On the 28^th of October, a new Chamber of Commerce between Gibraltar and Israel is going to be launched on the Rock, under the name “Gibrael”. This is the second bi-national Chamber of Commerce to be established in Gibraltar after AmCham was founded a couple of years ago, between Gibraltar and the United States. Gibrael is the brainchild of Eran Shay and Ayelet Mamo Shay, who have moved to Gibraltar over 8 years ago and run a local business & strategic consultancy firm called Benefit Business Solutions, which assist companies from around the world in using Gibraltar as a gateway to Europe.   

What made you decide to establish the Chamber of Commerce between Gibraltar and Israel?

The idea to launch “Gibrael” came from the realization that there are many potential synergies between Gibraltar and Israel. Over the last few years, both the Government of Gibraltar and local businesses are thirsty for innovative technologies and we thought Israel, who is renowned worldwide for being the “start-up nation” and a place from where many leading technologies have emerged, could best answer these needs. For Israeli companies, Gibraltar can serve as an ideal testing ground for new technologies as well as the ultimate gateway into the bigger European markets. There are benefits for both countries, and Gibrael would act as a bridge connecting people and facilitating business from both sides. 

What is it about Gibraltar that makes it attractive to Israeli companies?

Gibraltar’s membership of the EU along with its most attractive tax regime in the EU (10% corporate tax, no VAT, no capital gains tax, no tax on investment income, no dividends tax and other benefits) makes Gibraltar an attractive place for Israeli companies in which to establish a base as part of their expansion strategy to the European markets.

Technology testing and other pilot studies is an important milestone prior to mass marketing. Companies who wish to enter the European markets often want to test their technologies in an EU compliant environment under European standards and regulation. Due to its small size, Gibraltar has fewer bureaucratic layers than most other countries, making access to key decision makers, both in Government and in industry much simpler and quicker. Thus, there are much fewer bureaucratic hurdles in Gibraltar for companies to get approvals, licences or certification than in bigger countries. Gibraltar is a small contained economy (measuring 7sq kilometres), making it easier to administer and run pilot testing schemes and be in close geographical proximity to all test sites. Moreover, most start-ups have limited financial and human resources which impede on their ability to test trial their technology in the large countries thereby creating a barrier to entry to the big European markets.

Gibraltar’s unique advantages significantly reduce time to market and provide cost efficiencies to companies who wish to access the European markets. Innovative companies in the fields of FinTech, CleanTech, Telecom, smart city solutions, homeland security and more are already here and ripping the benefits of testing their innovative technologies first in Gibraltar, before moving on to the bigger markets in Europe.

Israeli companies from what sectors are likely to benefit from doing business in Gibraltar?  

Israeli FinTech startups and established financial services companies, including banks, insurance companies, funds, and asset managers can benefit from Gibraltar’s EU membership by becoming regulated in Gibraltar and then “passporting” their licence to the rest of the EU. This is also true for e-money type operations such as Forex trading platforms, electronic wallets, payment processing companies and other innovative financial services. The Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (FSC) is recognized for its quality by the IMF and boasts an accessible and user-friendly approach.

Another popular sector which has already seen vast Israeli involvement is the eGaming sector.  Gibraltar is home to 35 of the biggest names in the online gaming industry. Being close to these top operators, acts a magnate to related support services and software development companies who wish to enter this lucrative market.

Other types of eBusinesses such as online retailers, ePublishing, online marketing agencies and more can also benefit from Gibraltar’s position as a hub on the Europe-India internet gateway, offering bandwidth capacity of 3.84 Terabit. In addition, the Rock’s territorial tax system implies that income generated from outside Gibraltar is potentially exempt from tax in Gibraltar- a huge benefit for such companies.   

Finally, the fact that Gibraltar does not have a manufacturing sector and almost completely relies on imports for its domestic needs, means that manufacturers of finished goods, equipment, machinery and consumer goods, can explore opportunities in this market.    

What is planned for the Gibraltar-Israel launch event?  

This is going to be a high profile event, in the presence of the Chief Minister and other ministers from the Gibraltar Government, delegates from the Gibraltar Finance Centre and other local associations and various business leaders. The Israeli delegation will include the Economic Attaché from the Israeli Embassy in London, representatives from several Israeli trade and industry associations, and various CEOs of Israeli corporates. There will be opportunities for one-to-one meetings as well as networking dinners.    

For further details on the event please contact Eran Shay at Eran@benefitgibraltar.com

Not quite a third of the way into A Little Life, one of this year’s most divisive novels and hotly tipped to win the Man Booker Prize, Jude St Francis is given a present by Harold Stein, once his law professor and now his great friend and protector. It’s a “small leather box, about the size of a baseball”, ­inside which is a watch that has until that moment belonged to Harold and, before that, to his father, changing hands when Harold turned 30. Harold might have given it to his own son but he died of a rare and horribly painful illness that incrementally robbed him of his faculties when he was a small child. Now, Harold is adopting Jude, who is himself 30, “so at least I haven’t messed up the symmetry of this”. But it is asymmetry and suffering that are A Little Life’s main tropes.

Such an overtly meaningful gift might throw anyone off course and Jude’s reaction is not an especially odd one: “He runs his thumbtip lightly over the initials. ‘I can’t accept this, Harold,’ he says, finally.” But that moment seemed to me a synecdoche of the book. It proceeds by the drip-drip distillation of intense emotion but it also veers dangerously into cliché. Does anyone ever actually say the words “I can’t accept this” in such circumstances? Or, rather, anyone who has ever seen a film?

But A Little Life’s central characters – Jude St Francis, the mysterious, infinitely damaged protagonist whose horrific past is gradually unfurled over the course of decades; his friends Willem, Malcolm, JB and Harold, along with various satellite figures – are not much given to self-consciousness. They think about their lives a great deal and about each other’s but there is something curiously inert about their mental processes. They are ruminative rather than reflective, resistant to contextualisation or, indeed, irony.

This might explain something of the extraordinary response that has greeted the book, which ranges from the short but highly emotional (for months before it was published, early readers swapped updates on social media about its immense impact, the weeping fits and sleepless nights it provoked) to the respectful but slightly bewildered (how does the novel manage to mesmerise its readers so?) to the more sceptical view, which deems its extensive and repetitive detailing of child sexual abuse and its aftermath, mainly expressed in Jude’s adult practice of serious self-harm, as voyeuristic and manipulative.

It is quite possible to read A Little Life and find that all of the above apply. The problem is not what the novel makes you feel but what it makes you think. In my case, I felt engaged, compelled to read further, caught up in something; I also felt dismay, disbelief, pity, horror. But at the end of 736 pages, many of which I suspect could have been edited out without compromising the novel’s directness or its power, my thoughts revolved around the creation and prosecution of the novel, why Yanagihara had written it in the way that she had.

I didn’t think anything very different about child abuse or about self-harm, about the irredeemable nature of suffering and the impossibility of erasing it. I thought as I had done previously: that the trauma of sexual abuse is deepened and lengthened by the insidious way in which abusers can make victims feel that they have been somehow complicit; that the existence of sympathetic and caring listeners does not guarantee that a victim will be able to voice their experiences, or that doing so will bring them significant relief; and that self-harm, carried out in search of some kind of psychic release, however temporary, further consolidates feelings of isolation and self-disgust.

Although it is not the job of fiction to educate, it is odd to foreground such extreme subject matter without wanting to say something new about it. And it is odd to read such an in-depth treatment of it and come away thinking: well, yeah, obviously.

What else might there be in A Little Life? Yanagihara has said in interviews that she was interested in exploring male friendship (there are women in the book but they are few and far between) and – despite the book’s determinedly ahistorical narrative, which allows years to pass without documenting any great changes in the political or cultural landscape – a social setting in which heterosexual marriage and child-rearing are not regarded as the norm.

The contemporary setting she chooses (and the source of one of the novel’s most striking asymmetries) is characterised by affluence and achievement. When Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm graduate from university, they pass through an accelerated version of poverty: dead-end jobs, crappy apartments, terrible cheap dinners. But as they mature, none of them encounters ­particularly daunting obstacles on their route to becoming, respectively, a high-profile litigator, a world-famous actor, an acclaimed artist and a globetrotting architect. Nobody is a librarian or an accountant. They eat in high-end restaurants, construct fabulous homes filled with light and marble and dress beautifully.

In fairness, there is a point to this highly aestheticised and conspicuous consumption. It contrasts with Jude’s upbringing, in which he was abandoned as a baby on the steps of a monastery, brought up by abusive monks, then befriended by a monk who appeared to be his saviour but went on to semi-abduct him, abuse him further and force him to prostitute himself. Finally free of that situation, he falls into the hands of a paedophile who imprisons him and then lets him go, only to run him over in a car, leaving him with severely impaired mobility and in acute, lifelong pain.

It also contrasts with Jude’s method of dealing with the shame and distress of his memories, which is to slice into himself so repeatedly and severely that his body is patterned and ridged with scars and he frequently almost bleeds to death. His friends – as benign and selfless as his tormentors were malign and egotistical – know some of this past but Jude keeps most of the details hidden from them. There is one interesting exception to the friends’ general goodness. JB is ostracised for momentarily losing his temper with Jude and mocking his disabilities. It is awful behaviour but not a single character seems to read it as a bit of acting out, a childlike, transgressive breaching of a taboo, or as a reaction to the conspiracy of silence that surrounds Jude.

How else to read this novel other than as a fable? On a literal level, it is near preposterous; while victims of child sexual abuse may well find themselves preyed upon repeatedly, the serial and unconnected nature of Jude’s experiences stretches credibility. (As an adult, he has a relationship with a man who swiftly proves to be a violent ­sadist, even though virtually nothing in his behaviour has signalled this, either to us or to Jude. Pretty unlucky.) Indeed, at points, I wondered if Jude’s memories might eventually be revealed to be the manifestation
of some form of mental illness. This thought process, of course, has an uncomfortable echo of the questioning of the testimony of abuse survivors.

