We kicked off our budget coverage with a message from Nick Clegg warning us that things would not be pretty.

On budget day itself, we asked you what you thought, and spawned a massive comments thread with over 200 entries.

In the days that followed, Mark Pack wrote about tackling tax avoidance and brought you news on the budget from Clegg and from Simon Hughes. Newshound sniffed out Vince Cable’s views. When Vince himself popped by to give his perspective, a further 130 comments ensued.

Reaction from the budget continued to pour in through the comments, and Op-eds began to appear. Elaine Bagshaw saw light at the end of the tunnel whilst for George Kendal there was nothing but anger.

We were still talking budget by the end of the week when Iain Roberts ruled out returning to two-party politics and we had some further extracts of Danny Alexander.

But it wasn’t all high finance.

Are you thinking about going into politics? Mark Pack has a daunting list of things you should do this summer to convince yourself you’re serious.

Chris White is clear where the hammer should fall: not on the little people. Mark finds an interesting use of newly-public data. And Iain writes about what attacks we will face.

Finally this week, Tom Papworth makes a suggestion. The Government is planning a Great Repeal Act, removing from the statute book decades of unwieldy legislation. Do you have a view about what could be removed? If so, write a post on your own blog, or send it to us and we’ll publish it for you.

The quid pro quo of axing Daily View is a revival of the hated much-missed Weekly Catchup feature, which, in the latter months of its short run on these pages became less weekly and more catchup. After more than a year away, it’s like we’ve never been gone.

Iain kicked off the week with a look at the polls. They’re inconclusive and inconsistent.

We’ve had four big debates this week, with comment numbers running in the dozens.

James Graham led the charge with a plea for Lib Dems not to compromise on fairer taxes. What will next week’s budget reveal? Will we get Lib Dem tax cuts without the redistributive linked Lib Dem tax rises to make a cohesive package? Only time will tell.

The Deputy Prime Minister made a speech. Helen posted the video. You all had your say in the comments. You wrote over 12,000 words. Cripes.

Mark Pack explored the ramifications of the timing of the AV referendum. Me? I’d prefer it wasn’t at the same time as my re-election campaign. But it doesn’t look like it will pan out that way.

And Mark pointed out a tiny inconsistency in Labour’s approach to public spending. If you can call £44bn tiny.

Iain found something scary but exciting for our local government colleagues to think about in the coming weeks.

David Thorpe called for renationalising our railways. Merlene Emerson reflected on UK-China relations. Jo Shaw found healthy scepticism at Liberty’s AGM. And Linda Jack found the FPC in combative mood in its first post-coalition meeting.

Lib Dem Voice has a strand of writing called the Independent View, intended for people who are not Lib Dems themselves, but who would like to talk to vaguely Lib Demmy people. Availing themselves of the opportunity this week were Thomas Cawston, of Reform, reflecting on the Budget; and Sinead Doyle telling us about the Red Cross’s campaign for Refugee week. Look Beyond the Label.

Personal news this weekend. Chris Huhne is to get a divorce. Eek. Jo Swinson and Duncan Hames are getting married. Woo!

What Newshound sniffed out this week:
Jerry Hayes’s swearword
Nick Clegg says families should come first

Not since Baroness Scott and the Lib Dem’s bureaucrat of choice Mark Valladeres changed their facebook statuses to “engaged” has the Lib Dem online world been so charged with romance.

Now Jo Swinson and Duncan Hames used the medium of Twitter to tell the world of their engagement, to cheers of encouragement all round.

Every congratulation and wish for happiness from all your friends at t’Voice.

I praise the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) and all those who have made their maiden speeches for their eloquence and endurance. It is customary during a maiden speech to speak in complimentary and glowing terms-indeed, frivolous terms in some cases-about the relevant constituency. However, I hope people do not mind if, as a Bradford councillor, I pass on that and leave it until another occasion.

I love my constituency, I really do, but it does have its problems. I fought it five times over a period of 20 years and I never considered for even one second trying to be an MP anywhere else. I am proud to be an MP, but even prouder to be MP for Bradford East.

I shall get one thing out of the way. I did not know Terry Rooney, my predecessor, too well, although I fought him five times. I do know, however, that he was a colleague of many here and gave 20 years’ service to the House. He put in many years’ work on the Work and Pensions Committee and chaired it. I pay tribute to him.

I have extensive yet limited experience of education; I shall try to explain what I mean by that. The extensive experience includes working for Leeds Metropolitan university for nearly 25 years. I cannot say that I regret having failed to come here sooner, because that would have meant my missing out on my wonderful memories of working with thousands of bright, funny, infuriating, creative and inspiring young people.

