today that someone who has fought for our country and served for 40 years in our armed forces will not only advise our defence team but will join our benches in the House of Lords and if we win the election could serve in a future Conservative government: General Sir Richard Dannatt. As we welcome him to serve with us, let us all salute those who serve our country.

Fox signalled to the world the end of Dannatt's ministerial ambitions in a little-noticed interview at the end of January. In remarks that were helpfully buried towards the end of an interview with the Sunday Times on 31 January, Fox made clear that defence chiefs had vetoed Dannatt's appointment as a minister:

They think there would be a problem in the constitutional relationships if he were to hold a ministerial role.

Fox's victory means that he will be a formidable force in a Cameron cabinet. That is quite an achievement for someone who had been subject to a whispering campaign last summer that he may not be appointed defence secretary.

And the future? Fox is still only 48. He would be one of the few cabinet ministers to have served in the last Tory government. If the Tories follow Labour's example, Cameron's successor will probably emerge from the heart of the party. Step up Liam Fox, your time may arrive, though you might have to wait a decade.

Schools adjudicator clamps down on parents who deceive to get their children into the best state schools
• Datablog: get the data behind this story

Parents caught lying to the authorities to get their offspring into top state schools will have their child's place automatically withdrawn under new rules, the schools adjudicator said today, following indications that more than 4,000 fraudulent applications were made last year.

Officials will conduct random samples of at least 10% of applications to root out deception, and set up a whistleblowers' hotline for parents to report their suspicions about other families. If a family changes its main place of residence within a year of an application, it will trigger an automatic re-examination of the case, to check they have not given false information about where they live to get into a high-performing nearby school.

The adjudicator, Ian Craig, said parents should have to sign a statement promising their application was truthful, after being given clear warnings on the consequences of making a fraudulent application. If they have suspicions, local authorities should instruct their lawyers to send parents letters demanding further signed confirmation that information provided was accurate.

And if cheating were detected, the child's place would be withdrawn immediately, even if he or she had already started at their chosen school. They would be allowed to continue to attend classes until a fast-track appeals panel had heard the case within two weeks, but after that could be forced to leave – particularly if they had not been at the school long.

If the panel allowed them to stay, deciding it was in their best interests, their parents would be penalised by losing the right to get a priority place at the school for their other children through the "sibling link" provision.

There is currently no rule that local authorities must withdraw a place where cheating is found, and they tend not to act if a child has been at the school more than a term. Under the new rules that would no longer be a consideration, at least until the appeal panel convened.

Official statistics published by the department for children, schools and families today showed that one in six children in England did not get into their first choice secondary school.

In total, 83.2% of families were given a place at their highest preference school on national offers day earlier this month, which is unchanged from last year. But there were wide variations around the country – in London and Birmingham, 66% got their first choice school.

Some 94.9% of children got a place at one of their top three preferred schools, which is marginally up from last year.

The adjudicator also recommended a media campaign pointing out that lying to get a place is not a victimless crime, and branding those break the rules thieves.

Craig said local authorities reported 1,400 cases of fraud last year,but that the data suggested that for every case detected and dealt with, there were two more suspected. This meant it was likely that more than 4,200 false applications were made each year, he said.

The schools secretary, Ed Balls, said: "While I am reassured that only a tiny minority of parents apply dishonestly, I am also clear that every place gained by deception is denying another child their rightful place.

"No child should be punished for their parents' actions, but neither should families on waiting lists be unfairly disadvantaged or delayed."

The Observer conversation: food critic Jay Rayner discusses the nature of our cuisine with three food bloggers and invites them to suggest a quintessentially British three course menu. What would you serve up?

Scottish Power has said it will reduce its gas prices by 8%, double the cut announced hours earlier by EDF

Scottish Power has become the latest company to reduce the price of its gas, doubling the cut made by rival EDF Energy just hours earlier.

The company's 1.6 million gas customers will see the size of their gas bills fall by 8% – a typical £66 a year – from 31 March. EDF Energy also announced it would cut its prices, but the 4% reduction has been described as a "token gesture" by one expert.

EDF's cut, which amounts to about £30 a year off a typical gas bill, will take effect from 26 March. It follows recent cuts from British Gas, E.ON, Scottish & Southern and npower of between 6% and 7%.

Mark Todd, director of price comparison website energyhelpline.com, said: "Although any cut is welcome, this is a token gesture by EDF and hardly worth the wait."

Gareth Kloet, head of utilities at Confused.com, branded all the recent energy cuts a "disappointment" and "too little too late."

