This is not something one should rail against with too much venom. It is the result of a trait consistent with human nature and evident in all of us. My form of this is most evidently found in a propensity to read books written by Bertie Russell & Co. and ignore (relatively) comment in the media or on blogs.

Parties, or more relevantly, governing parties, like to justify their opinions the same way everyone else does. Confirmation bias sadly doesn't discriminate against those in power.

Ho, and indeed, hum.

With this, and past ramblings, in mind, one might well expect the rest of this post to descend into a cynical submission to the POWER Inquiry debate, something along the lines of how after a couple of days the report will live us as nothing more than an occasional aside in those debates in the Commons that, owing to their somewhat soporific, anti-Sun-editorial nature, only tend to trouble the Hansard reporters, nobly exercising their shorthand in the name of the posterity of insignificance.

Well, maybe. But there is, for once, hope. Or, reading it another way, an uncharacteristic lightness of cynical pondering. Or, to put it differently again, a mistake about to be made.

This report, could, with a bit of luck, find itself away from the bin, and onto the spaces on desks usually reserved for the more *important* types of report mentioned above. (This is reinforced as every paper ran with it at once, rather than it becoming, for example, The Independent's 'thing'.)

Obviously Blair can't touch it, it's not really his bag. But not having to win any more elections, his self-interest lies elsewhere nowadays. Brown, Cameron and Huhne, on the other hand, have battles to be won, things-to-be-seen-doing-something-about to be seen doing something about, and above all, their faces to get into the media, at whatever cost.

We've already seen that Gordon has stolen a march on his foes, by tacitly implying in the Guardian (and, rumour has it being a lot more forthright with his opinions in private, suggesting that there's more to come when the time is right). Cameron and Huhne thus can't be seen to be standing still or ignoring the question of disengagement, especially not Cameron, he of the 'I'm going to make politics fun and groovy for the kids, not like that boring old git Brown'.

This doesn't mean they have to do anything, of course, and history and the like would suggest they won't. Tony is still in charge after all, and whoever gets there next will have better things to do than mess about with the system that got them there, but still… it could add up to a longer life than usual for an independent report, and could yet get reborn nearer the election fulfilling the need for things to make vacuous promises about.

The problem of disengagement is not going to go away, perhaps ever, and thus every party will try to tackle it, whether they really want to or not. Sooner or later the chat will produce something. What that something is remains to be seen.