Labour says it will fight any effort to use special procedures to reverse Lords’ votes on cutting benefits to disabled people

The government was warned on Thursday that it is running the risk of abusing parliament in its attempts to reverse a triple defeat in the House of Lords over plans to cut benefits for disabled people.

Labour, which accused the government of crossing the line of decency with its reforms, pledged to fight any coalition effort to use special parliamentary procedures to reverse the votes.

The row erupted after Lord Freud, the welfare reform minister, surprised peers late on Wednesday night by tabling a new amendment. Freud acted after peers rejected plans to means-test employment and support allowance (ESA) payments for disabled people – plus cancer patients and stroke survivors – after only a year. Peers also rejected plans to time-limit ESA for cancer patients and to restrict access to ESA for disabled or ill young people.

But the minister’s amendment partially reversed the vote on young people.

Lady Hollis of Heigham, Labour’s former welfare minister, criticised the Freud amendment – tabled after most peers had left parliament for the evening in the belief that there were no further substantive votes.

Hollis told peers: “I am sure Lord Freud doesn’t wish to appear to be subverting the view of the entire house, which was expressed in the full knowledge that the amendment which we voted on was devised as a paving amendment to a substantive one so that we could debate it in good time.”

Clerks in the Lords indicated that Freud’s amendment was procedurally correct. The minister had earlier indicated that he might table the new amendment.

But Lady Royall of Blaisdon, Labour’s leader in the upper house, was highly critical of the coalition tactics as she pledged to try to reverse the Freud move.

“The early votes last night clearly reflected the will of the whole house, which will now expect ministers to bring forward amendments at third reading,” she said.

“If they fail to do so, Labour will table our own amendments in consultation with crossbench peers and other interested parties.”

Labour also hit out at government plans to block the triple defeats by using what is known as “financial privilege” on the welfare reform bill to make it impossible for the Lords to reject the will of the House of Commons.

The government has pledged to reverse the defeats when the bill returns to the Commons. Using financial privilege would avoid parliamentary “ping pong”, in which the bill is shunted between the two houses of parliament, because the lords cannot block money bills.

Royall said: “Retrospectively using financial privilege on a bill primarily to do with the delivery of policy would be unreasonable and open the door to the potential abuse of parliament by government.”

Downing Street confirmed that ministers were prepared to try to use the device, though it would have to be approved by the commons speaker John Bercow.

The prime minister’s spokesman said: “The issue of financial privilege is something which is ultimately a matter for the House of Commons and the speaker to determine. It is they that decide on the application of this.

“In any event, ministers have said they are intending to reverse the amendments that were made to the bill in the Lords. So there is a question about the precise process. But the outcome is the same.”

Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, wrote on the Guardian website: “Last night in the House of Lords, the government tried to ram through proposals that cross the line of basic British decency, axing help for young people with disabilities and for patients still recovering from cancer. How low can you get?”

Investigating officer in pre-trial hearing recommends that 22 charges against WikiLeaks suspect be referred to military trial

Bradley Manning, the US soldier accused of having been the source of the massive WikiLeaks dump of state secrets, is one step closer towards the possibility of spending the rest of his life in military confinement after the officer who presided over his pre-trial hearing recommended he be sent to a full court martial.

Colonel Paul Almanza, the investigating officer at last month’s hearing in Fort Meade, Maryland, has written to his superiors recommending that all 22 charges against Manning be referred to a general court martial – the most serious military trial. An announcement from the military district of Washington said that Almanza had found that “reasonable grounds exist to believe that the accused committed the offenses alleged.”

A final decision will be made by colonel Carl Coffman of the special court martial convening authority, though he has the option of passing it further up the chain of command to major general Michael Linnington.

The outcome of the pre-trial hearing means that a full military trial is almost certain to follow, and is likely to be held within the next three to four months. That will set the scene for what promises to be a dramatic clash of wills between the Obama administration and the military high command on the one hand, and Bradley Manning and his forceful defence lawyer David Coombs on the other.

