Image source, Getty

When Jeremy Corbyn first declared his candidacy for the Labour leadership, most of his colleagues in parliament saw him as the token candidate of the perpetually rebellious left. He needed charitable nominations just to get on the ballot paper. The limit of his ambition was meant to be a respectable last place out of four.

None expected him to emerge as a serious contender - the front-runner according to one opinion poll. (Although who believes those, these days?) But something extraordinary is certainly happening on the British left. Corbyn seems to be harnessing great stores of pent up energy from a generation that rejects not just the politics of the New Labour era but the whole style and idiom of pragmatic, centrist compromise. 

Activists forming this pro-Corbyn surge look to elements of the "Yes" campaign in last year's Socttish independence referendum and at anti-austerity parties in Greece and Spain - Syriza and Podemos. They look at the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a more radical left rival to Hilary Clinton for the Democratic party nomination ahead of US presidential elections. They see themselves as part of a global anti-austerity, anti-capitalist re-awakening. Thanks to new rules introduced under Ed Miliband, these Corbynites can buy a vote in Labour's leadership election for three pounds a time. With some help from large trade union campaign machinery the whole political complexion of the party seems to be shifting sharply left. 

The other candidates are worried. MPs who still think general elections are won by appealing to swing voters are veering between despair and panic. On Newsnight tonight we take a look at the Corbyn phenomenon. We speak to his supporters and to one shadow cabinet minister who warns of the potential chaos in the parliamentary party that his victory would unleash. And we consider the question of whether Corbyn is really just the lucky beneficiary of a force that was ready to erupt before there was even a vacancy at the top of the party. Does the romantic idea that some Corbynites have of their candidate match the reality of the man himself?   

Mark Urban
Newsnight Defence and Diplomatic Editor

Image source, Getty Images

If you're sitting in the Pentagon or State Department there's good news and bad news. The good news is that Turkey is embracing the struggle against the Islamic State group with a vigour it has never shown before; bombing them; allowing US aircraft to use Turkish air bases for the same purpose; arresting hundreds of suspects in Turkey, and tightening security on the Syrian border. The bad news is that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is also taking the opportunity for an onslaught on a long-standing enemy of Turkey's, the PKK Kurdish extremist group. 

So keen are the Americans to disabuse people in the region that they've given any sort of green light for this attack on the Kurds that a senior official, Brett McGurk, tweeted an unusually blunt message pointing out, "There is no connection between these airstrikes against PKK and recent understandings to intensify US-Turkey cooperation." With Turkey's call for discussions at Nato on Tuesday, its allies are nervous that it could link its actions against IS and the PKK in ways that they would rather avoid.

For the Americans, strikes against Kurdish armed groups in Iraq and Syria are highly unwelcome because these troops are one of the few reliable partners they have on the ground in the struggle against IS. To the Turks, the so-called Caliphate of IS and the PKK are two sides of the same coin - terrorist movements that endanger their security while exploiting the power vacuum in northern Syria and Iraq.

Mr Erdogan apparently calculates that hitting the PKK, against which Turkey fought a long and bitter insurgency, will not overly endanger his relations with the US, a two-year-old ceasefire with the Kurdish group, or shatter the peace of south-east Turkey more generally. He tested the waters last October with air strikes against PKK bases inside Turkey, which despite some angry rhetoric and Kurdish street protests did not reignite a full blown insurgency. 

His actions exploit the fact that Kurdish politics is very factional, with many Turkish Kurds rejecting the Marxist-hued politics and violence of the PKK. Furthermore Mr Erdogan has built good relations with the Kurdish factions in northern Iraq that have not so far been endangered by military action against the PKK. 

Syria presents a trickier conundrum, because the PKK is closely linked to the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which, backed by coalition air power, successfully fought off IS in Kobane and has expanded the area under its control. The YPG is another Marxist group closely aligned with the PKK.

For Nato ambassadors meeting tomorrow, the risk therefore is backing anything that might lead to a new conflict in south-east Turkey or endanger recent gains by anti-IS forces in northern Syria. At the same time, they must acknowledge both the importance of Turkish cooperation against IS and its right to self-defence against groups, including the PKK, that might bring terror to its streets.