A fable suggesting what, then? That all the friends in the world cannot offset certain kinds of trauma, certain levels of damage? That it is worth trying to be happy, even if it cannot last for ever? Who can say?

It’s invidious and fruitless to criticise books for not being about what you want them to be about; we should see them for what they are. As I read A Little Life, lots of other novels floated through my mind: for its portrait of metropolitan American youth, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children; for friendship depicted over decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings. For depic­tions of art and bereavement, Siri Hust­vedt’s What I Loved; for a parable about not being able to escape your fate, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Even, for a depiction of charisma and the outsider and for the deployment of sentimentality, John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. All of them, in different ways and to different degrees, are more successful books than A Little Life. None, perhaps, is so claustrophobic, so trammelling of the reader: both Yanagihara’s achievement and her limitation. 

“A Little Life” by Hanya Yangihara is published by Picador (736pp, £16.99)

Kim Jong-il may have been the Dear Leader but Elvis was the King. On a visit to North Korea, the English journalist Michael Breen found that few ordinary citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic had ever heard of Presley (or even Charlie ­Chaplin). Yet there in one of the 17 palaces and mansions owned by the dictator, among his collection of 20,000 DVDs that included Friday the 13th and Rambo, was a prized cache of Elvis movies – mostly cornball romances. Elsewhere were littered Elvis records. Kim liked to wear ten-centimetre platform shoes and had a fondness for American-style shades. Clifford Coonan, writing for the Independent, was not alone in comparing his “bouffant hair” with that of the King.

For all Kim’s possible (and laughable) debt to Elvis when it came to his personal appearance, his regime was unenthusiastic about North Koreans’ adoption of “foreign” fashions. “People who wear others’ style of dress and live in others’ style will become fools and [their] nation will come to ruin,” the state-owned Rodong Sinmun newspaper warned in 2005, during a months-long government campaign to halt the infiltration of “corrupt, capitalist ideas” into communist hearts through shoes, hairstyles and clothing. Your “ideological and mental state”, said the host of the radio show Dressing in Accordance With Our People’s Emotion and Taste, was manifested in what you wore and the way you wore it. So choose your trousers wisely – or else.

The policing of appearance is nothing new. In the mid-1920s, the then Mexican president, Plutarco Elías Calles, forbade Catholic priests from wearing clerical collars outdoors; more recently, on 14 September 2010, the French Senate passed the Loi interdisant la dissimulation du visage dans l’espace public, better known in the English-speaking world as “the burqa ban”. What is curious, however, is that the latest round of strictures on how individuals can present themselves comes not from repressive, dictatorial regimes or panicked politicians but from those who consider themselves progressives: liberals united against the menace of “cultural appropriation”.

In August, a student committee at Western University in Canada announced a ban on the wearing of cultural symbols such as turbans, dreadlock wigs and ethnic headdresses by white volunteers during orientation week. The sale of Native American headdresses has also been proscribed at Glastonbury Festival, after an online petition that garnered just 65 signatures persuaded organisers that offering them as a “costume” was insensitive. (The Canadian festival Bass Coast has similarly issued a prohibition on guests wearing the war bonnets.) Pharrell Williams came under fire on Twitter when he posed in a feather headdress for an Elle cover in 2014 – a striking image that the magazine initially boasted was the singer’s “best-ever shoot” – and was forced to apologise. “I respect and honour every kind of race, background and culture,” he said. “I am genuinely sorry.”

From Katy Perry’s adoption of geisha garb at the 2013 American Music Awards to Lena Dunham’s cornrows and their supposed flaunting of racial identity theft, all cultural cross-pollination now seems to be fair game for a drubbing at the hands of the new race activists. Recently in the Guardian, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd denounced the adoption of the Mexican-American chola style – dark-outlined lips, crucifixes, elaborate fringes, teardrop tattoos – by fashion labels and the pop star Rihanna as a “fashion crime” that amounted to an “ignorant harvesting” of the self-expression of others; she then mocked Sandra Bullock’s admission that she would “do anything to become more Latina”. Back off, whitey.

At a time of heightened racial tensions across the world, with police shootings of black men in the United States and Islamophobia (and phobias of all kinds) seemingly on the rise, this rage against cultural appropriation is understandable: no right-minded liberal wants to cause unnecessary offence, least of all to minorities. Yet simply to point out instances of appropriation in the assumption that the process is by its nature corrosive seems to me a counterproductive, even reactionary pursuit; it serves no end but to essentialise race as the ultimate component of human identity.

I’m Japanese but I felt no anger when I read that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was holding kimono try-on sessions to accompany its recent exhibition “Looking East: Western Artists and the Allure of Japan” – after all, it was a show that specifically set out to examine the orientalist gaze. However, some protesters (carrying signs that read “Try on the kimono, learn what it’s like to be a racist imperialist today!” and “This is orientalism”) evidently did. Their complaints against the show, which was organised in collaboration with NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, swiftly led to the cancellation of the “Kimono Wednesday” sessions. “We thought it would be an educational opportunity for people to have direct encounters with works of art and understand different cultures and times better,” said Katie Getchell, the justifiably surprised deputy director of the museum.

“Stand against yellowface!” the protesters declaimed on blogs and on Facebook. Elsewhere, the white rapper Iggy Azalea – like Elvis and Mick Jagger before her – was accused of “blackfacing” her way to stardom, after she became the fourth solo female hip-hop artist ever to reach the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with her 2014 single “Fancy”. At the end of that year, the African-American rapper Azealia Banks suggested that Azalea’s “cultural smudging” was yet another careless instance of cross-racial stealing; that white adoption of a historically black genre had an “undercurrent of kinda like, ‘Fuck you.’ There’s always a ‘fuck y’all, niggas. Y’all don’t really own shit . . . not even the shit you created for yourself.’”

Many of those calling out cultural appropriation of all kinds – from clothing and hair to musical genres – seem to share this proprietorial attitude, which insists that culture, by its nature a communally forged and ever-changing project, should belong to specific peoples and not to all. Banks is doubtless correct to feel this “undercurrent” of racial persecution by an industry that prefers its stars to be white and what they sell to be black, yet there is also truth in the second part of that undercurrent: “Y’all don’t really own shit.” When it comes to great movements in culture, the racial interloper is not wrong. None of us can, or should, “own” hip-hop, cornrows, or the right to wear a kimono.

Speaking to the website Jezebel, the law professor Susan Scafidi of Fordham University in New York explained that appropriation involves “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions or artefacts from someone else’s culture without permission”. Yet such a definition seems to assume the existence of mythical central organisations with absolute mandates to represent minority groups – a black HQ, an Asian bureau, a Jewish head office – from which permissions and authorisations can be sought. More troubling is that it herds culture and tradition into the pen of a moral ownership not dissimilar to copyright, which may suit a legalistic outlook but jars with our human impulse to like what we like and create new things out of it.

Elvis, Kim Jong-il’s hero, liked black music. While other kids dashed around at school picnics, the juvenile Presley would sit off by himself, “plunking softly at that guitar”, as one teacher later recalled. He shared with the Sun Records founder, Sam Phillips, the opinion that African-­American music was of that magic kind in which “the soul of man never dies”, and when he launched into a hopped-up version of Arthur Crudup’s blues “That’s All Right” at the tail end of a recording session in 1954, it was a natural, uncalculated act of cultural appropriation. “Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool,” remembered the guitarist Scotty Moore, who played on the single that many credit as the foundation stone of rock’n’roll.

It wasn’t the first of its kind. Rock’n’roll grew organically out of the miscegenation of rhythm’n’blues and hillbilly music, and other contenders for that title include Goree Carter’s “Rock Awhile” (1949) and Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket ‘88’” (1951). Both Carter and Brenston were black – but they are now largely forgotten. The smoking gun in the periodically revived argument that Elvis should be condemned for having participated in interracial plundering is Phillips’s often quoted remark: “If I could find a white man who had the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.” Yet the studio owner’s remark was, if anything, more a groan of exasperation than the blueprint for a robbery. He had tried to make a billion dollars before he recorded Elvis, with B B King, Howling Wolf and other black musicians; indeed, it was Phillips who recorded Brenston’s song. The racism wasn’t in the studio or cut into the record grooves. It was out there, woven into American life in the 1950s.

That tainted life was altered for the better by the emergence of rock’n’roll, whose enormous popularity forced many previously white-oriented labels to sign African-American artists and changed for ever the social interactions of black and white teenagers. It gave them a common culture based less on skin colour than on the spirit of youth, frightening reactionaries who were perturbed precisely by what they viewed as an unnatural cultural appropriation. After Elvis performed the “Big Mama” Thornton song “Hound Dog” on national television on 5 June 1956, Congressman Emanuel Celler stated disapprovingly, “Rock’n’roll has its place: among the coloured people.” Many white fans of the music, appropriators all, could not help but realise that their place and that of “coloured” fans were one and the same.

What was so with rock’n’roll goes also for rap, fashion and even that packet of tortilla chips you ate at the movies or the shish kebab you had on the way home. Appropriation tests imaginary boundaries. It questions them and exposes, just as Judith Butler did in relation to gender, the performative aspects of our racial and cultural identity: much of our yellowness, brownness, blackness or whiteness is acted out and not intrinsic to our being. It shows that we can select who we are and who we want to be. By opposing it unilaterally under the banner of racial justice, activists often end up placing themselves on the side of those who insist on terrifying ideals of “purity”: white and black should never mix and the Australian-born Iggy Azalea should leave rap alone. She should stick to performing . . . what, exactly? Perhaps she should consult a family tree. But how far back is she expected to go? And should we impose some sort of one-drop rule?

