The adulteress

was her joke name     for herself though
unfashionable &      (except in the literal
sense) incorrect.      She had to stop
attending dinner     parties as someone
would inevitably     say something
like, “I didn’t know      which husband to
expect tonight!” or      “Your husband” this/
“Your husband” that      with her partner
sitting right there.      She did not view herself
as a joke & yet this     joke word “adulteress”
was in her head so     she said to her daughter
who was learning      to sew, “Can you make
a big red A & sew     it on my black dress?”
Her daughter said,     “Which black dress?”
& the woman said,     “Every black dress.”

The H Man

His superpower was being the subject of ever-taller tales
about his prowess at hurling, a sport with prehistoric Gaelic
origins where players use hurleys (sticks) on a sliotar (ball),
aiming it over the crossbar of the goalpost for 1 point,
or under the crossbar of the goalpost into the net for 3.
Considered to be “the fastest player ever” in a sport known
to be “the world’s fastest field sport,” the H Man once broke
the nose of an opponent with his force plus his velocity
(though some say he broke his ribs or legs). He did not
“go professional” because there is no professional hurling,
but he did become a poet because that position does exist.

Kathryn Maris’s most recent poetry collection is God Loves You (Seren). Originally from New York, she now lives in London.

If you use Twitter a lot, you may have wondered exactly how to criticise large parts of the left without sounding like a bigot, a racist, or worst of all Richard Dawkins. 

The legacy of what the internet calls “identity politics” is that the lived experience of an individual now not only informs a given debate, as well it should, but dominates it, leaving no room for dissent.

Coupled with the binary nature of the internet, in which layered ideas are pounded flat by the limitations of the format, a new discursive register has emerged: either you’re with us, to the most extreme interpretation of our ideas, or you’re against us. There are no in-betweens.   

For instance, even advocates of political correctness (as I am) often concede that the use of inclusionary language can potentially be wrongheaded or clumsy. Yet anyone caught contravening the latest iteration of an increasingly esoteric cant is blacklisted as a witch, a heretic, a mansplainer, a “whorephobe”, Richard Littlejohn, or a similarly unflattering slur.

It leads to a question: is this hectoring attitude towards cultural shibboleths likely to alienate well-meaning middle-grounders from ever truly engaging with the ideas?

Not that engagement is always the objective. The development of stylesheets to define a person’s credentials is also a defensive weapon – if someone lacks the argumentative tools to tackle an idea, they can discredit the person having the idea instead. It’s an excuse for emotional, rather than critical, thinking. “Why,” a leftist might ask today, “should I engage with Peter Hitchens on immigration or drug law, when he’s a Tory/racist/space alien?” Twitter is lousy with people who know the answer before they’ve asked the question.

Equally the internet is a great way of insulating yourself against challenging ideas, and you can even become something of a left-wing darling among choirs of like-minded peers. But no matter your cachet within the hierarchy of progressiveness, will you ever be qualified to reliably discuss Beethoven if you’ve only ever listened to the Dead Kennedys? 

The reason I feel the need to analogise is that creativity is required to express ideas in an age where words and ideas can quickly become taboo. Try having a grown-up conversation about freedom of speech or immigration or austerity without the debate quickly descending into a face-off around each word’s representative categorical implications. Unironic use of the words free speech mark you as a libertarian, your stance on immigration makes you either pro or anti racism, and what you think about austerity implies whether or not class privilege courses inexorably through your veins. I am using this garish italicisation as is customary for non-integrated foreign words, because at this point they may as well be: these words have no longer have any original or literal meaning but represent only a wider cultural idea, like saying plus ca change or c'est la vie. 

Without doubt, this is a result of use, misuse and overuse, the sucking until flavourless the sour and sweet confectionary of political rhetoric. Powerful, provocative words cannot enjoy unlimited transplantations in and out of their intended context. Soon, the context will stop sticking, like worn-out velcro. We risk devaluing useful globules of language by repurposing them so often not as useful signifiers but as brands for the ideologically impure. 

This problem is by no means limited to the left – just look at how similarly right-wing parodies of social liberals miss the point of trigger warnings and safe spaces, warping the words beyond their intended uses – but the unifying factor of this context-free approach to language is that it makes criticism impossible without invoking some real or imagined transgression.

Think about when Charlie Hebdo recently published cartoons of Aylan Kurdi. The cartoons were many things – tasteless, offensive, upsetting – but instead the controversial magazine was accused of making fun of a young boy’s death. A cursory Google translation of the captions and an ounce of critical analysis confirms that this interpretation simply wasn’t true – but try typing that online without looking like you endorse Charlie Hebdo’s repugnant sketches. Like so much else, the answers to our questions of cultural morality exist in the spaces, where they can’t produce retweet-grabbing soundbites.

Maybe we should give up expecting balance in any criticism of the far left, the far right, or anyone. But we should always try to remember one of the things that separates us humans from pigs – chiefly, the ability to analyze a piece of communication critically. Tempting though it may be to allow emotions alone to decide our allegiances, mindlessly trotting in hundred-strong herds to whoever is offering the biggest pail of swill, we have the power to understand the world – and its language – objectively. We have the power to analyse and critique and discuss, beyond the scope of our base instincts. It’s a controversial thought these days, but perhaps if we remembered it more often, political discourse on the internet and beyond wouldn’t feel so much like Lord of the Flies. 

This is the text of a speech given on 18 September at the British Library in London in honour of the critic, novelist, poet and artist John Berger.

There’s a piece in a recent issue of the New Statesman where John Berger, who is one of the world’s most vital corresponders, talks, in a letter he writes, to Rosa Luxemburg, the long-dead (murdered in 1919) revolutionary socialist writer, Marxist activist and philosopher. Yes, but he doesn’t just talk to her, he talks with her, via some of the writing from letters she wrote herself, often when she was in prison. “Freedom,” Luxemburg tells him, and he reminds us, “is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently.” In this piece, Berger writes a freedom for her. “No single page and none of the prison cells they repeatedly put you in could ever contain you,” he writes. He also sends her a gift, a wooden box of painted birds, painted words – a box, it says on it, of bird song. He tells her its history and he sends that history along with the box. “I can send it to you by writing, in this dark time, these pages.”

Here’s the gist of an email that came for me a couple of months ago. Dear Ali, can you write an “appreciation” of John’s writing, ideas and influence, about why his work truly matters, and can it be between five and eight minutes long?

How about forty years long? Because I could say that everything I’ve ever written or aspired to write has been in one way or another an appreciation of the work of John Berger. Berger, a force of unselfishness in a culture that encourages solipsism, an insister on open eyes, on the recalibration and re-energising of thinking, feeling, fiercely compassionate, fiercely uncompromising vision in a time that encourages looking away or looking only at the mirror images that create power and make money. Berger, who suggests that the aesthetic act, that art itself, is always collaborative, always in dialogue, or multilogue, a communal act, and one that involves questioning of form and of the given shape of things and forms. Berger, who can do anything with a text, but most of all will make it about the gift of engagement, correspondence – well, I can’t give him anything but love, baby, it’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, and that’s what comes off all his work for me, fervent and warm and vital, an inclusive and procreative energy I can only call love.

My encounters with John Berger, whom I hadn’t met till tonight, have always been vitally personal, coup de foudre then coup de foudre again, then the next time I read him, coup de foudre, struck by light, by enlightenment. I suspect many of his readers would recognise that sense of being literally struck, gifted something that makes you more than yourself – the thing that happens when the work you’re reading or the art you’re seeing actually demands of you that you engage, passes out of itself and takes up residence in the self, in correspondence with it.

This movement, which happens so often in the reading of Berger, concerns art and love and the political heft of both, because in John Berger’s work love and art and political and historical understanding are always in layered combination. There are many other writers and artists who work with this relation, but none with quite the transformatory fusion of his combining, which is a bit like encountering what clarity really is, what the word means, like looking through pure water and seeing things naturally magnified. He writes, in Portraits, a new collection of his writing on art over his lifetime, about the working presence of the word “art” in the word “articulation”, about how the two words share a root, “to put together, to join, to fit . . . a question of a comparable flow of connections”.

In this flow, things simply become apparent, or more apparent. “The speed of a cinema film is 25 frames per second. God knows how many frames per second flicker past in our daily perception. But it is as if, at the brief moments I’m talking about, suddenly and disconcertingly we see between two frames. We come upon a part of the visible which wasn’t destined for us. Perhaps it was destined for night-birds, reindeer, ferrets, eels, whales . . .” as he writes elsewhere. Berger grants or creates something extrasensory by what he writes, and in the most natural possible way, as if nature and the human eye are already in their own liaison, and we have to catch up the knowing, get to where we’ll begin to know what it is we’re seeing. It’s a democratic looking. Berger’s take on invisibility is always about inclusion, has always been about the politically not-seen, the dispossessed, the people made to serve under so that there can be ruling classes, and via Berger the ear acts with the eye to hear the otherwise drowned-out and inaudible – the voices of the invisible.

