Nick Clegg is about to give an interview to the Today programme. I'll cover it here, before taking a look at some of the other broadcast interviews he's been giving today. As for the rest of the day, here's what's coming up.
9am: The conference opens. Delegates debate party rule changes affecting emergency motions and appeals.
9.40am: Delegates debate a motion calling for rules stopping men who have had sex with men (MSM) from giving blood to be reformed.
10.20am: A debate on social care. Delegates debate a call for the establishment of an older people's commissioner.
11.15am: Steve Webb, the pensions minister, delivers his speech to the conference.
11.35am: Paul Burstow, the health minister, John Pugh, the co-chair of the Lib Dem parliamentary health committee and Shirley Williams, the Lib Dem grandee and health bill "rebel", take part in a question and answer session on health.
12.20pm: Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, deliver his speech to the conference.
2.30pm: Delegates debate a motion on green policies saying the legislation to set up a Green Investment Bank should be introduced next year.
3.30pm: Andrew Stunell, the communities minister, delivers his speech to the conference.
3.50pm: Delegates debate a motion calling for the establishment of a national institute of wellbeing.
5.20pm: Delegates debate motion urging the Lib Dems to make a renewed commitment to the principles of "community politics".
As usual, I'll be covering all the Lib Dem conference news, as well as looking at the papers and the best politics on the web. I'll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm and an afternoon one at about 6pm. After that my colleague Paul Owen will take over the blog and keep it going into the evening.
Nick Clegg is on the Today programme now. Justin Webb is interviewing him.
Q: You said the government would not approve of "gratuitously offensive" bank bonuses. Aren't the current bonuses paid to bankers gratuitously offensive?
Clegg says he would like to have gone further. But in the Project Merlin agreement, the banks have committed themselves to bringing bonuses down.
Q: But it's not happening very quickly?
Clegg says it is not happening as quickly as he would like. But the government is introducing the greatest move towards transparency in this area the country has seen.
And Vince Cable has said shareholders should have more power in this area, Clegg says. Corporate governance is going to change, even though perhaps not as quickly as people would wish.
Q: But the cuts are taking place now. Why do you need to consult on these changes?
Clegg says in most areas of government people consult.
Q: When will the Vickers recommendations be implemented?
Clegg says everyone in government would like to do it as quickly as possible. But it is important to get it right. Vickers has set 2019 as a deadline. But that's a "backstop date", Clegg says. It might be possible to implement the changes ringfencing the retails arms of banks before then.
The interview is still going on.
Q: What is your evidence that the bond markets would punish the UK if the government changed its economic plans?
Clegg says when the government came to powers, other countries had lower deficits. But they are being penalised because they are not tackling their deficits.
Q: But it looks as if Italy is being punished by the markets because of lack of growth, which is the problem here. And UK debt has to be paid back over a longer period of time?
Clegg says the government has pulled the economy back from the brink, creating the space where it can do more to promote growth.
Q: But Italy is being punished because it has not got enough growth. We've got the same problem.
Italy has other problems, Clegg says. It has an ageing population.
Q: Aren't you conceding then that the UK is not in the same position Italy?
Clegg says that saying Britain is not Italy is a statement of the obvious.
The interview is still going on.
Q: What is the Lib Dem policy on the euro?
Clegg says the government is not going to join the euro this parliament.
Q: Does that mean the prospect of Britain joining is over for a generation?
Clegg says it is difficult to predict the future. He says he does not expect it to happen in his lifetime. Then he corrects himself, and says he does not expect Britain to join in his political lifetime, while he is Lib Dem leader.
He also says that no one predicted that the countries that signed up to the euro would be allowed to break the rules in the way that he did.
Nick Clegg's interview is now over. He's done various other interviews this morning too. I'll post a summary of the highlights shortly.
Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
Nick Clegg has given interviews to ITV's Daybreak, BBC News, Sky and the Today programme this morning. Here are the highlights. I've taken some of the quotes from the Press Association and PoliticsHome.
• Clegg said that joining the euro soon after it was set up - which was Lib Dem policy - would have been a "huge, huge error". Asked about Britain joining, he said: "I think, clearly, with the benefit of hindsight, you can say it would have been a huge, huge error."
• He claimed that no one predicted the euro would descend into crisis in the way that it did. "I don't think anyone could have predicted at the time that the euro was created that the rules, which were supposed to be in place to ensure that everybody looked after their own financial affairs properly, would be so spectacularly ignored and broke," he said. Given that Italian debt was 115% of GDP when it joined the euro, and that in theory 60% was supposed to be the limit, this is an assertion that the Eurosceptics will find hard to accept. Clegg also claimed that, if the rules had been observed, the euruld not be in the trouble it is now. My own view remains that if the disciplines - and they were strict fiscal disciplines - on which the euro was originally launched had been respected and adhered to, the euro would not now be in the trouble that it was."
• He said that he did not expect Britain to join the euro during his political lifetime. "I doubt very, very much that, during my political lifetime, certainly as leader of the Liberal Democrats, that we will see the UK enter into the euro," he said.
• He refused to deny a report in the Times (paywall) saying that he and David Cameron disagreed about whether to support Palestine's bid to be recognised as a state at the United Nations. "I don't think it helps at all on issues like that for there to be a sort of running commentary on who says what in the government." Ministers were agreed that the Palestinians should get statehood as part of a two-state solution. But there was "a difficult judgment to make" about whether the UN bid would help.
• He firmly denied that he would stand down after one term as deputy prime minister. Asked about the claim, he said: "Not true. Emphatically, totally, 100%, 2,000% not true." But he refused to discuss what he had said to his wife Miriam about this issue. "I can't tell you about conversations Miriam and I have," he said. I'm just going to draw the line there.
