“If you give 25 million people a new toy, the odds are pretty good that a lot of them will try it at least once.” So says Hunter Thompson in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail. Thompson is obsessed with the power of the “youth vote” to help George McGovern against Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. McGovern won just one state - Massachusetts - and the District of Columbia,  and lost the popular vote by 23 per cent.

This year’s general election showed that banking on the youth vote is equally disastrous in the United Kingdom. In the weeks before polling day, many Labour supporters imagined that young people could kick out the Tories (and Nick Clegg for good measure), especially after Russell Brand’s encounter with Ed Miliband. The National Union of Students (NUS) even predicted students could affect the outcome of the general election in around 200 constituencies

It did not happen. After all the bluster, the student vote swung just five seats, according to a new report by the Higher Education Policy Institute. The remarkable thing is not how much students matter but how little.

Jeremy Corbyn is committed to improving voter registration, and turnout, among students. It is an honourable aim, but is unlikely to help Labour nearly as much as he supposes. Students are more Labour-inclined than the population as a whole, but much less so than many imagine: a strong student vote helped Nicky Morgan increase her majority in Loughborough. Far from being obsessed with tuition fees, priorities for students just aren’t that different from the rest of the electorate.  

There is more bad news for Labour’s strategy of harnessing the youth vote. Despite what the thousands who attended rallies for Corbyn might suggest, the young today are not merely much less politicised than older people, but much less politically engaged than the youth in previous generations, as Maria Grasso has highlighted. What’s worse for the left is that the children of Thatcher and Blair are more right-wing than the children of Wilson, Heath and Callaghan. While today’s young are socially liberal, they lean to the right of their parents in their attitudes to the economy and welfare state.

Far from becoming more important to politics, young people are becoming even easier to ignore. This year, over 65s were 35 per cent more likely to vote than those under 25. And the grey vote is only going to become more critical: the percentage of the UK population who are over-65 will rise by a third in the next two years while the proportion of young people decreases. This year the Tories thrashed Labour by 24 points among OAPs. It is dramatically closing that gap – not getting more young people to the ballot box – that Labour needs to prioritise to improve its disastrous result in May.

While pensioners’ perks – the triple-lock, free TV licenses and the winter fuel allowance – remain austerity-proof, politicians of all stripes in need of extra cash will realise there’s no one easier to ask than the young. In 1990, the Conservatives introduced maintenance loans; in 1998 Labour introduced tuition fees; in 2006 Labour broke a manifesto promise to treble fees; in 2010 fees were trebled again, despite the Liberal Democrats pledging to abolish fees. Now students are being squeezed once again: maintenance grants are being converted to loans, while the threshold for repaying tuition fees is being frozen for five years (meaning it is being decreased by 12 per cent less in real terms).

History tells us that any anger today’s students feel about these hikes won’t last long. Labour should beware: if the party builds its electoral strategy on the backs of the young, it will be doomed to a catastrophic result to match that of George McGovern 43 years ago.

You might well have heard of something called “COP 21” by now.

 COP 21 is the 21^st Conference of the Parties who signed the Kyoto Protocol back in 1997. It’s an international treaty where the  objective was to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to “a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system".

The Protocol, based on the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’,: puts the obligation to reduce current emissions on developed countries - on the basis that they  are responsible for the current higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

It required the world’s leading economies   - those developed countries - to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 10% on 1990 levels by 2012, .  Europe developed what was, at the time, a ground breaking scheme to trade emissions.  The Emissions Trading Scheme ) is a cap and trade mechanism which aims to reduce greenhouse gases from the main industrial polluting sectors. This was followed by other pieces of legislation on renewables and energy efficiency.  These pieces of legislation have defined Europe as a leader in emissions reductions, with greenhouse gases  dropping to17.2% below the 1990 levels.[1]

Undoubtedly, these are big steps forward. Kyoto led to good things, Europe has done well and there has been real progress.

Nevertheless we need to recognise that reducing emissions in developed countries is no good if we simply move polluting industries to the rest of the world. – Certainly Europe’s emissions reductions look impressive on paper,but how much of those emissions reductions are coming back to Europe in imported carbon from India and China? Problems like carbon leakage won’t be solved until we have a global approach with robust accounting on emissions reductions imports and exports, with some sort of standardised accounting rules underpinning it. This really underlines the importance of Paris. 

The big problem we face now is that countries have been unable to agree to extend the initial Kyoto Protocol commitments beyond 2012 and precious few met their targets before 2012.We’ve witnessed six years of limbo since 2009 when the COP met in Copenhagen with such high hopes.

The most that six subsequent COPs have managed to achieve, with much wrangling, is that countries will, at most, agree to do their best –without commitment.

I think we’ve got to understand the challenge for developing countries. They have made strides too. Fossil fuel subsidies are falling in many countries, especially India and Indonesia. China has reduced its coal consumption by 2.8 per cent in 2014 and will that will probably fall again by the end of 2015. The Chinese renewables program is very impressive. But, of course, we shouldn’t forget that the developing countries also have their own development agendas. Perhaps understandably, they are loath to see any fetter put on these.

So we arrive in Paris with each country having submitted ‘intended nationally determined contributions’ (INDCs) which are essentially statements saying “We will do our best – and no more”.

There are difficulties that come with this approach – if parties weren’t able to meet the obligations they signed up to under Kyoto, why will they do any better under the INDC approach?

Any agreement from here has to end fossil fuel subsidies, a major driver for pollution around the world and has to address carbon sinks. We only have two in the world – the ocean and the forests. With deforestation we suffer doubly – the CO2 released by burning and the loss of sinks.And as we lose the forest sink we see ocean acidification reaching dangerous levels, causing significant damage to marine ecosystems, a major protein source for the world’s peoples. A major part of the problem here is agriculture and land-use change, as the largest contributor to climate change is actually agriculture. Deforestation, fertilization, and crop cultivation done for farming has contributed to about one-fourth of all excess CO₂ emissions. [2]

Now, just weeks before the conference in Paris begins, 120 submissions have been received, reflecting 147 countries (including the European Union member states), and covering around 86% of global emissions in 2010 (excluding land use, land use change and forestry) and 86% of global population[3]. Based on current projections, experts see this as bringing global warming down to 2.7°C which is an improvement on projections at the last COP by 0.4°C.,  But this is still not enough to reach the 2 degrees experts agree is the level of warming acceptable to avoid dangerous changes to the environment.

The negotiating text released on October 5^th wouldn’t fill most with optimism. There are many  –ifs and buts: brackets and lack of firm commitment in it that make the draft text look rather feeble. 

But let’s bear in mind that nations rarely give away their ultimate negotiation position before the final days of COP,  so I think we can be  genuinely optimistic that there is something to work with here.

With the eyes of the world on them, negotiators have a real chance to finally pull together an agreement that everyone can buy into, which will respect the right ofdeveloping countries to advance the living standards of their populations, and which may give us the chance to avoid dangerous climate change and biodiversity loss this century, with all that this entails.

It’s encouraging to see that many nations have now copied the European model with embryonic emissions trading schemes – California and Quebec, China, and  South Korea to name but a few. But we’re going to need to see more provisions for market-based mechanisms. Like it or not, the EU Emissions Trading Scheme has been a major driver of the reduction in Europe’s emissions, and 73 of the INDCs so far received express support for using market mechanisms to meet their commitments.

The pressure on COP 21 to deliver to the people of the world is huge. – Our governments must be encouraged to recognise this and put aside national self-interest in order to protect our climate.

Paris has to deliver proper mechanisms which allow countries to accelerate their current intentions and catapult them to something better. This will get us to where we need to be in terms of that all-important 2C target.

Bold pledges on finance and innovation from the richer countries are vital to encourage the developing countries to commit to accelerate.

There is momentum in the global shift away from fossil fuels towards renewables, and energy efficiency is on the up throughout the world.

Paris is not the end of the road; it is the beginning of a new road and the journey is far from over.

For the first time in half a century, a new grammar school will open. Officially the 450-pupil site opening in Sevenoaks is an annex of the Weald of Kent Grammar School in Tonbridge, but the two sites are nine miles away. “It is difficult to say an umbilical cord nine miles long can be seen as part of a parent school and not as a new school,” Bob MacCartney, chairman of the National Grammar Schools Association and a huge advocate of grammars, recently admitted.

It might not be the last new grammar school to open. While Nicky Morgan has denied any intention to scrap the law passed in 1998 that forbids new grammar schools, other grammars will be encouraged to try and get new sites approved. And, regardless, the number of pupils at grammars has been going up on the sly: 33,000 more students go to grammar schools now than in 1998 (as I recently noted for the Economist). A higher proportion of pupils in England and Wales go to grammars than at any point since 1978.

Many on the Tory right still resent David Cameron for his intervention on grammar schools eight years ago: he called the debate about grammars “pointless” because “parents fundamentally don't want their children divided into sheep and goats at the age of 11”. They will be ecstatic with the news. The leadership chances of Nicky Morgan, who has flirted with trying to replace Cameron, have also received a significant boost: the Tory grassroots will appreciate how Morgan has helped selective education in a way that Michael Gove did not. 

But the opening of a new grammar school bodes less well for the most deprived children – exactly those who it is claimed new grammars will help. The 163 grammars in England today are not a “tool of social mobility”, as Boris Johnson said this year, but are fiefdoms for the middle-classes. Less than 3 per cent of grammar-school students receive free school meals, compared with 16 per cent of pupils across the state sector. In counties with selective education, poorer children do worse than elsewhere and rich kids do better, as Chris Cook has brilliantly shown. 

Admirable attempts have been made to make entrance exams to grammars “tutor-proof”. They have not worked. When Buckinghamshire pushed “tutor-proof” tests in 2013, children from local state primaries did even worse than before: a child from a private school in the county is three and a half times more likely to pass the 11-plus than one from a state primary. In selective local authorities, disadvantaged children are much less likely to go to grammar schools than richer children with the same grades, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found. The real winners of more grammar schools opening would not be those in need of a ladder up, but the parents of middle-class children, who know that a few thousand spend on tutoring for the entrance exams is far cheaper than a private education.