The act of going beyond ourselves is the art act. Writing about Cézanne he calls it “his love affair, his liaison, with the visible”. Here he is on Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing: “We are with her, inside the shift she is holding up. Not as voyeurs. Not lecherously, like the elders spying on Susanna. It is simply that we are led, by the tenderness of his love, to inhabit her body’s space.” He quotes Simone Weil: “Love for our neighbour, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.” Unsurprisingly then, but always electrifyingly, he is one of the great writers on the subject of love: “A person loved is recognised not by attainments but by the verbs which can satisfy that person.” And love is an art, and art is a matter of physical love and generation: “At the best moments one draws with the whole body – genitals included,” he says in a piece on Maggi Hambling, in Portraits.

One of the things I love in Berger’s vision is his insistence on the artist not as creator, but receiver, as a figure crucially open and receptive, since art’s impetus is essentially collaborative or communal. Storytellers, he suggests, must “lose their identities”. It’s the only way to be “open to the lives of other people”. This open self-effacement is part of the act: as he says in A Seventh Man, his 1975 book on migrant workers in Europe, “To try to understand the experience of another it is necessary to dismantle the world as seen from one’s own place within it and to reassemble it as seen from his.” Art as a natural border-crosser: “If one thinks of appearances as a frontier, one might say that painters search for messages which cross the frontier.” And since we’re talking frontiers and the crossing of them – if Cézanne said of Monet, “Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye,” I’m going to say of Berger, Berger is only a man, but my God, the multitude of us, here, gone, and yet to come, that’s in him.

What a fruition, what a seer of past and of futures, of the damage that “the poverty of the new capitalism” would do to the multitude across all the frontiers, the people desperate right now to cross the frontiers as the only way to survive. What a gifting of voice to – and recognising and celebrating of, and fury at the injustices done to – the working classes, the underclasses and the people who have had to become migrants is in his work. What a clear vision of “consumerist ideology . . . the most powerful and invasive on the planet”, and of “the innate paranoia of the politically powerful” and the narratives this paranoia inflicts on the world. “Look,” he says, “at the power structure of the surrounding world and how its authority functions. Every tyranny finds and improvises its own set of controls. Which is why they are often, at first, not recognised as the vicious controls they are.” What a foul improvisation millions of people are caught up in at this moment.

Meanwhile, what an energy and a pleasure and a humanity there is, he points out, against the odds, of the poor, and of the people called migrants, when it comes to that survival. That “ingenuity of the dispossessed” is always up against a reductive power at every point, he says: “There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronise the urban poor in its naming. That is power.” Berger is clear about Power with a capital P, or what he calls in his letter to Rosa Luxemburg, “power-shit”.

“Today, to try to paint the existent is an act of resistance instigating hope.” Yet, “To face History is to face the tragic.” Despair is “intrinsic to the practice of painting”, he says in a piece about Frans Hals; Goya’s light is merciless for the cruelty it reveals; the Fayum painters “worked from dark to light”. And “the self and the essential come together in darkness or blinding light”. Everything in Berger’s own art of describing to us, of picturing for us where it is we live right now, is an act of resistance and hope.

Portraits is full of references to darkness and light, the unifying properties of light, “the attraction of the eye to light”, but the attraction of the imagination to light, he says, is more complex, “because it involves the mind as a whole . . . vision advances from light to light, like a figure walking on stepping stones”. He quotes Pasolini. “Disperazione senza un po’ di speranza: for we never have despair without some small hope.” And here’s Rosa Luxemburg, via Berger, from that recent letter to the past: “‘To be a human being,’ you say, ‘is the main thing above all else. And that means to be firm and clear and cheerful . . . because howling is the business of the weak. To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life in the giant scales of fate if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud.’”

So. A ten-year-old girl in the Scottish Highlands, way back in history, in 1972, is walking to school. It’s an ordinary day, and everything has changed, everything is new, and this has happened simply from a single phrase, a simple verbal act, having entered her consciousness. So, she is thinking, looking at the garage that she takes a short cut through, with the cars up on their raised platforms so that you can see underneath the part of them usually practically invisible, that’s always closest to the road, looking at the mechanics covered in oil and grease with their heads lost in the bodies of the machines, so, she thinks as she walks through the school gates, stands in line with all the other kids, sits down in the given place in the church and looks at the Stations of the Cross on the walls, how they stick out dimensionally, are three-dimensional pictures, and the blue-painted statue of the Madonna up at the front, so there is more than just seeing, there are WAYS of seeing.

That was a start. And “there’s never a conclusion”, is what Berger says in his preface to Portraits. In a world capable of reversing the meanings of “democracy, justice, human rights, terrorism” (“Each word,” he has written, “signifies the opposite of what it was once meant to signify”) we have a writer like Berger, who opens, reveals and reverses the given power relationships so that how we see changes. Way back, in Ways of Seeing (1972), he wrote warningly about how much we are led to “accept the total system of publicity images as we accept an element of climate”. He recognised a new nature, and Berger is, you might say, one of the most potent and authentic of our nature writers when it comes to the nature of the political structuring that gets called the world. He reveals and constantly reasserts the actual nature of things. “Tyrants”, he writes, “have no knowledge of the surrounding earth” from their “guarded condominiums” and their cyberterritories. He quotes Cézanne: “The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.”

From his piece on Jackson Pollock, here’s his definition of genius: “. . . the genius is by definition a man who is in some way or another larger than the situation he inherits.” Look at Berger in the world, and the world after him, then, now and to come. Not that I would characterise John Berger, whom I love, by his attainments, since, remember, a person loved is recognised not by attainments but by the verbs which can satisfy that person. Instead, in appreciation of him, I am and will be verbal: I see. I see in multiple ways. I veer towards that light in all the darknesses, real, historic, contemporary. And because of it, I will see. More, I will look. I will connect. I will co-respond. I will always know the life of dialogue. I will know the value of mystery, of not knowing. I will open. I will shout at the walls and the frontiers to break open. I will keep my nose open for the power-shit. If I despair, it’ll be with hope. I will attempt to pay, at all times, not just attention, but creative attention. I will love. And I will pass on, both to the past and the future, what generosity and gifts and sight and insight have been passed on to me, with love.

“Portraits: John Berger on Artists” is published by Verso (£25)

Francis has done a lot to earn that “Cool Pope” moniker, he really has. Walking into America and taking the side of the poor is a bold move. This is a country, remember, in which more than 15 people (not even as a joke) think Donald Trump should be president. So, on his recent visit to the US in which he decried things like corporate greed, Cool Pope was met by a lot of angry men and women with immense, sculptural Republican hairdos shouting words like “Marxist”.

During his two-year papacy, Cool Pope has instigated a debate about the Roman Catholic Church’s stance on divorce, authorised priests to “forgive” women who have had abortions (yes, this is a far cry from actually allowing Catholic women autonomy over their bodies, but hey, it’s a start), and called for action on climate change. But, most importantly, perhaps, CP has channeled the focus of the Church away from sinful stalwarts like abortion, homosexuality and contraception – things he accused the Church of being “obsessed” with in a 2013 interview – and towards fighting global poverty. Something Jesus would think was quite cool, I imagine. But hey, I’m an agnostic Jewish lesbian.

Then again, in shifting the Vatican’s attention away from homosexuality hasn’t Cool Pope just swept the issue under one of their big, fancy rugs (I’ve never actually been to the Vatican, but I imagine they have these)? The Wikipedia entry for “Homosexuality and Roman Catholicism” is over 16,000 words long. That’s around twice the length of the entry for “Cat”. Anyone who’s been on the internet lately, other than to read this piece, will know this is kind of a big deal.

Catholicism’s relationship with homosexuality isn’t just “complicated”, it’s “thesis-length complicated”. I may not be a gay Catholic myself, but I’ve dated more than one of them. OK, we’re not talking full-on Opus Dei self-flagellators, but I know a little bit about lesbian Catholic guilt. Meanwhile, all Cool Pope has really added to the fiercely convoluted dialogue involving God and gayness is the phrase, “who am I to judge?”. This, he directed at gay priests. In all fairness though, even his use of the word “gay” (as apposed to the more clinical “homosexual”) marked him out as a liberal by Vatican standards.

Since Francis was made Pope in 2013, his progressiveness, or lack thereof, has been debated in many, many, many articles. What the authors of many of these many, many articles seem to forget is the fact that they’re not discussing a politician, but the anointed patriarch of a 2,000-year-old religion. Cool as he may be, Pope Francis probably isn’t going to turn the Vatican into the world’s plushest gay club anytime soon.

True progressiveness in religion seems to come about in baby steps – cute little pigeon-toed baby Jesus steps, if you like. But since religious acceptance is the final frontier in the global push for LGBT rights, the cleverer religious leaders should probably think about taking at least one grown-up Jesus step. And who better to do this than Cool Pope? Sure, if he were to don a rainbow Pope hat (that’s the technical term) and declare to the 1.2bn Roman Catholics of the world, “gay is OK”, not all of them would be immediately convinced. But, as I said of his stance on abortion, it would be a start. A fairly significant start, actually.

OK so, seeing as the Pope very recently met with homophobic Christianity’s new poster child, Kim Davis, the rainbow hat thing isn’t exactly imminent. Cool Pope, while in the US, allegedly told Davis– the Kentucky county clerk who was jailed for refusing to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple – to “stay strong”. Really, Cool Pope? Not cool.