• He suggested that the proposals in the Vickers report on banking reform could be implemented before 2019. 'Vickers has said all of this needs to be implemented by, at the latest, 2019," Clegg said. "I'm pretty confident that basically is a backstop date. As long as we legislate during this parliament, I suspect actually the changes could be implemented well before 2019." But in the Commons last week Cameron said there was a reason for delaying until 2019. 'Vickers recommended legislating in this parliament, but introducing the reforms at the same time as the Basel changes are finalised in 2019, and that is exactly what we will do," Cameron said.
• He insisted that the coalition would last until 2015. When Tim Farron talked about the coalition breaking up after three or four years in his speech on Sunday, some people interpreted that as a sign that it would break up before the 2015 election. Clegg said this would not happen. "This coalition government is going to last the full course. About that, there is absolutely no doubt at all," he said.
• He insisted that he did not find Farron's swipes at the coalition annoying. Asked if Farron got "on his wick", Clegg said: "He doesn't. Tim is an incredibly charismatic performer, he's got a fantastic range in the way he talks to audiences, he uses a lot of humour."
Photograph: David Jones/PA
Tim Farron, the Lib Dem president, gave an interview to Radio 5 Live this morning that is being written up as Farron denying that he wants to be Lib Dem leader. But readers familiar with the way politicians answer questions of this kind will see that he made a point of quite explicitly making it clear that he was not ruling it out. I've taken the quotes from PoliticsHome.
I love doing my job and my job is to be the MP for Westland. That is my number one job. I have a mandate from the Liberal Democrats as well to be their president, I have absolutely no ambition other than that. Of course there is no ruling it out in the future.
Farron said that he had three young children (as well as an older one) and that he was more worried about spending time with them than about being Lib Dem leader. "If I get to 80 and I have not been leader I will not lose any sleep over it but if I get to 80 and have missed my kids growing up I will lose bags of sleep," he said.
But he also said this about his ambitions.
In my opinion you should be ambitious about your ideals and the things you want to achieve not your position.
This is almost word for what what Gordon Brown used to say when he was asked about wanting to be leader. And we all knew what to make of that.
Lib Dem delegates have called on the government to make it easier for gay men - or men who have sex with men (MSM), in the jargon - to give blood. At the moment MSM are banned from giving blood for life. Recently the government announced that the rules will change in November, and that at that point they will be allowed to give blood if they have not had sex within the last 12 months. But delegates voted for a motion saying this was still discriminatory. They urged the government to end the ban and to work with medical experts "to ensure adequate criteria and restrictions are put in place that reflect the risk posed by the behaviour of each individual."
More on Tim Farron and his leadership ambitions. Amber Elliott from Total Politics has sent me the comments Farron made about this in an interview with Total Politics earlier this month. Here's the key excerpt.
"If there's a vacancy tomorrow I wouldn't do it – for family reasons, essentially," Farron says. "I don't say definitely not. I don't say definitely never. My official answer – and I mean this – is I hope we recover, do incredibly well, and Nick Clegg is such a success that by the time he steps down, I'm too decrepit to be thought of."
Sir Menzies Campbell, the former Lib Dem leader, has joined the debate about the euro. (See 8.50am.) He told BBC News that the party's policy on the euro was "right at the time".
I don't think the problem was in the scheme of the European single currency - the problem was enforcement. People assumed, including myself, that countries that signed up to it would meet their obligations under the scheme and palpably they have not. I think we were right at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight you can reach an alternative judgment.
Lord McNally, the justice minister, has told a fringe meeting that the Ministry of Justice is trying to "fend off" the desire of Number 10 to insert new offences and stricter sentences into the legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders bill. According to PoliticsHome, he said this.
It's in grave danger of becoming a Christmas Tree of a bill on which baubles are hung.
Here are some quotes from delegates who spoke in the debate about gay men being allowed to donate blood. (See 10.08am.) I've taken them from the Press Association.
This is from Dij Davies, from West Lothian Lib Dems.
The new rules are better, don't get me wrong. But they are still fundamentally flawed and do not adequately safeguard the blood bank. The deferral does not take into account whether the men who have sex with men are using a condom or not, it does not separate those in a relationship from those who engage in sex with casual partners. And, crucially, it asks no such questions of heterosexual people at all.
And this is from Chris Ward, from Guildford, Surrey.
This ban has the potential to kill many more people than gay blood ever will ... A 12-month deferral is not scientific, it does not take into account what is risky sex and what is not, it does not insist that individuals should have been tested before they give blood and subsequently it does not protect the blood bank adequately.
After the vote the Lib Dem MP Stephen Gilbert, who is gay, issued this statement.
Millions of men up and down the country could be potential blood donors and many of them wish to help people in need by donating blood. They are prevented from doing so by the stigma that all men who have sex with men engage in disproportionately risky behaviour.
Liberal Democrat conference has today called for an end to stereotypes dominating decisions on who can donate and who can't. When it comes to donating blood, the safety of those receiving transfusions must always be paramount.
Steve Webb, the pensions minister, is delivering his speech to the conference. He begins with a rather good joke. Pointing out that Shirley Williams will be speaking on the platform in about 20 minutes, he says that for the first time in his life there will be more people in the hall when finishes his speech than at the start.
I'll post a summary of it shortly.
Photograph: Guardian
Steve Webb, the pensions minister, started his speech to the conference with a joke about how boring his speeches were. Having now read his text, I'm afraid I can see why. Has anyone ever given an exciting speech about pensions? Still, there were some snippets. Here are the main points.
• Webb dismissed suggestions that the coalitions was slashing welfare spending. Cash spending on housing benefit was £22bn at the start of the parliament. And at the end of the parliament it will be around £22bn, he said. Disability living allowance cost £12.3bn at the start of this parliament. And at the start the the new parliament the new personal independence payment will cost the same in real terms. Much of what was being said about welfare cuts was "exaggerated".