The administration and the military leadership have made it clear they wish to see a stiff sentence meted out to the soldier as deterrence for any future leaking of state secrets. Manning is charged with aiding the enemy, making intelligence available to the enemy on the internet, theft of public records, computer fraud and violation of military information security.

Manning and Coombs have already indicated that they plan a robust defence. They have raised the relatively harmless nature of the WikiLeaks documents, the army’s incompetence, lack of security at the forward operating base outside Baghdad where Manning was working as an intelligence analyst, and neglect towards Manning from his supervisors as possible mitigating arguments.

Jeff Patterson of the Bradley Manning support network said he was disappointed by the move towards a court martial – though “far from surprised. I sat in that courtroom and watched a Department of Justice employee pretending to be an impartial judge.”

Patterson was referring to Almanza’s civilian job as a Department of Justice prosecutor which Coombs challenged at the pre-trial hearing on grounds of conflict of interest.

Coombs told Almanza on the first day of the hearing that he should recuse himself, because the justice department was pursuing an aggressive prosecution of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange that would inevitably involve Manning as a key witness.

Patterson also objected to the way that the investigating officer at the pre-trial hearing had allowed the prosecution to present all its desired witnesses, but had barred all but a few requested by the defence.

It is understood that a general court martial will take between 90 and 120 days to be convened, after a final decision – expected over the next few days – is announced. At that point Manning and his lawyer will have another opportunity to press for their witnesses to be heard.

Coombs has already begun to press for more disclosure. On the same day as the investigating officer’s recommendation was released, Coombs filed a new deposition request with the government.

The defence wants to be able to quiz six military officials in out-of-court testimony about the classification of videos and documents that were part of the trove of hundreds of thousands leaked to WikiLeaks. Almanza previously declined to allow them to be called at the pre-trial hearing, ruling that they were “not reasonably available”.

Express owner Richard Desmond may have bristled with confidence, but his editors were decidedly less sure-footed

Even the dullest passages of Lord Justice Leveson’s phone-hacking inquiry are punctuated by outbursts of discreet sniggering, none more welcome on Thursday than when an Express group executive was struggling to explain how Fleet Street had been so hostile to his boss, Richard Desmond, the owner of Express Newspapers, without mentioning the P-for-porn word which so annoys him.

When Desmond’s turn came to give evidence at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, he did much better. Bristling with confidence, he was candid about his attitude to ethics (“I don’t quite know what the word means”), boastful about his business acumen, and unabashed about his interest in newspapers (profit).

Politics? He had told Tony Blair: “Honestly mate, I’m not interested in politics,” but backed him anyway (“he seemed a nice fellow”) until his editor pointed out that the Express is a Tory paper. So Desmond betrayed Blair (his words), but that’s business. His fellow Fleet Street bosses? Idiots and hypocrites, “tea and biscuits” plotters with “the Daily Malicious, sorry, the Daily Mail” the worst of them all.

So far so good, as nice an egomaniac as you could hope to meet, with no evidence of the foul temper and worse language of repute.

It was only when he floated “speculation” that the royal family might have killed Diana (the Duke of Edinburgh is the Express’s No 1 suspect) and that the McCanns might have done the same to Madeleine that Desmond’s matey credibility fell off a cliff.

“I apologise again to the McCanns etc etc etc, but there are views about the McCanns and what happened,” he said darkly – and readers are entitled to their opinions. At that moment that peerage for the former proprietor of Asian Babes, Big Ones and Readers Wives looked further away than ever.

Lacking the charisma that attaches itself to a tanned self-made billionaire, the stream of Northern & Shell executives who preceded the boss to the witness box mostly failed to impose themselves on court 73. Dawn Neeson, the editor of the Daily Star, sounded so clueless about the way her newspaper is put together (the hands-on editor of the Daily Express, Hugh Whittow, was not much better) that Leveson – for once – probably believed their protestations of ignorance about phone-hacking, private detectives or libellous stories – until the writs landed.