Meanwhile, in South America and parts of West Africa, in particular, the Catholic Church remains one of the loudest voices against progress of any kind. If religion is ever going to stop doing battle with modernity, Catholicism is one sect that could really stand to be a lot less “thou shalt not”.

After all, wasn’t it the Catholic Church that famously protected so many Jews during the Holocaust? (Yeah, let’s set the Spanish Inquisition to one side for a moment). And wasn’t John F Kennedy, one of the US’s most progressive leaders, also the only ever Catholic president? Not to mention (OK, fictional) President Bartlet of the West Wing, a Catholic who – in one of the greatest TV moments ever –completely eviscerates an anti-gay Christian. And, while we’re doing fictional, what about those Nazi car-wrecking nuns in The Sound of Music, eh? Anyway, fictional or genuine, Catholics have a history, albeit a modern one, of standing up for oppressed people. If anyone is going to take on religion’s anti-gay stigma, it might as well be a Catholic. Your move, Cool Pope.

The first full day of Labour conference felt like the universe’s way of backing Jeremy Corbyn’s criticisms of privatisation and unregulated markets. First came the unwelcome discovery that engineering works had left delegates with a choice between a local stopping service to Brighton and the three most feared words in the English language: rail replacement bus. I picked the former, and spent the next two hours staring out of the window at the seemingly endless green fields of the South Downs. (Anyone who complains about Britain being an overdeveloped concrete jungle clearly never gets the train.) Andy Burnham, now shadow home secretary, took the bus – and tweeted at the end of his “nightmare journey” that he was “ready to clap loudly when Jeremy mentions rail renationalisation”.

When I arrived in Brighton, there was another unpleasant surprise: the host of our Airbnb rental was nowhere to be found, and unreachable by phone. As I stood in an alleyway, hammering the door like an estranged spouse in an EastEnders Christmas special, suddenly the “disruptive” sharing economy didn’t look so appealing. Eventually, I gave up and found a hotel.

Lynchian mob

The slogan of the conference was “Straight talking, honest politics” but the real theme was modernisers v Corbynites. With the exception of a few loose cannon on either side, these skirmishes were camouflaged, as the centrists acknowledge that Jeremy Corbyn’s mandate is such that he is untouchable in the short term.

As Ed Miliband’s pollster James Morris observed, this made it feel like a David Lynch production: “everything seems normal, fringes tick on, members upbeat. But there is sadness and rage underneath.”

The most obvious change is that the modernisers have begun to show passion and conviction when articulating both their ideas and their personal attachment to the party. They have dropped the complacency that came with being the establishment, a move which, one MP admitted to me, was long overdue. “Those of us in the centre have a duty to be radical, too,” he observed.

This battle of ideas is exciting (something conference badly needed) but it does mean more arguments and more hurt feelings, because everyone feels there is something existential at stake. At the New Statesman party, Chuka Umunna – a politician whose easy self-assurance sometimes seems borderline robotic – spoke emotionally about a new member who told him at a fringe event she was afraid to speak in case she was “accused of being a Tory”. It’s a widely held but little expressed view, even among MPs.

The challenge now for the centrists is to reframe the battle. At the moment, it feels like a contest between principles (on the left) v competent, compromising, bloodless managerialism (at the centre) rather than a fight between two competing ideologies. “Your ideas won’t win an election” is no substitute for “our ideas are better”.

Bursting bubbles

If I sound grumpy, it’s because being shouted at (both virtually and in the real world) about my status as an emissary of the Evil Mainstream Media is beginning to grate. Inveighing against the “Westminster Bubble” has the benefit of truth – politicians and the media do often have more in common than either does with the average voter – combined with the power of an ad hominem attack. It suggests that the speaker’s opinion is worthless because of their personal circumstances, which removes the need to listen to their words. For that reason, it has become a thought-terminating cliché, used too often by people who are in bubbles of their own.

In Brighton, I did a Radio 5 show where an audience member castigated us for insufficient enthusiasm for the new political dawn whose effects were apparently being felt everywhere. There was simply no polite way to say that Brighton – with its Green MP and its record as the first city to elect a Green-led council – was not an accurate bellwether for left-wing enthusiasm in the nation as a whole. The “Labour bubble” can be just as stifling as the Westminster one.

Sour plumbs

Another bucket of cold water came at my next fringe on how Labour can win back working-class voters. John Healey, now shadow minister for housing, pointed out the scale of the challenge: it needs to win 94 additional seats in 2020 to secure a majority of one, including many where the Ukip vote was larger than the Tory majority.

Polly Billington, Labour’s defeated candidate in the Essex seat of Thurrock, said that immigration and cleaning up the streets were the two issues most raised on the doorstep. She said something else that Labour should reflect on as the debates about EU membership roll on: free movement of people “is great if you want a plumber; it’s less good if you are a plumber”.

The houses that Jez could build

Huge credit is due to Corbyn for seizing upon housing so early in his leadership and appointing a dedicated ministerial team. Labour has not, until now, had an effective counter-offer to Help to Buy and the extension of Right to Buy, nor has it been able to capitalise on the Conservatives’ lack of interest in the problems of private renters.

The area should be an open goal for Labour: the forced sell-off of housing association properties will make council waiting lists rocket, according to Shelter, while more of their budgets will be swallowed by expensive temporary accommodation. All the Tory waffle about the revenue from the sell-off being used to fund more housebuilding is deluded: since 2012, for every nine homes sold off under the reinvigorated Right to Buy, just one has been built or started. In the north-west, 1,264 homes have been sold. How many replacements have been built? Two. 

A very long time ago, some wide-eyed utopians dreamed a seductive dream. A dream of a perfect world. A world without coercive constraints on economic activities, where the intrusive hand of government would be eliminated. They conceived of an economy governed by the same laws that operate in nature. And they called it the free market. And over time the left began to believe in this fantasy as much as the right. For the right it is a call to arms against the domination of the ‘villainous’ state; for the left it is the rot at the heart of our ‘inequitable’ economic system. Yet while they disagree on its desirability, both positions assume that a ‘non-regulated’ market can even be possible. One of the key insights of the Hungarian philosopher Karl Polanyi, however, is that there is no such thing as a free market. There never has been, and there never can be. Let me explain.

The concept of an economic sphere completely divorced from government and civil society institutions, Polanyi argues, is a “stark utopia”—stark, because the attempt to bring it into being is destined to fail and will inevitably bring about dystopian consequences for human beings and nature alike. However, there is a gulf of difference between a market and what Polanyi calls a market society. The first is a necessary part of any functioning economy, one of many different social institutions on which the common good depends; the second imperils human society by attempting to subject almost everything that social life depends upon to market principles: health care, legal security, and the right to earn a wage. When these ‘commodity fictions’ (Polanyi’s words, not mine) are treated as if they are genuine commodities, produced for sale in the marketplace, rather than inherent rights, our social world is thrown before the lions and major crises inevitably follow on. The financial crisis of 2008 and the Wall Street Crash, arguably being just two examples. 

The flip side to all this, Polanyi argues, is that human beings tend to mobilise in response to such crises, but the resulting resistance is not always necessarily democratic (think the New Deal)—it it is just as likely to be authoritarian and nasty. For all their wickedness, the Nazi Party came to power on a protectionist ticket, promising to restore order in the face of the social chaos created by the crash of the early 1930s. Looking at today’s world through this prism, isn’t free market ideology the common thread that links many of today’s problems too—global warming, rising anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and economic instability?

To any rational thinker, then, the very idea that markets and governments are independent and autonomous institutions is clearly dangerous nonsense. Government action is not some kind of Orwellian “interference” in the autonomous sphere of economic activity. In simple terms, the economy just cannot exist without the mediating influence of government and social institutions. It’s not only that society depends on schools, a legal system, and other public goods that only government can provide. It is that every major input the economy needs in order to function—land, labour, and money—originate and are maintained through sustained government action. The supplies of money that enable us to purchase goods, the employment system, the arrangements for buying and selling land, all are supported and organised through the exercise of government’s authority, rules, and regulations. Put simply, there is no such thing as a “free market”.

In light of this doesn’t the quixotic left need to stop tilting at windmills and see the world as it really is? It’s time we changed the terms of political debate and made it clear that the frustrating economic problems we face today are exclusively political problems. This means rejecting the illusion of a deregulated economy altogether. Instead of parroting the fallacious ideology of the free market, we need to close the book on this myth and tell an alternative story. 

As the academic Margaret Somers has pointed out, what happened in the 1980s in the name of “deregulation” was, in truth, simply “re-regulation”, this time by laws and policies completely opposite to those of the mid-twentieth century—of Attlee and Roosevelt. Those older regulations laid the foundations for greater social equality, a thriving middle class and increased economic and political security. The reality is that, between the ‘Big Bang’ of 1986 and the present day, government continued to regulate, but instead of acting to protect workers and customers, it devised novel policies aimed to help multi-national corporations and the financial services industries maximise the returns on their investments, by reforming anti-trust laws, putting obstacles in the way of unionisation, and handing out bank bailouts without any conditions attached whatsoever. In 2008, 1.3 trillion pounds were transferred to the banks in the UK overnight—the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in history—but nothing was asked for in return. You get the picture. 