• He said that he would take action to stop companies cheating employees by using bribes to persuade them to opt out of final salary pension schemes. Some firms are offering workers financial incentives to transfer to "money purchase" schemes, which are often far less valuable in the long term. Webb said some firms were offering people large cash incentives just before Christmas, or making an offer and telling people they had just 24 hours to decide.
Whilst firms have every right to talk to their workers and ex-workers about getting their pension rights in a different way, we need to make sure that people are making well-informed decisions and not losing out on valuable pension rights without realising it.
• He accused Labour of "shockingly" raising the cold weather payment to £25 per week but failing to budget to maintain that increase in future years. That meant that, under Labour plans, it was due to go back down to £8.50 per week after the general election. The coalition has reversed that cut, he said.
• He said that 10m people would enter workplace pensions as a result of automatic pension enrollment which is coming into force next summer.
• He said that he would produce a paper later this year on how people with money in lots of different pension schemes could put it all in one "big fat pot".
• He said he was looking at what could be done to cut pension scheme charges.
Do take a look at the Comment is free rolling comment blog from the conference. Among today's contributions is one from George Monbiot, who has put up a terrific short post about corporate lobbying at the conference. Here's an extract.
Amid a series of pathetic excuses, Lib Dem officials tried to claim that the only purpose of their "corporate day" is to talk to business and hear its concerns. The fact that the corporations they're talking to happen to be paying £800 a person for this access is neither here nor there.
There are two problems with this explanation. The first is that it's not as if big business is short of opportunities to have its voice heard by politicians: in fact it seems to be the only voice the current government (Lib Dems and all) listens to. The second is that, while the payment is insignificant for Imperial Tobacco (gross profit last year £5.5bn), it means rather more to the Lib Dems, who have been in dire financial straits ever since their chief donor absconded to the Dominican Republic to avoid a seven-year prison sentence.
Back in the conference hall, the health Q&A is under way at the moment. Shirley Williams is on the platform and she's making it clear that she is still unhappy about the health bill. Some of the questions are very critical too. But the tone is polite and Paul Burstow, the health minister, seemed to impress some delegates when he said the health secretary would have to retain legal and political accountability for the NHS. (Critics have been worried about provisions in the bill that appear to show the health secretary will abandon this kind of responsibility.) The Lib Dem rebellion on this issue is not yet over, but almost certainly passed its peak.
You can read all today's Guardian politics stories here. And all the Guardian politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today's paper, are here.
As for the rest of the papers, here are two columns that are particularly good.
• Steve Richards in the Independent says Tim Farron's speech to the conference on Sunday was "a political work of art, mapping out a more social democrat argument while declaring several times his overwhelming admiration for Nick Clegg's leadership".
Farron was much more mischievous when he turned to public-service reform. For parties supposedly on the centre left, public-service reform is almost as divisive as Europe is for the Conservatives. It was at the heart of the Blair/Brown policy divide and still causes unresolved tension within Labour. For the Lib Dems the tensions are more immediate because they are in power. Farron appeared to praise Clegg for challenging the NHS reforms: "Who is taking the Blairite nonsense out of the NHS bill? Nick Clegg!"
This was almost Shakespearean in its multi-layered trouble-making. In relation to public-service reform, Clegg is a Blairite. Broadly he supported the original NHS reforms, as did his closest ministerial ally Danny Alexander. Both moved fast when they realised that a political catastrophe was looming, but were relaxed when the mountainous White Paper appeared from nowhere. It took the social democrat Shirley Williams to recognise the practical dangers arising from Andrew Lansley's revolution.
The term "liberal" is the most flexible in British politics. From the left to the right, nearly everyone claims to be liberal – one reason why Liberal Democrats have at times appealed to disillusioned Tories and Labour voters. But now, at the point in the political cycle where they have most leeway, the reluctance to debate and resolve differences limits their influence within the Coalition.
• Rachel Sylvester in the Times (paywall) says Nick Clegg may be trying to replace "fluffy bunny voters" with another type.
In his new study of coalition Government, Clegg's Coup, Jasper Gerard argues that the Lib Dems need to exchange what he says one minister calls "fluffy bunny voters", the idealists who prefer ideological purity to power, with realists (wily foxes?) who are willing to make the compromises required by government.
The "coup" that he describes is Mr Clegg's attempt to turn his party from "some pressure group of perpetual and immature opposition" to a "centrist, liberal party of coalition" of the sort seen on the Continent. There are, he believes, grounds for optimism for the Lib Dems in an age that is about "the inspiration and invention of the individual, not the march of the masses".
So far Mr Clegg seems to be losing fluffy bunnies faster than he is winning over wily foxes, but there are still many undecided voters. According to a Populus poll for The Times, carried out before this week's conference, more than a third of the electorate say they might be prepared to vote Lib Dem. The challenge for the Lib Dems is to turn that might into a would. It may be difficult but it's not impossible.
My colleague Paul Owen has just been to a Q&A with Sarah Teather, the children and families minister in the Department for Education. On Sunday Teather announced that the government would soon begin piloting voluntary parenting classes for every parent of a child under five in three or four areas. Today she was asked whether children should be given parenting lessons in schools. Teather said that on average people now had children later in life. She said she was 37 and had not had children yet, and asked: "What on earth good would me learning about parenting at 13 be now?"
She said she felt that "sticking it [parenting classes] on the school curriculum somehow absolves society for its responsibility". Learning about parenting skills was "a wider job for society", she said.