It is true that cultural appropriation can hurt those whose traditions, religions and ways of life have been lifted, taken out of context and repackaged as a new aesthetic trend or exotic bauble. The feather headdress, for instance, has deep symbolic value to many Native Americans and to see it balancing on the wobbly head of a drunk, white festivalgoer might feel like an insult. Yet is it a theft at all, when that original value is still felt by the Native American tribe? Little of substance has been taken away. To the white reveller, those feathers probably signify something as simple as: “I am trying my best to have fun.” There is no offence intended. If it channels anything of the headdress’s origins, it is no doubt a distant echo of some ancient myth that placed “Indians” as the other, the sworn enemies of the “cowboys”.

Appropriations of this sort can, if unchallenged, entrench negative racial mythologies. But such myths are part of the language of human culture and their potential for harm can only truly be diffused by putting forward stronger, newer narratives about ourselves and by tackling the systemic injustices that oppress us: in law, in government, in the workplace. I can live in the knowledge that the Mikado myth continues to have some currency and that films, songs and books still toy with the orientalist fantasy of Japan. That is partly because their sting has been dulled by an ever-increasing understanding in the west of what real life in east Asia is like. I accept that our culture can be transformed and absorbed into the folklore of another people – and when this happens, we have only a limited claim on that folklore. Like it or not, it becomes theirs as much as ours. Sometimes, we have to let culture do its thing.

Yo Zushi’s latest album, “It Never Entered My Mind”, is released by Eidola Records

Do androids dream of a three-day week? This week, Professor Stephen Hawking weighed in on the topic that’s obsessing technologists, economists and social scientists around the world: whether a dawning age of robotics is going to spell mass unemployment. “If machines produce everything we need,” Hawking wrote in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, “everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared – or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.”

As technology advances, the question is no longer whether or not robots are coming for your job. The question is whether or not you should let them take it. 

According to two new books by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the automation of up to 60 per cent of current jobs in America, and by extension other nations, is all but inevitable. This time, as Martin Ford argues in Rise of The Robots, education and upscaling won’t help us. There will simply be fewer jobs to go around, as everything from accountancy to journalism will be done faster, cheaper and more efficiently by machines. The result, as Jerry Kaplan agrees in Humans Need Not Apply, is that billions will be left destitute – unless we radically rethink our way of keeping people fed.

We’ve seen this pattern before. In successive waves of technological innovation from the industrial revolution to the automative leaps of the 1950s, millions of working people found themselves replaced by machines that would never inconvenience their owners by getting sick or going on strike. This time, however, it’s not just working class jobs that are threatened. It seems that Robespierre was right – it’s the prospect of angry unemployed lawyers and doctors that really prompts the elite to panic, or at least to produce urgent hardbacks and suggest to major news outlets that wealth redistribution might not be such a bad idea after all.

There is little to argue with in Kaplan and Ford’s basic predictions. Whatever happens, it seems that by the time most of us reach retirement, machines will be doing far more of the jobs that nobody really wanted to do in the first place. In any sane economic system, this would be good news. No longer will millions of men and women be stuck doing boring, repetitive, often degrading work for the majority of their adult lives. That’s fantastic. Or it should be. Did you really want the job those thieving android scabs are about to take from you? Wouldn’t you rather be writing a symphony, or spending time with your kids, or plucking your nose-hair? All else being equal, don’t you have better things to do than spending most of your life marking time at work to afford the dignity of not starving?

All else, however, is very far from equal – and that’s the problem. Technology is not the problem. The only reason that the automation of routine, predictable jobs is not an unmitigated social good is that the majority of the human race depends on routine, predictable jobs, and the wages we get for them. The rioting textile workers who smashed their weaving machines in the eighteenth century did not do so because they simply loved working twelve-hour days in dangerous, dirty conditions. They did it because they had been given a stark choice between drudge work and starvation. Two hundred years after the Luddite rebellions, most of us, when you get down to it, would not work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for forty years if we had a choice – but the necessity of earning a wage gives us no other option. In fact, advanced automation should for some time have made it unnecessary for any of us to work more than a handful of hours a week, as originally foreseen generations ago by thinkers like John Maynard Keynes – but somehow, most of us are working longer hours for lower wages than our grandparents.

The problem is not technology. The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we’ve created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a single parent, an unemployed veteran or an unpaid intern – the logic of late capitalism grants you no right to live unless you are making money for someone else. If our economic system defines the basis of human worth as the capacity to do drudge work for someone else’s profit then the question that has troubled science fiction writers for a century is solved: not only are robots human, they may soon be more human than us. 

The automation crisis need not be a crisis at all – but the simplest solutions are too radical to be raised by anyone but a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a job title with the authority of “Archbishop of Canterbury” under the moral logic of modern economics. Martin Ford is neither an economist nor a political theorist, but I imagine that when he says that in order to save us all from armies of robot scabs, “a fundamental restructuring of our economic rules will be required”, powerful people will listen. Kaplan and Ford’s books propose the same solution, and it’s one that socialists have been suggesting for generations: a universal basic income. This is not a new idea. Campaigners for social justice have long proposed a basic income as a way to solve every social ill caused by the fact we all have to earn a living, from drug trafficking to gender inequality. Kaplan and Ford, however tell us that there’s an even more important reason to consider it – because it might be the only way to save capitalism from itself.

The logic is solid: if nobody can afford to buy the goods and services all these robots are producing, global markets will collapse. World capitalism cannot be sustained, Ford argues, on luxury consumption alone. It turns out that the only way to save the system might well be massive wealth distribution and total reorganisation of the wage system.

That sounds rather a lot like socialism to me. Ford insists that it isn’t – it’s merely common sense, and everyone knows that socialism can’t be common sense. It is perhaps for this reason that neither Kaplan nor Ford push beyond their policy proposals to imagine what such a future – a world where everyone is guaranteed an income, and wage work is a choice – could really look like. This, surely, is the most thrilling promise of an automated future. What could we become, as a species, if most of our useful years were not taken up by working, looking for work, or doing essential domestic and caring tasks to sustain that work? One thing’s for certain: it’s either going to be wonderful, or it’s going to be disastrous. If we don’t get fully automated luxury liberalism, in Ford’s words, “the plutocracy [might] shut itself away in gated communities or in elite cities, perhaps guarded by autonomous military robots and drones.”

Automation offers us two options. Just two. The first is that we finally, collectively, break our addiction to disaster capitalism and do what needs to be done to create a future where human beings can reach their full potential. The second is that we don’t. And we might not. Just because the answer to the “threat of mass unemployment” is obvious does not mean that we will take it. It is just as likely that the magical thinking of market fundamentalists will prevail in the field of automation just as it has in the field of environmental protection and topple us all into a chaos where only the very rich can survive, for a time, alone in their climate-controlled towers of glass and steel. That’s the other solution. Whether it’s the solution we choose will determine, far more than any job-thieving algorithm, what it truly means to be human. As Professor Hawking observed: “So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

If we choose to allow technology to plunge us into a new age of inequity, then maybe we deserve to be replaced by robots. If the human race can’t get it together to fix this basic bug in our collective survival matrix, then maybe it’s time for us to step aside and let the metal guys have a try. Perhaps it would be kinder, if capitalism continues its current suicide canter, to breed our children and grandchildren of sterner stuff than flesh – with hearts that don’t break in the face of inhumanity, because they are made of silicon and steel.

It had already been a deadly summer of political instability in Turkey. And now this. Another massacre – this time at the hand of twin bomb attacks on a peace rally in Ankara, which have killed at least 97 people.

It is the worst terror attack in Turkey’s history. In just a few months, hundreds of civilians, Turkish security personnel and PKK members have been killed. Barely a single day passes in Turkey without some incident of lethal political violence.

Freedom from fear is the very basic principle of human security, which should be protected by any state that wants a true sense of legitimacy over its population and territory. In Turkey, that freedom is under enormous pressure from all sorts of internal and external forces.

Stirred up

There are plenty of competing explanations for the political violence engulfing the country, but none can seriously overlook the impact of Turkey’s bad political leadership.

The terrible, violent summer reflects nothing so much as an elite’s greed for power and willingness to treat civilians as dispensable. This has become particularly apparent since Turkey’s inconclusive June 7 election, and the way various political parties and leaders did all they could to prevent the formation of a viable coalition government.

Ultimately, the power game is simple enough. At the elections hastily called for November, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party needs to garner only a few per cent more than it did in June to win the majority it needs for Erdogan to bolster his powers and make himself the country’s executive president.

To that end, pro-government media has been in overdrive throughout the summer, deliberately fuelling an environment of division, paranoia and mistrust in hopes of winning votes out of pure fear.

All the while, southeast Turkey has endured dreadful violence. Some towns – Cizre, for instance, which was under seige for days – have suddenly found themselves on the front line of renewed fighting between the security forces and the PKK.

The demise of the peace process is not just a failure of diplomacy – it signals that the armed conflict is still hugely politically and financially lucrative to Turkey’s political and military leaders. And the violence they’re profiting from is rapidly corroding social life and human security across the country.

The war next door

But the political instability caused by Turkey’s leaders has been greatly exacerbated by its neighbours, especially the continuing civil war in Syria and its deadly ramifications – an influx of jihadist fighters, a massive refugee crisis, and spiralling military interventions.

Since the end of the Cold War, global security has never been so seriously threatened as it is by today’s situation in Syria, which is now host to a head-to-head clash between the interests of Russia, the Assad regime and Iran on the one hand and the US, the EU, their Arab allies, and NATO on the other.

All sides claim to be fighting against the Islamic State and other Islamist extremists, but it’s clear that what’s really at stake is a lot more than just the fate of the jihadists or the political future of Syria. Already there’s an ominous spat underway over Russian planes'incursion into Turkish airspace; NATO has already raised the prospect of sending troops to Turkey as a defensive gesture.

