Labour have pulled a u-turn today with the announcement from everyone's favourite housing overlord, Caroline Flint, that they are now going to try and tackle the "problem" of "studentification". This is an issue that manages to branch all of the main parties as reprehensible with even supposedly student friendly MP for Bristol West, Stephen Williams, signing an EDM to tackle "studentification" through excessive planning regulations that would see local residents able to put a stop to student housing being created, certainly affordably so.

Green taxes, apparently they will save the world. I on the other hand think that they are being mishandled and misused as a means for generating income off of people unfairly. Green taxes, at their best, are a means of penalising those that make active choices to do environmentally unfriendly things and to take money from them to actually go about solving this country's climate change issues.

At their worst, however, they are used to plug gaps in local governance finances with disregard to reality and to simply make it looks like something is being done to tackle climate change...even if it means telling supermarkets to generate more profits without a set plan on how to spend those profits on green initiatives.

As it happens David Cameron has wised up to this and becomes the only party leader so far to actually start thinking sensibly on the issue of climate change when it comes to Green Taxes, for whatever means that is.

So the first part of my thoughts goes to Environmentally charged changes in the budget, potentially one of the biggest political areas in the budget that turned out to be more than a damp squib.

All in all I don't think that the budget we witnessed today was especially ground breaking. Commentators have already said about how most of it was expected and about the tone, my only interest is what the effects mean for people in the long run. Personally I don't think it is as bad as it could have been but it's certainly not favourable, certainly some of the "positives" are barely positives at all in more historical context and it's not within me to congratulate people for offering piecemeal as if it is a huge concession.

Can I just say... HALLELUJAH! If there is a god then they have obviously heard our collective prayers because today's PMQs was far beyond head and shoulders above the rest of the recent events

The reason for this seems to be partly down to a slight reduction in the heckling, but in reality I believe it to be because of as much as half the amount of planted Labour questions, real issues being discussed, and perhaps through a lack of pressure a Prime Minister that actually answered questions better without the constant need to attack "the party opposite"

Unfortunately the bill I have previously asked people to support didn't get a simple hearing on Friday as the timings involved meant that the debate has been delayed. This isn't a bad thing of course, it just means a bit of a wait for the verdict from the MPs interested, the debate continues on the 14th (this coming Friday). So, of course, I urge people to continue to support this trial especially given that we can see from Hansard just how a minority of people seem to be opposed to any positive move for utterly petty reasoning.

Steve Webb, Lib Dem MP, has recently said online that online campaiging such as e-petitions offers a great way to get people involved in campaigning. I completely agree, I think that the more avenues open to people to easily show their disgust, horror, disapproval or disenfranchisement with policy the better. However one area that I don't agree any of this works is E-Petitions.

So ID Cards are back on the agenda again now and actually threaten to be more confusing a policy than the ratification of the EU treaty. The time scales are slipping further and further, ambiguity is rife over the compulsion that may exist, and the politicians are still woefully clueless about the lack of integrity the system will inherently have.

The EU treaty was last night sent a step further towards being accepted by British parliament as the Labour party successfully managed to vote out the possibility of a referendum on the document. As the debate showed there is a lot of hostility towards referendums as a way of making decisions, contrasted with the moral dilemma of breaking a promise to the country. The following are a few of my thoughts and I have to say watching the debate sharpened my mind on the issue and was very worthwhile for me personally...

However it must be said, if referendums are supposedly no good because of lack of information, lack of clarity over why a decision has gone the way it has and because the act of debate is supposedly so essential to democracy in Britain, why have three line whips been used in this vote meaning that this great debate held yesterday is effectively nullified by party lines, and why has the time allotted to the debate been insufficient to actually fully debate the issue and thus leaving even our MPs only partially informed when they come to make their decision?

On Friday (7th March) comes a very important and exciting bill that I have previously blogged about in some detail, the "Energy Saving (Daylight) bill" that would see us permanently operate on Central European Time rather than GMT for a three year trial.