Teather also gave a firm defence of the "ebacc" - the new performance measure pupils achieve if they get grade C or above in English, maths, a foreign language, two sciences and history or geography. She said the ebacc was "intended to try to encourage schools to offer a wider breadth of subjects and encourage pupils to stay in the kind of academic subjects that will help them" in the future. "Even if they go down vocational routes they still need those basic skills." She said a "surprising number of schools", for example, entered no children for foreign languages.
And she gave short shrift to claims from delegates that the name ebacc – which is short for English baccalaureate – was confusing because a baccalaureate was the equivalent of A-levels in other European countries. "The point behind the label is really to get people to aspire … It's to try to encourage schools to think that it's a good thing to have more children go through these subjects." She added: "We can argue about that label till the cows come home – it's unlikely to change."
Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, is speaking now.
He says the government will be "the greenest government ever".
He says that he and Vince Cable have been competing for the "most unpopular minister" slot in the poll of Tory activists on ConservativeHome website. That means they "must be doing something right", he says.
Chris Huhne says cutting carbon is vital to the economic recovery.
Cutting carbon is also a vital part of our recovery from the deepest recession since 1929.
Then we had David Lloyd George's Yellow Book: now we have Green Growth ...
Every month, more than 300,000 people leave the unemployment register to find new jobs.
Thousands of those jobs are now in the low carbon economy. It is our route to recovery. Green business is good business.
There are now a million jobs in low carbon goods and services in Britain, and they are growing rapidly.
Chris Huhne says the government is creating new jobs in nuclear "without a penny of public subsidy".
Chris Huhne says some people say that Britain should not be pushing low carbon business because other countries are not doing this. This is "nonsense", he says.
Look at China, with six of the biggest renewable companies in the world.
Installing wind turbines across the South China Sea.
Building 28 nuclear power stations in the time it will take us to build one.
Building 10,000 miles of high speed rail in the time we will take to go from London to Birmingham.
Covering 40 per cent of the Chinese population with low carbon economy zones.
If that's doing nothing, then climate sceptics have a weird idea of zero.
Chris Huhne says it would also be a mistake for Britain to rely on oil and gas.
To say it is to laugh at it.World gas - and hence electricity - prices have leapt by a third thanks to Libya and far eastern growth.
Global factors.
So we should surely try to limit our dependence on oil and gas, not increase it.
Chris Huhne says he wants to help consumers with fuel bills.
Today I can announce a new package to help the hard-pressed consumer this winter and every winter.
We are determined to get tough with the big six energy companies to ensure that the consumer gets the best possible deal.
We want simpler tariffs.
Requiring energy companies to tell you whether you could buy more cheaply on another tariff.
And you can save real money.
Ofgem, the independent regulator, calculates that the average household could save £200 by switching to the lowest cost supplier - but fewer than one in seven households do so.
Huhne criticises the Times for the way they reported his comments on this subject at the weekend (paywall).
Contrary to the Times' report, I neither said nor meant that this was laziness.
It is just that consumers still think that they face the same bill whoever they go to.
Britain privatised the energy companies, but most consumers never noticed.
Chris Huhne says he wants to give Ofgem new powers.
Ofgem should also have new powers to secure redress for consumers – money back for bad behaviour.
Ofgem is already stamping out bad doorstep practices that lead to energy mis-selling, with the guilty companies suffering swingeing fines.
And we will stop the energy companies from blocking action by Ofgem, which can delay matters by a year.
I remember when I was on the board of Which? the Consumers' Association that the best guarantee of a good deal is more competition for your pound.
We want to encourage new small companies to come into the market.
Chris Huhne stresses the importance of Britain's links with Europe.
Being part of Europe is not a political choice. It is a geographical reality.
It always was. And until the tectonic plates break up, it always will be.
We will not, as Liberal Democrats in government, weaken the ties that deliver our national interest through Euro.
He defends the importance of compromise in politics.
Many countries that have suffered from the debt crisis since then – Portugal, Spain, Italy – had smaller budget deficits than us.Yet we can borrow money at lower rates than at any time in three hundred years.
This coalition government saved Britain's credit standing by compromise.
And he ends with a warning to the Conservatives.
The danger if you don't compromise is now clear from America.
There the markets looked over the brink when the mad-cap Republican right in Congress would not compromise with the President.
Let that be a warning to the Conservative right here: we need no Tea Party Tendency in Britain.
If you fail to compromise, if you fail to seek the common ground that unites us, if you insist that only you have the answers, if you keep beating the anti-European drum, if you slaver over tax cuts for the rich, then you will put in peril the most crucial achievement of this Government.
You will wreck the nation's economy and common purpose.
We are all in this together and we can't get out of it alone.
Chris Huhne has now finished. Full details of the measures that will give strengthen the rights of energy consumers are now on a news release on the Department for Energy and Climate Change's website.
Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA
Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, had two main themes in his speech. There was a departmental announcement, and there was a political announcement - a warning to the Conservative right. Here are the key points.
• Huhne said he was forcing energy companies to tell customers if cheaper deals were available. The firms have already agreed in principle that this will start this winter, and Huhne wants to ensure that by next year information about cheaper tariffs is actually displayed on energy bills. He cited this as one of several measures being announced to protect the consumer, including a crackdown on predatory pricing and a plan that could lead to Ofgem having the power to order energy firms to refund customers if they break the rules. (See 12.49pm.)
• He suggested that Tory extremists were putting the future of the coalition at risk. He expressed his faith in "partnership politics" and he said that the Tea Party in America were putting the American economy at risk because of their refusal to compromise. Addressing the Conservative right, he suggested that they were behaving like the Tea Party.
If you fail to compromise, if you fail to seek the common ground that unites us, if you insist that only you have the answers, if you keep beating the anti-European drum, if you slaver over tax cuts for the rich, then you will put in peril the most crucial achievement of this Government. You will wreck the nation's economy and common purpose.
