The party has also made a virtue of devolution and local consultation, running opinion polls on spending priorities in some places and in others handing power to neighbourhood councils – occasionally, as in the case of Kingston, to opposition councillors.Nationally, the local government grant and finance regime, with most councils now spending up to their cap, allows little sensible to be said this year about whether Labour, Liberal Democrat or Conservatives are the highest or lowest spenders. But on 10 performance indicators which the Audit Commission highlighted recently, the Liberal Democrats could claim they did as well or better than average on nine of them.The party’s rapid rise in local government – it has quadrupled the number of councils it controls in the past five years – has sometimes brought problems of inexperience as first-time councillors have suddenly found themselves running the local authority.Less noticed than the rise of the Liberal Democrats in district and county councils has been the party’s advance in some metropolitan authorities where they have become the challenger to Labour.The party’s results on Thursday will depend partly on the electorate’s perception of their growing track record in local government, partly on continued disillusion with the Conservates, and partly on whether the Blair effect hardens the Labour vote in the South – a change that in some councils could benefit the Tories rather than the Liberal Democrats.. Tony Blair looks set to go into the general election unencumbered with controversial union demands for a high national minimum wage – potentially one of the most sensitive issues, writes Barrie Clement. A confidential TUC document suggests a much lower limit than the sum backed by most unions and even questions whether they should tie the Labour Party to any figure.
Union leaders are also asked to consider whether a minimum rate should be “phased in”.The new mood at the top of the union movement will be seen as a critical victory for Mr Blair over “old Labour” and will undermine Conservative allegations that a minimum wage will destroy jobs.While the union movement publicly endorses a rate set at half male median earnings, calculated at pounds 4.26 an hour, a paper prepared for the TUC favours an interpretation of the formula yielding pounds 3.65.TUC officials would prefer to see no figure mentioned because they believe a sum below pounds 4 would be difficult to get through Congress and any figure above would embarrass Mr Blair.. All week, the black flags will be flying in Lebanon. Yesterday, they flew in Nabatiyeh for a mother and her seven children and her future son- in-law, who were buried amid scenes of grief and anger in the market town where an Israeli helicopter pilot fired a missile into their home on 18 April.

The black flags hung, too, at the tiny village of Mansuri where they buried four children killed when another Israeli helicopter pilot deliberately targeted the ambulance in which they were travelling five days earlier. In Qana tomorrow, the black flags will hang from every house in the shell-smashed town, as at least 100 of the Lebanese refugees massacred in the United Nations compound on 18 April are placed in a mass grave next to the UN post in which they were killed by Israeli shells. Each of the bodies will be laid in a brick-lined cavity although many legs, arms and hands which could not be identified will be interred together.
UN personnel have asked if they may be permitted to mount an honour guard at what will be the most traumatic mass burial in Lebanon since the Sabra and Chatila massacres of 1982. One UN official, so moved by the killing of so many civilians under the UN’s protection, has asked if troops of the international peace-keeping force could carry the bodies to the graves, although his request is likely to be turned down.A man and a woman who were also killed in the Israeli attack on the ambulance will be buried later in the week in their home village inside the Israeli occupation zone. Family members are awaiting Israeli permission for the corpses to be taken across the front lines from the mortuary in Sidon Still more funerals will be held later in the week.

Only at the weekend did returning Lebanese refugees discover the body of a shepherd lying in a field near Nabatiyeh beside his dead flock. He had apparently been killed in an Israeli air attack in the first day of the offensive. His body was badly decayed and could not be identified.In Nabatiyeh yesterday, thousands of mourners followed the bodies of Fawzieh Hawajah and her family as they were carried into the town’s cemetery, the youngest of her children – a baby only four days old – a tiny bundle under a grey blanket. Women collapsed at the graveside and a banner strung across the road outside read, in poor but all too angry English: “Damn on you American black peace.”With tragic irony, Lebanon’s week of funerals coincides with the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, when Muslims across Lebanon should have been celebrating the most important day in the Islamic calendar, when the Prophet Abraham – or Ibrahim – killed a lamb rather than his own son. In southern Lebanon, however, the remainder of the half million refugees driven from their homes by the Israelis were returning to find houses destroyed, water pipes broken and every main road cratered by aerial bombs. Lebanese troops have been drafted south to repair the highways and water supply while 300 linemen have been sent to restore electrical power.UN troops in southern Lebanon have reported no ceasefire violations although the Lebanese have discovered that the terms of the truce – which forbid the Israeli army and the Hizbollah from shooting at or from civilian areas – are already being interpreted with a double standard.