Neesom and Whittow both insisted accuracy and truthfulness were central to their governance systems, but were then cornered by Robert Jay QC, counsel to the inquiry, over headlines like Chip Shops Ban Salt; Muslim Thugs, aged 12, In Knife Attack on Brit Schoolboy (the attack was on Facebook); and 75% Say Quit EU Now. Er, not exactly true.

When asked about disciplining reporters over dud stories Neesom replied: “I have been known to pass comment, yes.” When the judge looked sceptical, she added: “My husband looks like that at me as well” and giggled “sorry”. Leveson beamed as if she’d snogged him. “I am usually responsible for the jokes,” he trilled.

So someone was claiming responsibility for something in court 73. The editors, lawyers and execs weren’t rushing to do so. They were on their new year breaks when Christopher Jeffries became (briefly) the suspect in the hunt for Joanna Yeates’ killer. They blamed the PCC for not stopping them writing dreadful things about the McCanns (libel settlements over 38 stories in the Express alone) and the Portuguese police for feeding them inaccurate theories. It is the cry of bankers and burglars everywhere: why didn’t you stop me?

“Portugal is a civilised country, part of the EU, we had no reason to believe its police force was not a proper body,” explained Peter Hill. As former editor of both titles, he was behind the Quit Europe crusade and proud to have led the Star with a Big Brother story (prop R Desmond) for 28 consecutive editions.

It may have been the day’s most pompous utterance, though his colleague Paul Ashford cheered up the court when trying to avoid saying what exactly the porn-baiting Daily Mail had said about Desmond in its mailshot to Express readers. “Maybe you don’t want to go into this?” asked Jay, with Desmond looking on. “I don’t think I will …”

When the time came, Desmond had his revenge on the Daily Malicious without spelling it out either. “Did you see the cuttings … the only thing I wasn’t accused of was murder.” Most of Fleet Street was against him (he was suspiciously vague about the Guardian’s motives) as an outsider, but the Mail was worst – it is “Britain’s worst enemy … their tone so negative and disgusting.”

As for the PCC regulation could be streamlined with a proper “RCD board,” he suggested. Leveson walked straight into that one. “Sorry, you may have to explain RCD.” “Richard Clive Desmond” came the unabashed answer.

He cheerfully told the court that news stories do not sell newspapers (DVD offers do), and that adverts, not sales, make profits. He had sacked the Express’s investigative unit (“a room full of scruffy geezers”) virtually on day one to save money. No disrespect to journalists, of course. Or to the McCanns and the Duke of Edinburgh. It’s all just business.

BMA warns that proposals to replace NHS Litigation Authority with private model ‘mimics worst aspects of US healthcare’

Potentially life-saving procedures could disappear from the health service because the high risks involved will force doctors to take out unaffordably expensive medical insurance, the British Medical Association has warned after it emerged that the NHS compensation fund may be privatised to curb the burgeoning cost of medical litigation.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information act show that last October officials in the Cabinet Office drew up a “business assessment” for the NHS Ligation Authority (NHSLA), which pays out legal fees and compensation claims in medical negligence cases, for a “credible business plan” that would be an “alternative to [the] existing service delivery model”.

The plan says the Confederation of British Industry has identified the litigation authority as a “potential opportunity” and suggests the “need for a joint venture partner” that could provide “investment, expertise, access to markets”. A month later the authority, which paid out £1bn last year in compensation – up from £280m in 2001 – was asked about pursuing a course of “mutualisation”.

Doctors’ leaders said any move towards a privatised model would mimic the worst aspects of US healthcare. In America there are well-documented cases where physicians simply do not take up jobs in risky specialisms such as obstetrics, where the cost of insuring operations are too high or where insurance companies fail to honour their moral obligations to pay out.

Mark Porter, chair of the consultants committee at the BMA, said: “We do not want to go down the US route of private insurance. You can travel whole sections of the east coast and not find an obstetrician.”

“Only a pooling of risk across the NHS can protect hospitals from catastrophic events. We did not know that certain arthritic drugs caused heart attacks 15 years ago when they were started being prescribed. But that is what happened. Medical techniques are a risky area. You can never engineer risks out completely. And no one hospital or doctor could ever bear the costs of a catastrophic event. That’s why we have an NHS-wide insurance scheme for doctors and patients.”