"Energy suppliers are acting like a pack by all cutting by around the same amount, despite the fact that energy regulator Ofgem recently concluded they are making profits amounting to around £105 a year per energy customer," he said.

"The fact that most of these companies, with the exception of British Gas, are delaying the reductions until the end of March is also poor. When they put prices up they do it with immediate effect."

He added that some customers could now save up to £400 a year by switching to an online tariff and paying by direct debit, rather than paying by cash and cheque and staying on a company's standard tariff. This is because the gap between the cheapest online tariff and the cheapest standard tariff has widened significantly over the past few months.

Scottish Power said today that customers could make further savings of up to £382 by paying by direct debit and managing their account online.

Estimation warning

Meanwhile, two out of five householders are overpaying for their gas and electricity and failing to ask for a refund, according to latest research by Gocompare.com.

Those that are overpaying are owed, on average, £124.34 by their energy supplier, while one in 10 is due as much as £500, it said.

Mark Greening, head of utilities at Gocompare.com, said: "You should never let your utility company estimate your energy usage – it is a sure-fire way to end up shelling out more than you really need to.

"It is not unusual to build up a credit during the summer, and following the bitterly cold winter we have experienced, any overpayments made could have helped soften the blow of the big bills that most of us have recently received."

He continued: "However, if you find yourself in credit after your winter bills have been paid then make sure you ask for your money back – it is better to have the extra cash in your bank account than in your energy provider's."

• RMT union refuses to rule out Easter national walkout
• Talks continuing over BA cabin crew strike threat

The prospect of a national rail strike over Easter loomed larger this morning after maintenance workers voted in favour of a walkout.

The RMT union refused to rule out a bank holiday strike by thousands of Network Rail staff, and they could be joined by 5,500 signal workers whose ballot result is announced next week.

Meanwhile, a source close to the fraught peace talks between British Airways (BA) and the Unite union said informal discussions over averting a cabin crew walkout were continuing, with the possibility that strike dates would not be announced today. A source close to Bassa, Unite's cabin crew branch, said it had no wish to disrupt BA passengers.

Bob Crow, the RMT general secretary, left open the option of an Easter national rail walkout and called on Network Rail to hold further talks over changes to working practices. "It could well be that both the signal workers and maintenance workers take action together," he told Sky News.

Network Rail believes it can withstand a maintenance strike for at least a week, with some branch line closures, before services are disrupted by safety measures such as speed restrictions. However, the company admitted this week that a signallers' strike could bring the busiest sections of the network to a halt because the main signalling centres, which employ around 3,000 people, would be unstaffed.

Crow said the vote, with 77% in favour on a turnout of 65%, reflected concerns over rail safety after Network Rail's decision to restructure its maintenance division. The Network Rail proposals include 1,500 redundancies, the majority voluntary.

"RMT members were faced with a stark choice in this ballot. They could either sit back and wait for these cash-led maintenance cuts to lead to another major disaster on Britain's railways or they could vote to take action to stop the attack on rail safety. They have overwhelmingly voted to take action," said Crow.

Network Rail, which has overseen a significant increase in rail passenger safety since taking over from Railtrack in 2002, has denied vehemently that the new regime could see a return to the dark days of the Hatfield crash in 2000, in which four people died, and the Potters Bar accident in 2002, which claimed the lives of seven people.

A Network Rail spokesperson said: "The way the railway is maintained and operated needs to change. Work practices that date back to the steam age should no longer have a place on a modern railway.

"We cannot allow the unions to hold this country to ransom. Negotiation is the only way this dispute will be settled, and the sooner we get around the table the better for everyone."

Unite and Bassa officials met to discuss the next steps in the industrial dispute with BA that is close to escalating into a walkout, after a deadline to secure a deal was missed yesterday evening. The general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Brendan Barber, is acting as an intermediary in the talks with BA.

The Bassa source said it had "absolutely no wish" to trigger a strike and claimed that the two sides were £10m apart in agreeing on cost-saving proposals. Unite and Bassa have offered a one-off 2.6% pay cut in talks, but BA says the proposals are still "significantly short" of its £60m cost-saving target.

In a direct appeal to Willie Walsh, BA's chief executive, the source said: "We are taking this opportunity to ask him to reconsider the formal offer of cuts we have made and to accept the sacrifices that we and our members are willing to make in order to help British Airways to protect on-board service levels for its customers, and so prevent industrial action.

