The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee thinks Ed Miliband is not the best salesman of his ideas, is no orator, and is short on showmanship, with a mildly eccentric manner. (Attlee, Heath and Major lacked obvious charisma too, and “best leader” is less important to voters.) He will win if his ideas chime with enough voters, or at least if he can frighten enough people with the prospect of a second Tory term. In The Daily Mirror Ed MIliband says we can make the long-term changes that Britain need sonly if we take on powerful vested interests, from energy to banking, and reform broken markets. The FT’s Philip Stephens argues that the bankers have got away with it. They have seen off politicians, regulators and angry citizens alike to stroll triumphant from the ruins of the great crash. Some thought the shock of 2008 might change things. We were fools. Bankers are still collecting
multimillion-dollar bonuses even as they shrug off multibillion-dollar fines. The Daily Telegraph’s Fraser Nelson says that it may take the EU to save the country from Ed Miliband’s plans to kill as many Tory experiments (and end as many contracts) as he wants. Jeremy Warner thinks there is something strangely irrelevant about the whole banking debate, stirred up anew this week by Ed Miliband and his unworkable proposals for addressing deficiencies in competition and capping pay at RBS. In The Times Paul Marshall, a hedge fund co-founder, thinks Ed Miliband’s proposals for banking reform are unimaginative and statist. We need to give people ‘number portability, letting people switch bank as easily as they can mobile providers.

In The Times Philip Collins says the argument for press freedom is doen no service by the idiot wind blowing behind the Hollande case. Press freedom is not poorer because we don’t know things. In The Guardian Josh Cohen, a professor of modern literary theory, argues that to attack privacy is to attack the very source of creative and imaginative life. In flooding us with light, in promoting our permanent and total visibility, our culture threatens to turn personal violation into an unnoticed fact of our daily lives. The Daily Mirror’s Paul Routledge thinks l’affaire de Paris does bring out the hollowness of the American concept of the ‘first lady’. The Independent’s Mary Dejevsky believes that we Brits, who delight in the suave allure and impeccable manners of the French male, should not ignore the reality: that in relationships, especially unmarried relationships, those same
seducers hold almost all the cards. In France, more admiration than social censure attaches to the man who plays around – and the more gorgeous the new female on his arm, the greater tends to be the cachet. The Sun’s Katie Hopkins says discretion is the key to a successful affair. Hollande has been as discreet as a streaker on a football pitch.

The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins thinks that without some idea of an enemy, we cannot judge how much defence is needed where. Not since the end of the cold war has there been a sensible threat to Britain. The defence lobby has cleverly converted criminal deeds by terrorists into threats to “national security”. This is lobbying talk, not reality. he Independent’s Mary Dejevsky thinks US defence secretaries, former and current, should know better than to feed Britain’s imperial nostalgia. It only perpetuates illusions in London and Washington and gives succour to a British top brass that has been heedless of expense for too long. The UK should live, and fight, within its means.

The Independent thinks that the way in which Nick Clegg has handled complaints about the Liberal Democrats’ chief executive has been lamentable. The allegations that Lord Rennard made unwanted advances towards women working for the party or looking for preferment in it were first made a decade ago. And Mr Clegg said that he became aware of “indirect and non-specific rumours” in 2008, the year after he became leader.

The FT thinks the US and its allies must seize the opportunity to stress the non-negotiability of Bashar al-Assad’s departure as a condition of any transition. He bears the overwhelming culpability for the deaths of more than 120,000 of his countrymen. Syria cannot be stabilised while he remains in power. Although direct intervention is unlikely, the west must restate its willingness to give lethal weapons to the rebels fighting both the regime and the jihadist groups.

The Times says that the UK is still the fourth-biggest defence spender, but only because the rest of Europe spends so little on armed forces. Nato has accepted that most of its members can no longer offer ‘full spectrum’ capabilities, hoping instead for complementary ‘smart defence’ strategies. Britain is flirting with dumb ones.

The Guardian’s Ian Birrell notes that Britain has ended up with too many shops, the space they occupy having swollen rapidly in recent decades, and far too few homes. Yet given the outdated desire to protect high streets, it is very hard to convert shops into homes or other uses, so we have thousands of wasted properties in prime locations in our towns and cities. When interest rates rise, this imbalance may worsen despite the improving economy.

In The Daiy Express Stephen Pollard argues that no one would ever want to see their loved one in a home but if that does have to happen it should be somewhere where the nurses and staff clearly treat residents not as prisoners living out a life sentence but as adults to be treated with respect. In the end it’s that word – respect – which matters most. So long as relatives and carers offer patience, dignity and respect then we will have done at least something to help mitigate the awful consequences of an appalling disease.

In The International New York Times Graeme Smith, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, says that fear of a Taliban resurgence is so widespread that it is hurting property prices and the value of Afghanistan’s currency, scaring investors away and impelling Afghans to seek foreign asylum. Worries about the year ahead are a kind of pathology. Yet if Afghans are too scared about the withdrawal of American troops, the United States government may not be scared enough. In its latest report to Congress, the Pentagon said that fighting had eased in 2013, reporting a 12 percent drop in security incidents over the previous summer. The United Nations, by contrast, found an 11 percent increase between May to August 2013, compared with the same period in 2012.

@davidschneider