Oslo is a delightful city, and exactly what one would expect of Scandinavia. Being Easter weekend it was fairly quiet, and also rather cold, particularly in a morning.

Anyway, here are some things I particularly liked:

1) Norwegians – Scandinavians generally are pretty grounded, rational sensible people, and that’s certainly true of Norwegians. Part of that surely has to do with the economic security provided by having the third-highest GDP per capita in the world. But it is also a northern-European trait which I think we share. The standard of English spoken by Norwegians is excellent – indeed on many occasions it I thought I was talking to an American but was actually talking to an Osloite (I would imagine that has something to do with the pervasiveness of US TV shows).

2) Frogner Park – the park is located in the suburban west of the city, and houses the Vigeland Sculpture Arrangement, a selection of works by Gustav Vigeland. He specialised in nude portraits in some rather interesting positions, and the centrepiece of his work is a tower of intertwined nude statues (see picture) which takes pride of place in the park. The Vigeland Museum, located just outside the park, is well worth a visit.

3) The museums - Oslo has a ton of museums, with everything from Viking ships to Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The city provides something called the Oslo Pass, which enables free or reduced-price entry to many of the museums, as well as free use of all the public transport (see below). Well worth it.

4) The public transport – as befits the capital of a wealthy nation, the transport infrastructure is impressive. It is also pretty cheap, which is not something that can be said of everything in Oslo – a 24hr pass for all the forms of transport (bus, tram and underground) costs 80 kroner, about £10.

5) The coffee and cakes – Norwegians, apparently, drink more coffee per person than any other nation on earth. That is probably true in volume terms (given the tendency of southern Europeans to drink short coffees – espresso, ristretto – and the northern preference towards longer drinks). Norwegians like their coffee hot, black, strong and long. They accompany it with bolle, small sweet bread cakes. My favourite (pictured) was the iced cinnamon version. No visit to Oslo is complete without at least three visits to United Bakeries, a chain found all over the city. There’s a nice one near Frogner Park (see above).

6) Frognerseteren – anyone who has spent any time in London is used to unusual sites on the tube. But you don’t often see fully clad skiers, carrying their skis, on London’s public transport. You do in Oslo, thanks to the skiing available just 30 minutes or so away in Frognerseteren. Even for non-skiiers like me the journey by T-bane is worth making. There are some stunning views down over the city (see picture) and some restorative apple cake (and more coffee) to enjoy at the Frognerseteren Restaurant. You can jump off and visit the Olympic ski-jump en route.

So, a lot to like about Oslo. When I go back I will definitely do the journey from Oslo to Bergen by train, which is supposed to be spectacular. As it was I couldn’t fit it into my schedule – it takes 7 hours each way.

There was one thing, though, that I particularly did not like about Oslo, and that was the number of people sleeping rough – Norway in winter is not a place one would want to be homeless. But one couldn’t walk down a street in central Oslo without being asked for money, usually several times. For one of the world’s richest countries, and one with a left-leaning population and a social democrat government, I found this surprising and depressing. If Norway doesn’t have the resources to solve this problem, then nowhere does.

The call comes after a spate of examples of medics forgetting that their job is to treat patients  rather than produce seemingly identical reports suggesting new taxes to solve the various crises that they believe society faces.

In a statement, the Royal College of Letting People Get on With Their Own Lives said:

The endemic condition of doctors not being able to propose solutions to problems that don’t involve the state dictating how people should live their lives by making food, drink, cigarettes and, well, just about everything more expensive is a serious risk to the public’s mental wellbeing.

We therefore propose that each time a doctor decides it is their role force people to pay more for the products they buy they should pay everything they earn in a special “illiberalism tax”.

It is estimated that the tax could either raise approximately £3000 bn in additional revenues, to be used to reimburse people for the amounts of extra tax they have paid as a result of whinging doctors over many years. Alternatively, the tax may free up so much time amongst doctors that GP appointments may be extended by 10%, to an average of 98 seconds.