"What company in their right mind would refuse the offer of a pay cut from its own staff to protect the health, safety and service offered to its customers? Before ordinary people's travel plans are unnecessarily inconvenienced we hope that common sense will prevail and that our offer is reconsidered. The deadline for calling industrial action is very close. Mr Walsh should not squander that time."

A BA spokeswoman said the airline remained available for talks. One emerging scenario could see BA lodge a formal offer to Unite that would allow the union to extend its strike mandate while members consider the proposal. Unite must announce strike dates by Monday under rules set down by the 1992 Trade Union Act.

One key sticking point in the BA proposals is that the airline appears to have accepted the partial repeal of staffing cuts but has not gone far enough to satisfy Unite and Bassa. BA is understood to have offered the return of about 184 cabin crew positions, while Unite is seeking around 700. BA unilaterally cut staffing levels on flights by at least one flight attendant last November, after a voluntary redundancy programme.

His email describes an experience he had yesterday evening:

At Victoria Station tonight at 8.00pm London Underground closed down one of the up escalators from Victoria Line to the main concourse. They put up a sign saying it was "switched off to save energy". It goes on to say that this would happen during quieter times of the day as a way of saving energy. But this happened at 8.00pm on a weekday night when trains were still pretty full, which meant there was a queue of people trying to get up one escalator, forcing others to walk up a non-moving escalator. See Picture.

I was sceptical that any saving made would be greater than the cost of the inconvenience to Tube users (especially as there are lots of travellers with suitcases going to Gatwick airport) plus the unintended side affect of some travellers deciding to use cars or other more polluting forms of transport than Tube travel.

Interesting. The reader asks?

How much money is saved per hour turning off the escalators? My original guess that it would need to be thousands of pounds per hour, to outweigh the potential dis-benefits of the above.

Helpfully the TFL website tells us how much per year an escalator costs to run. There is a report from 2009 which states: "The amount of electricity used by an escalator varies depending on how long it is and how far it rises but as a guide will cost in the region of between £7,000 and £12,000 each year."

This is from page 33 of the London Underground Carbon Footprint report 2008, published in 2009. My reader continues:

I was surprised by these low figures. If we assume that the escalator at Victoria station is one of the more expensive ones, the hourly cost is less than £2.00 per hour: £12,000 divided by 365 days divided by 18 hours per day.

£1.83, to be exact. Well, that's what my calculator says.

In July 2009 Boris Johnson said about the £695million plan to improve the station: "This key upgrade will transform the experience for those using the station - making life easier and more convenient." But TfL's own figures suggest it doesn't make economic or environmental sense to turn off escalators at 8.00pm in busy stations like Victoria.

I should disclose two things about this reader: one, I know him to be a very competent person; two, he is a Labour Party member. That done, I'll be asking TfL if they think he has a point.

Euthanasia campaigner Vicki Wood, who earlier tried to to kill her ailing husband, dies at Dignitas clinic in Switzerland

A woman who admitted trying to murder her terminally ill husband in a "mercy killing" has taken her own life at Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, it was reported yesterday.

Vicki Wood, a 67-year old artist and toymaker from Devon, died at the Zurich clinic on Friday, according to Western Morning News, adding that she had been suffering from a debilitating physical illness and had travelled to Switzerland with a friend.

A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said officials were looking into the report.

In 1999, Wood, a euthanasia campaigner, told a court in Exeter she had tried kill her husband, Tim, who had dementia, by smothering him with a pillow as he slept after she gave him sleeping pills.

Wood was put on probation for two years and banned from being alone with her husband. He died nine months later.

Passing sentence at the time, Justice Toulson accepted that Wood was acting out of compassion and love for a her husband.

In an obituary authorised by Wood, Andy Christian, a journalist and friend of the couple, wrote: "Despite the setbacks, Vicki Wood led a bountiful life."

The tribute, which was sent to the Western Mail, adds: "I remember Tim and Vicki as a happy couple. They were always full of fun and we shared serious conversations and lots of laughter."

The newspaper reported that Wood and her husband had been members of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, now called Dignity in Dying, and had discussed euthanasia in a BBC documentary.

Vicki Wood wrote letters to the press in support of the campaigner Diane Pretty, who died unassisted in 2002, a year after losing her battle to get her husband granted immunity from prosecution if he helped her to die.

Wood and her husband had written "living wills", saying they wanted to die rather than have their lives prolonged during serious illness.

Last month, the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, issued new guidelines to clarify the rules on assisted suicide. They set out six mitigating factors against an individual being prosecuted for assisting the suicide of another.