These calculations could become even more fraught if Turkish troops enter Syria to create a buffer zone. Mr Erdogan has been toying this idea for the past two years - seeing it as a way to fill a power vacuum, thwart the Kurds, and give a serious blow to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Now there are reports suggesting that the US has agreed to a limited buffer zone.

If Turkish armour does indeed roll across the Syrian frontier, President Erdogan's gamble will be that the US and Nato have little choice but to back him. The consequences in terms of the fractured politics of Kurdish nationalism and the Syrian opposition would though be far harder to predict.              

Marc Williams
Newsnight Election Producer

Image source, PA

The allegations against Lord Sewel have led to many people asking whether it is possible to "sack" a peer who is deemed guilty of misconduct, either in the court of law or in the court of public opinion. The answer reminds me of that of Reverend Lovejoy in the Simpsons., external

It may surprise you to know that, until 2014, there was an extremely limited process for disqualifying a peer and no process at all for peer to resign voluntarily.

Up until then, as this House of Commons Library note, external sets out, you would leave the House of Lords if:

• You were a septuagenarian Bishop who was not a life peer. They are required to retire from their see at 70
• You successfully applied to the Clerk of the Parliaments for a leave of absence for the rest of the Parliament
• You were declared bankrupt under the Insolvency Act 1986. Once your period of bankruptcy finished, you could resume sitting and voting 
• You were convicted of treason under the Forfeiture Act 1870 until you had either gone through your term of imprisonment or received a pardon 

Otherwise, there would need to be a specific Act of Parliament. There was one in 1917 to "sack" two peers for supporting "the King's enemies" during World War One, while Tony Blair's House of Lords Act in 1999 ousted all but 92 of the hereditary peers.

Progress was made in 2014 through the House of Lords Reform Act,, external which set out some additional exit paths. A peer could now:

• Voluntarily resign
• Be removed if he or she didn't not attend the Lords at all during a session
• Be sacked if convicted of a "serious offence", defined as a sentence of more that one year

A final development came through the House of Lords (Expulsion and Suspension) Act 2015, external. This short Act allows a Standing Order of the Lords to be introduced to allow for anyone to be suspended or expelled from the Lords via a resolution of the House. A Standing Order is merely one of the basic rules that determines how Parliament operates.

The Standing Order to this effect was passed by the Lords on 16 July 2015. The House of Lords Committee on Privileges and Conduct (whose Chairman is, as chance would have it, Lord Sewel) published a report , externalonly a couple of weeks ago which set out a draft Standing Order. 

Through this, the process would be:

• A suspension or expulsion "must follow a recommendation from the Committee for Privileges and Conduct that the member be expelled or suspended (as the case may be) because the member has breached the Code of Conduct"
• "Such a recommendation may be made by the Committee for Privileges and Conduct only if the Commissioner for Standards has found the member in breach of the Code of Conduct or the member is in breach of the Code in accordance with paragraph 16 or 17 of the Code, external"

It's worth noting that those paragraphs of the Code of Conduct only apply to convictions and not to any general poor behaviour.

The clear concern for a layperson looking at that is that the process seems to rest on a judgement behind close doors by a Commissioner and a Committee. Peers do not, to state the obvious, have an electorate to answer to. They are, nonetheless, lawmakers. Whatever happens to Lord Sewel, one of the central consequences of this affair might be demands for increased public accountability for the inhabitants of the red benches.

Correction: A previous version of this story stated that the Standing Order had not, to the author's knowledge, been passed. It was on 16 July 2015. 

The Bank of England's chief economist, Andy Haldane is widely regarded as a free thinker and an internationally influential central banker. He's been speaking to our Economics correspondent Duncan Weldon - and he had some tough words for British businesses. In case you missed it, here's the interview. You can watch more on our YouTube channel, external .

Marc Williams
Newsnight Election Producer

I've discovered a tool which should definitely be filed under "Just a bit of fun" (©Peter Snow). It comes courtesy of the IBM Watson supercomputer, external and is called "Personality Insights". Essentially, what you do is to input a decent chunk of prose from a single person and it comes up with a brief personality profile of that person. 