And tonight, I’m announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union — because trade that is fair and free across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs.

Here’s what Lord Justice Pill had to say towards the end of his judgment:

49. I readily appreciate the need for flexibility in devising arrangements which will achieve the statutory purpose of improving prospects of obtaining employment. The needs of jobseekers will vary infinitely as will the requirements of providers prepared to participate in arrangements with them. I am impressed with the care shown in attempting to devise arrangements and with the resources devoted to attempts to achieve the statutory purpose. There is an important public interest in getting people back to work as well as a major saving in not having to pay Jobseeker’s Allowance, and possibly other benefits.

50. I also appreciate that there could be a substantial saving of public money if effective sanctions are available when jobseekers are not cooperating with proposals properly put to them under the Act. The Secretary of State’s object in these proceedings is not to end Jobseeker’s Allowance but to ensure that it is only paid to those actively seeking employment and prepared to cooperate with attempts made by the state to achieve that end. The entitlement to receive the weekly sum should depend on such cooperation. 

Which got me thinking: how would a court treat such a breach (if indeed it is a breach) if the agreement actually were a binding contract?

First off, the coalition agreement is not a binding contract (because the formalities needed to make a contract are not present) so a court would throw out the case on this basis. But let’s assume for now that it is.

The claim that the Lib Dems would bring against the Conservatives would be for breach of contract, so as you might expect the court would usually, after deciding that there is indeed a contract, go onto consider whether a party has breached it.

In many cases this is a fairly straightforward process: if you agree to buy 10 tomatoes but are only given 5 then the supplier has breached the contract and you are entitled to be compensated for that breach.

But in other cases things are not so straightforward, primarily because there is a disagreement between the parties about what exactly each of them was promising to do. It looks likely that this would be the case here.

In their defence to the claim, the Conservatives would be likely to say that in the clause on Lords reform they did not promise to ensure the legislation was passed. They only agreed to “bring forward proposals”.

The court has now got a different question to consider: what obligations does the clause that has alleged to have been breached actually impose on the parties.

In deciding what a clause in a contract means, the court will take an objective view. That is, they will consider what a reasonable person, having all the background knowledge of the parties, would take the clause to mean.

But there is another complication. The courts have long taken the stance that “background knowledge” does not include the pre-contractual negotiations of the parties. This is a decision taken by the courts for reasons of pragmatism: it provides a level of certainty to contracting parties that the agreement they have entered into actually does constitute the whole agreement, so the other party can’t, in the event of any minor breach, run off to court clutching a load of evidence that a different interpretation was intended before the contract was signed.

Unfortunately, then, we couldn’t have David Laws, Andrew Stunnell, Chris Huhne, Danny Alexander, George Osborne, William Hague, Oliver Letwin and Ed Llewellyn on the stand giving evidence of what was intended by this clause when they negotiated it.

However, there’s plenty of evidence to be considered. There’s the parties’ manifestos, the last three of which for the Conservatives at the very least spoke positively of democratic Lords reform and arguably committed them to it. There’s public statements: by the prime minister in the TV debates, by the Conservative’s former shadow home secretary chastising Labour for their woeful progress.

The “background knowledge”, then, is arguably this: unwavering Liberal Democrat support for Lords reform and a series of pretty unambiguous statements from Conservative documents and individuals expressing support for a democratic Lords over a long period of time.

Given this, would a court really be convinced that the clause on Lords reform in the coalition agreement wasn’t an intention to legislate? I’m not so sure.

And if the court decided that it was intended that legislation would be passed, the Tories would almost certainly have breached the contract.

But now the equally important question: what remedy would the Lib Dems seek?

The usual remedy for breach of contract is damages. The court would order a sum of money to be paid by the party in breach to, so far as possible, place the innocent party in the position they would have been had the contract not been breached but had been properly performed.

A fundamental breach of a contract – one that essentially renders it worthless – allows the innocent party to ‘repudiate’ the contract – ie treat themselves as discharged from any further obligations. This would clearly not be such a breach.