Politically, this had the effect of associating George Osborne with Sarah Palin, and suggesting that the Lib Dems represent the centre ground.
Here's a lunchtime summary.
• The CBI has broadly welcomed Chris Huhne's plans to force energy companies to tell consumers if cheaper deals are available. Competitive energy markets benefit businesses and consumers," said John Cridland, the CBI's director general. "Energy customers should be helped to get the best deal and we support easier switching of accounts." But he also expressed some reservations. "We must remember that prices also reflect the critical need for energy investment for a low-carbon future, where there are opportunities for new entrants to the market," he said. Friends of the Earth said: "Chris Huhne is right to target the Big Six, but his fighting talk must be matched with bold action to slash energy waste and cut our dependency on expensive fossil fuels." (See 1.05pm.)
• Chris Huhne has been criticised by a senior Lib Dem for describing some Tories as "slavering over tax cuts for the rich". On the World at One, Shirley Williams said: "Language like that is not very helpful at all." She was talking about the language Huhne used in his conference speech. (See 1.05pm.) She went on: "We can't expect an idealistic, lovely friendship - life's not like that, is it? But one doesn't need to bash the other side with all abuse you can find."
• Lib Dems have called for the government to abandon the ban on sexually active gay men giving blood.
• Paul Burstow, the Lib Dem health minister, has said that he expects further changes to be made to the health bill. Speaking during a Q&A session on the bill, which has just gone to the Lords, he said: "I've never known a bill, in my 14 years in parliament, that has gone to the House of Lords and come back exactly as it was when it left the House of Commons." Delegates expressed concerns about the bill during the session, although there was no public row and Burstow made an effort to stress the significance of the changes already made. "The commitment I make to this conference is we haven't stopped listening, we are keen to carry on listening, we are keen to make changes if they are needed to this bill to put beyond doubt that we as a party are committed to a comprehensive health service, free at the point of use, funded by general taxation and based on people's need and nothing else," he said.
• Tim Farron has sought to play down the idea that he wants to be Lib Dem leader. In an interview this morning he said that he had no ambition to be leader, but he did not rule the idea out. (See 9.48am.) Later, in an interview on the Daily Politics, he was more explicit.
I have no such ambition. It is not going to come up, Nick Clegg is doing a brilliant job. I would refuse. Not only is he doing a good job but he is also a mate who needs some support. Everybody's ambition should be to be like Simon Hughes.
(I'm not sure this is particularly helpful. One Lib Dem website described an interview Hughes gave at the weekend as "a PR disaster on almost every level".)
• Nick Clegg has claimed that no one predicted the euro would descend into crisis in the way that it did. "I don't think anyone could have predicted at the time that the euro was created that the rules, which were supposed to be in place to ensure that everybody looked after their own financial affairs properly, would be so spectacularly ignored and broke," he said.
• Clegg has said that the government's planned banking reforms could be introduced "well before" 2019. This contradicts what David Cameron said last week, when he told MPs during PMQs that there were good reasons for delaying implementation until 2019.
• Lib Dems have called for the creation of an older people's commissioner for England. They backed a motion proposing the idea and also calling for the care system to be reformed along the lines in the Dilnot report. Paul Burstow, the Lib Dem health minister, said afterwards: "The white paper that we are producing for the spring will seek to address many of the issues raised here today at conference, and will help provide a Liberal blueprint for the future of adult social care."
The continuing Conservative whispering campaign about the future of the Human Rights Act is beginning to unnerve some leading Liberal Democrats, writes my colleague Alan Travis. Lord McNally, the Lib Dem justice minister, who deals with human rights legislation, is growing more vehement in his insistence that the Tories have to realise they did not win an outright majority last year.
Conservative speculation that the Tories are preparing new moves to repeal the HRA were fuelled last month when David Cameron insisted that "phoney human rights concerns" should not prevent proper punishment of the rioters.
But McNally says the Tories have to face up to the "reality'' that they did not win the election.
"We fought the election on retaining the Human Rights Act. They fought the election on repealing it," he told delegates this morning. "The compromise was that we would examine the arguments for a British bill of rights, based on and building on, the European convention on human rights. This was a long way for the Tories to travel," he explained.
"We were going to establish a parliamentary commission but the prime minister then got spooked by the Daily Mail and it was decided we would have a non-parliamentary commission which will report in 2012. We shall await its report."
He points out that pro-HRA parties got 60% of the vote in the election and there was no mandate for repeal: "There is no majority in either house to repeal the HRA," he said. "It won't happen in this parliament. It will not happen on my watch." Mcnally insisted
My colleague Paul Owen has just been watching Evan Harris and Simon Hughes debate whether the coalition is a "marriage of convenience or relationship from hell".
Harris, the former MP for Oxford West, seems to have taken over from Hughes, the deputy leader, as a lightning rod for dissent in the party in recent months, and the two clashed over how much influence the wider party should have over future coalition policies. Motions passed at the Lib Dem conference – such as the one setting up a panel to examine decriminalising drugs – become party policy, but they don't become coalition policy. Harris said: "We need to keep our party democratic. We need to work out what the role is for a democratic party for a party in government." If the coalition introduces policies not in its original agreement, "there should be some way of checking that with the party".
Hughes said Lib Dem MPs now had to agree any such policies, but Harris said that wasn't good enough: "You must not be frozen out," he told delegates. "If there had been advice from the wider party then the tuition fees train crash could have been avoided."
Evans also said Lib Dems "have to make it clear that if the parliamentary arithmetic is right we are clearly capable of docking with either party". He said the Lib Dems had to be "equidistant" between Labour and the Tories, and should start attacking the Conservatives in their local election leaflets. "We can't go into the election having just knocked Labour for five years."
But a delegate told him: "We cannot be equidistant while we are in government with the Conservatives." Evans said he meant at the time of the next election.