Social networking site fears reputation permanently damaged by false claim that it let older men pressure teenage girls for sex

Facebook has threatened to sue the Daily Mail for damages after the paper wrongly claimed in a piece published on Wednesday that 14-year-old girls who create a profile on the social networking site could be approached "within seconds" by older men who "wanted to perform a sex act" in front of them.

The paper apologised in print today and online yesterday for the error, which the author of the piece, Mark Williams-Thomas, insisted had been introduced by editors at the paper despite being told it was wrong. In fact, Williams-Thomas – a retired policeman who now works as a criminologist – had been using another, unspecified social network.

But the giant social networking site, which has 23 million users in the UK alone, said that although the Mail has changed the headline of the article online – so that it now reads "I posed as a girl of 14 online. What followed will sicken you" – it had not at first changed the page title of the article online, used by internet search engines to index content, nor the URL of the piece, which is also a factor in search-engine indexing.

At 10am today the title still read "I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you" while the URL contained the text "i-posed-girl-14-facebook-what-followed-sicken-you". The title and URL were, however, amended before noon.

A UK spokeswoman for Facebook said that the company was still considering legal action and looking at the "brand damage that has been done".

Charles Garside, assistant editor of the Daily Mail, said that the apology had been produced in consultation with Facebook, and that representatives of the paper and Facebook would be meeting today. The changes to the URL and page title were "a technical matter", he said, adding: "We are removing elements of that".

The incorrect naming of Facebook is understood to be blamed on "a matter of miscommunication".

Facebook staff claimed that attempts to add a comment to the piece, as readers are able to do, were repeatedly blocked by the Daily Mail.

The company is concerned that the article may have done permanent harm to its reputation in the UK. "If you were a Middle England reader and your child was on Facebook, this sort of thing would have a very serious effect on what you thought of us," said the Facebook spokeswoman.

Tensions over Facebook's position in the UK as a popular site among people of all ages, allowing them to contact each other, have been magnified in the past week after Peter Chapman was convicted of murdering Ashleigh Hall, a 17-year-old girl who thought that Chapman, 33, was also a teenager. Chapman had got in touch with Hall via Facebook, leading to criticisms from some senior police officers over the measures that the site takes to protect susceptible individuals .

But the Daily Mail piece, which carried Williams-Thomas's byline, suggested that anyone who signed up as a 14-year-old girl would be approached "within minutes of the profile going up". The piece also said that "messages from men poured in" and that "the first three who approached me were aged between 20 and 40".

However, Williams-Thomas and his agent, Sylvia Tidy-Harris, both insisted on their Twitter feeds that he had not used Facebook for the Mail article.

It "was on another well-known SNS [social networking service], not Facebook", said Tidy-Harris, echoing Williams-Thomas.

Tidy-Harris said that yesterday had "Been a hellishly tough day trying to juggle @mwilliamsthomas misquote in daily mail along with meetings and literally 100ks of calls/emails".

At Facebook, the anger at the misrepresentation was magnified because, they say, they were initially unable to get any response from the paper to their appeals for corrections.

"The people at Facebook in the US were reading this and knew at once that it couldn't have been our platform," said the Facebook UK spokeswoman. "We have made Facebook much more favourable to the safety of minors – minors under 18 cannot receive messages from somebody over 18."

That means it would be impossible for the scenario described by Williams-Thomas to happen on Facebook.

Facebook's representatives said that they tried to get a response from the Mail throughout Wednesday without success, and that attempts by people at its PR agency to post comments on the piece with clarifying text failed. The Mail uses moderators who on that story approved comments before they could appear. By this morning the article had 380 comments.

Williams-Thomas has not responded to requests to specify which social networking service he was using by the time of publication.

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The data is unequivocal: investing in scientific research during times of recession results in economic growth

On Tuesday night, the science representatives of the three main parties jovially debated in front of a heaving Westminster audience, all pushing the agenda that science is now a central election issue.

Quite right too. All evidence suggests that increased expenditure in basic research results in economic growth. Conservative shadow science minister Adam Afriyie immediately set up their stall the wrong way round, by declaring that mending the economy came before investing in science. Science minister Lord Drayson countered, as he always does, by engaging well with critics, saying the right thing, but appearing hamstrung by his own party.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Royal Society, under Lord Martin Rees's excellent leadership, has the very clearest view on what needs to be done. Published on Monday, their report entitled The Scientific Century: Securing Our Future Prosperity is a masterful document, packed with robust data, and well written to boot. In it, they recommend a long-term strategy of ring-fenced investment, and increased funding towards people rather than projects. It plays down the sometimes false dichotomy of "basic" as opposed to "applied" research, but reasonably promotes revenue generating academic-industry collaboration.