As an industry has developed around tutoring kids to get into grammars, so they have become worse for social mobility. But they were never nearly as good as is imagined. When many growing up in the 1950s and 1960s romanticise grammar schools as offering them a route to the top, they forget that they also benefited from “more room at the top”. As skilled jobs increased, so those from state schools could get top jobs without having to elbow those from private schools aside. And while Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher all liked to present themselves as rising from humble origins to become prime minister, their backgrounds were relatively middle-class by the standards of the times. So disadvantaged young people did not benefit from selective education in the way we are often told. “Any assistance to low-origin children provided by grammar schools is cancelled out by the hindrance suffered by those who attended secondary moderns," a British Journal of Sociology study in 2011 put it. "Comprehensive schools were as good for mobility as the selective schools they replaced." Even the right-leaning think tank Policy Exchange have found that grammar schools “may have provided a better outcome for those few who attend them, but such benefits are entirely cancelled out, and more besides, by the negative consequences for the majority in these areas who attend secondary moderns”.

Evidence from Europe also shows that the notion that restoring grammar schools will transform the quality of education in England and Wales is fool’s gold. Finland is the best performing country in Europe: it does not separate kids until the age of 16.

Morgan has rightly highlighted Poland as an example for the UK’s schools to follow: even though Poland spends over a third less than the UK per pupil, it is higher than the UK in the PISA rankings for reading, science and maths. While Poland has benefited from demanding more of its teachers and updating the curriculum, its more significant reform has been to delay academic separation until the age of 16. Less academic children benefit from more being demanded of them for longer. As Amanda Ripley notes in The Smartest Kids in the World: "There seemed to be some kind of ghetto effect: Once kids were labeled and segregated into the lower track, their learning slowed down." That is why pupils in selective school systems actually scored lower on the most recent PISA maths tests than those done in 2003.

Michael Gove was right to resist the clarion calls of the right and oppose opening new grammar schools and instead focus on lifting up standards for all pupils. Now the Conservatives have been seduced by the myth that grammars aid social mobility more disadvantaged children will be failed by Britain’s state schools. 

Three hours, five revelations

• Allegations of sexual misconduct were denied by both. Yentob believes they came from a malicious source. Batmanghelidjh claims they are the real reason for the charity’s closure, rather than its financial problems.
   
• The missing clients – the charity’s records claimed to have 36,000, but only 1,069 of their files were handed over to local authorities – were explained as being held back due to a “data protection” issue by Yentob, and Batmanghelidjh suggested restrictions on the kind of cases they would accept explains this.
   
• Although he denied any conflict of interest, Yentob admitted he was in the producer’s box during Batmanghelidjh’s Today programme interview, and also made phonecalls to BBC journalists covering the Kids Company story, at one point asking if it couldn’t wait “til tomorrow” because he hadn’t yet heard the allegations.
   
• Batmanghelidjh accused (without providing evidence) civil servants of briefing against Kids Company – though she denied that she suspected a link between Cabinet Office sources and the sex abuse allegation against the charity.
   
• Batmanghelidjh claimed that she put her own flat down as surety money, in exchange for Cabinet Office funding, in the event of Kids Company failing to raise enough external funds.
   

How it happened

“There are more journalists here than in the audience,” one woman observed, entering the select committee room, where the now-bust charity Kids Company is being subjected to an inquiry.

And no wonder. Because seconds later, in walked a duo of such epically proportioned egos for which even the most masterful headline-writer would struggle to make room.

Camila Batmanghelidjh, the technicolour tartan, paisley and scarf-clad former founder and chief executive of Kids Company, and the ex-chair of trustees and divisive BBC creative director Alan Yentob, who shuffled in first, his scuffed Nike trainers withering ahead of her hot pink Crocs.

But even the promise of two such personalities was nothing on what they delivered.

They persisted in making as little sense – and as many accusations – as possible in their three hours before the Public Administration select committee’s increasingly frustrated panel of MPs.

As revelations about the charity’s beleaguered funds and other scandals continue to be uncovered, the point of this inquiry is to get to the bottom of Kids Company’s relationship with successive governments. In particular, why the Cabinet Office gave the charity an emergency £3m loan shortly before it closed, in spite of concerns raised about how it was being run.

Not that our antiheroes Batmanghelidjh and Yentrobin were going to help much with this. So fed up was committee member Paul Flynn MP with the former dancing around his questions that he accused her of “a spiel of psychobabble, a torrent of words, verbal ectoplasm”.

Where he got this from – following her simple explanations of children “secreting fright hormones”, how “all scientific research has two sides to the coin”, and that employees’ taxes that weren’t collected or refunded were “conceptualised” – is anyone’s guess.

Committee chair Bernard Jenkin found Batmanghelidjh’s decision to speak just as frustrating as the words she chose. She constantly interrupted Yentob’s answers, “can I please contribute to this question . . . I can be helpful . . . Please!”

“ORDER!” bellowed Jenkin. “I don’t know that shouting is going to get me to behave any better,” Batmanghelidjh replied, never breaking her permanent placid smile.

She insisted that the image of Kids Company giving out sums of money in envelopes to its clients was unfair. “It has turned into the notion that it was handed out willy-nilly,” she said. “It wasn’t. It was accounted for.”

But she was soon contradicted when decrying, “how this myth developed”.

“It’s not a myth though, is it?” interjected Jenkin.

“No, it’s not a myth,” she confirmed. The first of many moments of incredulous laughter from the committee room audience.

She also struggled to answer how and when the safeguarding of children was inspected. “No one wanted those,” she spluttered. “They weren't due for an inspection. Who by? Who do you want?”

Yentob didn’t fare much better. Ever a figure of luvvie-orientated mockery, he looked distinctly like he’d prefer to be back at the Beeb where nothing could hurt him.

Replying to a furious Kate Hoey – MP for Vauxhall and therefore local to Kids Company’s work in Lambeth – on whether charity staff had signed non-disclosure agreements, Yentob admitted two of them had, “just as we do in the BBC when people leave”.

“This isn’t the BBC!” cried the panel. “Are you comparing Kids Company to the BBC?” asked Hoey. “No,” Yentob conceded, dejectedly.

His biggest giveaway was that he was “behind the glass” in the producer’s box during Batmanghelidjh’s recent interview on the BBC’s Today programme. Flynn called this an “abuse” of Yentob’s position as a senior BBC executive, and suggested he was trying to “influence the coverage”.

Yentob denied this, saying he’d only been there to “listen” to her. That's right. He had to be present to listen to a radio interview. He added, “if it was intimidating, I regret it”, and also accepted that he “probably should have stepped down earlier” as the charity’s chair of trustees – a position he’d held since 2003. He had no time, however, for the intriguing “abusive limericks” sent to him by a disillusioned former Kids Company donor.

Batmanghelidjh made no such concessions, accusing everyone – the media, civil servants, lack of government funding – but herself and her right-hand man for Kids Company’s downfall. “I don’t like to make accusations without evidence,” she informed the committee, right after making an accusation without evidence about civil servants briefing against the charity.

The most stunning revelation, however, was wheedled out of the witnesses by the good cop MP Cheryl Gillan, who was trying to establish the relationship between the two. “So you never went out to dinner with Mr Yentob?” “No,” replied Batmanghelidjh. Not in 20 years. “Sorry,” quipped Yentob. But he didn’t look very sorry at all.

This morning the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has released statistics that challenge our understanding of what has happened to crime in recent years. Crime as we have traditionally understood it (assault, burglary, vehicle theft etc) has fallen by 66 per cent since its peak in 1995.  Governments of all parties have claimed much of the credit.

There has always been an inconvenient truth about this fall in crime however: it happened not just in this country but across the developed world.  This suggests a structural change in the underlying drivers of crime, independent of national government policies or the tactics of different police forces.

For some time criminologists have suspected that crime has not so much fallen as changed character and that technology is driving that change. Today’s figures confirm that insight, with estimates of fraud and cyber crime being appended to the official figures for the first time. The Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) now shows an additional 5.1 million incidents of fraud and 2.5 million incidents of computer misuse such as hacking.  If one were to add these 7.6 million offences to the 6.5 million traditional crimes found in the survey in the year ending June 2015, it is clear that overall crime has not fallen by anything like as much as previously thought.

To some extent it has suited everyone to keep these crimes ‘off the books’.  No politician wants the crime figures to go up on their watch. The police face massive budget cuts and lack the capacity to take on new areas of work. The banks operate in a competitive market and are reluctant to flag up vulnerabilities. 

The lack of public pressure to act is however the most significant factor - and this is the reason we should treat ‘surge in crime’ headlines with some scepticism.  The traditional crimes that pose a threat to our physical security have fallen dramatically.  We are much less likely to burgled, robbed or attacked than we used to be and this is very good news. If asked to choose whether we would want someone to spend £500 on our credit card that the bank will very likely pay back or have our house burgled, most people would readily choose the former. For most of us attempted online fraud (eg receiving a phishing email) is just part of the background noise of everyday life. Attempted burglary or robbery, on the other hand, can be extremely unsettling.

These are still crimes, however.  To take fraud, for example, even when the banks cover our losses, we will all ultimately bear that cost in higher bank charges.  The survey estimates that 22 per cent of victims were not compensated for their loss and this will hit many families hard. Bad people are making a lot of money to engage in further criminal activities.

The rise of fraud and cyber enabled crime poses a major challenge to the police. The police could use these figures to call on the government to protect existing budgets. However, bobbies on the beat will not stop email phishing scams or computer hacking.

The police have not yet developed the insight or practice required for an effective response to fraud and online crime.  Only a very small number of reported fraud offences are investigated. Reported incidents are referred to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau which decides on which cases to prioritise but does not itself have the investigative tools to take them on. Cases are passed to local forces who will often lack the capacity, skills and indeed motivation to investigate fraud, which is rarely a priority.   There is the added complexity that the victim may not reside in their force area and the perpetrator may often operate overseas.

Even if the police had a better capability to investigate fraud and cyber crime, a traditional ‘pursue and prosecute’ model is unlikely to match the scale and complexity of the challenge.  Prevention is key and policymakers have not yet decided who should take the lead on that.  Should all PC manufacturers be compelled to “design in” anti virus software in the same way that car manufacturers have “designed in” measures to prevent theft? Should we have stronger universal standards of banking security?  Currently banks face a tension between making their systems more secure while at the same time competing with each other to make the customer journey seamless and irritation free. And who should be responsible for educating the public about the dangers of cyber crime?  It is not obvious that police officers are best placed to be warning young people of the dangers of ‘sexting’ and online bullying, for example.

These figures do not mean we are in the middle of a crime epidemic. We are safer as a society than we were twenty years ago.  But in a digital age we need to radically re-think our approach to preventing, reporting and investigating crime. 