Hughes said that if the party could "differentiate ourselves from the Tories" at the next election with clear, deliverable policies it could end up being a part of a number of future governments. "You might one day be complaining at conference that it would be good to have a spell in opposition because we're so fed up of being in government all the time," he told the delegates.
The deputy leader made a rather strange suggestion about how the Lib Dems should have handled the fact all its MPs pledged to abolish tuition fees and the coalition then tripled them. Hughes said they should have passed legislation abolishing fees, thus keeping their promise, and then passed the new legislation introducing the new system. I'm not sure people would have seen that as the Lib Dems keeping their promise.
Jackie Ashley has posted her verdict on the Chris Huhne speech on the Comment is free rolling blog. Here's an extract.
So the "I'm more anti-Tory than you" game continues in Birmingham. Today Chris Huhne proudly announces that he's vying with Vince Cable to be the most unpopular minister on the Conservative Home website, and adds in a bashing for "Tea party Tories" to try to boost his chances there.
Mark Pritchard, the secretary of the Conservative backbench 1922 committee who recently got onto the front page of the Daily Telegraph by calling for a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU, has issued a statement responding to Chris Huhne's Tea Party jibe. (See 1.05pm.)
After the next election, I suspect many senior Lib Dems will find time on their hands to hold their very own tea parties, drinking expensive yellow tea, a favourite of the Imperial Court. By then, Tim Farron, more of a Tetley Tea man, would have been elected the new Lib Dem leader.
Vince Cable, the business secretary, told a fringe meeting at the conference that factories should open their doors to schoolchildren so that they can find out what manufacturing is really like. It's no longer all "flames from the forges", he said.
I went round Jaguar Land Rover yesterday in Solihull. What struck me was the number of young women on the production line, quite different from the old image of manufacturing. It was clean, sophisticated, highly-skilled, gender neutral, a different kind of work altogether. One of the things we are doing is encouraging companies to open their factories once a year to just let the local schoolkids in and just have a look at it. The scales drop from their eyes and they see a totally different world from what they had imagined and some of them may be persuaded this is a good thing to do.
Nick Clegg has also distanced himself from Chris Huhne's "slavering over tax cuts for the rich" comment about some Tories. He was not as critical as Shirley Williams (see 1.40pm) but, when asked whether he agreed with Huhne's choice of words, he replied:
We will all choose our own words ... I'm not there to vet the individual words of senior Liberal Democrats.
Clegg said Huhne was making a point about compromise. "The point that Chris was making, whether you like the choice of words or not, was a very simple one - which is, in a coalition government compromise is the glue that holds the government together," he said.
It wouldn't be a Lib Dem conference if we didn't have someone slagging off the Guardian. (See here, at 3.29pm and 3.30pm.) Now Andrew Stunell is having a go. Stunell is a communities minister. He was also a member of the four-person Lib Dem coalition negotiating team. Only you would not know that ...
Newspapers full of the back stories of the four-man Liberal Democrat negotiation team of Danny Alexander, Chris Huhne and David Laws.
I'm not bitter. Honest. The Guardian wouldn't have spelt my name right anyway.
It didn't get a laugh. Maybe that's because the delegates are fond of the Guardian. Or maybe it's just because they did not get the Grauniad reference.
It's heavy going at the conference this afternoon. The speech from Andrew Stunell, the Lib Dem communities minister, was hardly scintillating. But he had a respectable announcement to make. Here are the main points.
• Stunell said that councils could be given the power to impose higher council tax charges on homes that have been empty for more than two years.
We will shortly be consulting on whether councils should be given the power to charge extra council tax on homes in their area that have been empty for more than two years, through an Empty Homes Premium.Discretionary, naturally. Localist, certainly. With essential safeguards and exemptions, of course. But a nudge to owners to bring abandoned homes back into use.
An extra weapon in a council's armoury in the battle to make better use of our housing stock.
The premium will act as a spur for landlords to bring their properties back into use quickly. And where they don't, it will provide an extra revenue stream for Local Authorities to plough back into bringing more homes back into use.
• He said the government would be encouraging people to renovate empty homes to bring them back into use.
Homesteading – where empty homes are brought back into use through self-renovation – has proven successful both internationally, for instance in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and also back here in the UK, such as in Benwell in Newcastle
Homesteading provides a triple benefit, it gives families a foot on the housing ladder, brings empty homes back into use, and it helps to regenerate whole communities.
So I can also announce today that we will work with local authorities to identify areas where effective homesteading schemes could be delivered to rejuvenate local communities.
• He said the coalition would be the first government for 30 years to deliver an increase in social housing during its time in office.
Tim Farron's leadership ambitions are a little too obvious. As David Blackburn reports at Coffee House, there is now a bit of backlash against him. That might explain why, as the day has gone on, he has been more and more insistent about not wanting to replace Nick Clegg. On Radio 5 Live this morning he was not ruling it out. (See 9.48am.) By the time he appeared on the Daily Politics he was saying that Clegg was doing a "brilliant job". (See 1.40pm.) And then, shortly after that, when he was interviewed by Channel 4's Gary Gibbon, he was even more adamant.
If Nick Clegg wanted to quit, I'd nail his feet to the floor ... I want him to be leader of this party for so long that by the time the vacancy comes up, I'll be too decrepit to take it.
The Lib Dems are debating now happiness. They are discussing a policy paper calling for the establishment of a national institute of wellbeing (a happiness quango?) that would measure whether government policies were increasing wellbeing. You would thought everyone would be in favour of happiness. But they're not. We've now had at least two speeches from delegates strongly attacking the motion. One woman claimed that it was an insult to people who were suffering real social deprivation. And another delegate has just told the conference that liberalism should be about freedom, not just about being nice.