The government began a review of the litigation authority last March – undertaken by Marsh, one of the world’s biggest insurance brokers – but has yet to make its findings public. In an email from a civil servant in the Cabinet Office to the litigation authority, the recommendation is described as a “Marsh show stopper”.

The proposals also expose a divide between Downing Street and the Cabinet Office, which are at the forefront of public sector reform, and the Department of Health. The paper says the “Cabinet Office [was] requested by No 10 to include specifically look at NHSLA … DH has agreed to keep open (sceptical) mind”.

It emerged on Thursday that Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, had secured £185m in new funding for the authority this year, partly to offset an anticipated legal ruling that might mean bigger payouts for victims of clinical negligence.

There is little doubt that payouts are rising. Cerebral palsy victims now get £6m each – three times the amounts courts awarded a decade ago. Even in the UK private sector obstetricians are faced with insurance premiums of £50,000 a year.

Doctors say the reason is not a “compensation culture” but that payouts are not capped and that patients can take legal action against the NHS 25 years after an operation occurred. Sir Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, the head of obstetrics and gynaecology at St George’s hospital, Tooting, said centres of excellence would be penalised for taking on harder cases.

“We are referred cases that are likely to have much more risk. Premiums would reflect that and [St George's] pays £5m in maternity contributions to the NHS litigation authority to deliver 5,400 babies every year. Instead of changing the NHSLA the government needs to look at capping payouts and paying in instalments so that if the patient were to die the payout could be stopped. That would cut costs.”

Andy Slaughter MP, Labour’s justice spokesman who obtained the documents, said the government was turning the NHS over to the private insurance industry. “Despite the doubts of the Department of Health, the NHS and practitioners, the Cabinet Office still continues to fly in the face of public and professional opinion,” he said. “Cameron and Lansley are combining disruptive top-down reorganisation with an aggressive bottom-up programme of selling as many subunits of the NHS as possible to insurers and private health interests.”

Sources within the Department of Health said the plans represented “blue sky thinking” and that the litigation authority was “under review”. When pressed for a statement it said: “There are no plans to change the structure of the NHS Litigation Authority, and it will continue to provide cover to its members and their employees.”

alphadogg writes “Google, joining forces with CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, has announced the 2012 Google Science Fair, an online competition open to 13-to-18-year-olds around the world. Prizes include a $50,000 college scholarship, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands and more. Judges include Google VP and Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, CERN Director Steve Myers, oceanographer Sylvia Earle and others.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When these welfare changes come into force, their savage effect will be seen – and then the public mood will turn

Ask who deserves support from the state and people choose disabled children first, along with cancer sufferers. How inept to targets cuts on these, then. Members of the House of Lords, packed with experts in disability, were always likely to rebel.

An £18bn cut from the benefits spend is an unthinkable sum, bound to damage the frail – and Lord Freud’s underhand procedural trick to overturn the rebel amendments will only harden the crossbenchers. Yesterday the government proclaimed no turning back, but the lords representing the likes of the disability charity Scope or Macmillan Cancer Support should make them blench.

This is classic policymaking from David Cameron. First, soften up the public: tell horror stories about the rising benefits budget. Cue benefit cheat stories of “disabled” claimants caught running marathons, or water-skiing in foreign locations. Ignore Department for Work and Pensions figures showing that disability fraud is just 0.5% – one anecdote trumps all statistics. Keep repeating Iain Duncan Smith’s “the incubation of the benefits culture was one of Labour’s great sins”.

Who will know that numbers going on to incapacity benefits were falling in the wake of Labour’s many crackdowns? Costs of disability living allowance (DLA) rise not through fraud but demographics, as the old live longer and are sicker, disabled babies survive into adulthood, an epidemic of diabetes is upon us, the mentally fragile get more help to claim benefits and challenges extend the scope of disabilities covered.

Opinion polls showed strong support for cuts, though few knew what they were – benefit details are far too labyrinthine for most news editors. To soothe alarm among decent people, Cameron said the opposite of what he was doing. His manifesto promised no cut in disability allowance, and he said “I would never do anything to hurt disabled children.”