The implications of Polanyi’s critique for the left are critical. If regulations are necessary features of markets, then surely we’ve got to stop fixating on the ‘regulation versus deregulation’ debate that has distorted political discourse for the last thirty years, and instead discuss what kinds of regulations we want to see put in place? Those designed for the exclusive benefit of capital and the billionaire class? Or those that jointly benefit workers, customers, and businesses? We must not ask whether the law should intervene in the market but rather what kinds of rules and rights should be expressed in these laws—those that recognise that it is the expertise and experience of employees that help make firms profitable and productive, or those that rig the race solely in favour of employers and centralised capital? 

The truth, of course, in the 1930s as now, is that the poor have always struggled to keep their heads above water in the face of forces that overwhelm them. Confronted by the economic failures and instabilities brought about by what political philosopher Maurice Glasman calls “market utopia”, we must be relentless in guarding against the threats which the advocates of free market ideology unwittingly present to democracy and peace. Unless there are some serious initiatives to chart a new course, we can only expect that the threat from the nationalist right and the anti-Semitic hard-left—that is currently growing across Europe— will grow stronger.

“Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves,” says Don Quixote, as he advances towards the windmills on the plain. Taking Polanyi seriously means the left needs to confront reality. Or the economic inequities it rallies against will prevail. Another major crisis will become inevitable. And we may well have no say in our destiny at all.

The Conservatives are the real "workers' party". That is the message that will be delivered repeatedly at the party's conference in Manchester. To this audacious rebranding, there is no more awkward rejoinder than the coming cuts to tax credits. The new "living wage", which will reach £9 by 2020, will not compensate for the losses that low and middle-income families will endure. As the IFS has calculated, three million households will be £1,000 a year worse off. When MPs recently voted in favour of the cuts, there was a small but significant Tory rebellion (former leadership candidate David Davis and Stephen McPartland voted against). It is the loss of income that low-paid workers (the "strivers" in Conservative parlance) will suffer that they object to. 

Now, Frank Field, the chair of the work and pensions select committee, and one of the Labour MPs most respected by the Tories, has offered George Osborne a partial escape route. In a letter to the Chancellor, the former social security minister argues that he should protect the poorest by raising the withdrawal rate for those earning above the new living wage. At present, the planned increase in the taper rate from 41 per cent to 48 per cent and the reduction in the earnings threshold from £6,420 to £3,850 will result in 3.2 million families losing an average of £1,350 a year. 

Field writes: "As you will know I welcome wholeheartedly the introduction of the National Living Wage. But its potentially revolutionary impact will be extinguished next year by these cuts to tax credits. Might I therefore ask please whether you would consider introducing a mitigation policy, at nil cost to the Treasury, to protect the lowest paid while the National Living Wage is phased in?

"There is one cost neutral policy in particular which could protect National Living Wage-earners: a secondary earnings threshold paid for by a steeper withdrawal rate for those earning above this new minimum rate.

"This option would retain the existing £6,420 income threshold but introduce a second gross income of £13,100, the equivalent of working 35 hours a week on the National Living Wage. For gross earnings between £6,420 and £13,100, the taper rate would be kept at 41 per cent. The lowest paid working families, therefore, would experience no reduction in tax credit income compared with the current system. To keep the policy cost neutral, gross earnings above £13,100 would need to be tapered at 65 per cent.

"Might this be something you are willing to consider for the Autumn Statement?"

It might indeed be something Osborne is willing to consider. The Sun reports that Boris Johnson, the Chancellor's chief rival for the Conservative leadership, has been studying the proposal and has warned him of "political disaster" if the lowest-paid are not protected. The Mayor of London, frustrated by Osborne's deft appropriation of the "living wage" he championed, is looking for new means of differentation. Past form suggests that Osborne may well give himself some protective cover when he delivers his joint Spending Review and Autumn Statement on 25 November. 

1. The independent cancer taskforce published its 5-year strategy for cancer with a number of recommendations, in July 2015.  What do you think the government must do to ensure some of the biggest challenges contained within it are attainable?

“The current Government is following through on the good work of the Coalition, maintaining cancer as a key priority for the NHS. Both the Secretary of State for Health and the Minister with responsibility for Cancer, Jane Ellison MP, have been great supporters of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer (APPGC) in recent years, and my fellow Officers and I are looking forward to working alongside them to ensure cancer’s voice continues to be heard in Parliament.

Overall, I was pleased with the Independent Cancer Taskforce’s new cancer strategy. The sustained focus on health outcomes is pleasing, and continues the positive aspects of the last Parliament’s NHS reforms. I particularly welcome the ambition not only to monitor these health outcomes, but also to improve the NHS’ performance at achieving them.

However, the APPGC does have concerns lest the measures in the new strategy undermine our parallel work in persuading the NHS to take action on its cancer survival rates. The importance of this can not be overstated: it is estimated between 5,000 – 10,000 extra lives could be saved every year if the NHS matched European and international survival rates. Whilst the average NHS cancer patient has a 68% chance of surviving one year from diagnosis, in Sweden this rises to 82%. There is clearly scope for improvement.”

2. This will be the 7th year that you have chaired the Cancer APPG; what achievement in cancer policy are you most proud of?

“A few years ago the APPGC conducted a major report, which concluded the principle reason for the NHS’ underperformance was because it diagnosed cancer too late.   As a result, the APPGC focused its campaigning on the importance of improving earlier diagnosis. The Lansley NHS reforms, with their emphasis on local accountability coupled with a new focus on outcomes – measuring the success of treatment, rather than just its volume – dovetailed well with this approach.

Individual Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) now have the freedom to design solutions to improve earlier diagnosis – and therefore survival rates – appropriate to their populations. These could include screening programmes, awareness campaigns, and better GP training, amongst many others. The APPGC, together with the cancer community, successfully campaigned for one-year survival indicators to be embedded in the NHS’ new accountability frameworks, enabling the NHS’ performance, at both a local and national level, to be monitored.

The APPGC successfully persuaded the Chief Executive of NHS England to include one-year survival rates in the new overarching tier of CCG accountability, known as the ‘Delivery Dashboard’ from April 2015. This is superb news for patients and their families, as for the first time CCGs are being held accountable against their survival rates.”

What do you see as the biggest challenge to improve cancer outcomes over the next few years?

“From the APPGC’s standpoint, if the past few years have been about putting in place the tools required to reduce the ‘cancer gap’ between the NHS and other comparable health systems, then the next years will be about putting the tools to good use, driving up standards, highlighting best practice and shining a light on dark corners. It is an inspiring time to be involved with cancer policy, and, along with Government and the wider cancer community, the APPGC looks forward to playing its part through the new Parliament.”

John Baron MP, a former Shadow Health Minister, has been Chairman of the APPGC since 2009. 

Yesterday, you were probably one of the millions around the world who recoiled from their screen in blank-eyed horror at the news: Peeple, an app to be launched in November, will let others rate you, publicly, on the internet, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't opt out, and you don't need to join in order to be rated on a scale of one to five by colleagues, friends, and romantic partners. That boy whose girlfriend you stole? He can review you. The boss you swore at as you quit? Her, too. Those people in your life who think you're just a bit average? Expect a lukewarm three stars from them.

Of all the online rage at the app's announcement, perhaps the most was directed at the fact that you can't remove your own profile. Other users need only submit your mobile number and name to create your page, and you have no control about who posts on there. Reviews of two stars or less are invisible to the public for 48 hours, and you have the chance to review them and try to "work it out" with the rater. Once that time is up, though, the negative reviews appear for all to see. You can comment on them to defend your corner, but unless they break the app's rules, you can't delete them.

There are all kinds of problems with Peeple's premise. Despite its founders' promises that bullying and harassment won't be tolerated (helped slightly by the fact that users must be over 21 and use their full name and Facebook profile to comment), it seems impossible that they'll be able to moderate this effectively. And as we've learned from sites like TripAdvisor or Yelp, the majority of reviews are from those seeking to boost the company's reputation, rivals, or angry customers - it's rare to see one that's balanced and helpful.

Yet the biggest flaw of all is the assumption that public rating and shaming has a place, or is even acceptable, in our society. There's something fundamentally broken in the app's presmise, which is summarised in its tagline, "character is destiny".  As western society has moved on from earlier ages where people were fundamentally changed in the eyes of the law and public into "criminals" by virtue of their deeds, or a time where a woman was utterly defined by her sexual acts, we've ceased to accept this as truth. The app's whole set-up assumes that someone who has offended a co-worker is likely to do it again, or a positive review from a partner makes it likely you'll enjoy a good relationship with them. As a society, we accept that some violent criminals are likely to re-offend, but we also see the value of rehabilitation, and can accept that people make mistakes they're unlikely to repeat. 

The dark side of social media is that it moves us backwards on this front. It allows permanent imprints of our online lives to be seen by everyone, to the extent where they seem to represent us. Victims of cyberbullying terrified that naked photos of them will be released, or people who make public gaffes on social media, become reduced to and defined by single acts. The mental health deterioration (and sometimes  suicide) that follows these shamings hints at how unnatural it is for single actions to change lives in such disproportionate ways. 

