So I’m a day or two behind everyone else in posting my thoughts about the QS, well so what. When it’s your job to produce a digest inside three hours for your boss, doing it at home too (not that, given the time, I’m actually at home!) seems a bit of a drag.

I guess I was sparked by the Honorable Fiend’s post about his disappointment with the QS. I was just struck by his analysis of the things that were wrong with it. While the rest of the leftish-blog-world seems to be having agonies about ID cards (about which, for the record, I don’t really give a 4X either way, to my girlfriend’s fury), his vitriol is reserved for the proposed commission on equality and human rights and the changes to the Welsh Assembly.

For my part, I’m really pleased about the equality bill, which will make public authorities have a duty to promote equality between women and men in all their functions - sounds bureaucratic, but it’s one more tool to ensure that all public bodies do an effective gender analysis of their workforce and policies (now that sounds even more bureaucratic!) - it means that local authorities, universities, quangos, the police, all sorts of public bodies will have to look at the impact on women and men of what they do, how they do it and who they employ to do it. CEHR is great too - first statutory support for LGB people and might even give effective support to people who experience multiple discrimination.

Pleased to see Government of Wales bill in there. Had the pleasure of living in the valleys for a year, and got pretty involved with the local party. It was bloody obvious to us all that the stupid regional list system disadvantaged the Labour Party and let sub-standard politicians who were kicked out by the voters of their own constituencies in through the regional back door. We lived a few doors down from Jane Davidson, who when I’m having moments of disillusionment with Ms Kelly (understandably quite frequent) I imagine is the education minister not just for Wales but for England too.

So, what else is right with it? Parental rights and childcare bills, to start with. Labour keeping its promises from the manifesto always a good thing, particularly when they’re the nice progressive policies that will actually help poorer people and make a difference to their lives. Smoking ban, reintroduction of criminalising incitement to religious hatred, violent crime bill to sort out alcohol-related crime and young people buying knives - all good.

I was glad to see a commitment - however vague - to sorting out my generation’s pensions after the Turner review. It appears that we’re all going to have to find out a lot more about pensions policy in the coming years.

I’m pretty indifferent about most of the rest of it, though for the life of me I don’t get why we need another law on asylum.

My big worry is about Incapacity Benefit, and exactly what DB has up his sleeve. I think we can all agree that the numbers on incapacity benefit would appear to indicate that not everyone receiveing that benefit will neccessarily be unable to work again at some point. We also know that thousands of heavy industrial workers were thrown on the scrapheap under the Tories, and that many were encouraged onto IB as a means of getting them off the unemployment lists.

I don’t think IB and IB claimants are “scroungers”, but nor do I think that IB has to be some sort of sacred cow which you don’t dare discuss. The plans we have in outline look okay - moving those who are unlikely ever to be able to return to work onto a higher guaranteed allowance, and encouraging everyone else to attempt to find work, with plenty of support to do so. But with all of these things, the devil is in the detail - specifically, the decision about which person with which condition is entitled to which allowance, and the nature of the support to retrain and look for work. It’ll have to be good, in a society where disabled people are five times more likely not to be working than non-disabled people.

So there we are: glad to have got that down. There’s a post brewing in my brain about the left’s response to crime, prevention, rehabilitation and the fear of crime, but I think it’ll wait a day or so.