It is ten years since Robin Cook died and somehow the hole left by his departure only seems to have grown bigger with time. Looking back on a decade of almost continuous crisis and decline for Labour, it is hard to think of a moment when the party would not have benefited from his presence. Ed Miliband would certainly have benefitted from his wisdom and support during five years in which Labour’s surviving grandees offered very little of either. Perhaps his most important contribution would have been in Scotland where he would have relished the opportunity to make the radical case against separatism and provided a living rebuttal of the SNP’s “Red Tory” attack line that did Labour so much damage at the general election. He was the missing link needed to reconcile Labour with its disenchanted former supporters.

Cook is still missed because he represented something that now seems to be lacking on the British left. The substance of this is the topic of a new book, Robin Cook: Principles and Power, written by his former media handler, John Williams. It tells the story of Cook’s time as Foreign Secretary and his struggle, as Williams summarises it, “to reconcile principles with the democratic necessity to compromise”. It records, in particular, his determination to integrate an ethical dimension into British foreign policy at a time when the realities of international diplomacy and the constraints of collective cabinet responsibility presented significant obstacles.

Williams provides valuable insight into the inner workings of government and the relationship between its key personnel. But the book’s real value is that it relates an important and previously untold part of the New Labour story that helps to shed light on how the party got to where it is now. Cook regarded himself as a moderniser by instinct, yet he was always clear that the goal of modernisation should be to make progressive politics work. While crediting New Labour with genuine achievements, especially in its first term, he felt that the party had sacrificed too much of its purpose in the quest for office. His willingness to press the issue became a recurring point of tension in relations with Tony Blair and other senior colleagues.

In the end the Blair government became too narrow and too contemptuous of progressive concerns to accommodate Cook’s brand of politics and he ended up resigning on an issue of principle over Iraq. While his standing was enhanced by the split, New Labour was irreparably damaged by it as its reputation for cynicism became embedded and the broad electoral coalition that delivered two landslides started to crumble. The aftershocks are still being felt now in the collapse of Labour in Scotland and the failure of Blairite candidates in two successive leadership contests. There will be more to come if and when the Chilcot enquiry finally reports.

Despite the plaudits he received at the time, it is important to record that Cook regarded his resignation as a personal failure. Although he rejected the idea that power should ever be an end in itself, he had little time for the argument that good intentions are all that count. The true conviction politician should never embrace opposition as a way of life because, just like the unprincipled politics of triangulation, it means giving up on the possibility of change. Radicalism requires a strategy for power. This matters today because Labour has emerged from an era in which the balance was often tipped too far in one direction and is now in danger of tipping it too far in the other.

The undoubted advantage of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is that it draws a firm line under the New Labour years and forces the party to think afresh about what it really stands for. Ed Miliband tried valiantly to achieve a similar reset, but his style was so diffident that only those threatened by it really noticed. Now that Labour is compelled to address some fundamental questions, it has a chance to move on, provided it comes up sensible answers. The problem is that Corbyn and his supporters have yet to give a plausible account of how they intend to build an electoral majority behind policies that have always been rejected by voters in the past. They too need to understand the democratic necessity to compromise, both with their internal Labour critics and with the country as a whole.

The most difficult challenge for those opposed to Corbyn’s approach is to be honest in accepting their own share of responsibility for his rise. It is easy to rail against the “politics of illusion”, but that is what you get when the politics of disillusion has run its course. There is no future in a bloodless technocratic centrism that ignores the country’s biggest social and economic problems in the name of “realism”. That much we know. The big question is whether Labour moderates can learn from their failure.

The evidence of Peter Mandelson’s recent leaked memo, in which he bemoaned “the last five years’ of intellectual sterility”, is not encouraging. A frank assessment of where Labour went wrong would admit that its period of intellectual sterility began twenty years ago, under him. Telling Corbyn that he is wrong because he can’t win simply confirms the impression that nothing has really changed. Labour’s recovery can’t start with a brute assertion of electoral logic. It has to start with a principled debate about the best way to achieve its goal of a stronger and fairer society. If it goes back to believing that winning elections is all that matters, it will fail even on this narrow measure of success. A hollowed out Labour Party with a minimalist offer cannot secure the broad support needed to govern.

Corbyn’s campaign only achieved lift-off because the Labour leadership contest seemed to be in danger of becoming a mindless stampede to the right. The mainstream candidates spent its opening days trying to outbid each other in the number of progressive commitments they proposed to dump – the mansion tax, the 50p higher rate, responsible capitalism – as if Labour could hope to win in 2020 by standing for less rather than more. They did this reflexively, in the erroneous belief that Labour lost because it was too radical. It was only after Corbyn had become the shock frontrunner that any of them sounded like they wanted to lead a party of the left. It’s hardly surprising that Labour’s membership didn’t buy it.

Many now expect Labour to descend into civil war, as early skirmishes over defence and fiscal policy would seem to confirm. But there is another scenario in which its different wings attempt to reach an historic compromise that allows them to marry principles with power in the way that Robin Cook envisaged. Corbyn and his supporters would learn to embrace compromise as a principled democratic choice while party moderates would move beyond narrow electoralism and attempt to recapture a genuine sense of idealistic purpose. Cook would have been a good rallying point for a project of that kind. Labour’s prospects over the next five years – perhaps its very survival – now depend its ability to find a new progressive consensus without him.

We talk the fiscal charter, Labour in chaos, and the lives of Terence Trent D'Arby. (Helen Lewis, Stephen Bush, George Eaton, Anna Leszkiewicz, Kate Mossman)

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Last night's Labour rebellion over the Conservatives' fiscal charter was smaller than party whips originally feared. Twenty one of Jeremy Corbyn's MPs abstained, rather than voting against the measure. But an issue on which Labour is far more divided is Trident. Only a handful of shadow cabinet members (Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Jon Trickett, Ian Murray) share Corbyn's unilateralist stance, with a majority, including shadow defence secretary Maria Eagle, opposed. 

The "maingate" vote on Trident renewal has long been scheduled for next year (around June) but the Tories are reportedly considering bringing it forward to December to exploit Labour's divisions. Eagle denounced the plan as a "despicable attempt to play politics" when I interviewed her this week. 

Now, the anti-Trident SNP is also seeking to cause trouble for Labour. In his speech at the party's conference, Westminster leader Angus Robertson announced that the nationalists would seek to use one of their opposition day debates to trigger a vote on the issue. He said: 

Can I just say to Jeremy Corbyn that one U-turn that he can’t consider is ditching his principled career-long opposition to Trident.

We will have to decide shortly at Westminster on Trident, and the SNP will resolutely oppose the renewal of weapons of mass destruction and the enormous waste of £100bn pounds.

Labour weren’t prepared to have a specific debate on Trident at their conference. I am pleased that the SNP is debating it here at our conference. I’m also happy to help Jeremy Corbyn and ensure that there is an early debate and vote at Westminster aimed at opposing Trident renewal.

Hopefully Jeremy will join the SNP in the lobbies as he has often done in the past in opposing Trident, although I am not holding my breath that he can bring his colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party with him.

The prospect of an early vote on Trident leaves Corbyn with little time to reach a position. Eagle is about to begin a review of defence policy, including nuclear weapons, for the party. Should Corbyn whip MPs in favour of the SNP motion, he would risk a mass rebellion, including possible shadow cabinet resignations. Alternatively, he could allow a free vote, or simply ignore the motion (which is purely symbolic). But this would hand the SNP a chance to denounce Corbyn as "weak" and reaffirm its status as the only major anti-Trident party. Rather than attacking the Labour leader's policies, the nationalists' focus since his election has been on presenting Labour as too divided to "stand up for Scotland". Few issues provide better opportunities to do so than Trident. It is for this reason, among others, that Corbyn will find it so hard to make progress north of the border. 

WARNING: This blog is for people watching The Apprentice. Contains spoilers!

Read up on episode 1 here.

Did you know the Barbican has a special cactus room? With 2,000 different types of species and everything?! Yeah! It’s not all just sound exhibitions and performance art. Who knew? Let’s definitely wake up at 5.50am to catch a black cab there one day!

…said no one ever. Apart from Alan Sugar, who hoicked his 17 remaining contestants out of bed and to the Barbican’s conservatory in London in order to give them a lecture at dawn about the beauty qualities of cactus oil. He should know. It’s how he keeps his signature fuzz so irresistibly fuzzy.

For the second episode of the week it’s a double whammy – a combination of the Questionable Cosmetic Product Task and the longstanding favourite Attempting To Cobble Together An Advert Task.

Yes, the candidates have to market a cactus-based shampoo. And whichever team markets a cactus-based shampoo the least worst wins.

“What you’ve got to worry about is wrapping that branding round the cactus,” Sugar explains, as the cacti around him wilt in horror at the exploitation.

The teams are split back along gender lines – the women look thrilled at this because they’ve witnessed what meatheads the men are; the men look thrilled at this because they are meatheads.

Discussing salon owner Charleine with his new team, Richard observes, “she’ll be henpecking at every single girl because their pecking order hasn’t been settled”, picking a peck of pickled peppers.

But in spite of Charleine’s shampoo experience (and incessant protests), the hair extension specialist Aisha heads up the women’s team, Connectus. And digital marketing agency director Richard picks his way up the pecking order to lead team Versatile.

They brainstorm about cacti for a bit.

“Quite deserty,” muses plumbing business owner Joseph.

“Live life rough. Then make it smooth,” is Brett’s offer.

“Manly moist?” moots Scott.

“My idea is sexiness,” honks Mergim. “A gentleman with a haircut similar to mine, and slow motion women just – looking at his face.” Dream big, Mergim.

Instead, they come up with “Western”.

The women decide to go for the “grey pound” with their product – the both insultingly and sleazily named “Desert Secret” – and duly book a handful of women in their twenties to model the over-45s product.

The men’s team march a nonplussed male model into a bucket, strip him down to his underwear and film him lathering his hair as they empty a watering can over his head. A dignified television debut, all told.

Project manager Richard is doubtful about the advert. “Let me just re-go over my brief,” he says, sayingly. “I can’t accept a cactus getting lost on this.” No cacti were harmed in the making of this advertisement, Richard.

Ruth, of neon tartan skirt suit fame, volunteers to be the subject of the women’s billboard advert; they decide their young models don’t look quite like they’re in on the eponymous desert secret yet.

The shell of Claude’s egg head cracks gently into a smile at the advert: “It’s bright, it’s colourful, and it seems to be resonating with ladies of a certain age,” he exclaims, yolk running down his cheeks in delight.

Then comes pitching to the inevitable “panel of experts”.