Money damages would clearly be a pretty inadequate remedy in this case, so the remedy I would be pushing for on behalf of the Lib Dems would be what is termed ‘specific performance’ of the contractual term. In other words the court would order that the Conservatives do what they promised to do in the contract and vote through Lords reform.

A failure to comply with such an order for specific performance would be held to be contempt of court and might see the Conservative rebels end up with a jail sentence.

And however attractive that solution might seem at times, I think we can all agree that it’s probably best that politics and contract law stay well and truly separate.

Fourthly, here’s how the Lib Dem and Tory commitments to Lords reform combined in the coalition’s programme for government:

We will establish a committee to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation. The committee will come forward with a draft motion by December 2010. It is likely that this will advocate single long terms of office. It is also likely that there will be a grandfathering system for current Peers.

Now, a few Tories have tried to weasel out of these commitments by saying they are too ambiguous to be regarded as clear support, so here’s David Davis – now a leading opponent of reform – attacking the then Labour government in wholly unambiguous terms for its woefully slow progress in delivering their 1997 promise to deliver an elected second chamber:

Are the Government planning to make the upper House democratic? Did I miss that aspect of the Queen’s Speech, or have the Government redefined, in some Orwellian fashion, what democracy means? If the Prime Minister does not stand by his commitments, the House and the people of Britain will be left with no other conclusion than that the Government’s reforms are simply a sham. They will be seen as nothing more than an attempt to bring to heel an upper House with principles and powers that have proved inconvenient to the Government, and nothing more than an attempt by the Prime Minister to stuff the upper Chamber with yes men who will do his bidding.

Finally, here’s the prime minister speaking just weeks before the 2010 general election in the leadership debates, where he couldn’t have been clearer in his support for a mainly or wholly elected chamber, and again criticising Labour for failing to deliver this:

The Ministry of Defence is to abandon plans to buy the preferred fighter for the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers, in an embarrassing a U-turn for David Cameron.

The prime minister personally endorsed the decision to equip the over-budget carriers with “cats and traps” so they could catapult and recover a version of the F-35 joint strike fighter (JSF) from their decks.

But the cost of converting the carriers has already reached £2bn, and the JSF model Downing Street wanted has been beset by delays and technical problems.

Here’s what the strategic defence and security review said about the need to abandon Labour’s plan to buy the F-35B version of the joint strike fighter and switch instead to the more capable F-35C, and the consequent need to adapt the new aircraft carriers already ordered:

• A single carrier needs to be fully effective. As currently designed, the Queen Elizabeth will not be fully interoperable with key allies, since their naval jets could not land on it. Pursuit of closer partnership is a core strategic principle for the Strategic Defence and Security Review because it is clear that the UK will in most circumstances act militarily as part of a wider coalition. This will delay the in-service date of the new carrier from 2016 to around 2020. But it will allow greater interoperability with US and French carriers and naval jets. It provides the basis for developing Maritime Task Groups in the future. This should both ensure continuous carrier-strike availability, and reduce the overall carrier protection requirements on the rest of the fleet, releasing ships for other naval tasks such as protection of key sea-lanes, or conducting counter- piracy and narcotics operations.
• The strike needs to be made more capable. Installing the catapult and arrestor will allow the UK to acquire the carrier-variant of Joint Strike Fighter ready to deploy on the converted carrier instead of the short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) variant. This version of the jet has a longer range and greater payload: this, not large numbers of aircraft, is the critical requirement for precision strike operations in the future. The UK plans to operate a single model of JSF, instead of different land and naval variants. Overall, the carrier-variant of the JSF will be cheaper, reducing through-life costs by around 25%.

It will be interesting to see what Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, has to say when he appears in the Commons later.

So yesterday, when we heard that the government was considering new proposals to retain yet more of people’s data, I hesitated before condemning. The selective briefing, I thought, was simply not enough information on which to come to a decision whether this was so terrible that I needed to condemn it.