Cameron keeps forgetting that public applause is less than half the battle. Out in the real world, the wheels come off bad ideas rushed through recklessly. He will face a mudslide of awful stories: media outlets that support cuts now will soon be reporting shocking cases. Most disabled children lose £27 a week, and families with two disabled children lose twice as much. More than 40% already live below the poverty line, as these mothers can’t work and have extra childcare costs. Expect heart-rending stories from the 25,000 young carers looking after disabled parents who lose £70 a week. Wait for the disabled ex-soldiers’ complaints. All attention has been on cancer sufferers, but many with MS, motor neurone and other chronic disease lose employment and support allowance, too. Come 1 April, 280,000 disabled, both young and old, will have their benefits cut.

The government claims that these amendments cost £1.8m – which is less than honest, since it’s spread over five years. DLA is cut by 20% – a random sum. That means no funds for transport or daycentre fees, just as council social services are withdrawn. This is only half the sum the DWP is pledged to cut from disability benefits. More is yet to come.

People on DLA being transferred to the lesser personal independence payment will have new tests, by their GP and by outside assessors, repeated regularly. That costs a staggering £675m to administer. Not surprisingly, Atos is backing off applying for this work after criticism of the company’s work capability assessments, through which 40% are overturned on appeal (and some die shortly after being declared fit). Citizens Advice wants Atos fined for every error.

Cameron is about to be reminded that most people are nicer than he thinks. Voters think two sensible things about benefits: citizens needing help should be well cared-for and the healthy should be deterred from malingering.

British Social Attitudes shows how the pendulum swings. In power, Labour increases benefits that have shrivelled miserably in Tory years, and most people approve – until gradually fearing their generosity may be exploited. When Tories are in power, people who voted to have scroungers scourged grow kinder when they see what cuts really do to the sick and unemployed.

Watch the public mood turn. These cuts are unlike anything ever seen before – and people didn’t vote for savagery: they voted for a Cameron in sheep’s clothing who promised general wellbeing, letting the sunshine in and care for disabled children.

Politicians promising perfect solutions to the benefits conundrum risk disappointing voters. William Beveridge never got it right, either. His clever idea was to make people feel everyone had contributed through national insurance, so the poor deserved support in times of need – good political cover for enormous redistribution. There was no NI fund and governments can cancel contributory “rights” at any time, as now with ESA. Hardly anyone knows which benefits are a right, earned through NI, and which are means tested, for need. Contributions created a notion of a moral bond, but it was always bogus. NI is just another tax, which governments dare not abolish to raise income-tax rates instead.

The eternal dilemma has been argued in the same terms since the Poor Law 1601: how does the good society care for everyone without creating “dependency” on that goodwill? Once, punitive workhouses were the answer, but they proved expensive as well as cruel, so it was cheaper to pay the poor in cash; anxiety about moral hazard was the price.

That’s the choice, more or less generosity, stricter or gentler policing of people on the margins. Look at a post office queue on benefit day and see how many people inhabit a twilight zone of semi-disability, borderline odd, barely coping, and unlikely recruits by any employer. People’s circumstances are complicated, and so the benefit system must be too, as it tries to grade levels of need as fairly as possible. Beware politicians promising simplification.

If not these cuts, then what, the government challenged the Lords rebels yesterday? The answer is to cut almost anything else before picking on the disabled. Bank bonus season is upon us – ripe pickings? This, too: before cutting 20% from the disabled, remember that a one-off windfall of 20% from the £4 trillion wealth of the top tenth could pay off the nation’s debts at a stroke. But maybe we’d rather cut help for stroke patients.

Twitter: @pollytoynbee

Islamist party is poised to take 45% of seats amid soaring public expectations but with few concrete powers to deliver reform

It’s a triumph that’s been 84 years in the making and, despite a concerted effort by all involved to stay humble and on-message during their movement’s finest hour, few members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood can hide their exhilaration.