Corporate account manager Natalie pitches for team Connectus. “Good morning, everyone, we’re delighted to be here today,” she says, in the tone of a hostage announcing their own execution. “Now, we’ve got a secret to share with you all today.” Small pause. “A secret from the desert.” Dramatic pause. “Desert secret.” Even the sphinxes of Ancient Egypt weren’t this enigmatic.

Scott for the boys’ team is even worse. “More now than ever before is th..the…men spending more time and money on their appearance.” His mind blanks as the ever-ready backing violins quiver into a crescendo. “So we’ve made this sleek design…make be appearing really well on the shelf…”

These pitch is result of being preparation not enough, eh Scott?

But matters it not! For Sugar, who informs everyone that he first did this task when he was 16 at school – “the thought behind it was to exploit the virtue of the cactus,” he recalls, poetically – thinks the men’s campaign was great.

“It’s got to be one of the best,” he says, to the men’s delight. They seem to be forgetting that the bar for such tasks was significantly lowered by the misogynist propaganda Octi-Kleen advert of 2010, so it’s not exactly an achievement.

Sugar, whose love of exploiting the virtue of the cactus was deeply wounded by Aisha’s interpretation of exploiting the virtue of the cactus flower, heaven forbid, fires her: “You came up with the name, you came up with the brand, and you came up with the flower.”

The unholy trinity of business blunders.

Candidates to watch:

Ruth

The first time an Apprentice candidate has ever been endearing two tasks in a row.

Richard

Avoided taking any responsibility for anything. Could be a useful skill.

Elle

Relentlessly negative, but she did teach herself Latin. So she understands the team name Connectus, at least.

I'll be blogging The Apprentice each week. Click here for the previous episode blog. The Apprentice airs weekly at 9pm, Wednesday night on BBC One.

When David Cameron addressed the nation last week to deliver his assessment of Tory Britain, he spoke of security and stability, of well-paid jobs and better training for our young people. He sought to stamp out the nasty party image and highlight the “compassionate Conservatism” of his government.

There was only one standout problem with the world Cameron described. It’s not the real one.

If the Tories did take a moment to step into the world the rest of us live in, they would find a very different picture to the one they’re trying to paint. Because to be frank, kids are going hungry.

In my own constituency of Stoke-on-Trent North and Kidsgrove, 31 per cent of children are living in poverty. In one secondary school in my constituency 52 per cent of pupils qualify for free school meals. But even these statistics do not do justice to the terrible reality of poverty in our city and our country today.

While Iain Duncan Smith is lounging at the dispatch box describing food banks as a "lifestyle choice", I’m seeing and hearing the realities of child poverty in Britain today. I’m hearing from teachers who are sneaking snacks to their students to make sure they’ve eaten something, and I’m seeing the stress and worry of young families whose wages aren’t enough to get them through the month.

It has long been understood that many families struggle to afford to pay for school meals during term time. Free school meals have become an established part of our education system, since their introduction in 1906. Many schools have gone further in their attempts to tackle child food poverty, with breakfast and after school clubs and other support becoming increasingly common. These projects make a huge difference and ensure that our most vulnerable children are receiving the nutrition they need during term time.

But what happens to these kids when school is out and the holidays loom? How can we expect them to achieve their potential when they are returning to school in September malnourished?

And let us not be in any doubt - that is exactly what is happening at the present time.

The statistics on this are stark. A recent report by Kellogg’s on Isolation and Hunger in the school holidays has found that a third of parents have skipped a meal so that their kids could eat during the school holidays.

This is not just a tragedy in its own right, it is having a serious impact on the educational attainment of our poorest and most vulnerable students, and widening the divides in our society.

If a child is coming to school hungry and malnourished, then they are never going to achieve their full potential. Concentration, behaviour, the ability to learn, all of these things are affected if a child is not receiving the sustenance they need to get them through the day.

We can’t start to narrow the gap in pupil attainment until we recognise this gulf in opportunity between our poorest students and the rest. Nor can we expect teachers, even great teachers, to keep a child’s development on track without dealing with these structural inequalities. We cannot pretend that inspiration alone can overcome starvation.

If we cannot guarantee our children are being fed, we are depriving them not only of the joy of childhood but of the hopes of a better future.  That’s why I’m using my adjournment debate this week to start to shine a spotlight on the quiet crisis of holiday hunger, and to call on the government to recognise the problem and work with me to start to fix it.

But the impact of holiday hunger will reach far beyond those children who are directly affected. We live in a competitive, globalised world, and our country will rise or fall on the backs of the next generation.

JFK once said that “our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.” If we cannot provide for our children now, if we cannot ensure that the brightest kids of this generation have the opportunity to fulfil their potential, then we are hindering our national progress and condemning to a life of struggle and indignity the very young people who might otherwise have led our national renewal. If we do not take action now, we will pay for it for years to come.

Ruth Smeeth is Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North.

A distressed mother on Question Time confronted the Tory Energy Secretary Amber Rudd about her government's tax credit cuts policy. Rudd looked uncomfortable as the mother shouted "shame on you!", decrying the proposals that could see over 3m families £1,300 a year worse off.

Watch it here:

She was on the edge of tears as she told the minister:

"I voted for the Conservatives originally, because I thought you were going to be the better chance for me and my children. You're about to cut tax credits after promising you wouldn't. I work bloody hard for my money. To provide for my children to give them everything they've got – and you're going to take it away from me and them.

"I can hardly afford the rent I've got to pay, I can hardly afford the bills I've got to do, and you're going to take more from me . . . Shame on you!"

> Now read Anoosh Chakelian's Q&A on tax credits and the government's plans to cut them.

Carl is a crime novelist with one book published and another under way. His father has left him a house in Maida Vale and a collection of “alternative medicines”. On the first page of her final, posthumously published novel, Dark Corners, Ruth Rendell intimates that at least one of these facts will lead to Carl’s ruin.

Carl has a girlfriend called Nicola and a lodger called Dermot. Dermot soon becomes problematic. He is creepy, noisy and nosy and burrows his way into Carl’s life. When Carl sells slimming pills to an actress friend who then overdoses and dies, he finds himself the victim of blackmail. Confiding in Nicola only makes things worse and Carl’s world is soon spinning out of control. Rendell handles all of this with her usual economical brilliance and although Carl is no Raskolnikov, when his way of life is threatened, a violent demise is never far from his mind.

In the meantime, the dead actress’s friend Lizzie has moved into her flat and begins to live the life of the deceased, dressing in her clothes and pretending that the chichi abode belongs to her, in scenes that echo the Hollywood film Single White Female. But then Lizzie is kidnapped and held to ransom, while her happily retired father finds that his hobby of exploring London’s bus routes leads to him foiling a terrorist plot. Back in Carl’s world, Dermot’s new girlfriend, Sybil, is proving to be as much of an impediment as Dermot. Something must be done and Carl reckons that there is only one avenue open to him.

Dark Corners is twisty, character-­driven and claustrophobic. Rendell’s London seems full of everyday menace, while her prose remains elegantly understated. And yet . . . It would be lovely to describe this as a fitting peroration to one of the most
accomplished careers in crime fiction but it is not quite vintage Rendell. There is a sense of subplots not adequately explored, or left hanging. Characters don’t always act plausibly and there are a couple of coincidences too many. My initial thought was that perhaps Rendell had finished the book towards the very end of her life but I have learned that the manuscript was handed over before her stroke at the beginning of 2015. That stroke took away one of the all-time greats, the author of more than 60 novels, together with glittering collections of short stories, plus works of non-fiction.

I interviewed Baroness Rendell at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2007 and remember precious little about the encounter, other than that I was as nervous as a schoolboy up before the head teacher. Her reputation was fearsome. She took no prisoners and was not about to abide lazy questions or glib theorising. Her first novel, which introduced Reg Wexford to the world, had been published in 1964 (when I was four). I only started reading her in 1987, the year my first Inspector Rebus book was published. She soon became a compulsion. Her fictional town of Kingsmarkham was no pastoral idyll. She took on female circumcision (and, as a life peer for the Labour Party, she introduced to the House of Lords the bill that became the Female Genital Mutilation Act).

She also dealt with racism, misogyny, social change, refugees and their mistreatment, the rise of celebrity culture and much more. Some readers preferred her non-Wexford books, the ones in which she shone a torch on London’s dispossessed and dysfunctional. Dark Corners is just such a book. Rendell once said she thought that “to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden” – and so it proves for poor Carl, although his burden only increases afterwards.

Rendell’s enduring legacy is that she took the English crime novel away from Mayhem Parva (Colin Watson’s disparaging shorthand for the idealised village that became the location for many golden-age whodunnits and its way of life) and gave the genre a new breadth, depth and confidence. Her books were realistically contemporary and there was room within them for rigorous and explicit social commentary. The “puzzle” element of the whodunnit was never quite enough for Rendell.

I once described her as an expert witness of the human condition and plenty of readers seem to agree. The MP Gerald Kaufman has argued that, were she not thought of as a crime writer, she would have won the Booker Prize; for some readers, her psychologically complex “Barbara Vine” novels were attempts to do just that. Above all, she was an extraordinary entertainer whose opening lines grab you by the eyeballs:

“Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.” (A Judgement in Stone)

“The world began to fall apart at nine in the evening. Not at five when it happened, nor at half-past six when the policemen came and Eve said to go into the little castle and not show herself, but at nine when all was quiet again and it was dark outside.” (The Crocodile Bird)

“The gun was a replica. Spenser told Fleetwood he was ninety-nine per cent sure of that.” (Live Flesh)

There is an immediacy, a confidence, about these openings. We are in the hands of a born storyteller, which is why it is surprising that in Dark Corners she glosses over Carl’s career as a novelist – his experiences at the sharp end of crime and punishment might have been used to some effect in the novel he is trying to write.

Still, the book is at its best in its atmosphere of palpable dread and awful inevitability. Dermot, a churchgoer who admits to himself (and therefore to us) that he has “no honour”, makes the skin crawl. Alongside Carl, Lizzie and Sybil, he is psychologically damaged. The dark corners referred to in the novel’s title are not only physical spaces in Rendell’s London suburbs but the nooks and crannies of the human mind, places where reason starts to fracture and where our uglier impulses are made manifest and given free rein.

Ruth Rendell died in May, a scant five months after the literary world had lost P D James. These were indisputably the two giants of post-1945 crime fiction in the UK. They were also great friends and admirers of one another’s work. James was possibly the better stylist and held more dearly to the motifs of the classic English detective story. Rendell’s world seemed more urbanised and atomised, appealing to European film-makers (Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie, Pedro Almodóvar’s Live Flesh, François Ozon’s The New Girlfriend) in a way that James’s work did not.