Here's a gallery of Steve Bell sketches from the Lib Dem conference.
Here's a short afternoon reading list.
• Jon Snow on his Channel 4 blog says the conference shows that the Lib Dems are "focused, professional, branded, and coherent".
For many Liberal Democrats at last year's conference, power seemed to have discombobulated, even corrupted the purity of what some regarded as their eccentric roots. But this year there is a swelling, a puffing, a confidence even, and yes, a surprising enjoyment of the power of being in power.
• Stephen Tall at Liberal Democrat Voice looks at the good news and the bad news in the latest polling about the Lib Dems.
Christina Baron has just told the conference that voting in favour of setting up a national institute of wellbeing (see 4.23pm) "is going to make us look really, really silly".
The Lib Dems have voted in favour of imposing a windfall tax on the nuclear industry. They passed a motion on a green stimulus for the economy earlier this afternoon that included an amendment saying the government should "introduce a windfall tax on operators of existing nuclear stations, recovering through taxation the profits they make solely as a result of the introduction of the carbon floor price from April 2013". Paul Steedman, a Friends of the Earth energy campaigner, has warmly welcomed the vote.
Lib Dem members are right to call for a windfall tax on existing nuclear power plants. It's scandalous that they should earn millions of pounds for doing nothing when the government introduces its carbon floor price next year.
Chris Huhne must stop the nuclear industry from benefiting from this hidden subsidy – and spend the money raised helping householders save energy and slash rising fuel bills.
The Lib Dems have voted in favour of setting up a happiness quango. (See 4.23pm.) But it was close. It got through by 158 votes to 122 votes.
Here's an afternoon summary.
• Lib Dems have called for the creation of a national institute of wellbeing, a "happiness quango". It would advise the government on policies that could be implemented to promote wellbeing. The motion was approved in a close vote even though one delegate said it would make the party look "really, really silly". According to the text of the amendment, the Lib Dems are also calling for the creation of a "cabinet-level champion for wellbeing" (ie, a minister for happiness), a European Commissioner for wellbeing, a law saying that big firms should have to report on employee satisfaction and a law allowing company directors to be disqualified for failing to proect the wellbeing of their workers. (See 4.26pm, 4.53pm and 5.26pm.)
• Andrew Stunell, the communities minister, has announced that the government will consult on plans to allow councils to increase council tax on homes that have been empty for more than two years. He said it was a "crime" that 300,000 properties had been vacant for more than six months, equivalent to two years' new housing supply, at a time of a chronic housing shortage. (See 3.55pm.)
• Lib Dems have called for a windfall tax on the nuclear industry.
• Tim Farron has firmed up his declaration that he does not want to replace Nick Clegg as leader. "I want him to be leader of this party for so long that by the time the vacancy comes up, I'll be too decrepit to take it," he said.
• Lib Dems have committed themselves to putting "community politics" at the heart of what they do. They passed a motion saying that their role as activists was to "help organise people in communities to take and use power, to use our political skills to redress grievances and to represent people at all levels of the political structure".
That's it from me, Andrew Sparrow. Thanks for the comments. My colleague Paul Owen will carry on blogging here into the evening.
Hi, Paul Owen here taking over from Andrew Sparrow for the evening. I'm watching the Observer's Andrew Rawnsley interviewing Chris Huhne, the climate change secretary. The screen behind them promises "an intimate, personal and political discussion". Sounds good. Rawnsley told Huhne before they began: "We might sneak some policy in ... "
The interview starts with an Observer film in which the Guardian's Patrick Wintour described Huhne as a "lothario" at university. Huhne says Patrick's memory must be playing tricks on him.
Huhne talks about his family background and their "progressive" politics, and his youth at the private Westminster school, where he says he was a "rebel" rather than a "swot". He agrees that the fact that the cabinet is packed with people from private schools reflects badly on social mobility in Britain. "I'm doing my best short of resignation to do something about it," Huhne says.
Does he still hold with his student view that drugs such as LSD are an "accepted facet of our society"? "No, certainly not," says Huhne. Why did he think that at the time? "There was clearly a lot around of … flower power, the Woodstock festival … and students were part of that."
Did he take LSD himself? "Probably I should apply the David Cameron answer," he says – namely that what he did before he became a politician should remain private. "My favourite tipple for a very long time has been alcohol rather than anything else … That period certainly there were a lot of drugs around that were clearly quite dangerous," he adds.
Huhne talks about his time as economics leader writer at the Guardian. "I was essentially hired by the paper to provide a coherent critique of what Mrs Thatcher was doing," he says.
He says he dropped out of the Labour party as it moved further to the left during the 1980s, and eventually joined the breakaway centrist SDP when it launched.
Then he went into the City. Did he do that to get rich? No, he says. "It was a new challenge," he says. "I'd done 10 years of economic commentary … and you begin to notice that the same things come round again … I was approached by a firm in the City because of some of the books I'd written about third world debt and development … and they offered me a job … looking at the credit worthiness of firms in developing markets." He says it was "very scary" after doing the same job for 19 years, but "once you've done it it's very rewarding"
"Mmm … very rewarding," says Rawnsley. How many homes does he own now?
"We're down to four," says Huhne. He invested in property as his "pension fund", he says.
To the "round million", how much is he worth? "I don't know," says Huhne. "To be frank, I don't keep a tab … " Ministers have to put everything in a blind trust, he says.
He does not have to pay the top 50p rate of tax he says, meaning he earns less than £150,000 a year. He would have paid it when he was in the City if it had been in place then, he says.
He says the 1983 election made a big impression on him because of the wild disparity between the number of votes the Liberal-SDP Alliance got and the number of seats they won.