In search of some suitable victims to try this out on, I alighted upon the four contenders to be Labour leader. Here is the supercomputer's verdict (all inaccuracies should be directed to IBM...).

Liz Kendall (based upon her speech, external on devolution):

"You are genial and helpful.

You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You are self-controlled: you have control over your desires, which are not particularly intense. And you are altruistic: you feel fulfilled when helping others, and will go out of your way to do so.

Your choices are driven by a desire for connectedness.

You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done. You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you."

Jeremy Corbyn (based on his speech, external on the economy):

"You are shrewd, skeptical and tranquil.

You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. You are imaginative: you have a wild imagination. And you are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself.

Your choices are driven by a desire for prestige.

You are relatively unconcerned with both tradition and taking pleasure in life. You care more about making your own path than following what others have done. And you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment."

Yvette Cooper (based on her article, external on welfare reform):

"You are shrewd, skeptical and can be perceived as indirect.

You are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them. You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. And you are energetic: you enjoy a fast-paced, busy schedule with many activities.

Your choices are driven by a desire for connectedness.

You are relatively unconcerned with taking pleasure in life: you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment. You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you."

Andy Burnham (based on his speech, external on the economy):

"You are inner-directed, skeptical and strict.

You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. You are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself. And you are empathetic: you feel what others feel and are compassionate towards them.

Your choices are driven by a desire for prestige.

You are relatively unconcerned with both taking pleasure in life and tradition. You prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment. And you care more about making your own path than following what others have done."

A lot of common ground there, giving hope to those who are hoping for a harmonious denouement to the contest. 

Try it yourself here, external.

Marc Williams
Newsnight Election Producer

Image source, AP

The past few days in the wake of what we should probably now just call "The Poll" have seen a variety of doom-mongering predictions about the Labour Party's future. On Wednesday you had Tony Blair saying that the party could be out of power for 20 years if Jeremy Corbyn won, top donor John Mills warned about turning off the cash supply and others have predicted a possible SDP-esque breakaway by Labour centrists.

What hope is there at the moment if you're a gloomy Labour supporter (not all are, by the way, particularly those energised by Mr Corbyn's message of anti-austerity)? Here's one crumb of comfort that I encountered listening to Slate Magazine's Whistlestop , externalpodcast presented by John Dickerson (well worth a listen for fans of US presidential politics). In the latest episode, Dickerson is actually talking about the turmoil within the Democrat party in 1978 as Jimmy Carter floundered, but he referred to the situation faced by the Republican Party just two years previous in the toxic aftermath of Watergate. He says:

"The Democrats are having a restless self-examination in December of 1978. You’ll remember in the 1976 Ford-Reagan fight, the huge debate in the Republican Party was how the party after being in such horrible straits could repair itself. Remember 'Republicans are people too', the ad campaign from the Republican National Committee. Just two years later the Democrat party are having their own soul-searching moment which reminds us of something we should always be reminded of, which is that things can change very quickly in politics. And usually the moment that you declare the death of a party is the moment you should ‘buy, buy, buy’ into the stock of that party."

On that basis, should those of you of a betting sensibility out there be putting the house on a Labour victory in 2020? The cheery lesson closer to home for the Labour Party is that similar warnings of imminent obsolescence were voiced following their defeat in 1992. Five years later, they were celebrating a landslide victory. 

But let's talk about elastic. Sir John Major has talked about a conversation he had with Chris Patten following that 1992 victory:

"The day after the 1992 general election, Chris Patten (the Conservative chairman) and I sat in the White Room at Number 10. Chris had lost his seat at Bath. And we agreed that in winning a fourth successive term, we had stretched the democratic elastic as far as it would go, and unless Labour collapsed, we would have little chance of winning the next election."  

Two points: firstly, the Tories have only just won their first election victory since 1992, so it is questionable as to how taut the democratic elastic is in Labour' favour. Secondly, the important Major-Patten caveat was "unless Labour collapsed". Surveying the current state of the Labour Party, there is at least a small possibility that this might happen this time. Just as the "democratic elastic" stretched to breaking point for the Tories in government in 1997, so it can do so for parties in opposition that cannot come to terms with defeat. 

