David Cameron has promised that, if he wins, he will reduce the size of the House of Commons, probably by 10 per cent. Andrew Tyrie has set out the scheme in detail. It sounds like a sensible non-partisan idea. Britain has the largest parliament of any major democracy. We also suffer from the Redistribution of Seats Act of 1944 which, by its bad drafting, guarantees an increase in the number of English MPs whenever there is a general redistricting.

With only months to go till the next election, all the major parties have been setting out their vision and ideas for the country. Late last year David Cameron delivered the Hugo Young lecture attempting to row back from his vitriolic anti-governmental conference speech and lay out his prospectus for Britain. But his speech was highly worrying as it demonstrated his flawed understanding of socioeconomic problems, and lacked any coherent analysis.

I've got a bit of a confession. Whilst my head tells me climate change is one of the biggest challenges we face, my heart hasn't felt as passionate about the issue as giving every child the best shot at life, or transforming the way we look after older people. And although I kid myself I'm making an effort, I don't live anywhere near as green and environmentally-friendly a life as I should.

The casual anti-Jewishness of most of British society, prevalent before the war, and found everywhere from the royal family to TS Eliot to George Orwell, has largely disappeared. Instead, like a virulent bacillus, hatred of Jews finds new hosts: amongst Islamist hate-mongers, the ultra-left and neo-fascists on the streets, and in the upper echelons of academia and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The Tories have fallen in love with Nudge theory. But while the veneer of Nudge works well with wonks and the chattering classes, the deeper story of Tory nudge policy in local government is more troubling.

Every child death is a tragedy. And when a child dies violently, public outrage rightly follows: how can we have failed to protect the most vulnerable?

But new findings from researchers at the university of Bournemouth, showing that the number of violent deaths among children in England and Wales has fallen by almost 40 per cent since 1974, is something to welcome, even as we strive to learn from the cases that go horribly wrong. Today, the death rate is the fourth lowest in the western world, the result, the researchers say, of improvements in social care systems and a greater focus on child poverty.

In the lion's den: Obama before the Republicans shows the way for UK leaders' debates

Up and down the country town halls will be preparing their election year budgets. Many Tory councils facing yearly or all-out elections (like in London) will be pledging populist two- or even four-year council tax freezes to their electorates. How any pledges of this sort can be made without even more savage cuts to local services than the ones being developed now in council finance departments should be a matter of real concern.

If you were in student politics in the 1980s you were handed a lot of leaflets. I remember only one. It was given to me by an Iraqi student, who was also a member of the university Labour Club. It was April 1988, and it had a photograph of dead Kurdish women and children lying in the street in Halabja. They were the victims of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. About 5,000 civilians were killed by chemical weapons dropped from Iraqi jets flying repeated sorties over the Kurdish town of Halabja. The weapons contained a combination of mustard gas, sarin, VX, and other nerve agents. Some victims died immediately; others died slowly in unimaginable agonies. Many more were injured, burnt, or blinded and many babies have been born with birth defects since.

Just two months ago it looked like President Obama might soar into his first state of the union address, riding high on the passage of healthcare reform and ready to lay out a bold second year policy agenda. In the event, he rather shuffled in, weighed down by grim approval ratings, and the recent loss in Massachusetts that has put healthcare on hold.