Jon Ronson, author of So you've been publicly shamed, which cleverly links the current culture of internet shaming with a legal past where criminals were shamed indefinitely as criminals for a single illegal act, seems chilled by the prospect of Peeple:

Heart is pounding with anxiety at the thought of peeple being real.

— jonronson (@jonronson) October 1, 2015

As one review of Ronson's book noted:

As Ronson makes patently clear, all these people’s punishments by far outweighed the gravity of their so-called crimes. In fact, having researched the history of public shaming in America in the Massachusetts Archives, he can only conclude that Lehrer, for one, was humiliated to a degree that would have been thought excessive even in the 18th century, the Puritans of New England having seemingly worked out that to ruin a person in front of his fellows is also to refuse him a second chance in life.

As Ronson explores in his book, extreme public shaming doesn't make us better people, or encourage us not to repeat offend: it shuts us down and exiles us from society in a way that benefits no one. (This makes Peeple's URL – forthepeeple.com – seem grimly ironic). What Ronson calls "chronic shame" occurs when our regretted actions harden into something far greater, something we allow to become part of ourselves. As Gershen Kaufman, a scholar of shame, notes:  "Shame is the most disturbing experience individuals ever have about themselves; no other emotion feels more deeply disturbing because in the moment of shame the self feels wounded from within."

We also shouldn't be forever defined by a clutch of "good" actions, or people who see some benefit in leaving us gushing reviews. Those who measure their worth through social media come to rely on the endorphins sparked by small online interactions and boosts to their confidence, at the expense of the more slow-burning satisfaction of real life. A single person's thoughts about us are relatively inconsequential, whether positive or negative - but they're given far greater weight on the internet  by virtue of their permanence and publicity.

In Mary Gordon's novella The Rest of Life, a character wishes that someone had told her earlier that "the world is large and will absorb the errors you innocently make". If we're to avoid tearing each other to pieces, we need to make sure that this remains the case. 

In a year when there are more new film releases than ever (18 this week, not including event cinema broadcasts such as the Met Opera), some are bound to get overlooked. Even I, as a loyal fan of the US writer-director Andrew Bujalski, didn’t know that his latest easygoing comedy, Results, had already been and gone at the cinema. Fortunately it’s out now on DVD.

It is Bujalski’s glossiest film to date, with his most experienced cast, and appears to the casual observer to be a standard, chirpy rom-com. As with all Bujalski’s movies, looks can be deceiving. The stylistic shabbiness of his early work served as a smokescreen for the tautness of the construction, so that moments of emotional precision caught viewers off-guard. Results works in the opposite direction; the smooth facade of the movie only enhances its quirky surprises.

The central location is Power 4 Life, a gym in Austin, Texas run by the go-getting fitness guru Trevor (Guy Pearce), who dreams of expanding to include a juice bar and an on-site therapist. But there is disquiet in his ranks. One of his top personal trainers, Kat (Cobie Smulders), with whom Trevor has a complicated history, is being rather over-zealous in her commitment to the job – pursuing clients who haven’t paid their bills, haranguing those who’ve had enough of exercise (“Fuck you! You’re not a quitter!”). She also gets romantically involved briefly with a client, Danny (the endearing Kevin Corrigan), a doggedly unfit stoner who has become suddenly wealthy due to a combination of bad luck (his mother died) and good timing (his divorce came through a week before his windfall, so he doesn’t have to share the money).

The surface slickness should help ensure that Results gets a wider audience than Bujalski’s four previous films. It doesn’t have the scrappy, shoestring look of the tremendous opening hat-trick – Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax­– which helped create the “mumblecore” mini-genre of shambolic independent comedies about shambolic independent twentysomethings.

Nor is Results as formally adventurous and skew-whiff as his fourth picture, Computer Chess, a study of Eighties tech geeks that was shot only on the equipment that would have been available at the time. In that picture, the cameras appeared to go rogue as the film progressed – it was as though they were removing control from human hands. Here the technical side is steady and dependable. It’s human beings who go rogue.

I loved the new film. It takes a while for Bujalski’s sensibility to bed down in the bright, zingy setting he has chosen for his story. The empty spaces, with their emphasis on open-plan fluidity, reflect the unformed personalities of the people who inhabit them; everyone here seems provisional and no one has quite worked out who they are or what they want.

The charitable bagginess of Bujalski’s world-view is at odds with the motivational vigour of the fitness industry, a tension mirrored nicely in the characters – Kat and Trevor have to learn to loosen up around Danny (the scene where Trevor tries to appear casual and unperturbed when Danny suggests he might attempt a reconciliation with his ex-wife is a corker).

And Danny has to meet them halfway. Physically he puts in the donkeywork, giving rise to one of the funniest training montages ever committed to film (“You’ve seen Rocky, right?” asks Trevor). Emotionally it takes a little longer. His attempts to lure Kat into a relationship are brilliantly misguided.

In turn, Trevor’s gentle efforts to retain Danny as a customer, even after things have gone as pear-shaped as the millionaire’s physique, form a different but no less touching sort of courtship. Bujalski might never crack Hollywood, but what does it matter? He’s defiantly his own man. Results gets results.

A very different but similarly overlooked film also out on DVD this month is the British thriller Catch Me Daddy. This arresting debut from the writer-director sibling team of Daniel and Matthew Wolfe brings together three disparate sets of people – a pair of grizzled, middle-aged white bruisers, a quartet of Asian men in their twenties and a young mixed-race couple holed up in a caravan on the moors – whose fates intersect over the course of several violent days in West Yorkshire.

It’s advisable to approach the movie without much prior knowledge: the tantalising reveal of connections between the characters is masterfully done. The sense of place and class, as well as the desperation in the lives here, is also expertly captured.

The Wolfes and their cinematographer, Robbie Ryan (best known for his work with Andrea Arnold) evoke a world that can be oppressively grim but also euphoric in its visual poetry. What saves the film from charges of miserablism is the insistence that wild beauty can still flourish even where it appears to have been most brutally stamped out.

Results and Catch Me Daddy are on DVD now.

The New Statesman is hiring an editorial assistant, who will work across the website and magazine to help the office run smoothly. The ideal candidate will have excellent language skills, a passion for journalism, and the ability to work quickly and confidently under pressure.

The job is a broad one – you will need to understand the requirements of both halves of the magazine (politics and culture) as well as having an interest in the technical requirements of magazine and website production. Experience with podcasts and social media would be helpful.

The right person will have omnivorous reading habits and the ability to assimilate new topics at speed. You will be expected to help out with administration tasks around the office, so you must be willing to take direction and get involved with unglamorous tasks. There will be opportunities to write, but this will not form the main part of the job. (Our current editorial assistant is now moving on to a writing post.)

This is a full-time paid job, which would suit a recent graduate or someone who is looking for an entry into journalism. On the job training and help with career development will be offered.

Please apply with an email to Stephen Bush (Stephen. Bush @ newstatesman.co.uk) with the subject line ‘Editorial Assistant application’.  

In your covering letter, please include a 300-word analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the New Statesman. Please also include 500 words on what you consider to be the most interesting trend in British politics, and your CV as a Word document. 

The deadline for applications is noon on Monday 12^th October.

Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening (Harvard University Press, £16.95) is a book not quite like any other. First of all, this graphic novel was his doctoral thesis at Columbia University. Second, the book is entirely non-narrative – it doesn’t tell a story but instead explores and is powered by a series of ideas about how the human mind produces meaning. It takes on the problem that Jacques Derrida and others identified as “logocentrism”, the primacy of words over images in the western philosophical tradition, but then goes about the critique of the idea in a completely different, evidence-based way.

Ranging across a wide range of disciplines – the arts, the sciences, popular culture, critical theory – Sousanis argues that the verbal and the visual are inextricably entwined in the production of knowledge. His book enacts that process, being at once a thesis and its illustration (in both senses: example and pictorial representation). It is a book that is dense with the syntheses of ideas, nimble, far-reaching and impossible to summarise. It liberates itself from the standard layout of panels within frames, teaching the eye and mind to read the unfailingly intelligent black-and-white artwork in unconventional and new ways. Unflattening deserves a place as a compulsory textbook in schools.

William Goldsmith’s Vignettes of Ystov (2011) announced an original talent. He is back with his second graphic novel, The Bind (Jonathan Cape, £20), which is set in a Victorian bookbinders called Egret, run by two brothers, Guy and Victor, of opposite temperaments. Guy is prudent and responsible, while the devil-may-care Victor is a rule-bending risk-taker. The making of the most expensive book ever ignites the tinderbox of the destructive dynamics between the brothers, with disastrous consequences for the bindery.

The ghost of the brothers’ dead father, despairing yet powerless, hovers over the events as a chorus of one, commenting on the action, while Goldsmith, as natural a storyteller as he is a dazzling illustrator, keeps wrong-footing the reader, introducing twist upon twist in the corkscrew narrative. The result is utterly delicious, a gripping story that is beautiful to behold. Goldsmith’s restrained palette of greys, orangey browns and umbers gives the book the visual feel of early cinema.

David Hughes’s second graphic novel, The Pillbox (Jonathan Cape, £18.99) transports the structural elements of a ghost story – an unsettled and unresolved past misdeed, its sudden and inexplicable irruption in the present tense and its equally sudden vanishing – to the Suffolk seaside and creates a distinctive creature of it. Quite apart from the stunning artwork – knowing, often painterly, part George Grosz, part Ralph Steadman – the book turns around a cruel deployment of dramatic irony: the characters are refused the bitter illumination that the readers are given.