We are quite unused in this country to the idea that prominent parties can just cease to exist and the experiences of Labour until Blair and the Tories until Cameron have implanted the notion that time and the right leader can heal all wounds. As Gershwin wrote, "it ain't necessarily so."

Ed Brown
Newsnight producer

Image source, Getty Images

A candidate who was expected to get nowhere suddenly turns out to be the frontrunner. Who do you expect to be most excited - the candidate, or their opponents? 

The story of the last few days is that it's the opposite to what you might expect.

At about 22:00 on Tuesday night we got news of the remarkable poll from YouGov and the Times putting Jeremy Corbyn as the frontrunner in the Labour leadership race. At 22:01, I called Corbyn's spokesperson - and it turned out I was the first to break the news to them. They were just putting the finishing touches to the press briefing on Corbyn's speech on the economy the next day. 

There was a certain resignation in their voice to that economic speech being buried as they gave me the following statement which you've probably seen around since:

“You can get excited about polls if you want to, Jeremy will continue to concentrate on policies not polls, policies not personalities, and in the morning he will be outlining his economic vision of fairer taxes for Britain in 2020.”

It was a forlorn hope. Some people got very excited about the polls - and it wasn't Corbyn's supporters.

Thirty-five minutes later, John McTernan called MPs that had nominated, external Corbyn "morons" on Newsnight, and since then there's been a veritable smorgasbord of anti-Corbyn rhetoric from the Labour establishment - Blair, Milburn, Umunna, Beckett, the list goes on. And those are just the ones that are willing to talk live on air. "Very cross" says one very senior former adviser. "Spitting mad" said another former cabinet minister.

Contrast this with the Corbyn supporters. I've spoken to a few of them over the past couple of days. Several of them have said they simply don't believe the opinion poll. A few of the older heads say they've seen these sorts of things before - and they are a mere puff of air, a bit of media overexcitement. The message seems to be, let's see where we are in a month or so, it's only one poll and so on. You'll notice that there have actually been relatively few of them around on the airwaves. I suspect the reason why is that they don't want to stoke things up any further.

Perhaps it's because they've been beaten so many times. Perhaps it's because they're right, and the whole thing is a media overreaction. But it's not the Corbynites that are all in a tizzy. 

Strangely enough, it would seem that the thing that gets the Blairites and the centrists really excited is the prospect of a left wing candidate winning the leadership.

Image source, Emily Thornberry

This was the scene in our Green Room last night just before we went to air.

The guests were: Diane Abbott, Emily Thornberry, Mary Creagh, Marieme Jamme and Robtel Neajai Pailey.

Notice anything?

If you missed the programme, you can watch again here (UK only)

Duncan Weldon
Economics correspondent

Image source, Getty Images

On Wednesday Greece votes on the second tranche of reforms required to secure a third bailout from its creditors.

The upside, optimistic scenario, now looks something like this: the measures are passed, a third funding package is agreed and, with trust between the Greek government and its creditors gradually restored, some sort of debt relief (probably involving interest rate cuts, interest payment moratoriums and the extension of the loans maturities) is agreed later this year or early next.

Read the full piece on my blog

Lewis Goodall
Newsnight producer

Image source, Getty Images

As the Corbyn bandwagon has picked up pace (it's looking more HS2 than wagon as thing stand) there has been a lot of excited chatter among the Westminster classes about the Islington MP being the party's "new Michael Foot". This is pretty ahistorical and a really bad parallel.

Yes the two men share some significant policy positions. They're both unilateralists, they're both on the left of the party, they're both favourites of the party grassroots. But in almost every other respect they're extremely different.

1. Foreign affairs: Foot was not pacifist.Foot supported the Thatcher government's military efforts against the Argentinians in the Falklands War. It's hard to imagine Corbyn doing the same. Nor was Foot in favour of withdrawing from Nato, as Corbyn has in the past indicated he'd like to do.

2. Foot had been a distinguished cabinet ministerthroughout the 1970s Labour governments. As leader of the house he had given a virtuoso parliamentary performance on the night of the Callaghan government's last stand in its vote of no confidence, leading the debate for the government. He had also been Employment Secretary under Wilson and a string of junior ministerial posts before. He was very much inside the Labour machine and as a consequence not a surprise candidate for leader. He'd run for leader twice and deputy leader too - he was very much a big beast already. Corbyn, by contrast, has spent over 30 years on the backbenches.