It was Rendell who probably had the bigger influence on the generation of British crime writers that followed, writers exploring the margins and the marginalised of our contemporary cities and towns, locating crumbling relationships, misshapen desires and motive-yielding acts of violence. But is this the end of the story? The rumour persists that, several years ago, Rendell penned a Wexford book to be published at some point after her death, a book that would add a final full stop to the inspector’s long, illustrious career. It may or may not be true but we will always have her work to remind us that crime fiction at its best holds a mirror up to society, showing us that dark corners exist everywhere and within us all.

Ian Rankin’s next Inspector Rebus novel, “Even Dogs in the Wild”, is published next month by Orion

Dark Corners by Ruth Rendell is published by Hutchinson (288pp, £18.99)

Maybe we can start (and end) with mouths. Karl Kraus, the Viennese gadfly, said that a portrait was a painting in which the mouth was wrong. If you look at Goya’s portrait of Antonia Zárate (1805-06, above), you see a beautiful woman whose mantilla lace is expertly rendered. There is something, however, not exactly wrong but not quite right with the mouth. The eye’s instinct to auto-correct makes it right but if you override this reflex, you can see that her mouth is faintly odd, like a brilliantly repaired harelip, almost perfect. The portrait of Andrés del Peral (before 1798) presents a man with unintimidated fuck-you eyes, his hand inside a flowered waistcoat and a mouth dragged down to the right – possibly palsied, perhaps poorly painted. It is hard to know.

Mouths in nature are often wrong. Laurence Olivier hated his upper lip. Kenneth Branagh was on The Graham Norton Show the other day, hiding his thin upper lip behind a beard. Years ago, as I took his photograph in New Zealand, David Lodge ruefully remarked, “The mouth that has defeated a hundred photographers.” Think of the bottom lip bestowed on Bourbon kings: a jut like the lip of a jug. Think of Damien Hirst’s mouth.

One of the best things in “Goya: the Portraits” is a red chalk drawing of Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez (1798-99). It is the spitting image of Hirst, with that tough, terse, lipless shrewdness – the mouth of a market stallholder in Leeds – inadequately disguised in a wig like an inverted empire sofa with scroll arms. There is a Self-Portrait (1815) later in the show, in which it looks as if the Botox went wrong in the right of the mouth.

All of this reminds me of Lucian Freud’s etchings, which render noses like Jan van Calcar’s anatomical drawings for Vesalius – a webbing of muscles. It’s as if the noses have been working out like bodybuilders; an attempt, you might think, to reproduce the brushstroke on the etching plate, resulting in the unrealistic cable-knit nose. But check it out and you will discover that this is how many noses are in reality, slightly deformed but assimilated to a mean by the eye.

There are many brilliant mouths on show here – for example, the vacant, open mouth of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón (1783). You can almost hear him trying to breathe through his blocked nose. Or take a look at Ferdinand VII in Court Dress (1814-15, above), an impostor who has pillaged the dressing-up box. Even the clothes look ersatz. But the face is authentic and calls to mind Rigaud in Dickens’s Little Dorrit. When Rigaud laughs, a change comes over his face, “more remarkable than prepossessing. His moustache went up under his nose, and his nose came down over his moustache, in a very sinister and cruel manner.”

Goya’s aristocrats (and there are a great many in this show, as you would expect from a court painter) divide into two types. There are the kings and queens, who look plain and implausible, like farmers in fancy dress, sharing a good deal of facial DNA with the mangel-wurzel. And there are the satellite aristocrats, the courtiers, whose mien is expressionless, whose default blankness is that of Henleigh Grandcourt in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, men for whom emotion is vulgar, whose eyes impose distance between their person and the suppliant viewer. Neither you nor the artist is permitted intimacy. There are a great many of these frozen types in this exhibition and sometimes their unseasonably adult children, already adept at putting the viewer in his place. You can’t come in. No admittance.

This brings us to a crux in the theory of portrait painting. In Sartre’s La nausée, the protagonist Roquentin visits the museum at Bouville and reads into the portraits the potted, exemplary lives of the sitters. The most notorious instance of this is Walter Pater’s rhapsody on the Mona Lisa. Oscar Wilde didn’t care if Pater had invented the backstory of Leonardo’s painting: the passage was an example of the critic as artist. Most are still buying into the sentimental idea that portraits allow the viewer access to the soul and the intricate psychology of the sitter. Alas. In the catalogue, Manuela B Mena Marqués tells us: “Goya’s later portraits not only expressed his sitters’ psychology and the hidden shadows of their personalities (as did his early ones) but they now also conveyed changing emotions. He achieved this with heavily charged brushstrokes . . .” With heavily charged brushstrokes. Well, now you say it, it seems obvious.

You have to remember that between October 1792 and February 1793, Goya suffered a kind of apoplexy that left him deaf: rather a disadvantage if you are to capture the essence of the sitter in a few sittings, sometimes only a single sitting. The truth is that painting is as disadvantaged with regard to psychology as ballet is when it comes to efficient plot narration. Francis Bacon, when asked about this creaking commonplace, was characteristically to the point: it was an example of overreach but faces often reflected the lives lived by their owners. As George Orwell put it, by the age of 50, everyone has the face he deserves. It is a half-truth. Shakespeare is truer when he says, “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” A three-quarter truth.

Nevertheless, Marqués has this to say about Goya’s portrait of The Duke of Wellington (1812, above) and the artist’s “exceptional degree of both conscious and intuitive empathy”: “The duke still seems to see and be overwhelmed by the terrible scenes of the Battle of Arapiles, which had taken place a few days before Goya painted him . . .” The cliché reaches its climax by the end of the paragraph: “Goya penetrated to the very heart of his models, and in this case did not see the satisfaction of a victorious soldier but a sensitive human being, a lover of art and women, shocked by the savagery he had witnessed.” Is that all? The art critic as clairvoyant. I can just make out the encrypted names of his mistresses.

Yet there is a scintilla of truth in these spurious claims. The portrait of Wellington is a surprise, especially if you compare it to Ferdinand Guillemardet (1798), France’s ambassador to Spain and a member of the convention who voted for the execution of Louis XVI. Guillemardet’s bicorne hat on the table is a great combustion of feathers. His sash and sword are another cascade of red, white and blue. He is in black. His face is calm and fearless – whereas the sashed and bemedalled Wellington shows us a slightly alarmed face and an apprehensive rabbit mouth. You wouldn’t take an order from this person unless you were a waiter. There are three stars on his chest, which seems right. This isn’t a five-star general: with so much gold braid, he looks like a corn dolly. For a five-star specimen, see General Nicolas Philippe Guye (1810), who looks as if he was kitted out by Fort Knox.

As well as the oil of Wellington, there is a little sanguine portrait, in red chalk over black chalk – a study that comprehensively outstrips the official portrait. Lucian Freud always sidestepped questions about portraits and psychology, usually diverting the question to what viewers thought, how relatives regarded the portraits, and so on. Pressed, he would only say that the portrait was a painting like any other, by which he meant the internal logic of intrinsic form. The Wellington drawing is a total dark-pink harmony, a chord of colour, and it is all suggestion – especially the mouth, which is completely successful. It is intimate and it is private, completely unofficial.

The best things in this show are the drawings. There is, in the final room, a black chalk drawing of Goya’s son Javier Goya y Bayeu (1824), the only one of his children to survive into adulthood. It is brilliant and unsparing – father and son were not on good terms – so we see the plump under-chin, the poached eyes on ghost (as Joyce has it in Ulysses), the greying Stewart Granger sideburns, the heaped hair, the suggestion of full, sulky lips. Goya has caught depression in all its obliterating singleness. It is a tiny drawing but as good as Freud’s portrait of the Duke of Devonshire at his most alcoholically troubled, where we see more than usual amounts of the top of his bowed head. Here, too, is Francisco Otín (1825), another tiny drawing, black chalk on paper, of a man with swept-forward hair and bilious, hungover eyes, who looks as if he has just crawled, unwashed, out of bed and into his clothes. Even his dishevelled moustache looks rackety.

One of the most intriguing drawings is Friar Juan Fernández de Rojas (1817-19, above), done in black chalk and graphite. It depicts a head whose eyes are slits, opened a fraction to show only the whites. The mouth is open. It might be singing, dying, experiencing religious ecstasy, or coming. The open mouth is like a Francis Bacon. What it is expressing is an enigma, an enigma that holds us. Painters know that faces are in reality action paintings, just as much as they are settled in repose. Rembrandt’s etchings and drawn self-portraits are his record of attempts to capture fleeting expressions. They all touch on caricature and overstatement, like someone signing for the deaf at a theatre performance. Bacon’s solution is to settle on the scream, on an extreme that doesn’t seem rhetorical. You can’t rehearse a scream. It is prima facie sincere. With Friar Juan Fernández de Rojas, Goya is there before Bacon. At a stroke, vistas of expressionless aristocrats are cancelled.

But there are too many of them in this exhibition for it to be a success. They aren’t bad. Some of them are passable. You feel too often like Konstantin in Chekhov’s The Seagull, when he points out that the older writer Trigorin, his mother’s companion, has his methods worked out. There is something practised, something automatic, something too easily satisfied. I found myself longing for Goya’s French contemporary Ingres – Ingres, in love with his own incomparable virtuosity.

Goya: the Portraits runs at the National Gallery, London WC2 until 10 January 2016. For details visit: nationalgallery.org.uk

Heart failure patient Gordon Hennessy doesn’t go into hospital as often as he used to. These days he monitors his own vital signs using a package of technology, education and support from clinicians at Bristol Community Health.

The health centre has been working in partnership with Philips to deliver an innovative supported self-care project, aimed at building evidence for a large-scale, long-term condition management programme. Sponsored by the West of England Academic Health Science Network and concentrated on the population of one GP practice in Bristol, the project focuses on increasing patients’ confidence in managing their own health needs at home, keeping them independent for longer. It also highlights more complex patients who require intensive monitoring and regular support to prevent their conditions becoming worse. If successful, it will be expanded across Bristol.

“All patients self-care to some extent, and supported self-care is all about enabling them to do that better – giving them the tools and support to help them manage their health and well-being,” says Hanna Eklind, a community matron at Bristol Community Health.

As new technologies come on to the market, more opportunities to manage health better are being created, bringing with them many benefits for an NHS under pressure. No longer does the patient experience have to be fragmented and reliant on appointments that need to be made many days, or even weeks in advance. With the Internet of Caring Things, big data analytics and algorithms, as well as secure cloud-based technologies, it is now possible for care teams to monitor hundreds of different people in different locations at the same time – reducing costs and improving efficiencies – and for individuals to take much more responsibility for their own health.

