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Share breaking news, leave links to interesting articles online and chat about the week's events in this open thread Share 1 inShare0 Email It was the Conservative party conference this week - what caught your eye in the political news? Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian I'm not writing my Politics Live blog today but, as an alternative, here's Politics Live: the readers' edition. It's intended to be a place where you can catch up with the latest news and find links to good politics blogs and articles on the web. Please feel free to use this as somewhere you can comment on any of the day's political stories - just as you do when I'm writing the daily blog. But it would be particularly useful for readers to flag up new material in the comments – breaking news or blogposts or tweets that are worth passing on because someone is going to find them interesting. A lot of what I do on my blog is aggregation – finding the good stuff and passing i

Have the speeches, themes and announcements of this year's conference season altered your perception of the main parties and their leaders? Share 4 inShare0 Email Ed Miliband addressing Labour conference 2012 Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian Conference season is over for another year. But how well did the leaders get their message across to their own parties and - increasingly - to the wider electorate? Ed Miliband reintroduced himself to the country, and attempted to claim the centre ground. David Cameron and George Osborne told the country (and Boris) there was no alternative. Nick Clegg was sorry for his pledge on tuition fees but unapologetic about the Lib Dems' record in power. Has conference season changed your opinion on the three main parties or their leaders? Vote in our poll and share your views below. Has your view of the Conservative party changed? 7% I view them more favourably 56% I view them less favourably 37% My view ha

But the party is at last showing signs of recognising what a mountain it has to climb, up here. Ed Jacobs, the Guardian Northerner's political commentor, reflects Share Tweet this inShare0 Email Failing to big up the northern challenge. Even heavyweights such as Eric Pickles - seen here at the party conference in Birmingham - have yet to get the urgency of the message across. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex Features It is perhaps a sign of a party that was rattled by Ed Miliband's speech that led to Cabinet ministers meeting at the Conservative conference in Birmingham this week to consider ways of stealing the 'One Nation' mantra back from Labour. Where did it start? With the beginnings of a long-overdue debate over how the party regains the trust and confidence of the north, particularly urban seats, in much the same way as Margaret Thatcher did. The facts speak for themselves. Of the 158 constituencies in the North, at the last General Election, the Conservatives

Story of Jean Moulin is a reminder of profound divisions that linger in French society. Do we have comparable fissures? Share 6 inShare0 Email Eric Lomax, a former British prisoner of war, whose book The Railway Man is a story of reconciliation. Photograph: Joe Payne/AP Did you register the death at 93 this week of Eric Lomax whose harrowing experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war on the Burma railway evolved into a quite remarkable story of reconciliation which he told in his late-life (1996) memoir, The Railway Man? If you didn't, you probably will because the story has been turned into a soon-to-be-released film starring no less a figure than Colin Firth. By a further coincidence I read the book this summer at the suggestion of my older brother who was staying on holiday with us. I did so after finishing a very different book with a more disturbing message to which I will return. The Burmese story is striking, not least by virtue of Lomax's powerfully plain and

Given the EU's current crises, both existential and economic, the Nobel committee could have chosen a better moment Share 67 inShare0 Email Why give the EU the Nobel peace prize now, rather than when it successfully expanded into the former Soviet Union? Photograph: EPA Is it right of the Nobel committee to award this year's peace prize to the European Union at a time when the EU is facing the gravest existential crisis of its 55-year history, and when the continent's elected leaders have repeatedly failed to resolve an economic conundrum which is largely of its own devising? No, I don't think it is. It smacks of bad timing, just as the committee's award of the same prize to Barack Obama in 2009 – when he'd barely sat down in the Oval Office – was toe-curlingly premature. It damaged the new president's standing at home (where plenty of US voters mistrust do-gooding foreigners) and was deemed sufficiently misjudged to make Obama stay away from Oslo

A report asserts that UK front pages are still male-dominated and sexist but feminist impatience is a manifestation of success Share 4 inShare0 Email Richard Desmond, owner of Express Newspapers. The WiJ report suggests that the Express's employment of more women writers might explain its high female readership. Photograph: Tom Stoddart/Getty Images/Hulton Archive In recent days I've been fighting a rearguard action against a disaffected Guardian reader in the north of England who keeps telling me he's going to end 35 years of loyal reading. Since he's been complaining that this "man-hating" paper now has "zero interest in male readers" (except for football), he obviously didn't enjoy Amelia Hill's front-page report on Monday, the one whose headline asserts: "Front pages still male-dominated and sexist". Look on the bright side, I say. At least Matey is still reading because he emailed me before dawn to complain about Am

Much can happen in two years to affect the outcome, but Salmond seems to have locked into a global tide of separatism Share 76 inShare1 Email Alex Salmond claims an independent Scotland would be the sixth richest country in the world – but by what calculations? Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA With the polls reporting that Scots are currently two-to-one against breaking up their 300-year-old union with England, the part-time unionist papers in London are already taunting Alex Salmond that he is engaged in "mission impossible" in seeking to win the referendum he agreed with David Cameron. Don't you believe it; that is foolish, complacent talk. No one can safely predict the outcome of the ballot the first minister plans to hold in the autumn of 2014 – around the time of the 700th anniversary of Scotland's famous (rare) military victory over the English at Bannockburn. In turbulent times like these too much can happen in the next two years to swing the result e