Jack, an 11-year-old, stumbles upon a Second World War pillbox on the beach and meets a slightly older boy called Bill. The next day, the pillbox is gone and there is no sign of Bill. The narrative loops back to 1945 to give us Bill’s story. It is violent and shocking, but even more shocking is the story of Bill’s sister, Rita, and her terminally ill husband. Hughes has captured something ineluctably English in the combination of seediness, violence, sensationalism and humour; the book’s biggest effect, however, is the resonance of the present-day story, which will leave at least one haunting question ringing in your head.

I’ve always had more admiration than love for Jules Feiffer’s work – there’s something about the messy fluidity of his lines that I don’t warm to – but Kill My Mother (Liveright, £16.99), his first foray into the graphic novel form (at the age of 86), is perfection of its kind. It’s a homage to the ­masters of noir: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M Cain are among the book’s dedicatees. Like Howard Hawks’s film of Chandler’s The Big Sleep (even its screenwriters, including William Faulkner, were in the dark about certain elements of the plot), Feiffer’s book delivers a story of devilish intricacy with remarkable economy: in a single page, he reveals vast backstories. The cast of characters features a needy daughter who wants to kill her mother; the mother, who works for a drunken private investigator and is looking for her husband’s killer; a chippy tap dancer who wants to be Hollywood’s biggest star; a weedy boy who grows up to be a hulky soldier. Kill My Mother spans a decade and its locations shift from Bay City to a theatre of war on a South Pacific island, where the story, a ticking bomb so far, explodes spectacularly.

Adrian Tomine is one of the finest graphic novelists working in the tradition of psychological realism. Killing and Dying (Faber & Faber, £14.99), a collection of six interconnected short stories, has all the depth, shadows, restraint and emotional impact of Alice Munro or William Trevor. There is no finer exploration of embarrassment than the title story about a stammering, under-confident 14-year-old who wants to be a stand-up, much against her unsupportive father’s wishes, but Tomine goes a few steps further and devastates you, changing the entire emotional weather. He is a master of melancholy, of depicting lives running into the sand. He is also a master of the deflating joke, of comedy that breaks the heart. The psychological complexity and depth he is capable of rendering in a few panels is astounding.

Neel Mukherjee’s most recent novel is “The Lives of Others” (Vintage)

The much-vaunted tech revolution is not without its casualties, as I discovered first hand last weekend. The album format, creative boredom and now my favourite skirt: all collateral damage in the vicious battle for our waning attention span.

The last met its end in a pub, when it found itself on the wrong side of a slate slab full of Sunday roast. Once gravy got involved, things turned pretty ugly; and when reinforcements arrived in the form of a red-hot jar of plum crumble, I abandoned all hope of making it out with my dignity intact and began pondering the best way of getting a dry-cleaning bill to Tim Berners-Lee.

I lay the blame for such crimes against food entirely at the feet of the internet. Serving calamari in a wooden clog, or floury baps in a flat cap, is guaranteed to make people whip out their cameraphones to give the restaurant a free plug online.

Sadly for the establishments involved, these diners are increasingly likely to be sending their artistic endeavours to We Want Plates, a campaign group dedicated to giving offenders the kind of publicity they’re probably not seeking. (Highlights from the wall of shame on the campaign’s website include a dog’s bowl of sausage, beans and chips, pork medallions in a miniature urinal, and an amuse-bouche perched on top of an animal skull – “Good luck putting those in the dishwasher”.) Such madness is enough to make you nostalgic for an era when western tableware was so uniform that it moved an astonished Japanese visitor to compose the haiku: “A European meal/Every blessed plate and dish/Is round.”

The ordinary plate has its limitations, naturally: as every Briton knows, fish and chips tastes better when eaten from greasy paper, while a bit of novelty can tickle even the jaded palate at the end of a meal. Watching Jesse Dunford Wood create dessert on the tabletop at his restaurant Parlour is definitely the most fun I’ve ever had with an arctic roll (there’s a great video on YouTube, complete with Pulp Fiction soundtrack).

Yet the humble plate endures by simple dint of sheer practicality. The slight lip around the edge is no mere bourgeois affectation; it keeps the food contained in its proper place, rather than slipping on to the tablecloth, while the flat centre is an ideal surface for cutting – as anyone who has ever tackled sausages and mash in an old army mess tin (“perfect for authentic food presentation”, according to one manufacturer) will attest.

Given these facts, I hope Tom Aikens has invested in good napkins for his latest venture, Pots Pans and Boards in Dubai. According to a local newspaper, “Aikens’s Dubai concept is all in the name”: in other words, everything on the menu will be presented on a pot, pan or board. So the youngest British chef ever to be awarded two Michelin stars is now serving up salade niçoise in an enamel pie dish rightly intended for steak and kidney.

Truly, these are the last days of Rome – except that those civilised Romans would never have dreamed of eating oysters from a rock, or putting peas in an old flowerpot. Indeed, the ancient concept of the stale bread trencher – to be given to the poor, or thrown to the dogs after use – seems positively sophisticated in comparison, although I can’t help seeing the widespread adoption of the modern plate in the 17th century as a great leap forward for mankind, on a par with the internal combustion engine and space travel.

Which is why I have every faith that all those tiny trollies of chips and rough-hewn planks of charcuterie will eventually seem as absurd as surrealist gazelle-skin crockery, or futurist musical boxes full of salad.

In the meantime, may I recommend the adult bib?

I was a bit humiliated and ashamed and mortified last week because of letters in this magazine about one of my recent columns. Wait till I see the Correspondence editor: there must be loads of nice letters, yet he or she goes and prints not just one, but two picking me up on my mistakes. By the left.

But mainly, my reaction was to laugh. Typical, huh, I’ve gone through life spelling things wrong, with dates dodgy, facts fictional – will I ever learn?

John Lennon did not use a watch. He maintained that he had people on the staff who would tell the time. I don’t wear a watch, either, but for different reasons. I want to get my wrists brown and I hate carrying anything.

By the same milk token, I don’t worry about my spelling. Like Lennon, I expect others to clear up after me. Surely the subs should have spotted it was a typo, that it is 64 years since 1951, not 54 as I wrote? What do they do all day? The other mistake was about replays in the League Cup: too boring to repeat, you would only yawn.

I usually try to get the spelling right the first time I use a word, then bash on, letting it come out any old way, intending to correct it later. Is it Middlesbrough or Middlesborough? Who cares? I’ll check later. Then I forget.

I was so pleased when Patrick Vieira left Arsenal. I found those ten seasons a nightmare, whenever I realised his surname was lumbering into vieiw (I mean “view”). Why couldn’t I memorise it? Mental laziness. The same reason that I don’t know the phone numbers of any of my children, or the correct spelling of my grandchildren’s names, Amarisse and Siena. I have to ask my wife how many Ss and how many Ns. She knows everything. The birthday of every member of the royal family? Go on, ask her.

I might be lazy on piddling stuff such as spelling but I like to think my old brain is still agile. I have three books on the go which are hellishly complicated. I have the frameworks straight in my head but I don’t want to cram anything else in.

It can be a bit embarrassing when writing about football, though. Since sport was invented, fans have been making lists, trotting out facts, showing off their information. As a boy, I was a whizz on the grounds of all 92 League clubs, knew the nicknames of all the clubs. It’s what you did. Comics like Adventure produced pretty colour charts full of such facts. I don’t remember sitting down and learning it all. It just went in, because I wanted it to go in.

Today, the world of football is even madder on stats than it ever was. I blame computers and clever graduates who get taken on by the back pages with nothing else to do but create stats. And TV, with its obsession with possession, as if it meant anything.

I find that if I watch three live games in a weekend, which often happens, I have totally forgotten the first two by the time the third comes up. Not just the score but who was playing. When Wayne Rooney or whoever is breaking records, or not, my eyes go glazed, refusing to take in the figures. When I read that Newcastle are again winless in their first seven League games now, I start turning the pages. If I get asked who won the Cup in 1923, my immediate answer is HowthefeckdoIknow. Hold on, I do know that. It was the first Cup final at Wembley, won by Bolton Wanderers. I remember that, having been there. I don’t know the dates of any other Cup final winners. England’s World Cup win? That was 1966 and I really was there.

I love football history (I’ve written three books about it) but it’s the players and the history of the clubs, the boots and strips, development in the laws, that’s what I enjoy knowing. Spellings and dates – hmm, I do always have to think. Did the Football League begin in 1888 or 1885? If I pause for half a second, I can work it out. Professional football came in first, which must have been 1885, so the Football League came later. Thus the answer is 1888. Bingo. Got it.

But more often than not, I guess, or leave it out. So, sorry about those mistakes. And if you’ve spotted any today, do keep it to yourself. 