And while it was always inevitable that the Syrian disaster would affect its northern neighbour to some degree, Turkey’s continuing internal political instability is proving something of an Achilles heel. By deliberately forcing their country into a period of chaotic and violent turmoil, Turkey’s leaders have made it more susceptible than ever to the Syrian conflict and the mighty geopolitical currents swirling around it.

And yet they press on with their cynical political ploys – seemingly unmoved by the cost to their people, and unaware that they could just be becoming pawns in a much bigger game.

Alpaslan Ozerdem is a Chair in Peace-Building and Co-Director of the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

If dangling on a zip wire waving Union Jacks, or giving a stand up Conference performance was all it took to be a good Mayor of London Boris Johnson would be a in a league of his own. Sadly for Londoners, whilst arguably one of the most well-known politicians in the country, behind his ruthless publicity machine and bumbling image, Boris’ record as Mayor reveals years of policy failures, missed opportunities and reneged promises.

At the heart of the problem has been a failure to get stuck in. From the start Boris adopted a “chairman of the board” style - very much aloof and clearly focused on using the Mayoralty as a stepping stone back onto the national stage. The problem is that means assiduously avoiding controversy as opposed to actively tackling the challenges facing London.

As a result, the legacy left behind him will be stark. The housing shortage inherited in 2008 is now an  entrenched crisis with the Mayor having missed even modest house building targets each and every year since he was elected. London’s cost of living crisis has grown unchecked as wages stagnate, housing costs rocket and the cost of commuting hits global highs.

Vital investment in transport infrastructure, for example the tube upgrade and bus network extension, has been shunned in favour of publicity projects like the Garden Bridge or Thames Cable Car. Perhaps this should all come as no surprise from a Mayor who believes high property prices are “the right problem to have”. The same Mayor who considers his £250,000 a year income for newspaper columns to be little more than “chicken feed.”

After eight years of inertia, London is crying out for a workhorse, someone who will tirelessly set about tackling these problems before they become unassailable. Londoners now know that is simply not Johnson’s pedigree. Maybe that’s why a national YouGov poll in April showed that of all the UK regions, Londoners had the lowest view of Johnson’s prime ministerial abilities.

Yes, we need a mayor with character, someone who can inspire others to follow their lead and promote the capital on the world stage. In fairness, as a profile raiser, Boris excels. But too often London is left out in the cold. Take the Mayor’s official visit to Iraq in January. It’s hard to envisage how Boris Johnson posing with a Kalashnikov on the front page of The Sun will bring any real benefit to the capital.

Despite stunts like this, we’ve seen little in terms of policy delivery. The pledges made in his manifestos have in large parts fallen by the wayside, embarrassments dismissed with empty quips that “It is easy to make promises - it is hard work to keep them." Quite.

For Boris Johnson, promises made are easily broken:

• Remember the pledge not to close a single tube ticket office? By the end of 2016 every single one will be permanently shut. 
• How about the no strike deal he pledged to negotiate? Despite a crisis entirely of his own making, the Mayor refused point blank to meet staff representatives when, during the summer, tube strikes over the Night Tube brought London to a standstill.
• End rough sleeping by the Olympics? It’s almost doubled since 2008.
• No cuts to the fire brigade? Boris has closed ten stations and axe 13 fire engines.
• The pledge to help hard-pressed Londoners? Not hugely helped by eight years of transport fare increases pushing average ticket prices up 40 per cent, with bus fares up by almost half.

And that cast iron promise not to run for Parliament? How quickly the Mayoralty went from the “greatest job in the world” that “cannot be combined with any other political capacity” to merely an opportunity to “show what he could do” and “gain some administrative experience.”

When Boris finally departs, London will have endured eight years of his leadership. Whilst much has changed, as it always will in a global city like ours, the challenges of eight years ago all remain, many having grown far worse. The legacy Boris has to bequeath to the next Mayor is dire. A deep housing crisis, a wider gap than ever between rich and poor, an £800m hole in the Met Police budget, toxic air pollution levels, the most expensive transport fares in the world and more Londoners than ever paid below a living wage.

For a household name like Boris separating out rhetoric from reality is a real challenge but take a minute to peek at the Mayor behind the mask and you may find that you do not like what you see.

Len Duvall is leader of the Labour group on the London Assembly. 

There is still a long way to go to improve the nation’s financial health.  A key aspect of this is to tackle financial exclusion, and to ensure that every adult is connected in the right way and affordably, to the regular, and therefore regulated financial system. Financial Inclusion is not a party political issue, it is a necessity which makes economic and social policy sense. Where people are financially included individuals, firms, and society as a whole benefit.   

The assumption that financial exclusion is a problem solely in developing economies alone could not be further from the truth. In Western Europe, the population of unbanked and underbanked totals 93 million people. The UK is also ranked ninth in the world in terms of banking inclusion, however two million adults still do not have a bank account. As the UK recovers from the economic crisis, living standards have fallen and inclusion in the financial system remains a major issue. This is despite the fact that the UK leads the world in financial services and technology. Sluggish wage growth, unemployment and macroeconomic uncertainties have placed great pressure on household budgets, exacerbating the fragility of personal finances for many of Britain’s most vulnerable citizens.

While there has been good progress made in the past to address the exclusion problem, the need to realise financial inclusion has never been greater. In March 2015 a report published by the Financial Inclusion Commission, a non-partisan, cross-party group of experts and parliamentarians, identified 20 key recommendations that policy makers could implement to create a financially healthy society. Among them was the recognition of the potential opportunities offered by developments in technology and digital innovation to connect all citizens to the banking system.

Technology and electronic payments are a lever, providing new ways to bring people into the system and to reduce vulnerable citizens’ reliance on cash. Evidence and experience has shown that where cash usage is higher, so is the level of corruption, poverty and exclusion, as well as lower levels of productivity and growth. The Bank of England recently published analysis of cash usage, finding that half of cash in circulation is held overseas or used in the shadow economy. Due to the untraceable nature of this tender, it is not known how much cash is lost to each market.

Promoting cashless economies, supported by technology, has a significant impact on the financial capability of individuals in managing private finances. New technologies enabling bank account holders to distribute their money into jam jars is an example of the role digital innovations are playing in addressing the exclusion issue.  There are already examples of where this is working. In the UK, the diverse London Borough of Brent recognised the opportunity electronic payments present and became UK’s first cashless local authority. Internationally, programmes like SASSA in South Africa and Adahaar in India, are overcoming the challenges of access and identification in disbursing welfare to remote communities, revolutionising the financial capability and access of the welfare recipients.

Yet, underlining all of this is a need for real leadership to drive the financial inclusion agenda. Politicians and industry both have important roles to play in joining-up and supporting the many organisations and individuals already doing good work in this area. Only through this leadership can the UK become a truly financially inclusive society.

Mark Barnett

President, UK and Ireland

MasterCard

Tackling financial exclusion is a global corporate objective for MasterCard, who provide support for the Financial Inclusion Commission.

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

The scale of the challenge is apparent. I think we should be as bold and ambitious as possible: scientists, clinicians, patients, the general public and politicians all working together for a single goal: to eliminate cancer within a generation, and Britain at the forefront of this.

The taskforce’s recommendations are achievable and the Government needs to act upon them. Patient experience has to be prioritised and this is difficult when NHS cancer services are under unprecedented pressure and the Government far too often provides contradictory messages. The Department of Health must provide the NHS with the resources and the long-term, holistic stability to allow Trusts to invest in state-of-the-art equipment.  The NHS needs to emphasise prevention and early detection too, but the risk is that under greater financial and workforce pressure, cancer services will be forced to firefight.

The Office of Life Sciences, headed up by George Freeman MP was created as the government’s bridge linking science and innovation with the work of the health service. You have recently taken on the role of Chair of the BIS Select Committee, why is the connection between R&D investment, industry, life sciences and the NHS important for fighting cancer?

This is a health and moral agenda, but I think we shouldn’t shy away from it being an economic and industrial one too. Britain is very strong in life sciences: our unique blend of excellent science and research institutions, world class pharmaceutical and med tech companies and the amazing NHS provides us with an unmatched ecosystem to develop the treatments of the future.

I want our country to be able to be supreme in every aspect of the fight against cancer: inventing the technology and drugs to treat it successfully, manufacturing those things here in the UK and giving NHS patients early access to the most innovative and effective treatments. That means maintaining and expanding the science budget, encouraging life sciences companies to locate here, and giving certainty to NHS funding to allow it to invest in more effective treatments for the long term.

The Office of Life Sciences (OLS) is an important part of that institutional architecture. It can provide the long-term certainty to allow treatments to be devised, researched and then brought to market. Research, development and application of treatments for cancer take longer than any single parliament, and the OLS should be able to provide that confidence over several decades. I’m pleased that George Freeman is leading this: his knowledge, experience and passion for life sciences makes him the best possible Minister in this field – if we have to have a Tory Government, at least some comfort can be derived from this.

However, there remain big concerns. The Innovation, Health and Wealth agenda designed to accelerate adoption of new treatments and technology in the NHS, now seems forgotten, and is an example of a long-standing weakness of this Government: a flurry of announcements and initiatives at the expense of successful implementation and delivery. George Freeman needs to tackle this and we on the Select Committee will scrutinise this.   

NICE and NHS England are working on a sustainable solution to the cancer drug fund (CDF) after it is due to end in April 2016; what confidence do you have in the progress they are making towards this and what role can you and your colleagues play to ensure there is continuity of access to oncology medicines after April?

