Over recent years there have been some quite heated local battles about the various elements of the redevelopment of the Kings Cross area and a wide swathe of land around it. I haven’t been involved in those and would be very wary of commenting on them, so I’ll keep well clear of that!

But as someone who goes through Kings Cross and the large area around it affected by what is going on quite often, it’s impossible not to be struck by the impressive scale of the improvements that are taking place.

Most striking of all at the moment perhaps is the refurbishment of St Pancras station in preparation for Eurostar starting their services there in November. The station building itself, which I remember from ten years ago as a rather dingy four platforms or so for getting a train to Leicester or Nottingham (and where I was once short-changed in WH Smith; this may not have been a permanent feature affecting all passengers), has been magnificently transformed. The outside of the building looks amazing and the glimpses of the inside look just as good, though I think the full force may only be visible to people hurriedly getting on or off Eurostar trains.

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I didn’t manage to write anything about the death of Tim Garden before going away on holiday but I didn’t want to let it pass without adding my own tribute.

Tim was a great person to work with - always friendly, very supportive, and very encouraging to a young enthusiast, as well as (it goes without saying) a wise head with good advice. When I was Vice Chair and then Chair of the Lib Dem European Group he was enormously helpful as a member of its committee, from taking on running LDEG’s website (which he continued to do even when he was a frontbench spokesperson in the Lords), to telling me that if ever I wanted an article from him for the LDEG Newsletter, he would be very happy to oblige (an offer I frequently took up), to being personally very supportive and encouraging. He once agreed to speak at an LDEG fringe meeting and was the only one of the panel (and almost the only one of the audience) to turn up for it on time, despite the fact that as he said cheerily, this was his 7 o’clock fringe meeting, and he had already done a 6 o’clock one and had to leave early to go to his 8 o’clock one!

Looking over some of the comments made by others I have been struck by how many others too have said similar things about how supportive he was.

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I”˜ve written before about the difficulty of having a sensible discussion about immigration policy, but the vital importance of doing so - so I am very pleased that Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes are bringing a proposed policy to party conference next month about it (and have also written about it in Liberator).

For a long time discussion of immigration found it very difficult to escape from a context of racism. I think the fact that in recent years much immigration has come from other European countries, rather than other continents, has done a lot helpfully to disentangle the two.

The other thing that seems to have changed is the sheer numbers of people coming into the country. I don’t at all say that that is necessarily a bad thing - but it quite clearly is a significant change and an important issue, and any sensible discussion about our society and country clearly can’t ignore it.

The motion seems to me a good starting-point for a serious discussion, untainted by racism, of the sort of way that we want Britain to develop, economically and culturally, and what role immigration has in that.

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After much heavy trailing, the Conservative policy group on Economic Competitiveness, today finally published its report.

The headline that the Conservatives are pushing is a call for Inheritance Tax to be abolished, on the grounds that too many middle-income earners are now paying it.

As house prices have continued to rise very fast in recent years, it is true that the number of estates qualifying to pay inheritance tax has risen. So have they got a point?

Well, according to the BBC, “no inheritance tax is currently payable on 94% of estates, according to official figures”.

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Gosh, David Cameron really is ditching the moderate image and scarpering back to cover his home bases:

Cameron on offensive with call for tax cuts (Daily Telegraph)

Osborne vows to ”˜pick fight’ with Brussels (FT)

This really is tantamount to giving up on trying to win over the moderate voters he would need in order to win a General Election, and just doing what’s necessary to shore up his core vote in order to avoid a meltdown in the Conservative vote.

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I see that if they can tear themselves away from the works of J K Rowling, William Hague and Paddy Ashdown, MPs will apparently be reading Richard Dawkins on the beach this summer.

I haven’t read Dawkins’ book, but I have been very impressed with a report “Doing God”, A Future for Faith in the Public Square that I’ve just discovered from a thinktank I hadn’t heard of before, Theos. It seems to me an extremely sensible and useful contribution to the debate about the proper role and contribution of faith to public debate (or the ‘public square’, as the paper calls it).

In particular, its exposing of the popular idea that a Bishop giving a view on anything affecting public life is somehow “extra-curricular”, and merely a “brief diversion from the clergy’s main roles of singing and wearing frocks in public” rather an expression of one of the core features of faith, is marvellously refreshing (and certainly far more effective than my own inadequate attempt to try and say something similar).

This is an issue which as the author, Nick Spencer, makes very clear, is not going away - indeed he argues convincingly, the very opposite.

I don’t agree with everything he says - particularly some of the questions he poses about the goal of freedom, and the relationship between the liberal state and the way individual citizens frame their own desires and goals.

However overall this report seems to me to put the general position on this important debate, as well as opening up some specific debates, very well and accessibly in today’s context, and I recommend it.

I have just discovered the ‘Wish List’ feature on Amazon and I think it’s great! All those books you think you’d like to read but will certainly forget or write on a piece of paper that you’ll then lose - and now someone else offers to remember them for you!

Now I just need them to offer to remember all the ones that I’ve already bought but haven’t managed to read yet!

Catching up on some reading I’ve come across a very interesting article by David Boyle in the most recent Liberator:“A way out of the 1997 trap”. David is a colleague in party policy discussions, as well as a friend, so what he says is not entirely a surprise to me but it is interesting so I wanted to comment on this piece.

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