This debate doesn't just centre on research. It also comes in a school education, and the Royal Society's report hammers home the primary importance of specialist science teachers. Afriyie cited shadow children's secretary Michael Gove's predictable declaration last week that the curriculum should return to the old school and comprise "traditional" lessons. Bizarrely, they are claiming to battle endemic dumbing down not by employing the knowledge of education experts, but by asking celebrities. To shape the science curriculum, Gove volunteered public scientists and figures including lords Rees and Winston, the publicity-courting Baroness Greenfield and Carol Vorderman. While no doubt these have all achieved excellence in particular fields, none is a school-level educational professional.

The New Labour project was in the thrall of expert advice, sometimes taking it, and in the case of the sacking of drugs advisor David Nutt, conspicuously ignoring it. The Conservatives appear to be following suit. Alongside their celebrity-endorsed curriculum, yesterday they issued a report by vacuum cleaner manufacturer James Dyson. It's not a bad document, glossy and vaguely in line with that of the Royal Society. But alongside Afriyie's statements in the debate, it's hard to see past this as being anything other than vacuous lip service, if you'll forgive the inevitable pun. Dyson, for the record, manufactures his vacuums, not in the UK, but in Malaysia.

The Lib Dems' Evan Harris is the only MP who genuinely appears to understand both the scientific process and the import of investing in that process to ensure our future. His position that the science budget can only be cut after we are out of recession is spot on. A coalition brought on by a hung parliament could result in the installation of this man as a science minister who will drive a genuinely progressive policy for the benefit of everyone. In a hung parliament, though, his position will be weakened in enacting those policies.

Science must be a major election issue. The data is unequivocal: investing in basic research during times of recession results in economic growth. That investment comes primarily at university level, and in hard times, by ring-fencing research council budgets. The current government has made some key progress on sorting out the science curriculum (such as on the teaching of evolution), but before 2009, the UK failed to meet its targets on attracting more secondary teachers into science and maths every year for a decade.

With little to call between the main parties on many issues, promises on how to bust the economic depression will be critical. Whichever party most heartily adopts the Royal Society's recommendations will secure the UK's future economically and, more importantly, create the science-literate society and research-driven economy we should all aim for. As this august organisation so pithily says: "Unless we get smarter, we'll get poorer."

Smaller arrangement fee means HSBC's discount mortgage is market leader

HSBC is offering a market beating discount mortgage with a rate of 1.99% from Monday.

The loan, set at a discount of 1.95% from its standard variable rate (SVR) of 3.94% for two years, has a £999 arrangement fee and is available up to 60% of a property's value.

Richard Morea of mortgage broker London & Country said the mortgage is good value, beating those with lower interest rates over the two-year period because of a smaller arrangement fee.

He calculates that a 25-year £150,000 HSBC repayment loan would cost £635 a month based on current rates. This means the borrower would pay £15,240 over the two years of the deal plus the £999 fee, producing a total of £16,239.

However, the same borrower taking out an Alliance & Leicester tracker mortgage set at 1.34% above the base rate would pay £624 a month. This would lead to lower repayments of £14,976 over the two-year deal period, but because the fee is 2% of the mortgage (£3,000) the borrower would pay a total of £17,976 – a difference of £1,737.

Morea said the difference would be even bigger if the borrower took out the maximum £250,000 available on this loan from HSBC. But he added that the A&L loan allows a higher loan-to-value of 70% and mortgages are available up to £750,000.

He added: "Tracker loans are completely transparent. If the base rate goes up the tracker rate will go up by the same amount. But discount rates are linked to the SVR and some lenders have been raising these in recent months, even though there has been no change in the base rate. The interest rates for this type of mortgage are therefore more cloudy."

However, HSBC spokesman James Thorpe said: "I have had it on good authority from our mortgage guys that we have no intention of doing that. We don't have the same funding pressures that other lenders are under."

Follow the train of events as the government's plans for a high-speed rail network are made public

3.30pm:
Alan Clifford, a presenter on BBC Radio Nottingham, always thinks of this sketch when high-speed rail is mentions.

3.00pm:
Friends of the Earth's executive director Andy Atkins gave news of the link a mixed welcome, saying it "could play a significant role in tackling climate change" but adding "these proposals are forecast to have a minimal impact on cutting carbon emissions, and may even lead to an increase".