This is a disturbing example of Government failing to provide the coherence and stability needed in this vital field, sending out the message that cancer drugs policy and provision is ad hoc and devoid of any sort of certainty. The recent delisting of several drugs from the CDF reinforces that sense of chaos, incoherence and inconsistency and undermines confidence for life sciences companies, research institutions and – most worryingly – those patients undergoing treatment. This needs to be tackled as quickly as possible to give reassurance. Parliament can obviously play a role in this but I hope we can go further. I want to see us widen provision to improve access to radiotherapy and surgery too.

 Your constituency of Hartlepool has one of the highest incidences of cancer in the country; what do you see as the biggest challenge to improve cancer outcomes over the next few years?

Our high incidence of cancer is both because of our industrial legacy and our lifestyles that increases the risk of developing cancer, particularly smoking. Smoking cessation clinics have been very successful in Hartlepool and this approach needs to continue. I urge the Government to implement policies that would help my constituents and others across the country, such as a one-week cancer test guarantee, improved screening programmes, and better access to and encouragement for people to see their GP.

Iain Wright is the Labour MP for Hartlepool and the Chair of the Business, Innovation and Skills Select Committee.

This week new analysis was published that reveals the Government is set to miss its recruitment target for teachers for the fourth year in a row. Overall, applications to teach have fallen by almost 21,000 in one year. It is subjects that are key to boosting our country’s competitiveness, such as English and Maths, which are among the worst hit. Some headteachers are saying they have never known it so bad.

You would imagine that tackling this critical problem would be at the top of the list of priorities for the Prime Minister and the Education Secretary’s programme for schools over the next Parliament. The urgency of the situation cannot possibly have caught them off guard. Experts within the education sector have been warning for years that the Government’s approach to teacher recruitment, including doing down the profession, increasing workload, and completely failing to properly handle rapid changes to the teacher training model, was storing up trouble for our schools.

Now, with schools facing simultaneous challenges of falling applications into teaching, missed recruitment targets and the highest number of teachers quitting the profession in two decades, you would be fooled for thinking that David Cameron and Nicky Morgan would understand the importance of getting to grips with this crisis. And yet, instead of a comprehensive and robust plan of action to deal with the shortages that schools up and down the country are struggling with, significantly the Tories marked the beginning of the new academic year with an announcement to open 18 more free schools.

On the one hand, we shouldn’t be surprised. Over the last five years, despite the fact that time and time again it has been shown that free Schools are not a panacea and that they can fail with disastrous consequences, the Tories have not wavered from their obsession with them. I find it remarkable that in the face of all the evidence that says what actually matters most is the quality of teaching in a school, David Cameron chooses instead to be fanatical about the name of an institution above its door. Indeed he is so fixated, that just this summer his Government amended the regulations so that any new school will now be legally classed as a free school - all so in 2020 he can say he has met his target of 500 more. That the Prime Minister considers this the priority for Britain’s education system in the modern, competitive world is, quite frankly, embarrassing.

And while the Tories tinker around with whether a school is called an academy or a free school or whatever, they offer simply no serious solution to the immense challenges facing our schools. How will the Government reverse the falling number of applications to teach, which are affecting schools at the same time as the their number of pupils increases? Where is David Cameron’s plan for raising standards in the one in five academies that are currently failing their Ofsted inspections? Why is the attainment gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and the peers being allowed to widen and what will the Government do to reverse this?

For what the Prime Minister seems not to have grasped is that at the end of the day it won't matter one jot whether a school is a free school, academy, or maintained by the local authority, if there are not enough maths teachers to teach in it. The Tories may well bury their heads in the sand over the teacher recruitment crisis. But if it comes at the expense of the next generation’s education, it will be our children who suffer and the country that pays the price.

If a line exists between earning money making videogames on one side and grifting on the other, then the recent change to the surprisingly enjoyable Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain represents Konami crossing it. Konami is a company with a storied history and some genuine classics in its oeuvre, now embracing pachinko parlours and mobile games like a fly fisherman who just found a box of hand grenades.

The specific change is quite small in practical terms, but the bad faith it represents has a disproportionately potent stink to it.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (MGSV) has the player build one or more bases called FOBs, which are like their main base but separate to it. Your FOBs give you advantages in the single player part of the game and allow you to store a greater number of resources.

However, the FOBs exist outside of the single player game and alongside those of other players in the online portion of the game. You are allowed to send soldiers to infiltrate the FOBs of other players in order to abduct their staff and steal their resources and they can do the same to you. This part of MGSV is similar in some regards to games like Clash of Clans.

At the outset, the FOB game favoured those who spent money to acquire the in-game currency called MB Coins, which are dished out in tiny numbers as a daily login reward but generally have to be bought. These coins allowed for players to buy more than one FOB, which was a benefit in the single player game but no advantage against other players as you could still only raid one base at a time – if anything, spreading resources over two bases made players more tempting targets.

The FOB management part of MGSV is sparse and incomplete and likely to stay that way. There’s simply not very much to do except attack visually near-identical bases crewed by soldiers who look exactly like your own. Even when these raids are contested by defending players, they are so woefully unbalanced that it doesn’t constitute an improvement.

So what was the change? Insurance was added, bought for MB Coins. You can now spend MB Coins to insure your base so that anything you lose in an enemy raid is replaced.

This sounds like a spectacularly small change, and it is. It won’t affect most players at all other than to cause them to roll their eyes so hard they might see their brains. What matters here is not the effect on the game, but the principle. What Konami are offering is an expensive opt-out for any negative consequences that the online portion of the game might bring, negative consequences that they built into the game by design. What we are looking at is a de facto protection racket.

Principles, even in something as wretched as the videogames industry, matter. What Konami and other companies are up to represents a very real problem in videogames. The wanton, gratuitous monetisation of any aspect of any game that a developer thinks they can squeeze a dollar out of is a sickness within the industry and it’s not without consequences. Games are built to accommodate pay-to-win mechanics. For example, MGSV has huge time delays attached to things like developing your base, time delays you can bypass by spending MB Coins – in effect, time delays added for no other reason than incentivising you to spend money.

We are seeing games designers building boring, time-consuming, frustrating elements into games deliberately in order to encourage you buy your way out of them. We’ve seen this before in free-to-play games like World of Tanks and War Thunder but it feels less obnoxious given these are games with no up-front fee. There’s a sense that a free-to-play game has a right to try to crack open your wallet; it goes with the territory. But a full-priced game shouldn’t be designed to mooch off its player base like some third-rate app-store scumware.

The greed of the games industry manifests itself in other ways too. The pre-order culture that now employs glorified pyramid schemes to secure early sales. Paid-for mods, a concept roundly rejected by players that may yet resurface with the release of Fallout 4. The pre-order DLC (downloadable content) packs where developers place chunks of content behind unnecessary pay walls or tied to specific sellers, preventing players from owning the whole game on launch day.

Players have complained vociferously and voted with their wallets too, but even so, tricks and gimmicks that would have seen hell raised just a few years ago are now sadly accepted as standard practice.

If there is a threat to the artistry of videogames development, it lies not with censors, critics or angry mobs; it lies in the stultifying over-monetisation of videogames and the insidious way that commercial interests are creeping into the design of the games themselves. It doesn’t have to be this way, and for the good of the medium this has to stop.

There was much surprise when John McDonnell announced on 25 September that Labour would be voting in favour of George Osborne's new fiscal charter. The target of an absolute surplus by 2020, which the charter mandates, appeared at odds with the shadow chancellor's support for borrowing to invest. At Labour conference, he all but admitted to Newsnight that his backing for the document was merely symbolic.

Now, ahead of tonight's PLP meeting and the vote on Wednesday, Labour has revoked its support altogether. In a letter to MPs, McDonnell wrote: "In the last fortnight there have been a series of reports highlighting the economic challenges facing the global economy as a result of the slowdown in emerging markets. These have included warnings from the International Monetary Fund’s latest financial stability report, the Bank of England chief economist, Andy Haldane, and the former Director of President Obama’s National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers.

He added: "I believe that we need to underline our position as an anti-austerity party by voting against the charter on Wednesday. We will rebuff any allegation of being deficit deniers by publishing for the debate our own statement on budget responsibility. We will set out our plan for tackling the deficit not through punishing the most vulnerable and decimating our public services but by ending the unfair tax cuts to the wealthy, tackling tax evasion and investing for growth.”

McDonnell has cited global economic conditions to explain the U-turn. But some in Labour suggest that he simply failed to realise that Osborne's new Fiscal Charter mandated an absolute surplus, rather than merely a current budget surplus. By reversing its position, Labour has denied the SNP a chance to outflank the party from the left and has appeased backbenchers who opposed the leadership's stance. But it has also made it far easier for the Tories to level the "deficit denier" charge that McDonnell's earlier support for the charter was designed to avoid. 

This is SRSLY, the pop culture podcast from the New Statesman. Here, you can find links to all the things we talk about in the show as well as a bit more detail about who we are and where else you can find us online.

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The Links

On The Intern

Ryan Gilbey’s discussion of Robert De Niro’s interview tantrums.

Anne Helen Petersen for Buzzfeed on “Anne Hathaway Syndrome”.

On Downton Abbey

This is the sort of stuff you get on the last series of Downton Abbey.

Elizabeth Minkel on the decline of Downton Abbey.

On Lolly Willowes

More details about the novel here.

Sarah Waters on Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Next week:

Caroline is reading Selfish by Kim Kardashian.

Your questions:

We loved reading out your emails this week. If you have thoughts you want to share on anything we've discussed, or questions you want to ask us, please email us on srslypod[at]gmail.com, or @ us on Twitter @srslypod, or get in touch via tumblr here. We also have Facebook now.

Music

The music featured this week, in order of appearance, is:

i - Kendrick Lamar

With or Without You - Scala & Kolacny Brothers 

Our theme music is “Guatemala - Panama March” (by Heftone Banjo Orchestra), licensed under Creative Commons. 