“These elections are a historic milestone for us and they are a historic milestone for Egypt,” said Amr Darrag, secretary general of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party in Giza. “We’ve not had such free elections since 1952, so it’s a great moment for the nation,” he said. “The Egyptian people really intend to seize this moment and secure the position for Egypt that it so clearly deserves.”

The FJP will be the largest force in the country’s new parliament when it opens for business on 23 January, almost exactly a year on from the beginning of the revolution that would eventually topple the Brotherhood’s tormentor-in-chief, Hosni Mubarak.

After decades of having to play by the rules of your oppressors, it’s a giddying feeling to start writing them yourself. Seham al-Gamal, a Muslim Brotherhood activist who ran unsuccessfully for parliament in 2010, remembers the old game only too well. “Politics was based on corruption, and only groups that accepted this corruption flourished in the political arena,” she said in an interview with one of the Brotherhood’s slick, regularly updated, bilingual websites this week.

The movement’s online presence contrasts sharply with that of parliament itself: Egypt’s legislature boasts two homepages, one of which was last updated in 2001 and the other is permanently offline. Now both the institution and the party that will dominate it are preparing for heady times. “[In the last election] there was scandalous vote rigging in favour of [Mubarak's] dissolved NDP,” said al-Gamal. “[Now] we plan to combat corruption in its entirety.”

In just over a week, Gamal will walk through the doors of Egypt’s almost century-old parliament building and take her seat as elected representative of the Nile Delta town of Mansoura. She will be alongside at least 192 colleagues from the FJP, marking a milestone of epic proportions for a movement which, as recently as 12 months ago, was headquartered on the second floor of a shabby apartment block and had much of its senior leadership behind bars. Today the FJP boasts a gleaming six-storey home in an upmarket Cairo suburb, its figureheads are feted by international policymakers, and its MPs are set to dominate the country’s first post-Mubarak people’s assembly.

But although it’s easy to see the outcome of Egypt’s elections as an unqualified success for the Brotherhood, the streets around the parliament building tell a more complex story. Entrances to the north and east are blocked off with hastily erected giant granite barriers, each presiding over a carpet of concrete rubble and twisted metal, the residue of recent street-fighting between revolutionaries and the security forces that left dozens dead and several thousand injured.

All other approaches to the building, which sits on a normally busy thoroughfare just off Tahrir Square, are clad in barbed wire and ad hoc security checkpoints; amid a row of pristine government cars sits one vehicle that has been gutted by a petrol bomb. Nearby walls and floors are blanketed in graffiti marking the dates of last year’s struggles, when the roads became a violent battleground between those who maintain a grip on the formal sphere of politics and those who have opted to remain outside it.

The message is that, despite the election of a new parliament, the era of street revolt is far from over and the fragile legitimacy of the military junta’s supposedly democratic institutions is yet to be accepted by all. As Gamal begins her first day at work, she will be greeted on her way in by a four-foot sprawl of spray paint, heralding 2012 as the start of Egypt’s second revolution.

It is against this uncertain backdrop that the lower house of parliament will assemble next week, raising the question of what the legislative body can hope to achieve in such a volatile climate, and how the Brotherhood will manage its new-found authority within it.

Although final confirmation of the results won’t emerge until the weekend, 85% of the seats have been decided and the remaining contests will not sway the general balance of the parties. At present the Brotherhood is on course to claim 45% of MPs, with the more conservative Salafists likely to gain 25% of the total. Secular liberals such as the venerable al-Wafd party and the newly formed Egyptian bloc should secure 15% between them, with the last few seats picked up by other Islamist parties, nationalistic “remnants” of the Mubarak regime, and leftwing political forces.

According to the current “transition timetable”, parliament will quickly appoint a special constitutional assembly and begin working on a new constitution, with a referendum on the new document to be held by April and presidential elections to follow in June.

It’s a breakneck – some would say slapdash – pace of change, leaving critics concerned that a new political system that leaves the power of the military and other elites essentially untouched will quickly become entrenched, thwarting any deeper, long-term struggles for economic and social justice.