3. Foot was no rebel.Until now Jeremy Corbyn's claim to fame was his record for defying the party whip 500 times. Foot served in both the Wilson and Callaghan governments without complaint.

4. Foot had the support of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). In the second round Foot won the support of 129 of his fellow Labour MPs as opposed to Healey's 119. Corbyn could barely rustle 35 nominations and only with a great deal of help from colleagues who had no intention of voting for him.

Image source, Getty Images

Which leads us to perhaps the most important difference...

5. He was the unity candidate. It's hard to imagine - given our knowledge of what was to come in 1983 - but in the 1980 Labour leadership election Foot was considered the unity candidate by most Labour MPs. Unlike Corbyn, he was not on the hard left of the party - he was neither a Marxist nor a Bennite. Rather he was a total devotee of Aneurin Bevan, a romantic socialist of the old school who felt more comfortable with the thinking of Swift and Laski than Lenin. 

His politics were leftist and hence to the distaste of people like Shirley Williams, David Owen and Roy Jenkins, but not so far left that he couldn't attract the support of a majority of Labour MPs. Hence he wanted to form a unity shadow cabinet: Foot went to enormous pains to try and keep the party together during the split. He was utterly furious with Tony Benn for challenging Denis Healey (on the right of Labour) for the deputy leadership and campaigned for the latter against his more ideologically compatible colleague. Indeed, Foot demanded that Benn challenge him instead of Healey. When he won the contest it was considered that the result was better for party unity than if Healey had won, given the former Chancellor's belligerent nature. It's hard to imagine that if Corbyn wins the press write up will be one praising the result as a paean of party unity.

So let's not make any mistake. If Jeremy Corbyn is elected Labour is in unchartered territory, even compared to 1983. In terms of parliamentary support, and his position on international affairs, Corbyn really would be in a league of his own.

Image source, Getty Images

Labour MPs are "moronic" and "suicidally inclined" to consider Jeremy Corbyn for leader. That's what former Blair adviser John McTernan told us on last night's programme, on hearing the news that a new YouGov poll has Corbyn as the frontrunner. 

In case you missed it, you can watch the interview below.  

Marc Williams
Newsnight Election Producer

Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) have been busy declaring their support for the four candidates for the Labour leadership. The CLPs have no official role in the contest: each is made up of individual members each with a single vote. So, an endorsement does not mean a block vote for the candidate (for example, in 2010 Islington North endorsed Diane Abbott but its members overwhelmingly plumped , externalfor the Miliband brothers). Nonetheless, they do provide an interesting snapshot of the political leanings of local party bigwigs.

The New Statesman is doing a useful running total, external of who is endorsing who. Here's where the fun begins. You can cross-reference this with who those CLPs supported in the 2010 contest (many formally endorsed no one).  

Look at this table, which shows how many of the 2010 endorsements have gone to the candidates this time and who those previous endorsements were for.

Now I admit that the significance of this chart is not immediately apparent. To get a better idea, let's first look at Andy Burnham. This table shows that 40  of the 396 CLPs that made an endorsement in 2010 are so far supporting Burnham. Of that 40, only 6 supported him in 2010 when he was also a candidate. 23 of his endorsements previously supported David Miliband, which sits a bit awkwardly with the idea that he is (Corbyn aside) the more left wing option.

What about Yvette Cooper? She's narrowly in the lead (among CLPs that endorsed in 2010) but only 2 of her 41 endorsements supported her husband Ed Balls in 2010 (he got 17). This means that there is not currently a transfer of Balls support to Cooper.

Or let's look at Jeremy Corbyn. First point is that he is doing very well, having near parity of endorsements with Burnham and Cooper. But look at where they came from: 10 of his 36 CLPs previously supported David Miliband. This would seem to lend credence to the notion that the leadership of some local parties moved leftwards during the Ed Miliband era.