"Ministers must scrap plans for new runways and roads and ensure that rail travel is the most cost-effective and convenient option for long-distance travel throughout the UK and into Europe.
"Because the new trains will only be as green as the power source that fuels them, we urgently need to develop a low-carbon electricity grid by investing in the UK's vast renewable energy potential.
"The new rail link must not come at the expense of other low-carbon transport schemes like buses, existing rail services and measures to encourage walking and cycling and government funding for these must be protected.
"The impact on communities and the environment must be minimised - and the Chilterns must be properly protected."

2.41pm:
Gordon Brown, wouldn't you know it, travelled from London to Birmingham by train this morning. He described the plans as "the biggest transformation of the railways and of the possibilities for economic regeneration that we have seen in decades, because Birmingham will be the hub of the new international and national network". He added:

"This is the most exciting development in railways, to get high speed rail to reduce the time from Birmingham to London to 50 minutes, to be able to go Leeds to London in an hour and 20 minutes, Manchester to London in an hour and 20 minutes.
"This is a transformation of the possibilities of rail travel, it will mean that more people use the railways and it will mean that the hub of these railways will be right here in the Midlands, the heart of British manufacturing."

2.29pm:
Our transport correspondent Dan Milmo has written a news story on the announcement.

You can find the full text of Adonis's statement to the Lords here.

2.17pm:
Okay, so the high speed rail link will probably not look like Supertrain (see 1.29pm) below but it could well look like Network Rail's CGI animation.

Network Rail chief executive Iain Coucher said:

"By slashing journey times, high-speed rail can drive economic growth and boost jobs. It would also take cars and lorries off the road, cut domestic flights and release capacity on the existing rail network; transforming services even for those communities not served directly by a high-speed line. It is the low-carbon, sustainable transport of the future.
"We will now analyse the white paper in detail to see how its proposals would expand the network. The railway is a system and we will work with government to understand how high-speed lines can be developed to make the best use of capacity of the entire network."

2.10pm:
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said:

"The government must ensure the project maximises opportunities for UK suppliers, along with apprenticeships and training for local people.
'By slashing journey times and improving connections, it will also provide a long term boost to businesses in the regions it serves. The future plans to take the route north of Birmingham will be key to bringing these benefits to the north of England and Scotland, further chipping away at the north-south divide.
'But investment in high speed rail must not come at the cost of other national and regional services. We need a high-quality network across the UK, including reliable local and regional services."

2.03pm:
The Campaign to Protect Rural England understandably has some concerns. But it is also seeing the positives of the proposed network.

Ralph Smyth, senior transport campaigner, with the group said:

"By using existing and disused transport corridors as well as tunnelling, the impact on the Chilterns is less than feared. But the impact on the Warwickshire, where the line is proposed to run through open countryside, is a major concern.

"There is a strong need for more than just fine-tuning. The firm commitment to community consultation made by Lord Adonis must be backed up by real engagement and flexibility. As with the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, local people's contribution can help turn a contentious route into something that works both national and locally."

CPRE has set five criteria to measure the High Speed rail link against. They are: How high is high [speed]? Station location; Cost to the countryside; Community engagement and carbon calucations. For an expanded assessment of these criteria visit its website.

1.42pm:
Lots of regional websites are reporting the news. While they trumpet the possibility of better transport links they also emphasise the lengthy amount of time the plans will take to reach fruition...assuming they do.

The Yorkshire Post headline is:

"High-speed rail on way to region – but it may take time"

While the Scotsman goes for:

"High-speed national rail network to reach Scotland - eventually"

1.32pm:
There's a Twitpic of Gordon Brown viewing the plans for the new network at the site of the proposed terminal in Birmingham if you're interested.

1.29pm:
Anyone remember the 1970s B movie Supertrain? Thought not. Could this be a clue as to what the government has in mind:

1.25pm:
The Commons debate is over. Some non-political reaction:

Anthony Smith, chief executive of rail customer watchdog Passenger Focus:

"Passengers will welcome this bold plan. In the long-term, more and more people are going to want to use the railway. So, a step change in the ability of the network to handle more trains, longer trains and more reliable trains, all key passenger priorities for improvement, is needed now.
This plan represents an important first step in unlocking this potential, that should also free up more space on the rest of the network to handle more regional and local trains. More trains arriving on time are now helping to attract more passengers. Add higher speeds to that and a whole new group of passengers could be tempted to use rail."