“By securely connecting patient-gathered information to clinical data and turning this into actionable information, we’re helping promote better self-management,” explains Alan Davies, director of home health care at Philips. “Technology is empowering patients to take control. It gives them a better sense of their own well-being and encourages them to do something about stabilising or managing it.”

Pilot projects that encourage patients to take a more active role in managing their health have identified big cost savings for health providers. In America, an at-home telehealth programme for patients with multiple chronic conditions, operated by Philips and Banner Health, reduced care costs by 27 per cent; it also reduced acute and long-term costs by 32 per cent over a six-month period. These savings were driven by a reduction in hospitalisation rates of 45 per cent over the same period.

“Telehealth is opening up choices for patients and providers, giving them the freedom to transform how, when and where proactive care is delivered,” said Derek Smith, senior vice-president of Hospital to Home at Philips. “By focusing on those patients who generate the greatest health-care spend, we’re able to help these individuals get better care in the comfort of their own homes, while helping health-care providers achieve the financial reductions they need.”

Prevention better than cure
Of course, the benefits of supported self-care are not restricted to those with acute long-term, pre-diagnosed conditions. They also apply to individuals who can use supported self-care to help slow down the worsening of milder forms of illness and disease. As we know, the best way to optimise our health and well-being is to limit risks and take advantage of prevention interventions. Technology can help facilitate this, be it by encouraging people to increase physical activity, balancing nutrition, tracking vital health indicators before a problem occurs or reminding people to take their medicines.

Technology could, for example, prove to be a useful tool in the battle against the big killers: heart disease, stroke, cancer, respiratory diseases and liver disease – conditions that account for more than 150,000 deaths a year, some 20 per cent of which are believed to be entirely avoidable, according to the Department of Health. Although there can be many reasons why people develop these diseases, lifestyle factors such as smoking, obesity and high levels of alcohol consumption increase the risk.

For example, about a sixth of the total UK population smokes cigarettes, including 22 per cent of adult men, 17 per cent of adult women and roughly 8 per cent of teenagers. Smoking accounts for more than a third of all respiratory deaths, more than a quarter of deaths from cancer and about one-seventh of cardiovascular disease deaths. Overall, about half of regular cigarette smokers will eventually be killed by their addiction.

How can self-care technologies help these people? Surveys show that about two-thirds of current smokers would like to stop smoking. Mobile apps have been developed to help them achieve this. The programme of support on offer includes daily trackers, money saving calculators, motivational pictures and videos, and signposting to other services – all in the palm of the user’s hand.

Similar apps exist to help people lose weight, get fit, track the number of calories or units of alcohol they’ve consumed, or nudge them to move if they’ve been sitting for too long – easily done, when you consider our increasingly sedentary pursuits, be it at a desk, in a car or in front of the television.

Apps such as these are a familiar addition to many smartphones these days. However, there are others that are even more intelligent when it comes to the management of health conditions. There are apps to check for signs of skin damage, apps to allow cancer patients to manage chemotherapy toxicity effectively . . . It is even possible to attach ECG machines to smartphones. Meanwhile, Philips has developed apps to help diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients manage their own care in partnership with health professionals, while the company’s eCare Co-ordinator and eCare Companion programmes connect clinicians to patients and enable remote monitoring and intervention.

Quality first
The integrity of the data a tool carries is vital if it is to be useful for both clinician and patient. As an industry leader and global brand that works in partnership with health systems around the world, Philips tests all of its new tools thoroughly, both before they hit the market and throughout their lifespan. However, any app that can be downloaded off the internet needs to be investigated properly to ensure it does what it says it does, otherwise patient safety could be compromised. The NHS is aware of these risks and has launched its own Apps Library that contains only those apps it has reviewed for safety. 

Equally, health-care professionals need to understand which apps and other forms of self-care technologies are able to meet the needs of patients, and which patients should be given access to the technologies in the first place.

“GPs feel accountable for their patients and want to know that they are safe,” says Alan Davies. “So one of the things Philips does with supported self-care is to make sure GPs have access to the information they need.  It’s vital that we make the connection between any data an individual may be tracking and the medical data tracked by professionals.”

A key factor here is ensuring that patients are supported when it comes to using and interacting with these new technologies, Davies says. “I’ve talked to some GPs who are concerned about those patients who, instead of being motivated to manage their health within a set of parameters, become more anxious given this clinical knowledge. These are legitimate concerns but can be addressed.”

For instance, it is possible to use modelling techniques to assess a person’s propensity and capability to use and understand technology and its results, particularly more complex machines, such as blood-pressure cuffs, scales and glucometers. “There’s a proportion of the population for whom it may not be suitable for them to use what’s on offer, but for those who can use it we look to educate them through one of our content partners,” he explains. The British Lung Foundation, for example, provides videos for people with COPD, who are then tested on what they have learned, while non-clinical supplementary health coaches can sometimes be provided to answer questions and provide additional support.

While many patients may be nervous or unsure at first, it is often the case “that, once people are used to the new technology, they don’t want to let it go because it does provide a lot of care and reassurance”, Davies says.

These comments are reflected by Gordon Hennessy’s own experiences. He initially found the technology used to monitor his heart condition “daunting” but soon got used to it.

“I’ve found it very reassuring. My community nurse is at the end of the phone, and my doctor’s at the end of the phone,” Hennessy says. “This scheme gives you confidence. If there’s anything wrong my doctor will pick it up.

“It certainly helps me, and I think it would help other people, too.”

This article is part of a thought-provoking series on living health, brought to you by New Statesman in association with Philips, that looks at how technology, innovation and big data are helping to improve your health and our health-care system.

The Gibraltar Financial Services Commission has signed a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) with Hong Kong over alternative investment funds (AIFs), reports International Advisor. It should improve co-operation in supervising the funds. This will all help the economy, which according to Yahoo! Finance is already going to reach double digits over the next 12 months.

There are elements that could knock it off course, naturally. The Gibraltar Chronicle reports some concerns over self-sufficiency should Britain pull out of Europe, as both the “yes” and “no” campaigns start to hot up in earnest. That said, it also confirms that Gibraltar Airport has had a record year. It’ll be even more popular when, as the Daily Telegraph reports, tunnels built for wartime purposes are filled with £millions worth of wine.

Finally, having covered the Britain’s Got Talent entry from Gibraltar it would be wrong not to mention Elisha Lang (12) reaching the final of Spain’s La Voz Kids, even if, as the Olive Press reports, there was some confusion about her origins after she had some unhelpful advice about confirming where she was from. She’s 12 and deserves a break – we wish her and all contestants well.

With a screech of brakes and the roar of a U-turn, the Government has announced plans to devolve powers over abortion laws to the Scottish parliament at Holyrood.

The question of the devolution of abortion law has already been a flashpoint for political posturing and hard bargaining over the last year, after unionist leaders vowed to support further devolution during the independence referendum; this latest development offers the potential to develop into an unholy row.

It has been a complex story so far. Abortion law was initially included among the recommendations for devolution by the Smith Commission last year, having been proposed by the Green Party and agreed by the SNP, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. It is, noted Lord Smith, "an anomolous reservation" given that Scotland already has powers over healthcare and end-of-life issues including assisted suicide.

But the issue was dramatically pulled from the Commission's final report in the very final moments of negotiations after Labour designated abortion law a "red line issue" and refused to sign the final package until it was removed. 

Now, apparently it is back on the agenda.  "I do not see a convincing constitutional reason for why abortion law should not be devolved," Scottish Secretary David Mundell told the Scottish Affairs Committee this week, adding that the Scotland Bill would be amended to reflect this decision when it reaches report stage later this year.

A debate on the subject took place in the Commons in July after three Catholic MPs tabled a similar, cross-party amendment. The three MPs – all members of the pro-life parliamentary group, and none of whom represent a constituency in Scotland – seemed to be working on the reasoning that a Holyrood parliament seeking to flex new muscles might review current abortion rules after powers were devolved, thus opening the door to stricter measures north of the border. If so, the current consensus around a 24-week time limit would be challenged, and perhaps then dismantled in piecemeal fashion in the rest of the UK.

One of the three, Liberal Democrat John Pugh, confirmed as much: "The 1967 Act [which legalised abortion] is defended as though it was holy writ and unamendable," he told me by email. "I think the Scots, if given the right to frame their own legislation would debate the subject in a more measured, less charged way and make sensible amendments. If they were able to do this a less polarised discussion could take place in England." 

It is for the same reason that Labour so vociferously opposes the devolution – Harriet Harman was reported to have gone "ballistic" when the topic was first raised, fearing a Scottish clampdown.

There is some precedent: in Northern Ireland, which already has similar powers, abortion is illegal except under “extraordinary circumstances”. Those seeking safe and legal abortions are forced to travel to England to procure them.

However there is little evidence that Holyrood would act to bring in more draconian laws. Polling shows that there is little public appetite in Scotland to do so; while 80 per cent of Scots consider the Northern Ireland situation “unacceptable”.

Indeed, historically Scotland has taken a more liberal approach to abortion than England and Wales: even prior to the 1967 Act a Scottish physician would not be prosecuted for aborting a fetus providing it was undertaken “in good faith” and for “reputable medical reasons”. In 1965, the eminent professor of obstetrics Sir Dugald Baird reported he was already aborting around two per cent of all pregnancies in the Aberdeen area, having clarified that there was little danger of prosecution. 

It was a Scottish politician too, David Steel, who introduced what would become the Abortion Act as a private members bill a year later, following extensive discussions with Sir Dugald.

Nevertheless, the outcome of any debate in Holyrood is difficult to predict. The SNP, with its comfortable majority, considers abortion to be a matter of conscience; several prominent SNP figures – Alex Salmond, for example – have previously voiced support for lower time limits. 

Any such debate would cause a major headache for the party, with the potential to alienate the thousands of Catholic voters who have swollen its ranks in recent years, deserting Scottish Labour. This election, nearly half of Catholics (48 per cent) voted SNP, up from only 17.9 per cent in 2010, while senior Catholic figures including the Archbishop of Glasgow have expressed personal support. 

The group is a decisive bloc in Scottish politics, making up a larger proportion of the whole (15.9 per cent, as opposed to 7.4 per cent in England and Wales) and an even larger proportion of those in favour of independence (58 per cent of Catholics voted “yes” in the 2014 referendum, while 60 per cent of Protestants voted no). 