When Campbell stood down, the leadership race against Nick Clegg, which Huhne's election literature called "Calamity Clegg", provoking a complaint from Clegg. A "young researcher" came up with that headline, Huhne says, and he thought it was "inappropriate" and "not my choice of words". But they have made up now, and he was the only senior member of the party at Clegg's wedding, he says. "We have an awful lot in common in our politics, especially in Europeanism … We think exactly alike on the importance of Europe, the importance of international institutions. We trust each other completely on that."
Will he stand again as leader one day? He refuses to rule it out, saying instead: "I'm absolutely confident that Nick will lead the party into the next election," he says. Rawnsley asks him again. Huhne replies: "I cannot conceive of the circumstances … I don't know how you can say it more seriously than that. Nick will be leader long beyond my time in politics."
Rawnsley asks him about claiming £119 for a trouser press on his parliamentary expenses. Huhne does not seem to think this is very serious, but Rawnsley asks: why should the taxpayer pay for your trouser press? Huhne says he paid the money back once the scandal started. In my opinion he does not seem to really understand why people might object to his claiming for an item like this.
Huhne is asked about the formation of the coalition. He runs through the familiar story, which many ministers have told this week in Birmingham, of having to form a strong government to protect the UK's economic credibility. "I was completely clear [about that] because of my experience of the financial markets."
Huhne points out how new senior Lib Dems were to government – a similarity to Tony Blair in 1997. It has been a "steep learning curve", he says.
On anger over the party's tuition fees U-turn, he says: "If it hadn't been on tuition fees, it would have been on something else." But he praises the idea of compromise, comparing the situation to the gridlock between Democrats and Republicans in the US.
But he says of the coalition agreement "we got a good agreement".
Huhne is asked about the allegations that he got his estranged wife to pretend she was driving in order to take his speeding points. How often has he exceeded the speed limit? "I have no idea, but too many times because I lost my licence on cumulative points and tot-up."
He hopes the police and official inquiries into this will "draw a line under it".
Have you ever asked your wife to take your speeding points? "I've very clearly denied this. I continue to deny it."
Do you swear it? "Absolutely."
Would he resign if the police investigation goes against him? "I don't see that as a likely outcome."
Huhne expresses regret about the affair that led to his splitting up with his wife.
Asked about his "commitment" to nuclear power, Huhne talks about the ambitiousness of trying to "decarbonise" the economy. "However attractive a share was, you wouldn't put all your money in one share." Investors say the lowest investment at the moment is nuclear, he says.
Rawnsley points out that he once called it a "failed" technology. He says the companies have to prove they can "deliver, on time and to budget". But it's key to get low-carbon electricity "at a price British consumers are prepared to wear".
Huhne says it is a "myth" that all power companies charge the same and one can't save much money switching between them. But he says "there is some anti-competitive behaviour that we are getting on top of" among the big six energy companies. "We will stamp on that."
Asked about climate change policy, Huhne says David Cameron "is committed to this agenda". "You should not judge the success of the government by how many speeches" Cameron has made on the subject.
Huhne says he thinks it is "slightly unlikely" that Britain will now follow the path of the Japanese economy: very slow growth over a long time. Japan faced this after a period of very high growth whereas "we've had a long, long history going back to the industrial revolution of pretty slow growth … [so] the experience of change is less dramatic."
How bad would it have to get before he, Clegg and Vince Cable went to see George Osborne and said the economic plan is not working? He says in most of the post-war era a Keynesian solution would have been tried, but "effectively given the scale of our budget deficit that option is blocked off from us". Another solution might have been deregulation of the finance sector, but "given the banking crisis that option is not open to us". Pressed on this again, he launches into a technical argument which seems to mean that if growth became too low some aspects of the deficit could be approached more flexibly.
Could he be in a coalition with Labour? "Of course. Absolutely." Which would he prefer? He says the Lib Dems will put their stall out at the election and "it's up to the voters to decide". It's not impossible that the Lib Dems could be the biggest party, he says, "given our experience in government".
"Who you may or may not have a prejudice about doing business with is neither here nor there." The key thing is getting as much of their manifesto through as possible.
And with that the interview concludes. I'm going to call it a night there, but go to guardian.co.uk/politics in the morning where Andrew Sparrow will be covering the last day of the Lib Dem conference – including Nick Clegg's big speech to the faithful. Good night. Thanks for all the comments.
One last thing before I go. My colleague Patrick Wintour writes that senior Liberal Democrat economic ministers desperate to inject a stimulus into Britain's stalling economy are looking at boosting housebuilding by penalising property firms that fail to build on land with long term planning permission.
They also want the Bank of England to undertake further quantitative easing within weeks by buying debt of small businesses, so stoking the small businesses cash flow. They say it is for the Bank to work through the scale and precise timing, but argue the need to act is growing ever more urgent, and a public debate is needed.
Ministers are aware that the Bank must remain constitutional independent in setting interest rates, but believe the invention of quantitative easing as a means of stimulating the economy has broken down the distinctions between the Bank and government.
The ministers recognise that the government cannot be seen to be straying openly from the deficit reduction strategy, and if they did so it would only lead to a self-defeating reaction in the bond markets that drive up interest rates. "We cannot be seen to do anything dodgy or use bogus Labour schemes like the Private Finance Initiative," one said.
But they are starting to argue in private for the first time that it may be possible to bring forward capital spending from the timetable set out in the initial spending review in 2010, or that the overall level of capital spending could be increased by a couple of billion in a bid to keep the economy sliding back into recession and unemployment spiralling.
Explaining the government's dilemma, Vince Cable, the business secretary, said: "We have built up a lot of credibility in international markets. We don't want to lose that position. There is flexibility built into our fiscal plans, we have that. There are other ways of maintaining stimulus to the economy. There is monetary policy and we can use imaginative infrastructure development to push the economy forward domestically."