A few important caveats to all this:

1. The endorsements are still coming in, so the picture might change;
2. A number of CLPs have endorsed this time that didn't in 2010, so it's not possible to compare in those cases;
3. The CLPs in 2010 do not in some cases directly correlate to those listed for 2015. I have omitted them where this is the case.
4. Not all CLPs are equal. Some (like Hornsey and Wood Green) had over a 1000 members in 2010, while other were barely more than a hundred.

Ed Brown
Newsnight producer

George Osborne this morning released a document, external suggesting that he was asking for departments to outline possible cuts of either 25% or 40%. 

One of the arguments that gets made around the upcoming spending review is that this set of cuts is going to be harder to make. The argument goes that a lot has been cut off departmental spending in the last Parliament, so presumably all the low-hanging fruit are gone. Now the government has to do the really difficult stuff.

That may well be true. And 25% or 40% on top of the 2010-15 cuts does sound like a lot. 

But there is a little bit of arithmetic that means that the impact might not be quite as great as it appears.

Imagine department X had a budget of 100 in 2010. It took a 20% cut from 2010-15, which meant that in 2015 it had a budget of 80. Let's say it makes 20% of cuts again 2015-2020. That gets them down to a budget of 64 by 2020. 

You'll notice that, despite both cuts being 20%, the 2015-2020 cash cut is of 16 rather than 20. In cash terms, it is less, despite the percentage being the same.

That means to do a 20% cut this time around, you need to fire fewer civil servants, get rid of fewer facilities and so on than last time.

So yes, it may be the case that the low hanging fruit on spending cuts are gone. But remember that this time around, because the tree is often smaller than it was, to get the same percentage cut they also need to pick fewer fruit.

Image source, Zero Gravity Corp

Has Stephen Hawking committed a cosmic U-turn on the question of whether or not we should be trying to make contact with aliens?

A Russian billionaire is ploughing £64m into the search for extra-terrestrial life, saying he wants to take the search for intelligent aliens away from being a fringe activity and into the realms of serious science.

Professor Hawking, who launched the quest yesterday, said: “Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, wondering what they mean… It’s time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond earth.”

But in 2010, in a series for the Discovery Channel, he said: "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.” He added that we should actively avoid contact.

Rather than flip-flopping, Professor Hawking could be referring to two different scenarios: ‘If aliens find us, that’s bad’; ‘if we find them, it could be very interesting.’ Or he could simply have changed his mind.

Either way, the prospect of finding aliens isn’t as remote as we once thought. Nasa chief scientist Ellen Stofan was quoted earlier this year as saying, external: "I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade, and I think we're going to have definitive evidence within 20 to 30 years."

Laura Kuenssberg
Newsnight Chief Correspondent

Image source, AP

Thought the Budget was it? Think again. The government's spending review, which will set its priorities for the next five years, will take place on 25 November. On Tuesday, the Treasury will write to cabinet ministers asking for savings in their departments to total £20bn.

The Treasury believes that billions can be found from selling off public land - they say currently over £300bn worth is owned by the taxpayer. And for the first time, departments will be expected to show they are contributing to the government's target of building 150,000 homes on land previously owned by the taxpayer by 2020. It’s worth noting that the government’s attempts to do this in the last parliament was more stumbling than they had hoped, as a recent NAO Report found.

But ministers also believe that billions could be released by devolving spending from Whitehall, under the Chancellor's so called "Northern Powerhouse" strategy - plans for increased devolution across England. Concrete estimates of how much devolution could save are hard to find. But the Treasury is confident that pooling budgets under their proposed reforms can save significant amounts of money.

The independent IFS has calculated that departments that are not protected by the ring fence will have to cut 12.6% from their budgets over the next five years. But Newsnight understands the Treasury will not set specific targets for departments. Instead, George Osborne wants to encourage public sector reforms that use taxpayers' money more efficiently. Sources cite Michael Gove's proposed changes to the justice system as an example. The theme of the November review will be "more with less". 

The Treasury expects cabinet ministers to put forward their proposals for cuts in their departments by September. Newsnight understands the previous process of the "star chamber" where ministers had to appear in front of a small cabinet committee to answer for their plans will not be repeated. But ministers who are keen to "engage" with the Treasury as part of the process will have more control over where the cuts to the departments are made.