Today, I find myself in a position to do so. The proposals are wrong. They represent a massive increase in the amount of data about our private lives that will be held by companies and accessible to various branches of government.

They tip the delicate balance between liberty and security far too far the wrong way. Not that that has not happened already.

One of the reasons I support this coalition is its strong commitment to civil liberties as expressed in the coalition agreement. I anticipated a decisive shift from Labour’s authoritarianism. And on many fronts the coalition has not disappointed: ID cards and control orders are gone, and the Freedom Bill is working its way through Parliament.

But if it presses ahead with these new snooping proposals all of that will be in vain.

If the coalition does not u-turn on this issue I will, for the first time, have to question whether I can continue to support this government and my party. I really, really, really do not want to have to do that. I really do not.

And on that I am not alone. Many pro-coalition Liberal Democrats are furious, and rightly so. For the Liberal Democrats this could be more serious than tuition fees or the health bill because on civil liberties the entire party can unite.

That Nick Clegg has already made statements supporting the change is extremely worrying. But it shouldn’t stop him reversing his position. That is far better than the alternative, which, frankly, I don’t even want to think about.

As set out in the Strategic Defence and Security Review we will legislate as soon as parliamentary time allows to ensure that the use of communications data is compatible with the government’s approach to civil liberties.

The language is such that this paragraph could mean the government plans to legislate to do just about anything, which is perhaps why there has been little or no comment on this in the media until now. And presumably the reason we are now seeing media coverage is because of some tactical briefing by some interested party – be that the Home Office hoping to soften people up ahead of the Queen’s Speech or opponents hoping to drum up opposition before any proposal gets off the ground.

What is clear is that the detail around this policy is very much unclear, and I hope Liberal Democrat parliamentarians will be pressing the government to make clear its intentions so we can all respond to a concrete policy rather than mere speculation.

If I had to sum up her thesis in a sentence it’d be this: the Lib Dems should stop banging on about raising the threshold and taxing the wealthy and instead argue the merits of the “granny tax” and creating a “cliff-edge” where family tax credits are withdrawn.

That’s a slight caricature, of course, but I think it’s broadly accurate.

A couple of points. Yes, the abolition of age-related income tax allowances is a good idea and well overdue. But first it was the Tories who wanted to do it (the Lib Dems wanted instead to limit the tax reliefs higher earners receive on their pension contributions). And secondly on what possible basis does Orr think that claiming credit for this, instead of the raising of the personal allowance for millions of low earners, would benefit the Lib Dems politically?

The things the Lib Dems actually did achieve in the budget were the raising of the personal allowance and the increases in taxes on the wealthy, both of which are long-standing policy priorities. How would it be at all beneficial to stop talking about those and start claiming credit for much less popular things?

But there is another, more ephemeral, point in Orr’s article which is unfortunately slightly lost beneath the rather bizarre arguments I have just discussed. It’s probably best summed up in her final paragraph, which as far as I can see bears little relation to the rest of the article:

The Lib Dems have got a little wiser since the early days, when they were forever on the stump, disingenuously flogging Conservative policies and looking shocked because no one was thanking them for their trouble. But not much wiser. They are still nakedly thrilled that they got to hang out with the big boys at all. This only serves to emphasise what little boys they are themselves.

There is, I think, some truth in that. The Lib Dems in government have been naive. George Osborne, master strategist that he is, constantly has an eye on the effect of government policy on his party and its electoral prospects. The Lib Dems have been less focussed on that and more focussed – admirably one might say – on ensuring that the coalition not only survives but prospers.

I think the point is that we can do both. The difficulty, though, is that’s quite a difficult job for Nick Clegg to do. Governing is tough enough. Perhaps Clegg, then, needs to find his own Osborne; someone who unashamedly keeps an eye on the strategy, on the raw politics. The Tories are better at it than us – they’ve had more practice. But we’ve been in government for nearly two years now, and we should be doing better.