David Frost, director general of the British Chambers of Commerce:

"Continued investment in Britain's transport infrastructure will underpin economic growth, support business in driving recovery and create jobs. That is why we support a comprehensive HSR network that provides vital extra capacity and helps British companies compete on a global scale.
"With the public finances in such a poor state, the budget for this important project needs to be carefully considered. HSR is a long-term investment but it cannot be built at the expense of the current rail network. There must now be a binding, cross-party political consensus to ensure that both HSR and upgrades to the existing rail system proceed over the next two decades."

Keith Norman, general secretary of trains drivers' union Aslef:

"Although this is a high-speed initiative, we're still playing 'catch-up' with the rest of Europe.
"The public must be assured that the funding for a high-speed line will not be poached from the development or improvement of 'traditional' rail lines. And we must be assured that it will not mean a cutback on incentives to increase freight on rail."

1.18pm:
Wolverhampton South West MP Rob Marris asks if there could be double decker trains as on the continent and for an assurance that there will be sufficient space for bikes.
Khan only says that the government will build a network "fit for purpose".

1.12pm:
John Prescott is unsurprisingly effusive in his praise on his blog:

This will at last connect the Midlands and the North by high speed rail to the South and Europe and finally fulfill an empty promise made by the Tories 20 years ago, which they failed to deliver.
It will make Britain a high speed rail country, which is good for the North and the Midlands and good for the environment. More importantly it will also help to reduce the economic and social differentials between North and South
A modern transport system for a modern Britain that can only be delivered by Labour Governments.

1.09pm:
Jeremy Wright, Conservative MP for Rugby and Kenilworth is assured by Khan that the consultation will not be a "sham" and that the route could be changed, depending on its results.

1.02pm:
Khan says there will be 10,000 construction jobs created and 2,000 permanent jobs.
He says one of the reasons beginning construction in 2015, as the Tories propose, is "daft" is because they would lose the skills that could be transferred from the Crossrail project. There have been a number of questions about whether there are sufficient skilled workers.

In response to another question about the impact of the rail link on people living on/near the proposed route Khan says it is precisely because of those concerns that nothing will be finalised until the government has properly consulted.

12.58pm:
Here's a department of transport map which provides a useful overview of the route:

12.55pm:
Former health secretary Frank Dobson who is MP for King's Cross says the changes to Euston would have a devastating effect on his constituents. He asks if Khan accepts that six or seven blocks of affordable housing would have to be demolished.

Khan says "all the evidence suggests" that Euston is the best site. He says 27 possible locations were looked at and says everything will be done to minimise impact on constituents.

Khan has taken a series of questions, including from Aylesbury MP David Lidington, on the impact this is going to have on constituents.

12.50pm:
Khan says "all options are being considered" in respect of funding.

In response to Baker's question about international links, Khan says they are looking into the possibility of linking Euston to King's Cross (where the Eurostar departs from).

12.47pm:
Enter the Lib Dems' transport spokesman Norman Baker who is, in contrast to Villers, asking plenty of questions. He wants an assurance that the money for the rail link should not be taken away from other rail projects. He also touts Vince Cable's proposals for a national infrastructure bank as a way of funding the new network.

12.44pm:
Back in the Commons shadow transport secretary Theresa Villiers also has words about the third runway, saying the high-speed rail network "should be in addition to a third runway, not an addition to it".
She also repeats Hanham's criticism accusing Labour of failing to commit to an interchange at Heathrow.
Khan responds by saying he finds her criticism "incredible" and shows the Tories are not fit to form a government.
The speaker John Bercow intervenes saying it has been an unusual exchange. Bercow says Khan's statement was over-long and Villers unusually did not ask any questions in her response

12.37pm:
Back in the Lords, Lord Smith the former Labour cabinet minister says there are issues to be ironed out but the "economic and social incremental benefits will be well worth it".
But he asks Adonis if now is not a "golden opportunity" to consider reversing the decision of his predecessor to allow a third runway at Heathrow.
Adonis unsurprisingly makes no commitment of the sort.

12.31pm:
Incidentally, Network Rail maintenance workers have voted today in favour of strikes. If signallers also vote to strike, parts of the rail network could shut down over Easter.

12.27pm:
Transport minister Sadiq Khan is now announcing the details of the high-speed rail strategy in the Commons.
He is repeating Adonis's statement as far as I can tell, talking of this being a "once in the lifetime opportunity".
Capacity for consumers and freight would be released on the west coast mainline as a result of the new network.
It would be 70 minutes from Birmingham to Canary Wharf and 1h 40mins from Leeds to Canary Wharf.
He says the network would have the potential to be extended to other cities.