See you next week!

PS If you missed #13, check it out here.

“A total fucking shambles.” That was the verdict of the usually emollient Ben Bradshaw as he left tonight's Parliamentary Labour Party meeting. His words were echoed by MPs from all wings of the party. "I've never seen anything like it," one shadow minister told me. In commitee room 14 of the House of Commons, tensions within the party - over the U-turn on George Osborne's fiscal charter and new Corbynite group Momentum - erupted. 

After a short speech by Jeremy Corbyn, shadow chancellor John McDonnell sought to explain his decision to oppose Osborne's fiscal charter (having supported it just two weeks ago). He cited the change in global economic conditions and the refusal to allow Labour to table an amendment. McDonnell also vowed to assist colleagues in Scotland in challenging the SNP anti-austerity claims. But MPs were left unimpressed. "I don't think I've ever heard a weaker round of applause at the PLP than the one John McDonnell just got," one told me. MPs believe that McDonnell's U-turn was due to his failure to realise that the fiscal charter mandated an absolute budget surplus (leaving no room to borrow to invest), rather than merely a current budget surplus. "A huge joke" was how a furious John Mann described it. He and others were outraged by the lack of consultation over the move. "At 1:45pm he [McDonnell] said he was considering our position and would consult with the PLP and the shadow cabinet," one MP told me. "Then he announces it before 6pm PLP and tomorow's shadow cabinet." 

When former shadow cabinet minister Mary Creagh asked Corbyn about the new group Momentum, which some fear could be used as a vehicle to deselect critical MPs (receiving what was described as a weak response), Richard Burgon, one of the body's directors, offered a lengthy defence and was, one MP said, "just humiliated". He added: "It looked at one point like they weren't even going to let him finish. As the fractious exchanges were overheard by journalists outside, Emily Thornberry appealed to colleagues to stop texting hacks and keep their voices down (within earshot of all). 

After a calmer conference than most expected, tonight's meeting was evidence of how great the tensions within Labour remain. Veteran MPs described it as the worst PLP gathering for 30 years. The fear for all MPs is that they have the potential to get even worse. 

No one was surprised when HMV went into administration in January 2013. The chain was just one victim of the seemingly inevitable changes in our shopping habits: the decline of the high street; the rise in online shopping and digital formats; the decline in people actually paying for their music and films. Most of us probably assumed that this was the end for the music and film giant. After all, these aren't the kinds of trends that reverse. 

But this year, HMV is making a comeback. Among the arsenal of changes made to its business model lurks an unlikely secret weapon: vinyl records, which the store wants to "take back to the masses". This may seem a little improbable to anyone used to the decline and fall of old formats, but, based on numbers alone, it could well be a savvy move - sales of records have climbed steadily in the US and Europe since 2008, after they declined to almost nothing in the mid-noughties. 

Waterstones should, by rights, have been struck down by the rise of Amazon and the e-reader long ago, and yet saw an upturn in the 2013/2014 financial year after years of losses. This month, the retailer announced it will stop selling Kindles in its stores following "pitiful" sales figures, and plans to fill those shelves with physical books again. Last December, print sales were up 5 per cent on the previous year.

A not insignificant number of people, it seems, want to go into bookshops and buy  books they can hold. They want to scratch large, delicate discs with a needle to hear their favourite albums. And judging by a clutch of recent book releases like the Art of Typewriting or this new Comic Sans typewriter, they want to punch out their thoughts on paper-and-ink pre-computers, too.

Even tech start-ups are cashing in on throwbacks to near-obsolete technologies. Inkpact allows customers to order handwritten letters through a web portal, which are then written by the company's army of letter-writers (who work from home) and posted to the recipient.

So why the affection for the old, the physical, the clunky? The blog Cyborgology has run several pieces about hipsters and their "nostalgic revivalism", which hypothesise that those searching for the new and cool aren't content with things which are actually new - to move backwards in time with your technologies is, inherently, to go against the flow. It's notable, too, that this trend mostly applies to luxury products, rather than functional ones. There's no sign of a revival in landlines, nor of vinyl-loving music fans rejecting other new technologies like laptops for the sake of nostalgia. Instead, it seems that if someone has a passion for music or writing, they want to indulge it using less functional, more romantic tools.

These older technologies also cater to a notion of uniqueness and individualism. No two photos on a film camera are quite the same, and they're far harder to replicate than a digital file. A document from a typewriter is always unique. As PJ Rey writes at Cyborgology:

The fetishization of low-tech is about the illusion of agency; it provides affirmation for the hipster whose identity is defined by the post-Modern imperative to be an individual, to be unique.

Nostalgia and individualism certainly account for part of the trend towards low tech and new surges in old technologies. Yet that still doesn't explain the absence of of other, potentially romantic and defunct products from these revivals: it's hard to believe we'll ever see a sudden demand for videos or cassettes. Instead, it seems that those technologies that survive have genuine advantages over their replacements. The technology that came next didn't quite tick all the boxes. 

Digital cameras, for example, offer none of the quirks of individual film cameras - but old film cameras, or Instagram filters which replicate them, do. E-books haven't quite managed to replicate the visual quality of physical books, in terms of cover illustration (most cheaper e-readers are still in black and white) or fonts, still carefully chosen by the publishers of physical printed books.

So it's not clear that records and attractive hardbacks will hang around forever. After all, there's no reason why new, experimental technologies (like, say, e-readers or Spotify) would engage the whole market, especially if it involves a leap from physical to digital. It's easy to put the popularity of low tech down to a society-wide nostalgia, but it's perhaps more accurate to park it at the door of pure capitalism. People buy products they like, and which fill their particular needs - always have, always will. 

It’s no surprise that prostitution policy is an area rarely visited by our legislators. It’s politically charged - a place where the need to prevent exploitation seemingly clashes head on with notions of liberal freedom; where there are few simple answers, a disputed evidence base, and no votes.

There’s also little evidence to suggest that MPs are different from the rest of the population - where one-in-ten men have purchased sex. It is little wonder therefore that our report on how the law should change, published in 2014, was the first major cross-party intervention on the subject in twenty years.

Some take the view that by removing all legal constraints, it will make the inherently exploitative trade of prostitution, safer. It’s not just me that questions this approach, though I accept that - equally - there’s no consensus that my preferred measure of criminalising the purchase of sex, while decriminalising the sale, would fundamentally change the scale of the problem.

Where all sides come together, however, is in the desire to see women diverted from the law courts. It is still possible for women (and it still is women; prostitution remains highly genderised) to go to prison for offences related to prostitution. Today, in 2015.

The total number of prosecutions for all prostitution offences in England and Wales has been decreasing since 2010, but not in a uniform fashion. This does not reflect a reduction in the size of the trade, or the violent nature of it.

There were once consistently more prosecutions for kerb crawling, profiting, and control of prostitution. But since 2013, there have been more prosecutions for soliciting or loitering than for profit from prostitution and kerb crawling each year.

In simple terms, offences committed by men with choice, freedom and money in their pocket are having a blind eye turned to them, while women are being targeted - and this trend is accelerating. In the law courts, and in prosecutions, it is the most vulnerable party in the transaction, who is taking the burden of criminality.

Take on-street sex buying as an example. In 2013-14 just 237 prosecutions were brought for kerb crawling, but there were 553 - more than twice as many - for loitering and soliciting.

There is a similar pattern in the 2014/15 figures: 227 charges for kerb crawling reached court, while 456 prosecutions were initiated against those who were selling sex. Just 83 prosecutions for control of prostitution, or ‘pimping’, were brought in that same year.

These are men and women on the same street. It takes a high level of liberal delusion to be convinced that prostitution is caused by a surge of women wishing to sell sex, rather than men who wish to buy it. And yet women who sell sex are the ones being targeted in our law courts, not the men that create the demand in the first place.

This situation even goes against the Crown Prosecution Service’s (CPS) own guidance. They say:

“Prostitution is addressed as sexual exploitation within the overall CPS Violence Against Women strategy because of its gendered nature… At the same time, those who abuse and exploit those involved in prostitution should be rigorously investigated and prosecuted, and enforcement activity focused on those who create the demand for on-street sex, such as kerb crawlers.”

 

Why then, is this happening? For the same reason it always does - in our criminal justice system stigmatised, poor women are valued less than moneyed, professional men.

debate in Parliament today raises these issues directly with the government ministers responsible. But to be honest, the prosecution-bias against women in the courts isn’t the problem; merely a symptom of it. This bias will only be tackled when the law reflects the inherent harm of the trade to women, rather than sending the mixed signals of today.

That’s why I welcome the work of the End Demand Alliance, composed of over 40 organisations working to end the demand that fuels sex trafficking and prostitution, advocating the adoption of the Sex Buyer Law throughout the UK.

This would criminalise paying for sex, while decriminalising its sale and providing support and exiting services for those exploited by prostitution. Regardless of these big changes in the law, I don’t see how anyone can support the current state of affairs where there are more prosecutions brought against women than men involved in prostitution.

The authorities are targeting women because they're easier to arrest and prosecute. It goes against their own guidance, common sense and natural justice.
And it needs to stop.

This summer’s crisis has reinforced the ­distinction that is often made between refugees, who deserve sanctuary because they are fleeing from conflict, and “economic migrants”, those coming to Europe in pursuit of “the good life”, who must be repelled at any cost. The entire bureaucratic and punitive capacity of our immigration system is pitted against these ne’er-do-wells and their impudent aspirations.

Sunjeev Sahota’s fine second novel, The Year of the Runaways, now shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, takes a closer look at “economic migration”. Why do people – many of them educated, from loving families in peaceful communities – leave their old lives behind and come to Britain? Are they fleeing desperate circumstances or are they on the make? When they arrive here, do they find what they were looking for? Should we welcome them, or try to persuade them to stay at home? The book illuminates all of these questions while, much to its credit, offering no simple answers.