Shakespeare – that magpie plunderer of other people’s plots and characters – would undoubtedly have approved. The Hogarth Shakespeare project invites prominent contemporary writers to rework his plays in novelistic form and this is Jeanette Winterson’s reimagining of The Winter’s Tale. Like the original, it shuttles disturbingly between worlds, cultures and emotional registers. It has never been an easy play, for all its apparent focus on reconciliation, and Winterson handles the gear-changes with skill, moving between the offices of Sicilia, a London-based asset-stripping company, and New Bohemia, a New Orleans-like American urban landscape (with interludes in both a virtual and a real Paris).

Her Leontes is a hedge-fund speculator, Polixenes a visionary designer of screen games (the presence of this world echoes the unsettling semi-magic of Shakespeare’s plot). They have a brief and uncomfortable history as teenage lovers at school and Polixenes – Xeno – has also slept with MiMi (Hermione), the French-American singer who eventually marries Leo.

The story unfolds very much as in the play (though Winterson cannot quite reproduce the effect of Shakespeare’s best-known deadpan stage direction), with Leo using advanced surveillance technology to spy on Xeno and MiMi, and Perdita being spirited away across the Atlantic to the US, where her guardian, Tony, is mugged and killed and she is left in the “baby hatch” of a local hospital – to be found by Shep and his son and brought up in their affectionate, chaotic African-American household. Perdita falls in love with Zel, the estranged son of Xeno, discovers her parentage, returns to London and meets Leo; Leo’s PA, Pauline, has kept in contact across the years with MiMi, a recluse in Paris, and persuades her to return secretly to give a surprise performance at the Roundhouse, when Leo is in the audience, and – well, as in the play, the ending is both definitive and enormously unsettling. “So we leave them now, in the theatre, with the music. I was sitting at the back, waiting to see what would happen.”

That last touch, bringing the author into the narrative in the same apparently arbitrary way we find in a text such as Dostoevsky’s Demons– as a “real” but imperfect witness – gently underlines the personal importance of the play to this particular author. Winterson is explicit about the resonance of this drama for an adopted child and one of the finest passages in the book is a two-page meditation on losing and finding: a process she speculates began with the primordial moment of the moon’s separation from the earth, a lost partner, “pale, lonely, watchful, present, unsocial, inspired. Earth’s autistic twin.”

It is the deep foundation of all the stories of lost paradises and voyages away from home. As the moon controls the tides, balances the earth’s motion by its gravitational pull, so the sense of what is lost pervades every serious, every heart-involving moment of our lives. It is a beautifully worked conceit, a fertile metaphor. The story of a child lost and found is a way of sounding the depths of human imagination, as if all our longing and emotional pain were a consequence of some buried sense of being separated from a home that we can’t ever ­remember. If tragedy is the attempt to tell the story of loss without collapse, all story­telling has some dimension of the tragic, reaching for what is for ever separated by the “gap of time”.

Winterson’s text is full of metaphorical riches. She writes with acute visual sensibility (from the first pages, with their description of a hailstorm in a city street) and this is one of the book’s best things. There are also plenty of incidental felicities: Xeno is designing a game in which time can be arrested, put on hold, accelerated, and so on, and the narrative exhibits something of this shuttling and mixing – most effectively in the 130-page pause between the moment when Milo (Shakespeare’s Mamilius, Leo’s and MiMi’s son) slips away from his father at an airport and the fatal accident that follows. In the play, Mamilius’s death is a disturbing silence behind the rest of the drama, never alluded to, never healed or reconciled; here, Milo’s absence in this long “gap of time” sustains a pedal of unease that has rather the same effect and the revelation of his death, picking up the narrative exactly where it had broken off, is both unsurprising and shocking.

Recurrent motifs are handled with subtlety, especially the theme of “falling”; a song of MiMi’s alludes to Gérard de Nerval’s image of an angel falling into the gap between houses in Paris, not being able to fly away without destroying the street and withering into death. The convergence and crucial difference between falling and failing, falling in love and the “fall” of the human race – all these are woven together hauntingly, reflecting, perhaps, Shakespeare’s exploration in the play of Leontes’s terror of the physical, of the final fall into time and flesh that unreserved love represents.

A book of considerable beauty, then, if not without its problems. MiMi somehow lacks the full angry dignity of Hermione and Leo is a bit too much of a caricature of the heartless, hyper-masculine City trader. His psychoanalyst is a cartoon figure and Pauline’s Yiddish folksiness – although flagged in the text as consciously exaggerated – is a bit overdone.

How a contemporary version can fully handle the pitch of the uncanny in Shakespeare’s final scene, with the “reanimation” of Hermione, is anyone’s guess (the Bible is not wrong to associate the earliest story of the resurrection with terror as much as joy). Winterson does a valiant job and passes seamlessly into a moving and intensely suggestive ending but I was not quite convinced on first reading that her reanimation had done justice to the original.

However, weigh against this the real success of the New Bohemia scenes as a thoroughly convincing modern “pastoral” and the equally successful use of Xeno’s creation of virtual worlds in his games as a way of underlining Shakespeare’s strong hints in the play that art, with its aura of transgression, excess, forbidden magic, and so on, may be our only route to nature. Dream, surprise and new creation are what tell us what is actually there, if only we could see. Winterson’s fiction is a fine invitation into this deeply Shakespearean vision of imagination as the best kind of truth-telling.

Rowan Williams is a New Statesman contributing writer. His most recent book is “The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language” (Bloomsbury). The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson is published by Vintage (320pp, £16.99)

All football clubs have “ultras” – and, increasingly, political parties do, too: although, in the case of political parties, their loudest and angriest supporters are mostly found on the internet. The SNP got there first: in the early days of email, journalists at the Scotsman used to receive bilious missives complaining about its coverage – or, on occasion, lack of coverage – of what the Scottish National Party was up to. The rest soon followed, with Ukip, the Labour Party and even the crushed Liberal Democrats now boasting a furious electronic horde.

The exception is the Conservative Party. Britain’s table-topping team might have its first majority in 18 years and is widely expected in Westminster to remain in power for another decade. But it doesn’t have any fans. The party’s conference in Manchester, like Labour’s in Brighton, will be full to bursting. But where the Labour shindig is chock-full of members, trade unionists and hangers-on from the charitable sector, the Conservative gathering is a more corporate affair: at the fringes I attended last year, lobbyists outnumbered members by four to one. At one, the journalist Peter Oborne demanded to know how many people in the room were party members. It was standing room only – but just four people put their hands up.

During Grant Shapps’s stint at Conservative headquarters, serious attempts were made to revive membership. Shapps, a figure who is underrated because of his online blunders, and his co-chair Andrew Feldman were able to reverse some of the decline, but they were running just to stand still. Some of the biggest increases in membership came in urban centres where the Tories are not in contention to win a seat.

All this made the 2015 election win the triumph of a husk. A party with a membership in long-term and perhaps irreversible decline, which in many seats had no activists at all, delivered crushing defeats to its opponents across England and Wales.

Like José Mourinho’s sides, which, he once boasted, won “without the ball”, the Conservatives won without members. In Cumbria the party had no ground campaign and two paper candidates. But letters written by the Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, were posted to every household where someone was employed making Trident submarines, warning that their jobs would be under threat under a Labour government. This helped the Tories come close to taking out both Labour MPs, John Woodcock in Barrow and Furness and Jamie Reed in Copeland. It was no small feat: Labour has held Barrow since 1992 and has won Copeland at every election it has fought.

The Tories have become the zombies of British politics: still moving though dead from the neck down. And not only moving, but thriving. One Labour MP in Brighton spotted a baby in a red Babygro and said to me: “There’s our next [Labour] prime minister.” His Conservative counterparts also believe that their rivals are out of power for at least a decade.

Yet there are more threats to the zombie Tories than commonly believed. The European referendum will cause endless trouble for their whips over the coming years. And for all there’s a spring in the Conservative step at the moment, the party has a majority of only 12 in the Commons. Parliamentary defeats could easily become commonplace. But now that Labour has elected Jeremy Corbyn – either a more consensual or a more chaotic leader than his predecessors, depending on your perspective – division within parties will become a feature, rather than a quirk, at Westminster. There will be “splits” aplenty on both sides of the House.

The bigger threat to Tory hegemony is the spending cuts to come, and the still vulnerable state of the British economy. In the last parliament, George Osborne’s cuts fell predominantly on the poorest and those working in the public sector. They were accompanied by an extravagant outlay to affluent retirees. As my colleague Helen Lewis wrote last week, over the next five years, cuts will fall on the sharp-elbowed middle classes, not just the vulnerable. Reductions in tax credits, so popular among voters in the abstract, may prove just as toxic as the poll tax and the abolition of the 10p bottom income-tax rate – both of which were popular until they were actually implemented.

Added to that, the British economy has what the economist Stephen King calls “the Titanic problem”: a surplus of icebergs, a deficit of lifeboats. Many of the levers used by Gordon Brown and Mervyn King in the last recession are not available to David Cameron and the chief of the Bank of England, Mark Carney: debt-funded fiscal stimulus is off the table because the public finances are already in the red. Interest rates are already at rock bottom.

Yet against that grim backdrop, the Conservatives retain the two trump cards that allowed them to win in May: questions about Labour’s economic competence, and the personal allure of David Cameron. The public is still convinced that the cuts are the result of “the mess” left by Labour, however unfair that charge may be. If a second crisis strikes, it could still be the Tories who feel the benefit, if they can convince voters that the poor state of the finances is still the result of New Labour excess rather than Cameroon failure.