12.20pm:
Adonis rejects Hanham's criticism that the government has reject an on-site station at Heathrow. He says there does not appear to be a business case for an on-site station at the moment, which is why he has asked Mawhinney to look into it. The peer will report in three months time on the business case and "where it [the Heathrow station] would be placed".
Adonis points out that the Conservative proposal, based on that of the engineering firm Arup, does not provide for a station that is actually on-site but one that is 2.5 miles from the airport, requiring all passengers to undertake a transit journey.

12.13pm:
For clarification London to Glasgow/Edinburgh would be 3 and a half hours, according to Adonis.

12.11pm:
Responding to opposition questions Adonis says the project would have to be state-led but there could be "significant contributions" from the private sector, particularly with respect to stations.

Adonis says that if the correct parliamentary procedures are followed 2015 as a construction start date is unfeasible.

The Tory speaker was Baroness Hanham by the way.

12.07pm:
The Tories are pleased that Mawhinney has been appointed to look at the possibility of a station at Heathrow as they had been at odds with the government over the location of the station linking the airport to the network.

12.02pm:
The Tory peer says the proposals "lack cost detail", contain "no viable route options" and there is no indication of when detailed planning will begin.

12.00pm:
Here's the detailed route:

11.56am:
The reports can be found on the Department of Transport website.

Adonis has stopped speaking.

A Conservative peer (sorry, not sure of her name) says she "half-congratulates" the government.

11.55am:
The main London terminal would be Euston, while in Birmingham it would be Curzon Street.

Former transport secretary Lord Mawhinney has been appointed to investigate whether a new station should be built at Heathrow as part of the network.

An estimated 10,000 jobs would be created.

11.53am:
Adonis confirms construction would not begin until after Crossrail completed (i.e. 2017)
Estimated cost of between £15.8bn and £17.4bn for first 120 miles of network from London to West Midlands. Total cost for the Y-shaped network would be £30bn. Adonis says there would be £2 of benefit for every £1 spent.
He says it would "sustainable" because there is less carbon per passenger compared to air travel.

11.48am:
Journey times from London to the west Midlands would be reduced to between 30 and 50 minutes depending on the stations used.
Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield would be brought within 75 minutes of London, down from around two hours now. The journey time of these cities to Birmingham would also be halved.
London to Edinburgh would be about three hours.

11.44am:
The government's view is that a high-speed rail network "could be the most efficient and sustainable way to provide transport" between London and the West Midlands.

The network will be capable of carrying trains travelling at 250mph. It could triple capacity.

11.40am:
Here's Adonis

Transportl networks are the "life-blood" of UK trade he says. We need a "high capacity" and "efficient" network.

11.38am:
Still waiting for Adonis. The Mail suggests the government can't afford the rail link.

This is the Conservatives' preferred route from Arup:

11.16am:
The Tories would take the high speed link closer to Heathrow (approximately two minutes closer) and take begin construction in 2015 (two years earlier).
They say:

Labour have got high speed rail wrong for the economy and wrong for the environment. Their line to Birmingham leaves the North, Scotland and Wales out of the massive social, economic and regeneration benefits of high speed rail. And failing to take high speed rail through Heathrow, would be a big mistake and a major lost opportunity for the environment. Labour's deeply misguided support for a third runway has distorted their approach to high speed rail.

11.12am:
It's rare to have good news stories regarding transport in the UK, but today might fit the bill. As rail workers and BA staff prepare to strike, the transport secretary, Lord Adonis, will stand up in the Lords at 11.30 to announce plans for a high-speed rail network, including a London to Birmingham route.

The announcement has been widely previewed – here is a good ITN curtain-raiser video, and Adonis wrote about his plans in the Times – but there are plenty of details to be confirmed. They include:

• The precise speeds and journey times.
• The cost and how it will be funded.
• When construction will begin (2017 is considered the earliest date).
• The environmental impact; it will go throught the Chiltern hills, an area of outstanding natural beauty in England and Wales.
• The route beyond Birmingham and estimated timescale for the V-shaped network touted to run through Manchester to Glasgow on the west side of the UK, and Leeds and Edinburgh on the east side.

The journey (if you were the train driver) would look something like this, although not quite as fast.

The Tories, incidentally have called the plans a "big mistake". More on that to follow