Sahota interweaves the stories of three people whose reasons for emigrating are as individual as they are. Both Avtar and Randeep are from Indian Sikh families that might be characterised as lower-middle-class. Avtar’s father has his own small business – a shawl shop – and Randeep’s father works for the government. Both boys are educated and Avtar, in particular, is smart and motivated. But with employment hard to come by and no social security net to fall back on, it doesn’t take much to make leaving the country seem like the only option. Avtar loses his job, his father’s business is failing and he has high hopes of earning enough to marry Lakhpreet, his girlfriend-on-the-sly. Randeep’s family’s finances fall apart after his father has a psychological breakdown; their only hope of maintaining a respectable lifestyle is for their eldest son to take his chances abroad.

For Tochi, the situation is very different. He is what used to be called an “untouchable” and, although people now use euphemisms (“scheduled”, or chamaar), the taboo remains as strong as ever. He comes to Britain not so much for financial reasons – although he is the poorest of the lot – but to escape the prejudice that killed his father, mother and pregnant sister.

Tying these disparate stories together is the book’s most intriguing character, Narinder, a British Sikh woman who comes to believe that it is her spiritual calling to rescue a desperate Indian by “visa marriage”. Narinder’s progress, from the very limited horizons for an obedient young woman to a greater sense of herself as an active participant in her destiny, reminded me of Nazneen, the protagonist in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. But Narinder is a more thoughtful character and here the Hollywood-style journey of personal liberation is tempered by a recognition of the powerful bonds of tradition and family.

Once in Britain, Avtar, Randeep and Tochi enter a world of gangmasters, slum accommodation and zero job security, with an ever-present fear of “raids” by immigration officers. They work in fried chicken shops, down sewers, on building sites and cleaning nightclubs. Health care is off-limits for fear of immigration checks. Food is basic and the only charity comes from the gurdwara, or Sikh temple, which provides help in emergencies.

Avtar and Randeep struggle to send money back home while living in poverty and squalor that their families could barely imagine (at one point, Randeep notes with understandable bitterness that his mother has used his hard-earned contributions to buy herself a string of pearls). In the meantime, their desperation leads them to increasingly morally repellent behaviour, from selfishness to stealing and worse. Even if they do eventually find a measure of economic stability in Britain, they have done so at the cost of their better selves.

It has been pointed out that the novels on the Man Booker shortlist this year are even more depressing than usual and The Year of the Runaways certainly won’t have raised the laugh count. At times I had to put it down for a while, overwhelmed by tragedy after tragedy. It was the quality of Sahota’s prose and perceptions that brought me back. He is a wonderfully subtle writer who makes what he leaves unsaid as important as the words on the page. A wise and compassionate observer of humanity, he has gone to some dark places – places we would all rather not think about – to bring us this book. Whether we are prepared to extend a measure of his wisdom and compassion to real immigrants, in the real world, is another question.

“The Year of the Runaways” by Sunjeev Sahota is published by Picador (480pp, £14.99)

Stand-up comedian Grainne Maguire has been a long-time supporter of the Labour party and regularly performs at their events and rallies. When Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader, she was happy to see the party take a decisive turn to the left. "We have a radically right-wing Conservative government at the moment. We need a clear left-wing alternative. Of all the candidates, Corbyn was the only one offering that,” she explains.

“It's not a bad thing that we now have a leader who is as left-wing as David Cameron is right-wing. Corbyn's been presented in the press as being radical, extremist – a placard-carrying lunatic – but putting his ideas down on paper, I don't think anybody would really think they're that crazy."

On the BBC’s recent Panorama tracking the rise of Corbyn, Maguire was presented as an almost obsessive supporter of the party’s "radical" repositioning – but like many young Labour members, she doesn’t class her views as extreme: "I find the 'radical' label patronising. It's a way of dismissing the genuine passions and issues facing a lot of young people today. What is radical about thinking we should have affordable housing? What is radical about saying we should support workers and make sure people are treated properly? On the issue of renationalising the railways, you couldn't have a more populist policy. There's nothing radical about these things. They’re common sense.”

Maguire doesn’t think of herself as a particularly active campaigner, but over recent months she has become more engaged with Labour’s movement, especially through social media, because of the party’s left-wing positioning and support for democratic principles.

“I like that Corbyn has a strong anti-cuts agenda and that he seems comfortable standing by the unions. We're supposed to be a party of the unions and of the people – there shouldn't be any squeamishness about it," she says. "The other candidates kind of said, 'We'll do the same things that the Conservatives are doing, but we'll feel really sad about it.' Corbyn offers an alternative; a real opposition."

Over the past week, I’ve spoken to dozens of Labour party members and supporters like Maguire with the aim of unearthing Corbyn’s most radical advocates. But what I found instead was a widespread movement; people drawn from a variety of backgrounds who have come together under the umbrella of Corbynism to support principles of equality, fairness and democracy.

Corbyn symbolises an issues-based politics and a cohesive vision for the country’s future that challenges the widely accepted political narratives that exist in society today. As well as engaging the young – a supposedly apathetic political demographic – Corbyn is building a widespread consensus around the issues that matter to people. In doing so, Corbyn has attracted the support of various fringe parties who are concerned with specific political and social issues.

“Corbyn’s rise as Labour leader opens up debates on the left, shows there is a mood for change and gives confidence to everyone fighting austerity and racism,” says Charlie Kimber, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). His party is thought by many to be far-left, yet there is considerable crossover between Corbyn’s principles as a social democrat and the key issues that SWP members care about.

“We oppose nuclear weapons, austerity and racism, and we are against imperialist wars. We are anti-capitalist, anti-racist and we fight for positive social change and against austerity and climate change,” Kimber explains. “We want to lay the basis of a socialist society where people come before profit. We are for socialism, and so is Corbyn. We may differ about how to achieve our ends, but we share key aims.”

Clive Heemskerk, national agent for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), agrees that the level of consensus across campaigns from unions and fringe parties shows the extent to which Corbyn has already built a new, democratic consensus around his politics. “Corbyn’s victory has the potential to completely change the terms of mainstream political debate. We fully support his anti-austerity stance, his defence of public ownership and his opposition to Trident renewal,” he says. “We are part of Corbyn’s movement. Linking together all those who oppose austerity, defend trade unionism and support socialism, regardless of whether they hold a Labour party card or not, is the model of how the Corbyn movement needs to develop in the next period.”

In its core policy statement, the TUSC indicates that it is prepared to work with any Labour candidate who shares their “socialist aspirations” and is “prepared to support measures that challenge the austerity consensus of the establishment politicians”, but Heemskerk has concerns about the undemocratic influence of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). “The 95 per cent of Labour councillors who did not back Jeremy – and the party officials nationally – have already begun to restrict his stance and undermine his leadership,” he adds. “That includes a retreat from opposing the neoliberal EU and, on rail renationalisation, waiting for the franchises to expire rather than immediately taking all the rail companies back into public ownership.”

These are examples of areas on which the fringe parties are prepared to scrutinise and even oppose Corbyn and the Labour party – surely a symptom of a healthy democratic movement, not widespread socialist "radicalisation".

“Where Labour councillors or candidates are not prepared to follow Jeremy’s stance in opposing George Osborne’s austerity agenda, the TUSC will be prepared to stand against them in local elections,” Heemskerk asserts. The SWP holds the same concerns about the PLP, and sees scrutiny and accountability as key in taking Corbyn's movement forward. “We think that these changes won’t come through parliament. We need a mass movement outside parliament and independent of Labour. The experience of Syriza and Hollande shows the problems of just winning a parliamentary majority,” Kimber adds.

Cat Conway, a PhD student in poetry, is a founding member of the Women’s Equality Party and a supporter of both Corbyn and Labour. “I am most supportive of Corbyn's policies on social issues, particularly housing, the NHS, and welfare, as well as his attitude to the economy,” she says. “I also support his re-nationalisation of public utilities and railways. Not everything has to be a for-profit enterprise: education, healthcare, utilities and public transport should earn enough to pay their staff a fair wage and maintain their services to a high standard at the lowest cost possible for the consumer.”

Like Maguire, she feels that the "radical" label is a reductive and inaccurate portrayal of the burgeoning grassroots politics that has emerged over the past few months. “I do not consider an anti-‘f**k the poor’ platform to be in the least bit radical. Radical, to me, has always been synonymous with 'irrational' and 'inflexible'. I believe in compromise. I don't believe you have to be 'centrist' to compromise,” she asserts. “The constant use of the term 'radical' is meant to frighten people, to make them feel insecure. ‘Corbyn is radical’ translates to ‘this man is out of control, hysterical, angry, and a danger to us all’, as though he's some kind of madman anarchist and not a 66-year-old man who cycles everywhere.”

Opposition to privatisation is a key part of Corbyn’s movement, and something that Jen Hamilton-Emery, director of a small literary publishing house in North Norfolk and Corbyn backer, fully supports. “I believe that this is the time that people across the party, at grassroots level, will be properly listened to. It’s a great opportunity to engage with as many people as possible, both inside and outside the party,” she tells me.

Though Hamilton-Emery has always voted Labour, she only joined the party after Tony Blair stepped down. She worked in the NHS during the New Labour years and was appalled by moves to accelerate the privatisation of healthcare by a party she felt should be opposing it in principle. With changes in the Labour party’s positioning, she now intends to get more involved with issues-based campaigning: “With Corbyn encouraging local constituency parties to discuss policies and inform debate, I intend to mobilise members and get everyone more involved. It is people on the ground that we need to engage with, inform and bring on board.”