Perhaps with this in mind, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has reacted cautiously, welcoming the announcement on the grounds that all new powers are welcome, but in the same breath announcing that there are no plans to change current laws. It is a savvy move, one that she must hope will take the heat out of the issue, avoiding confrontation with her Catholic supporters and reassuring women's groups and the Church of Scotland, both of which have warned of the 'cross border trade' in abortions which would result in differing laws in the two lands.

It is a softly softly approach, not unlike the manner in which it currently treats its powers of taxation – Holyrood has, but so far neglected to use, the ability to vary the tax rate by up to three pence. She must carefully walk the line that Scotland deserves the power to debate and decide its own laws with regard to abortion, but that it will choose not to, at least for now.

"If you're going to say something radical, make sure you wear a suit". This is the solitary piece of advice Alex Salmond's grandfather is said to have sent him packing with as he started his career in politics thirty years ago.

As party conference season draws to an end, it's this advice which separates the two main parties in British politics, and defines their current trajectory. One side gets it, the other ignores it.

It isn't really, of course, a line about what constitutes proper dress - or at least not just. What Salmond's grandfather meant was simple: if people can pigeonhole you, they will – so don't let them. Confound expectations.

It remains as relevant as ever. Unpack why and you get to three truths that most pollsters will tell you define the ways voters engage with politics: they consume it in very small quantities, largely through TV and newspapers; they make their mind up quickly; and, most crucial of all, they filter what they see back through the lens of what they already think. If you sound and look how people expect you to, they will box you in as that, even if what you're saying is eminently sensible. So much is not about what is being said, but who is saying it.

This is difficult to absorb when most political discussion is still wedded to the idea of a rational-actor electorate. But the reality is most normal people respond to signals not details (and abnormal people in fact: most of those who read this article and tweet me furiously about it will only have bothered reading the headline and top line).

Thus a huge part of electoral politics is challenging prejudices people have about you. In this contest advantage accrues to those who can do unexpected things; the counter-intuitive. So, for instance, only a party that can convincingly present as moderate earns the right to govern as radical.

This is ultimately the fatal mistake made by the many people – including myself – who wrongly thought Ed Miliband had a shot at Number 10. Because he never ruthlessly and publicly dealt with Labour's weaknesses, particularly spending and welfare, his broader agenda never got a hearing. James Morris argues Miliband's early years spent talking about “too far too fast”, however economically justified, just hardened for voters their own pre-existing prejudices: that Labour wanted to spend more and can't be trusted with tough decisions. Later, Miliband just switched the subject. As a result, BritainThinks found that even when he said things that polled well, voters simply asked “yes but where's the money coming from?” in a way they never did of the Conservatives.

Which brings us back to this year's party conferences.

The Conservatives spent most of their time in Manchester, as they have since May, playing to their strengths while happily, ruthlessly and publicly attempting to deal with their weaknesses among undecided voters. For “party of the rich”, see the living wage and overtures on “the workers party”; for “the nasty party” see Cameron's paeans to equality. How substantial this in practice is irrelevant, in the short term at least. It was all clipped for the news for the same reason it will have cut through with floating voters: because it's counter-intuitive. It buys them cover to be quietly radical and, in many areas, push a traditional free-market agenda Michael Howard would never have got away with.

Labour badly needs to learn this skill: presenting as moderate, governing as radical. At the moment it is adept at precisely the opposite. Windy socialist rhetoric is cranked up only to be accompanied by fairly conventional social democratic ideas. An economic policy largely the same as Ed Balls’ sent the conference hall into raptures because it was wrapped in the crotchety language of anti-austerity.

This is the surest sign of a movement in love with the sound of its own voice. Everything it did will have entrenched voters’ prejudices about them, wittingly or not. To be fair, most damningly of all, it seemed designed precisely for that purpose. Every signal was aimed at pleasing the already converted and reaffirming their virtue. If there was any talk of persuasion, it only showed through in a desire to lecture the public: “busting myths”, “nailing the lie” and so on. Not an ounce of self-reflection, or an understanding that these rights have to be earned.

To be fair, the frenzy among activists was been whipped up largely in response to a half justified grievance: that New Labour managed to be seen as moderate but didn't exploit it by governing radically enough, as the Conservatives are now, particularly when it came to political economy.

But the fact remains: Labour will not get the chance to change the country again unless it re-learns what Alex Salmond's grandfather taught him. It will not even get a hearing until it is willing to confound perceptions of it among Conservative voters in particular, as the Tories have learnt to do. Why does it deserve one?

The reason this hasn't been done is that it's not easy. It doesn't mean aping every last detail of Conservative policy – but it does mean moving closer to the small-c conservative values that run through the population of this country outside its big cities: prudence, fairness as opportunity not just outcome, quiet patriotism, contribution. At the moment the party is a world away: obsessed with an arid Keynsianism, infatuated with ideas of entitlement and embarrassed about national identity.

The change here has to run deep; it has to be more than finding the most temperate words in a thesaurus. The challenge is to renew the party's politics in a way that intrinsically deals with its weaknesses, but leaves it with a prospectus bold enough to change the country. It has to look, over and over again, like it genuinely cares about things voters don't expect it to: the deficit, waste, unfairness in the welfare system; the middle as well as the bottom, as well as being comfortable with technology and innovation. Otherwise it will never be able to broach a conversation about inequality, reforming the economy so it works in the interests of the many, or tackling vested interests. And British politics will remain what it is today: a non-competitive sport. 

The morning after the latest mass shooting on American soil, I went to a street festival in my adopted home town of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The sun was out. Brass bands were playing. Children were mainlining sweets and charging about in a frenzy of high-fructose corn syrup. You would not have thought that their country was in the grip of an epidemic of attacks by murderous fanatics on schools, hospitals and universities.

As I write, the shooting of four people at a college in Flagstaff, Arizona, is the most recent gun attack to make the headlines in the US. One student died. It’s no exaggeration to say that by the time this piece is published, there may have been another. The previous attack, which took place in Oregon and left ten dead, was eight days earlier. This week, a YouGov study showed that 35 per cent of Americans think mass shootings are “a fact of life”.

The US has more mass shootings than any other nation in the world – five times as many as the Philippines, the next country to top that ignominious roll call. In America, they have become a meme, an idea with a life of its own that spreads like a virus wherever the conditions are right. In this case, the conditions are anger, entitlement, a background thrum of violence and easy access to firearms. Deaths in the US from gun violence, as Barack Obama pointed out in one of many such condolence speeches he has made during his time in office, enormously outnumber deaths from officially designated terrorist acts. “We spend over $1trn and pass countless laws and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so,” he said. “And yet we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths.”

This says more than Americans might wish to understand about the political priorities of their nation. Many of the same Americans who clutch their guns tighter after every new massacre will line up to forgo their civil rights at the first whisper of foreign terrorism. But violence committed by white American men is normal and natural, even at its bloodiest extremes. It cannot be terrorism, even if it is designed to produce terror, because it is not a threat to the social order.

Mass violence only gets to be terrorism when it is committed by cultural outsiders. Two years ago, my adopted hometown disintegrated into collective panic after two young men murdered three people with home-made explosives at the Boston marathon, just across the river. The entire metropolitan area was put under curfew as the man-hunt for the Tsarnaev brothers went on. The city was descended into a frenzy of fear that has yet to dissipate. T-shirts are still available in tourist shops and convenience stores bearing the legend “Boston Strong”, the rallying slogan used by Bostonites to declare that they would not be broken. Meanwhile, the reaction of the American public to the 35 mass shootings since 2005 has been one of sorrow – but not shock, and certainly not alarm.

There is a reason for that, and it is an ugly one. To many Americans, the Boston Bombers were following a different cultural script. They were foreigners. Muslim foreigners, at that. When a young Muslim man commits mass murder, he is a terrorist, a threat to the entire nation. When a young white man does the same . . . in the words of Jeb Bush: “Stuff happens.”

Killers who aren’t white men are usually described as terrorists, no matter how bonkers their manifesto, if they have one. Mass murder, in fact, is the one situation in which people from ethnic minorities can count on being treated seriously as political agents. A white man who commits mass murder, by contrast, can write a detailed, grammatically coherent manifesto, distribute it ahead of time, explaining precisely why he picked his victims and what statement he was hoping to make – and commentators will fall over themselves to dislocate his crimes from any possible political context, will insist that these are isolated acts of individual disturbance, will twist themselves into discursive knots to avoid stating the obvious. Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker this week, opines that “the great puzzle is how little school shooters fit any kind of pattern”. 

But there is a pattern. There is a clear pattern. More than 98 per cent of mass murders in the United States are committed by men. Most of them are young, most of them are frustrated and almost all of them are white. But when the overwhelming maleness of mass shootings is raised, the explanations sound an awful lot like excuses. It’s the effect of testosterone on the brain. It’s video games. It’s just the way boys are. It’s just the way men break. Women collapse inwards – men explode outwards, and sometimes they take A good few others with them.  These young men are mad, and that’s the end of the matter. When Dylan Roof murdered nine people at a historically black church in South Carolina earlier this year, Republican representative Sanford appeared on CNN to say:

“I don’t know what was going through the kid’s mind, but [it’s] certainly the act of a deranged human being, and this level of malice I think is unfathomable in this community, in this nation.”

To call Dylan Roof insane is to miss the point. To declare his violence unfathomable is deliberately to avoid the point. Most people who have reached the stage of contemplating such carnage are at least ethically deranged. But madness is also a political category, a taxonomic dumping ground for any behaviour that society doesn’t want to deal with. And the things the US doesn’t want to deal with right now are toxic masculinity, misogyny and racism.

The murderous ritual violence of young white men is political. The blogs and public posts of Elliott Rodger, Dylan Roof and Adam Lanza are steeped in the language of racism and misogyny, drenched in the conviction that they had been cheated of their birthright by women, people of colour or both, and. Their violence is political, and so is the tacit agreement by the American public that it is not political, must not be comprehended and will not be comprehended. 

Why does this matter to non-Americans? It clearly does matter, because every time a gunman lets rip in a college, a school or a church in the United States, it makes headlines across the world. It matters because America is still looked to to provide ethical leadership. It matters because the moral foundation of American power is its claim to uphold standards of freedom and justice - and to export them by force, if necessary. The ongoing meme of mass gun violence in America is not simply tragic. It is not simply embarrassing. It is a political statement in itself. 

My American friends are invariably stunned when I tell them that in Britain it took just one school tragedy – the Dunblane massacre of 1996 – to persuade politicians and the public to institute a ban on private handgun ownership on the mainland, giving us some of the toughest firearms legislation in the world.