For the past five years, I have been seconded to Bradford City football club. I went there to help it to create a community department to engage with the predominantly Pakistani-Bangladeshi community that surrounds the club in Manningham. It is now host to a positive lifestyle centre, which has run programmes for more than 11,000 school children in the past five years. There is the football in the community scheme, which works with 130 of Bradford’s schools. I am probably most proud of all to be associated with my hero, Andy Sykes, who joined the British National party, understood how he had made an error, was going to leave, went undercover and was featured in the BBC documentary “The Secret Agent”. Andy was that man, and he now works with Dale Althorp carrying out some really tough work across the country with some really tough young people with extreme racist views.

For 26 years, I was a councillor in a ward in Bradford, where I was a group spokesperson for education. For four years, I held the education portfolio at a very difficult time, with a privatised education service, an Ofsted inspection that was one of the worst in the whole country, a move from a three to a two-tier education system, and the closure of all special schools and the reopening of new schools with co-located mainstream schools. For nearly 30 years, I have also been a school governor in special, primary and secondary schools, and I am still a governor at two schools in Bradford.

Bradford has one of the fastest growing populations in the country, and one of the youngest. Believe it or not, one in four of the population in Bradford East is under the age of 25. That is scary, because many of those young people are failing quite badly educationally. There is a view-we have heard it tonight-that if one can only improve the educational outcomes of children in deprived communities, that will somehow break the cycle of deprivation. Well, that is not my experience. It is not by raising educational outcomes that we reduce deprivation-it is by reducing deprivation that we raise educational outcomes. This is why I intervened earlier. We need to look at all the possible determinants of educational attainment, including gender, ethnicity, religion, and school structure-we have been through them all: community, foundation, grant maintained, academies, city technology and private. Nothing, but nothing, compares with deprivation as the overwhelming determinant of a pupil’s academic success and later, sadly, their prospects for employment, mental health, physical health and life expectancy. In education, class really does matter.

Yes, schools can be improved-I have been there-by better leadership, management, governance, teaching, learning, and freedoms from central Government. However, all head teachers and governors know that the most effective way of improving attainment is to change the intake of a school. I get very angry when I hear people glibly talking about good, bad or failing schools. I was chair of governors at a school branded as a failure-part of the national challenge-because of its attainment levels. At the same time, it was the first secondary school in Bradford to be categorised by Ofsted as outstanding. Madness. Schools in the more affluent parts of Bradford district are deemed to be good, but only because of their A to C grade attainment. They are left standing, in terms of contextual value added, by many inner-city schools that are looked down on.

The Queen’s Speech-certainly, the agreement-contains many education proposals that I welcome. The slimmed-down national curriculum and flexibility in terms and conditions are necessary if the pupil premium is to work. I am not sure why these freedoms cannot just be made available to all schools, and why that has to be the preserve of academies. The most important freedom is not from overpowering local authorities, which can be controlled-perhaps unlike Essex. That view is out of date. The most important freedom is from the strangulating control of local education and authorities and schools by central Government.

The pupil premium, which is conspicuous by its absence in the Queen’s Speech, offers the real prospect of redressing the disadvantage faced by young people from deprived backgrounds. There is already deprivation funding, but it is a pittance. By and large, the amount of money that a school gets is based on the number of pupils in the school. That cannot be right, because going into an Ilkley primary school on a Monday morning is not the same as going into a school in BD3, the area that I represent.

I said that my experience of education is extensive but limited. It is extensive because of what I have done, but limited because of where it has been-in Bradford. I acknowledge that. However, it is that understanding of Bradford that I was sent here to voice. In a place such as Bradford, proposals for more faith schools and academies and the rights of parents to set up their own schools threaten social cohesion, strategic planning of school places, co-ordination of admissions and collaborative partnerships. I worry about that.

For many years, my wife has worked in a service providing support for Travellers, Gypsies, Roma, asylum seekers and refugees. My personal test of new academies and free schools will be based not on their standing in a league table showing key stage 2 and 4 results, but on the extent to which they provide a helping hand for the clients my wife represents. We will wait and see.

Also celebrating birthdays today are the chef Jamie Oliver (who is currently applying for planning permission to build a restaurant in Nottingham I will probably never be able to afford to eat in); West Wing actor Richard Schiff and the Lib Dem MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale Tim Farron. Some have speculated he might be in the running to replace Vince Cable as Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats; he tweeted last night that as Vince Cable’s PPS, he got to hear the “Stalin to Mr Bean” gag in rehearsal. Tim is 40 today.