It seems to me that those supporting Corbyn are not simply naive idealists, but rather, politically-engaged citizens concerned for those who are currently losing out in British society. “I don't consider myself radical. I see myself as standing up for and supporting the most disadvantaged and vulnerable. I don't think that Corbyn is a radical either. He's a man of strong and unshakeable principles,” Hamilton-Emery says. “But I do think that labels matter – he, and his supporters, will no doubt be called 'radical' by the press and, by extension, the public. It's reductive and potentially damaging, with no room for unpacking his message. As the Tories implement their cuts to public services, Corbyn will look increasingly radical by comparison.”

The Tories can label Corbyn and his supporters radical as much as they want, but the grassroots politics of the day seems much more likely to highlight the injustice and radicalism of Cameron and Osborne’s right-wing agenda: of tax breaks to corporations and the super-rich, of attacks on civil liberties and labour rights, of broad privatisation and of soulless ideological austerity.

What "grassroots" means under Corbyn is an issues-based and highly relevant politics. And the democratic strength of his position is self-perpetuating; the more he engages with individuals, organisations and communities about their social and political desires, the more likely he is to develop solutions in terms of policy and strategy that bring about the changes people want.

Welcome to the new British politics.

The most important thing about Justin Portal Welby, the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, is that he’s not Rowan Williams. How we all miss Rowan Williams! The whole point of the Established Church is that its ministry is for all Britons, not just confessing Anglicans; and Dr Williams achieved this difficult task brilliantly. That he did so was, in large measure, due to his appearance: the most fanatical adherent of sharia law hearkened to his fluting emollience, because, resembling as he does a fictional wizard straight out of central casting, they assumed he was either Gandalf the Grey, or Albus Dumbledore, or possibly both.

With Dr Williams’s successor we must bear witness to a marked decline in the archiepiscopal phenotype. Far from resembling some wand-waving sorcerer, and despite all the rich caparisoning, Justin Welby still looks like exactly what he is: a superannuated Old Etonian oil executive from west London with a sideline in religiosity. His is not a bonny countenance; rather, he resembles a constipated tortoise with sunburn. Frankly, he could do with a beard – the more patriarchal the better – simply to cover up that sourpuss.

Doubtless Welby’s supporters will find such a description rude to the point of impiousness – but for those of us who live in an uncloistered world, the most significant indicators of his true nature lie first in his appearance, and second in the manner of his ordination.

Welby is one of Sandy Millar’s men. (And I say “men” advisedly.) When Welby heard the call to be ordained in the late 1980s he was initially rejected by the then bishop of Kensington, who said: “There is no place for you in the Church of England.” Prophetic words, indeed. It was Sandy Millar, one of the founders of the evangelical – indeed, charismatic – Alpha course, at Holy Trinity Brompton, in London, who came out to bat for Welby. The evangelicals must have been delighted when they got one of their own into Lambeth Palace, yet ever since he took up his crosier he’s been insidiously sticking it to them. I’m going to explain why, but first a word or two about evangelicals.

It’s disconcerting the first time it happens to you: you’re standing up in church, ready to groan your way apathetically through another fusty Victorian hymn, when instead of the moaning of a clapped-out organ, an electric guitar strikes a resounding chord and the worshipper next to you bursts into enthusiastic song. Worse is to follow: for, as she warbles, she slowly raises one arm, extends it, and begins to wave it about like a tree bough while the other arm remains rigidly at her side. Looking around you, you see that the congregation is like unto a forest: so many raised and undulant limbs are there. Yes, you have fallen among evangelicals – and if you thought ordinary Anglicans were a bit too nice then you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Purely to show open-mindedness, my wife attended an Alpha course run by one of our son’s schoolfriend’s parents, who was an evangelical minister. After a few weeks she began to seem a little – how can I put it? – spiritually pained, and when I asked her what the matter was, she said she was having something of a crisis of no faith. “It’s just that they’re so very nice,” she said, “and the God they believe in is so very nice, too. They make me feel anxious I might be upsetting Jesus by not believing in Him as well.”

Nice as he may be, Welby remains an evangelical, and evangelicals have a tricky time when it comes to homosexuality, because although not exactly fundamentalists, they nonetheless cleave strongly to the Word of the Lord, rather than chipping up to the church fête from time to time to buy a few tombola tickets. So, simply by looking into his own heart, Welby knows the situation is intractable: those homophobic Africans and redneck Americans cannot be appeased, and though he personally is opposed to gay marriage, he has said he’s “always averse to the language of exclusion when what we are called to is to love in the same way as Jesus Christ loves us”.

Welby seems to feel Jesus loves us by letting us go, because he is now making noises about a “looser relationship” between the various Anglican churches: one in which – while they all remain attached to the Church of England – the connections between them become more attenuated. Some of his evangelical chums must be swaying with anxiety rather than enthusiasm but they should rest easy; on all other important matters the archbishop is behaving in an exemplary fashion.

Not a week goes by without him making some anodyne statement or futile gesture condemning food banks (then asking people to give to them), offering refugees tokenistic accommodation in the grounds of Lambeth Palace, and generally mithering on about the scourge of poverty while giving spiritual succour to those who’re doing very nicely out of the status quo. ’Twas ever thus: our Established Church may well be for all Britons, but, in Justin Welby, we have a prelate who speaks eloquently for the . . . few.

Next week: Madness of Crowds

A new study has shown social grooming behaviour is more prevalent in vampire bat species than their non-parasitic variants. The researchers used the species Desmodus rotundus and found that the bats spent 1.5-6.3 per cent of their time engaged in social grooming, compared with just 0.5 per cent in other species.

It's not exactly a secret that a range of animals engage in social interactions. This includes hyenas who simply greet each other to increase cooperation. However, recent studies have focussed on the use of social grooming being used by animals to maintain stable relationships.  

For example, age and body weight have been linked to the amount of social grooming given by dairy cows, and licking and head rubbing are used by lions to create bonds between individuals. Vampire bats also protect each other against bats with no social links to a group. Each roost site usually contains 8-12 female adults and their offspring, defended on the outside by an adult male.

Vampire bats not only show social grooming through the cleaning of each others' bodies, but also by sharing food through the ever-appetising regurgitation process. However, both of these behaviours are directly linked to one another.

When a pair of vampire bats are grooming each other and cleaning each other's bodies, they assess the bulging size of the abdomen. This allows them to check if their partner has eaten, and whether they need to regurgitate and share food.

Sharing food is a vital part of feeding and cooperation in vampire bats, as almost 20 per cent of bats don't find any food each night. This starts a ticking clock, as most bats can starve to death in under 72 hours.

The importance of social bonding is reflected in the anatomy of the bat. In proportion to their relatively small body size, vampire bats have a very large brain and neocortex. Previous studies have shown the size of the neocortex is linked to more complex social behaviour and bonding.

The authors of the paper conclude that social grooming acts as a way for bats to display their hunger to partners, or alternatively, that they are willing to share food, and for the need to sustain close bonds.

A spectre is haunting the Conservative party - the spectre of tax credit cuts. £4.4bn worth of cuts to the in-work benefits - which act as a top-up for lower-paid workers - will come into force in April 2016, the start of the next tax year - meaning around three million families will be £1,000 worse off. For most dual-earner families affected, that will be the equivalent of a one partner going without pay for an entire month.

The politics are obviously fairly toxic: as one Conservative MP remarked to me before the election, "show me 1,000 people in my constituency who would happily take a £1,000 pay cut, then we'll cut welfare". Small wonder that Boris Johnson is already making loud noises about the coming cuts, making his opposition to them a central plank of his speech to Tory party conference.

Tory nerves were already jittery enough when the cuts were passed through the Commons - George Osborne had to personally reassure Conservative MPs that the cuts wouldn't result in the nightmarish picture being painted by Labour and the trades unions. Now that Johnson - and the Sun - have joined in the chorus of complaints.

There are a variety of ways the government could reverse or soften the cuts. The first is a straightforward U-Turn: but that would be politically embarrassing for Osborne, so it's highly unlikely. They could push back the implementation date - as one Conservative remarked - "whole industries have arranged their operations around tax credits now - we should give the care and hospitality sectors more time to prepare". Or they could adjust the taper rates - the point in your income  at which you start losing tax credits, taking away less from families. But the real problem for the Conservatives is that a mere U-Turn won't be enough to get them out of the mire. 

Why? Well, to offset the loss, Osborne announced the creation of a "national living wage", to be introduced at the same time as the cuts - of £7.20 an hour, up 50p from the current minimum wage.  In doing so, he effectively disbanded the Low Pay Commission -  the independent body that has been responsible for setting the national minimum wage since it was introduced by Tony Blair's government in 1998.  The LPC's board is made up of academics, trade unionists and employers - and their remit is to set a minimum wage that provides both a reasonable floor for workers without costing too many jobs.

Osborne's "living wage" fails at both counts. It is some way short of a genuine living wage - it is 70p short of where the living wage is today, and will likely be further off the pace by April 2016. But, as both business-owners and trade unionists increasingly fear, it is too high to operate as a legal minimum. (Remember that the campaign for a real Living Wage itself doesn't believe that the living wage should be the legal wage.) Trade union organisers from Usdaw - the shopworkers' union - and the GMB - which has a sizable presence in the hospitality sector -  both fear that the consequence of the wage hike will be reductions in jobs and hours as employers struggle to meet the new cost. Large shops and hotel chains will simply take the hit to their profit margins or raise prices a little. But smaller hotels and shops will cut back on hours and jobs. That will hit particularly hard in places like Cornwall, Devon, and Britain's coastal areas - all of which are, at the moment, overwhelmingly represented by Conservative MPs. 

The problem for the Conservatives is this: it's easy to work out a way of reversing the cuts to tax credits. It's not easy to see how Osborne could find a non-embarrassing way out of his erzatz living wage, which fails both as a market-friendly minimum and as a genuine living wage. A mere U-Turn may not be enough.