I’m not claiming that Britain is a politically reasonable or humane place. We do, after all, have a queen, an ancient and arcane parliamentary system where bigots and aristocrats bellow at each other like howler monkeys over how quickly to strip welfare from the poor, a surveillance apparatus the Stasi could only dream of, and Boris Johnson. But since the institution of gun control, the murder rate in Britain has fallen. Experts can only guess as to how much of an effect gun control has had in the UK, just as they can only guess the potential impact in the USA, but the issue is not just about gun control. It’s about what gun control represents: namely, the collective will to do something to turn the tide of violence.

 American conservatives are prepared to sacrifice any number of constitutional and human rights in the name of protecting themselves from the real or notional violence of young Black and Muslim citizens. But after each US school shooting, as politicians, pundits and private citizens rally against gun control with the same breath they use to express condolences to the victims, they send the message that nothing can be done and nothing should be done. They send the message that this is tolerable. 

And one can tell a great deal about a society by the kinds of violence it is prepared to tolerate.

While young white men commit mass murder in increasing numbers, it is young black and Muslim men who are stopped and frisked on every street corner, gunned down for looking the wrong way at traffic cops and imprisoned in their hundreds of thousands. The failure of the US to discipline the violence of young white men is as much of a political statement as the excessive discipline it imposes on the bodies of young black citizens.

In the face of the murderous frustration felt by a minority of young white men, in the face of their viral, vengeful fury at being denied privileges they have always been told were owed to them, the US has thrown up its hands and said: these things happen. It’s tragic, of course, but it’s tragic in the way that a tornado or an earthquake is tragic. 

It’s just nature. Nothing can be done.

Something can be done, however, and something must be done. Something must be done to challenge the social attitudes that condone these shootings. Something must be done, in the US and beyond, to challenge the everyday violence of toxic masculinity that has become so normalised that it is culturally invisible. And that’s not just about school shootings. It’s about rape culture on campus. It’s about the vicious harassment of any woman who dares to raise her voice online. It’s about domestic violence. It’s about a culture that accepts all of these things as “natural”. A culture that looks at the carnage and says: well, boys will be boys.

How do you stop a meme? By changing the cultural climate in which it spreads. As a foreigner from a nation with its own political psychoses, my opinions count for less – but here’s my suggestion. 

Given that the one single quality that almost all mass murders have in common is gender, and given that when women use firearms, they generally do so in self-defence, a decent interim solution might be to impose a year-long waiting period on gun ownership – but only for men. Let the women and gender-variant people have all the guns they want right away.  If that sounds like a ludicrous piece of political positioning, well, it’s no more ludicrous than declaring these ritual massacres a “fact of life” – and no less political.

First it was the working poor that were made to pay for the latest round of welfare cuts, and now it is disabled widows. The Government’s claim that welfare reform is based on the principle of “fairness” is crumbling pretty fast.

The welfare state, which grew out of post-war solidarity, has for decades been based on the principle that those who pay into the system are entitled to expect that the safety net will be there for them when they fall on hard times.

This is a core British value, but it is one that the Tories undermining further almost every day.

In a little-noticed sleight of hand, the Government pressed forward yesterday with proposals to abolish a means-tested benefit which is as old as the NHS, replacing it with a repayable loan.

Support for Mortgage Interest (SMI) helps people on low incomes avoid having their homes repossessed when, for whatever reason, they lose their main source of income. As the name suggests, it covers the cost of interest repayments but it doesn’t extend to capital. It does not help people to pay off their mortgages, but simply helps them to fend off the mortgage companies and stop their homes being repossessed.  

It works in a similar way to housing benefit, except that SMI is vastly cheaper. The cost – at around £250,000 per year – represents just 0.002 per cent of the £12 billion which the Tories have said need to be saved from the welfare budget.

What the Tories have said, in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill is that this benefit should be replaced by a loan which the Government will then claw back from peoples’ estates when they die. In other words, it’s a death tax, and it is deeply ironic coming from a Government that has raised the inheritance tax threshold because, in George Osborne’s words:

“Conservatives support the most basic human instinct to provide for your children. And we believe that your home that you’ve worked for and you’ve saved for should belong to you and your family, not the tax man.”

Apparently this doesn’t apply if you’re poor.

Not only is the Government proposing to convert SMI to a loan – so you’ll get a loan with interest to pay off an interest on your loan – but at the same time they want to extend the waiting period before support can be paid from three month to nine. How many mortgage companies will wait that long? As you would expect, all the evidence suggests that this will drive up the number of repossessions. In the end this will cost the Government more as people will be forced into privately rented housing, where they will then have to claim housing benefit at on average three times the cost.

But evidence and expert opinion comes up against a brick wall with this Government. Ministers tell us they “believe” that the change won’t increase homelessness, and expect us to take their word for it.

And when you look who this will effect in practice, it is for the most part disabled people and single women over 60 – most likely widows who will have worked and paid taxes for decades only to find that the system they paid into is no longer there to support them when they need it.

The Government last looked at these proposals almost four years ago, and most of the data we have on its potential harmful effects on poor pensioners comes from the impact assessment that the DWP produced at the time, then buried for four years and then ignored once they’d got the election out of their way.

The Government claims that changes are needed because spending on SMI is “unsustainable”.

This is utter nonsense. Not only does SMI account for a miniscule proportion of the total welfare budget, but spending is actually going down – a trend which the DWP itself expects to continue.

The supposed cost is not the only problem the Tories say that they have with SMI. What the Minister said in committee this week was that “we believe it is wrong for taxpayers who are unable to afford to buy a home of their own are subsidising claimants who own their own homes.”

This seemed like a bizarre statement coming from a Government that has also announced its intention to extend the Right to Buy to tenants of Housing Associations – offering massive discounts to help people purchase their homes at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of £11.6 billion.

Neither is Right to Buy the only way the Government subsidises home ownership with the help of public funds. What about stamp duty relief for first time buyers? Or “Help to Buy” ISAs? Not forgetting higher thresholds for inheritance tax. The list goes on.

Why the Tories are happy to subsidise home ownership for middle class graduates and affluent social tenants, but not for widows on low incomes, is simply beyond me.

And yet, the Government yesterday voted down a Labour amendment that would have exempted pensioners from the switch from benefit to loan – this despite the fact that in the initial debate on this Bill, back in July, DWP minister Priti Patel claimed that the Government was “continuing to ensure that the welfare system will support the elderly, the vulnerable and the disabled by protecting pensioners”. 

And yesterday David Cameron said that the Government was “very proud to have kept all our promises to pensioners”.

It seems those promises don’t apply if the pensioners are poor. 

Clearly, the past thirteen months in British politics haven’t yet happened to everyone. The key lesson of that time – running through the Scottish Independence referendum and the Labour leadership election – has been the exponential potential of outsiders, capturing the imagination of public and channelling widespread frustration with the scaremongering of the perceived political establishment, to cause great political upsets. So when the official “In” campaign for the EU referendum was launched last week by Lord Rose– a Conservative Party peer and former CEO of Argos and Marks and Spencer – anyone hoping to keep Britain in the EU should have had great cause for alarm.

The key message that the campaign – Britain Stronger in the EU – has so far managed to put into the public imagination is that voting “In” is what the establishment expects loyal subjects to do. Rose focussed the thrust of his speech on the idea that being pro-EU was just as “patriotic” as the alternative, and on the great “risk” that leaving posed to national security and the economy. The endorsement of Tony Blair, which worked oh-so well for Jeremy Corbyn’s opponents, was the press story of choice in the next few days. At the heart of the official “In” campaign there appears to be a school of thought which sees the danger and popular appeal of the little-islander Euroscepticism, and places its hopes in becoming a pale imitation of it – risk-averse and inanely flag-waving, but with a bit more establishment backing.

If it is left to this establishment, the campaign to keep Britain in the EU will be doomed. Nigel Farage, whose entire career and political following has been calculated to exploit precisely this kind of situation, will look like a crusading outsider, despite being a privately educated former stockbroker. Despite the overwhelmingly rightwing terms of debate, UKIP will be given cover by some sections of the left – from Kate Hoey’s “patriotic Labour” line, to old Bennites with their arguments about national sovereignty, to the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party who will argue that the EU is a “bosses’ club”.  Commentators are used to looking at Europe as a Conservative Party split; actually, much of the outcome of the referendum will depend on what happens in Labour working class heartlands, and on the left.

The leftwing case for ‘In’ should be overwhelmingly clear. The European Union, for all its flaws, is a source of freedom of movement and legal protections for ordinary citizens. All of the problems that the EU poses for the left – its neo-liberal economic policy, its incompetent and barbaric treatment of refugees – are just as acute at a national level. The EU did what it did to Greece because of the policies of the national governments that comprise it. A Britain that voted to leave the EU on terms and arguments set by Nigel Farage would be a worse place, not a better one, for migrants, workers and the environment. 

What is needed to defeat Farage’s outsider ploy is an equally insurgent and radical campaign on the left of the debate, one which is unafraid of calling the EU what it is: a grossly undemocratic entity dominated by business interests, in dire need of democratisation. From there, a leftwing "In" campaign can directly take on Farage and try to shift the wider debate: it should unashamedly defend migration – and its arguments for doing so should be based on supporting freedom of movement and refugees on a human level, not on the basis that migration is good for profits.

Across the European left, a debate is raging about the EU. What is at stake in that debate is a series of radical ideas – peace, political and regulatory integration that defies national borders and identities, freedom of movement – which has been presided over for decades by an increasingly rightwing and technocratic elite. The British EU referendum should provide a platform to start the really important debate: about what the European project really means today, how to reclaim and democratise it, and whether, ultimately, the EU is still capable of transforming into a more social Europe. The seemingly dry content of this debate needs to be brought to life, and the idealism contained in the European project examined and renewed.

Another Europe is Possible, an explicitly leftwing campaign against Brexit, will launch soon, backed by dozens of prominent activists, MPs and campaigners. Other projects on the radical left, like Workers’ Europe, were launched over the summer, and time will tell how serious Labour’s own pro-EU campaign will be. In a country in which anti-establishment sentiment and poverty are both growing, any campaign that is seen merely to defend the status quo, and a sense of stability which does not exist for many millions of people, will fail. The political and business establishment seem to be capable only of triangulating towards Euroscepticism, further entrenching the anti-migrant and nationalistic sentiment which fuels it. So it will be down to the left – with ideals and radicalism – to defend against a Brexit.