2 Big Stories

Coalition government sets out radical welfare reforms

So says the Guardian headline, anyway, but the article is light on detail if heavy on mood music. A lot of people will be watching anxiously for the detail.

Duncan Smith says he is to propose to the Treasury a radical scheme that includes simplification of the complex benefits system designed to make it financially worthwhile for unemployed people to work, including in part-time jobs.

Concern over human cost overshadows iPad launch

Will you be queuing to spend 499 of your Earth pounds on an Apple iPad on Friday? The Independent has worrying news about the conditions under which the shiniest new gadget is being made.

The American electronics giant Apple was investigating damaging allegations last night that Chinese workers making its new iPad device were subjected to such “inhumane” treatment that some of them took their own lives by jumping off factory roofs.

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

• Lynne Featherstone is celebrating Camden Lib Dems’ recent victory
• Pretendy Liberal lets David Laws do the talking

Blogger James has a clip from the BBC Parliament service which has David Laws answering an urgent question, and swatting away Labour attempts at attack with all the ease of someone who had been doing this for decades rather than days.

Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.

In all that, there’s a good chance we might lose sight of our early morning post proposing a Tweetup / Liberal Drinks meeting at the end of the special conference on Sunday.

Full details are here: http://ldv.org.uk/19520

To keep our discussion tidy, comments on this post are closed. Please comment on the first blog post from this morning.

In all that, there’s a good chance we might lose sight of our early morning post proposing a Tweetup / Liberal Drinks meeting at the end of the special conference on Sunday.

Full details are here: http://ldv.org.uk/19520

To keep our discussion tidy, comments on this post are closed. Please comment on the first blog post from this morning.

In all that, there’s a good chance we might lose sight of our early morning post proposing a Tweetup / Liberal Drinks meeting at the end of the special conference on Sunday.

Full details are here: http://ldv.org.uk/19520

To keep our discussion tidy, comments on this post are closed. Please comment on the first blog post from this morning.

It’s been a long old while since I was at the NEC (we had a fab time at a printing exhibition ten years ago when we were replacing a folding machine. Going to a conference that included machines that could turn trees into decks of playing cards was a little OTT for a standard folding machine)

However, a bit of a look at the NEC website suggests there is a Wetherspoons on site – and it’s not terribly far from Hall 3 where the special conference takes place.

So, I am proposing a Lib Drinks / Tweetup in the Wetherspoons at the NEC immediately after the speech from the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, which is due to finish the conference around 5pm.

If you’d like to come along, why not click here to let your twitter friends know.

Today in 1958, Velcro was trademarked before going on to applications in haberdashery and space travel.

Birthday boys today include Arthur Sullivan, Armistead Maupin and Stevie Wonder.

2 Big Stories

There’s no doubting from the papers that today is all about the new inhabitants of Downing Street. From a Lib Dem perspective, there’s wor Vince, about to wage war on the banks. Or is he? Does the update to the Guardian’s article, filed 90 minutes after the article itself, herald the first hint of trouble in Paradise?

City is right to fear Vince Cable

Make no mistake, Cable’s appointment matters. David Cameron could have given him another economic job that would have kept him well away from anything to do with City reform. Last night it was mooted that the MP for Twickenham might be made chief secretary to the Treasury, and thus responsible for the delicate negotiations with Whitehall ministries over spending cuts.

Nick Clegg has proved he is no pushover

Jackie Ashley has praise for the Lib Dem leader’s achievements. But will it be enough?

By bringing in fixed-term parliaments and setting the next election for five years’ time, the Lib Dems hope to have had enough time to prove that they have made a difference, and are not simply mini-Cameroons. But it’s a big gamble. There is provision for another election sooner if 55% of MPs vote for one. A falling out between the parties, some rebellious MPs and a few by-elections could turn the arithmetic that way.

2 Must-Read Blog Posts

What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:

• Jonny Wright: tuition fees campaign misdirected

If, like me, you’re a student, and if, like me, you’re wondering how to get rid of tuition fees, then consider this. In power, Labour introduced the damn things. The Lib Dems want to scrap them, and if ever we’re in a position to do so, we will. Now, which party should you spent your efforts fighting against?

• Dave Page: ID Cards to go

I joined the Liberal Democrats at the same time as I joined No2ID, the nationwide single-issue, non-partisan campaign against the Database State. For the last few years, I have been co-ordinating Manchester No2ID, a local group of the national campaign. I have worked with people from all political backgrounds, including fellow Lib Dems, Greens, Labour and even anarchists. Working across party lines, on a single issue, has been very refreshing and helped me see beyond party politics. Our monthly street stalls keep me in touch with people’s opinions, and lead to frank and open discussions.

Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.