What the weeklies are saying

The Economist looks at Jack Straw's white paper on constitutional reform,

tinkering with its ancient and inscrutable constitution might not strike outsiders as a particular priority.

the bill is described as

Timid. A proposal that Parliament must vote on whether troops are committed to war is hardly radical: Mr Blair held a vote before the Iraq war and it would be politically difficult to go to war without one in future. Mr Straw held out the prospect of giving MPs greater say over public appointments and the date of general elections, but details are yet to emerge. Other ideas, such as restoring the right to protest outside Parliament and allowing the Union flag to be flown on government buildings at any time, are mostly symbolic.

Over at the Spectator,Alan Milburn gives his first interview since Gordon Brown moved into No 10

I thought the most helpful thing would be for me to keep quiet,’ ‘But now, I feel I’ve earned my passage. Let’s face it, there have been plenty of opportunities to rock the boat during the last few months

He agrees that Brown,although maybe too late has become a Blairite but

What Gordon needs to do when he talks about this “new politics” that places power in the hands of people, is to announce a policy that gives that huge symbolic lift.’

and his answer

by dramatically cutting the size of Whitehall. I would slash it over and above what is being done by a quarter.’

The New Statesman asks is Boris a fake?.Brian Cathcart tells us

a man with a lurid history of verbal incontinence is playing the 21st-century election game, with all its gaffe-traps and correctness tripwires - and he is winning.

Meanwhile at the Spectator David Selbourne writes

Britain has lost its identity and its sense of nation, The citizen is treated as a mere ‘consumer’, liberty reduced to the ‘freedom to choose’, politicians held in contempt and hostile forces such as Islamism appeased. The stakes could scarcely be higher.

In a must read article he says

A lot of this is owed to ‘Blairism’ and its corruptions of the body politic; much, too, to the previous Conservative period in office. The main parties, reduced in organisation and membership and with their inherited principles in dissolution, have themselves paid a high price in public recoil for what they have done to the country. Yet, compounding their misjudgments, each seeks the same chimerical ‘centre ground’ where stand the idols of Empowerment, Opportunity, Aspiration, Competition, Modernisation, Choice and so forth. It is the ground not of a Normandy beach but of a quagmire in Notting Hill.