The Brotherhood, time-worn experts at political survival and firm believers in a cautious “participation, not domination” approach, has ascended the political elevator just as the country’s contested future remains hanging in the balance, and the group stands torn between enjoying its electoral spoils and retaining credibility with its supporters by not bowing too subserviently to the junta.

“The movement is entering uncharted waters,” says Nathan Brown, an Egypt expert at George Washington University who argues that despite parliamentary victory, it is not yet clear what exactly the Brotherhood has won. “A number of features of Egypt’s transition process suggest that however many votes the Brotherhood attracts in the parliamentary elections, it will have a strong, but hardly a dominant voice, for the time being. ‘Participation, not domination’ may continue to work for now because of the hazy rules governing a country in transition.”

Mindful of the trap that lies before it – one that twins soaring public expectations with very few concrete powers to deliver reform – the Brotherhood is already manoeuvring to give itself cover, abandoning its earlier call for Egypt to become a parliamentary democracy and shifting its backing to a presidential system, alongside a promise that the FJP will not run a candidate for the presidency.

The emphasis is on partnership and coalition with other forces, including liberals, but the oft-repeated mantra of Egypt’s problems being “too big for one party” has been complicated by the FJP’s massive haul of seats. This has left other parties viewing the Brotherhood as a threat and consequently wary of linking up with it.

The Brotherhood is also treading a fine line on its policy programme, advocating a vision of market-friendly reform aimed at boosting living standards and wiping out corruption while pushing cultural and moral issues in the background – a move reassuring to secular Egyptians and international audiences fearful of a lurch towards religious conservatism, were it not for the worry that leaving such political space vacant would allow the hardline Salafists to move in.

But perhaps the biggest challenge for the Muslim Brotherhood and the parliament it now leads will be to win over those who distrust this junta-curated organ of official “democracy”, and move Egypt’s political process out of the streets and into a formal arena instead.

Philip Rizk, an Egyptian activist and film-maker, echoes the sentiments of many revolutionaries when he argues that the recent elections are designed to stifle meaningful change. “The ballot was used in two ways,” he claims. “Firstly there was a very specific discourse from the authorities, from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the transitional government, saying ‘stop protesting and go out and vote’. It was a propaganda effect aimed at altering people’s perceptions of change. Secondly, the vote was used as a cover for direct physical attacks on the protest movement that were carried out with exceptional violence.”

The Brotherhood, Rizk argues, has not been a radical or revolutionary player in the dramatic upheaval this nation has witnessed over the past year, and both its commitment to neoliberal capitalism and its alleged electoral violations – there have been accusations of illegal campaigning and voter intimidation in polling stations, all of which are denied by the FJP – have left it “barely distinguishable” from Mubarak’s NDP. “The most significant change that has taken place in Egypt is the one that has taken place inside people,” says Rizk. “Not the whole population, but a large proportion of it, have started analysing and thinking and protesting, both within their spheres of daily activity and more centrally in urban squares like Tahrir, as well as other cities like Alexandria and Suez. Elections can come and go but I don’t think that is going to shift: the bubble of complacency and fear has been broken.”

How the new parliamentarians respond to such a change remains to be seen. In a shift away from some of its more critical rhetoric towards protesters, leaders such as Darrag are reaching out to revolutionaries, acknowledging their concerns and admitting that the onus is on parliament (and by extension, the Brotherhood) to prove that it really can implement the demands of the revolution and sweep away the old elites. “To be honest, most of the revolution’s demands have not yet been met and many are suspicious that remnants of the old regime remain in power and are controlling things from behind the scenes, not necessarily in the realm of higher politics but also other decision-making bodies,” he argues. “People need to see the institutions that have been established – the parliament, and later the presidency – act in their interests and secure real achievements before they start believing that they have really made a difference.”

But with so many other unpredictably factors in play, the Brotherhood has a long way to go before it can build a genuinely national consensus and confidently get a handle on the levers of political power. As Nathan Brown concludes: “In the Egypt of 2012, the Brotherhood’s leaders will have to answer questions that have never been asked before.”