As for Cameron, in 2015 it was his lead over Ed Miliband as Britons’ preferred prime minister that helped the Conservatives over the line. This time, it is his withdrawal from politics which could hand the Tories a victory even if the economy tanks or cuts become widely unpopular. He could absorb the hatred for the failures and the U-turns, and then hand over to a fresher face. Nicky Morgan or a Sajid Javid, say, could yet repeat John Major’s trick in 1992, breathing life into a seemingly doomed Conservative project. For Labour, the Tory zombie remains frustratingly lively. 

Rare is the week that passes by without George Osborne donning a hi-vis jacket and lauding the worth of apprenticeships. The Conservatives have made creating 3m apprenticeships a governing mission. Labour, both under Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, are scarcely less enthusiastic about their value.

The best apprenticeships live up to the hype. Those with a level five apprenticeship (there are eight levels) will earn £50,000 more in their lifetime than someone with a degree from a non-Russell Group university, as new research by the Sutton Trust reveals.

But too many apprenticeships are lousy. In 2014/15, just 3 per cent of apprenticeships were level four or above. Over the last two years, there have only been an estimated 30,000 apprenticeships of at least level four standard. So while David Cameron comes up with ever grander targets for the amount of apprenticeships he wants to create, he neglects what really matters: the quality of the apprenticeships. And that's why most people who can are still better off going to university: over a lifetime the average graduate premium is £200,000.

Proudly flaunting lofty targets for apprenticeships might be good politics, but it isn’t good policy. “The growth in apprenticeships has been a numbers game with successive governments, with an emphasis on increasing quantity, not quality,” says Sir Peter Lampl, Chairman of the Sutton Trust.

60 per cent of apprenticeships today are at level two – considered to be no better than GCSE standard. These might help people get a job in the short-term, but it will do nothing to help them progress in the long-term. Too often an apprenticeship is seen as an end in itself, when it should be made easier to progress from lower to higher apprenticeships. The Sutton Trust is right to advocate that every apprentice can progress to an A-Level standard apprenticeship without having to start a new course.

Apprenticeships are trumpeted as an alternative to going to university. Yet the rush to expand apprenticeships has come to resemble the push to send half the population to university, focused more on giving ever-greater numbers a qualification then in ensuring its worth. For too many young people, apprenticeships remain an alternative to university in name only.

Whenever horrific tales of the drunken escapades of the youth are reported, one photo reliably gets wheeled out: "bench girl", a young woman lying passed out on a public bench above bottles of booze in Bristol. The image is in urgent need of updating: it is now a decade old. Britain has spent that time moving away from booze.

Individual alcohol consumption in Britain has declined sharply. In 2013, the average person over 15 consumed 9.4 litres of alcohol, 19 per cent less than 2004. As with drugs, the decline in use among the young is particularly notable: the proportion of young adults who are teetotal increased by 40 per cent between 2005 and 2013. But decreased drinking is not only apparent among the young fogeys: 80 per cent of adults are making some effort to drink less, according to a new study by consumer trends agency Future Foundation. No wonder that half of all nightclubs have closed in the last decade. Pubs are also closing down: there are 13 per cent fewer pubs in the UK than in 2002. 

People are too busy vying to get ahead at work to indulge in drinking. A combination of the recession, globalisation and technology has combined to make the work of work more competitive than ever: bad news for alcohol companies. “The cost-benefit analysis for people of going out and getting hammered starts to go out of favour,” says Will Seymour of Future Foundation.

Vincent Dignan is the founder of Magnific, a company that helps tech start-ups. He identifies ditching regular boozing as a turning point in his career. “I noticed a trend of other entrepreneurs drinking three, four or five times a week at different events, while their companies went nowhere,” he says. “I realised I couldn't be just another British guy getting pissed and being mildly hungover while trying to scale a website to a million visitors a month. I feel I have a very slight edge on everyone else. While they're sleeping in, I'm working.” Dignan now only drinks occasionally; he went three months without having a drop of alcohol earlier in the year.

But the decline in booze consumption isn’t only about people becoming more work-driven. There have never been more alternate ways to be entertained than resorting to the bottle. The rise of digital TV, BBC iPlayer and Netflix means most people means that most people have almost limitless choice about what to watch.

Some social lives have also partly migrated online. In many ways this is an unfortunate development, but one upshot has been to reduce alcohol intake. “You don’t need to drink to hang out online,” says Dr James Nicholls, the author of The Politics of Alcohol who is now Director of Research and Policy Development at Alcohol Research UK.

The sheer cost of boozing also puts people off. Although minimum pricing on booze has not been introduced, a series of taxes have made alcohol more expensive, while a ban on below-cost selling was introduced last year. Across the 28 countries of the EU, only Ireland has higher alcohol and tobacco prices than the UK today; in 1998 prices in the UK were only the fourth most expensive in the EU.

Immigration has also contributed to weaning Britain off booze. The decrease in alcohol consumption “is linked partly to demographic trends: the fall is largest in areas with greater ethnic diversity,” Nicholls says. A third of adults in London, where 37 per cent of the population is foreign born, do not drink alcohol at all, easily the highest of any region in Britain.

The alcohol industry is nothing if not resilient. “By lobbying for lower duty rates, ramping up their marketing and developing new products the big producers are doing their best to make sure the last ten years turn out to be a blip rather than a long term change in culture,” Nicholls says.

But whatever alcohol companies do to fight back against the declining popularity of booze, deep changes in British culture have made booze less attractive. Forget the horrific tales of drunken escapades from Magaluf to the Bullingdon Club. The real story is of the strange death of boozy Britain. 

Throughout the centuries, Jerusalem’s Old City has drawn pilgrims, tourists, and conquerors. This week it has been the focus of renewed media attention after a series of violent incidents.  For those ties of history, politics, and faith which link it to the rest of the world have also made it a magnet for reporters: some admired, more abused or admonished.     

Last summer, Israel’s international image took a beating. Some two thousand Palestinians – the overwhelming majority of them civilians, according to the United Nations– were killed during the Israeli Army’s operation in Gaza. Israeli casualties – at more than 70, almost all of them military personnel – had been far higher than in other incursions into Gaza in recent years. 

As the dust settled above the flattened buildings, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave a news conference specifically aimed at the foreign press.

It was aimed at them in that they were both the audience, and the target. Mr Netanyahu said, “I expect, now that the members of the press are leaving Gaza, or some of them are leaving Gaza, and are no longer subjected to Hamas restrictions and intimidations, I expect we’ll see even more documentation of Hamas terrorists hiding behind the civilian population, exploiting civilian targets.”

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz challenged Mr Netanyahu’s claim in a story headlined “Foreign Press: Hamas Didn't Censor Us in Gaza, They Were Nowhere to Be Found”. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East Editor echoed this when we spoke for my new book, Headlines from the Holy Land. “They’re all hiding,” he remembered of his experience of Hamas during that that conflict. “They had a spokesman who hung out at Shifa hospital. And he was very much a spokesman. He didn’t tell us what to do.”

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been covered by countless words and hours of airtime. It has also exhausted extensive diplomatic resources seeking to solve it. The diplomatic desert seems almost to have led to a situation where PR is a substitute for policy. Take Mr Netanyahu’s attempts, above, to rubbish reporting. Earlier this year, the Israeli Foreign Ministry posted, and later removed, a cartoon sneering at, and patronising, the foreign press. Why bother with politics, when you can poke fun?

The politics, though, are changing – and with them, the diplomatic challenge.

Religion is playing a growing role. Daniel Kurtzer was United States ambassador to Tel Aviv 2001-2005. He was also there as a diplomat in the 1980s. Then, he remembers “a fostering of the idea of Islamism as an antidote to nationalism. The natural consequence of that was and has been the growth of religious feelings, so certainly on the Palestinian side that’s the case, but it’s even now grown on the Israeli side”. He concludes: “I haven’t seen any success yet in integrating this move towards religion into the diplomacy of trying to resolve the conflict. It’s a real challenge.”

It is a challenge for correspondents, too – and their efforts are rarely admired. Shortly before the bloodshed in Gaza began, the head of Israel’s government press office, Nitzan Chen, shared with me his opinion of foreign correspondents in Israel. “Like the Israeli journalists, they are cynical, critical. I don’t want to make generalisations because some people are very professional and very unique, see the facts before they write the story. But the majority are lazy.”

Anyone covering the conflict needs a thick skin, and sometimes more. In addition to the risks involved in covering all armed conflict, conversations with Palestinian journalists will often quickly uncover stories of harassment and threats of violence from armed groups. 

The brevity of daily news stories means they rarely have room for discussion of religion, or   competing historical narratives. Yet, for all its shortcomings, real and imagined, the journalism of the Israeli-Palestinian press is most people’s only source of information about a conflict which has connections to so many parts of the world. If it were not important, presumably the protagonists would not waste time criticising it.      

James Rodgers is the author of Headlines from the Holy Land: Reporting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, just published by Palgrave MacMillan. He was the BBC’s correspondent in Gaza from 2002-2004. James will be taking part in a panel discussion next week at City University London. You can register to attend here.