The tactics in the battle of Daily Telegraph v George Osborne/Greg Clark over the planning system are the equivalent of trench warfare. The ministers insist, day in, day out, that they will not budge over its planned changes. Introducing a new “presumption in favour of sustainable development” will help the economy to grow, they fervently believe.

On the other side we have the Telegraph, which agrees with charities who fear that the changes (a new ‘national planning policy framework’) are a licence for developers to run amok.

The Tel believes that by running front page stories every day it will finally force the government to capitulate. So far we have had doomsday stories suggesting this slender document will result in the death of English countryside; Noah-style flooding; a collapse in house prices; and even the slaughter of all children born within 100 metres of an oak tree*. Equally, ministers seem to hope that if they keep repeating their arguments ad nauseum the Tel will just give up and turn its attention elsewhere.

I’ve written before about how both sides are exaggerating the potential impact of the changes.

What is curious, however, is that the new “presumption” has its antecedents which – on the face of it – were equally, if not more, positive for developers. (I only know this because someone senior at DCLG pointed it out to me.)

For four decades, until 1991, there was a presumption in favour of development which “did not cause demonstrable harm to interests of acknowledged importance“. That then changed into a “presumption in favour of the development plan, unless material considerations indicated otherwise“. Then in 2004 this was replaced by a John Prescott plan expressly designed to get thousands of new homes built.

In other words, the new guidelines are not massively different to those which came before – and which did not cause enormous angst.

Of course you could argue that during that period Britain saw some damaging out-of-town development, reminiscent of the USA – and that many green fields were lost. But it is wrong to suggest that Osborne’s new plan is in any sense revolutionary.

* This may be a slight exaggeration

I wrote a piece today on Labour’s attempts to exploit the Tories’ failure to connect with women voters. The piece highlights the coalition’s failure to help low-paid women cope with childcare as a major issue for the working mother. But during my research, another issue was brought up by Tory women: David Cameron’s marriage tax allowance.

It may be the Tory leader’s totemic ‘family’ policy but it is exactly the sort of scheme that chimes well with his old-style grassroots but does little to endear the party to the plight of the working couples.

Under the scheme as it was outlined before the election, a married couple only benefits if one person stays at home since the policy is based on one member of the couple being able to transfer £750 of their tax-free personal allowance to their partner to reduce the ‘family tax bill’. Eligible couples where the main earner has an annual income of between £7,300 and £42,000 will be £150 better off.

This morning I wrote on the FT front page that Ed Miliband has been accused of “hypocrisy” for launching his moral crusade against ‘bad’ business while Labour officials are negotiating a £1m donation from Andrew Rosenfeld, a former tax exile.

Rosenfeld is also controversial because in 2005, during the collapse of Allders, he refused to accept responsibility for its £68m pension deficit despite his large financial stake in the retail chain – through a vehicle called Scarlett Retail.

Meanwhile this morning Miliband is trying to refine his message further, suggesting that Labout is “not anti-business but anti-business-as-usual” – which is a much more effective line.

Channel 4 are doing more on Rosenfeld tonight. As Gary Gibbon writes on his blog:

 

You can see Jon Snow’s interview with the Labour leader tonight. It’s particularly interesting on whether the self-proclaimed ripper-up of the rule book intends to carry on negotiating a £1m donation from Andrew Rosenfeld, who only recently returned to the UK from Geneva and was criticised for refusing to accept responsibility for a pension deficit at Allders even though he had a chunky stake in the firm  (you can read a bit about it all in today’s FT).

Ed M says that on this donation he is playing it all by the rules: “we are not flouting the rules.”  Hmm. Not ripping up the rules exactly? The predator/producer check will be run very tightly by the media on who donates from corporate Britain to the Labour Party in future. Also who advises and who endorses.

Ed Miliband wants to help “producers” and not “predators” through the tax system. And through regulation. This was one of the driving messages of his speech.

At face value it’s hard to argue with that. But where things become far from crystal-clear is when you start to think about the detail of how a government would go about doing this.

Firstly, how do you separate hundreds of thousands of companies into “good” or “bad”? And how, in practice, do you penalise or reward them?

Miliband and his team know what a bad company looks like. It resembles Southern Cross, or Enron, appparently. This is obvious. And they know what a good company is: it manufactures things and invests for the long term.

But what about the majority of companies – which are in a grey area of neither “good” nor “bad”; or a mix of both.

In his speech the Labour leader contrasted the virtuous Sir John Rose, chief executive of Rolls-Royce, with pantomime villain Sir Fred Goodwin – who was paid three times more.

Sure. But did anyone notice at the time? Could they have done? And if ministers had suggested that RBS was a disaster waiting to happen – would anyone have listened?

Equally pertinent is this question: If many hedge funds and private equity groups and “asset strippers” are based offshore – how do you use the tax system to punish them?

I’m told that this is all “direction of travel” stuff and it’s too early to have any details. I don’t get the impression, however, that any of them have the faintest outlines of a palette of alternative options – let alone their most likely choice. (Equally on more fairness in the welfare system there is no detail; the idea of tightening the criteria for social housing allocation is not new.)

Meanwhile my colleague Andy Bounds asked Alistair Darling, former chancellor, what he thought about this. His answer: “If I build in a city centre am I good for investing or bad for speculating? Businesses are there to make money.”

Ed Miliband suffered a setback on his first day of the Labour conference after he failed in his symbolic attempt to reduce the relative influence of unions over future leadership elections.

A new cadre of “registered supporters” – thousands of members of the public who wants to influence the result – will have up to 10 per cent of the total vote, after a “Refounding Labour” document was expected to be passed at the Liverpool gathering.

But this will be at the expense of MPs, constituencies and unions alike, contrary to Mr Miliband’s original plan to carve out the new group from the union section – a move which would have diluted the union’s influence.

And the registered supporters will not get any vote at all until they get to the magic figure of 50,000.

The Labour leader had been keen to make the symbolic break because of criticism of the way in which he won last year’s leadership elections with heavy backing from the big unions.

The final result annoyed some constituency members, who had presumed that their vote would not be diluted as a result of the initiative.

The Financial Times revealed earlier this month that the unions had thwarted similar proposals to reduce unions’ voting power at conference from its current 50 per cent. That issue will now be debated again next spring.

We’ve written a long piece in the main FT this morning about the widespread attempts in Whitehall to avoid FOI requests – by civil servants as well as special advisers. Texts, private email addresses, more phone calls, and inserting *s in the middle of key words are among the popular methods.

One anecdote didn’t make it into the newspaper and it seemed worth repeating:

Late last year ahead of the Pope’s visit to London, officials in the Foreign Office used text messages to tell officials in the Greater London Authority that they would prefer Boris Johnson not to shake the hand of the distinguished visitor – although their attempts failed. ‘You can see how they would not have wanted that conversation to have been FOI-able’, says one person who saw the messages.

The mystery is why anyone would want to stop this particular photo-call – my mole has no idea.