Sex work divides feminist opinion like few others issues. The ideological clash – prostitution as violence against women vs simply a job – may never be resolved but where debate coalesces, around proposed legal systems, ideas become concrete and can be logically hashed out.

Largely, both sides agree that criminal sanctions against sex workers themselves should be lifted. At present, while selling sex is legal in the UK, women who work together for safety can be prosecuted for brothel-keeping and thousands end up with criminal records for loitering and soliciting.

Some claim, however, that people (usually men) buying sex should be criminalised, as is the case in Sweden. Others argue that this endangers sex workers, forcing them to work in secluded, dangerous conditions so that clients can go undetected.

Tension is escalating as the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) prepares to hold an evidence-gathering symposium in Parliament on 3 November, heralding a campaign for full decriminalisation. The ECP campaign mirrors that of MSP Jean Urquhart who, backed by sex worker organisations and health charities, is calling for sex work to be decriminalised in Scotland. In the other corner will be the End Demand campaign, which wants the government to follow Sweden by implementing a Sex Buyer Law.

So let the battle commence, but let it do so on clearly-defined terms. The ECP and Urquhart are campaigning for decriminalisation. This is not – as has been suggested in countless media reports – legalisation.

Insisting on clarification isn’t petty quibbling. The models are so distinct that when York University Student Union last week changed the title of its debate to “This House believes the legalisation of prostitution would be a disaster”, both sides thought they were arguing in favour of the motion. Sex worker and activist Laura Lee, who was up against outspoken abolitionist Julie Bindel at the debate, had to “tear up her notes” when it emerged that York Union actually meant “decriminalisation”, something Lee wholeheartedly supports.

The York mix-up wasn’t unique. Since Amnesty released its draft proposal for the decriminalisation of sex work, countless articles have conflated the terms, inaccurately holding up Germany and the Netherlands as examples of “decriminalisation gone wrong”.

Some clarification: under legalisation, sex work is controlled by the government and is legal only under certain state-specified conditions. Decriminalisation involves the removal of all prostitution-specific laws, although sex workers and sex work businesses must still operate within the laws of the land, as must any businesses.

Clear examples of a legalised system in Europe come from the Netherlands and Austria; a murkier example from Germany. In the Netherlands, brothels have been legal since 2000, but only if they comply with specific requirements and, in some cases, undergo regular visits from the police. Street workers must operate in designated areas, outside which they will be committing a criminal offence.

In Austria, most regions require sex workers to register, either directly with the police or, via a brothel owner. A national agreement stipulates that every sex worker must undergo a weekly health check, evidence of which must be provided in a compulsory booklet. Both of these measures, says Amnesty International, are human rights violations.

The situation is more confusing in Germany as federal states implement wildly different approaches, ranging from de facto forced registration in Bavaria to Munich’s almost city-wide no-prostitution zones. Elsewhere, licensing requirements support the much-publicised “mega brothels” at the expense of smaller operations which don’t have the resources to comply. The German government is currently debating bringing in compulsory medical examinations. 

For some sex workers, these models of legalisation have brought benefits, including access to the welfare state and better negotiating rights with bosses. For others – and, in particular, those who are already marginalised – life has got harder. State-imposed regulations have created a two-tier system, so that the undocumented or those who use drugs now work in clandestine, almost invariably less safe, conditions. These systems increase the power of managers, who know that women have few options for where they can work.

Accurate trafficking statistics are notoriously hard to come by and definitions can be slippery. In the Netherlands, coercion is more likely to take place outside the regulated spaces, although the Dutch government states:“It also happens that prostitutes who are exploited according to Dutch standards do not see themselves as a victim of exploitation.” In Germany, the most reliable figures come from by the Federal Criminal Police Office, which suggests that, since the Prostitution Act, the number of victims has declined. According to Eurostat’s latest report, the German per-capita rate of trafficking between 2010 and 2012 was lower than that of Sweden.

But here’s the thing: these are not the models that human rights and sex worker-led organisations across the world are advocating. The only country to have fully decriminalised sex work is New Zealand. According to research, both street-based and indoor sex workers there report better relationships with the police and say they feel safer. Indoor workers are protected by employment laws and can take employers to court. Contrary to fears, decriminalisation has not led to overall growth of the industry and trafficking has not increased.

This, then, is what sex worker-led organisations are calling for. Simply for prostitution-specific criminal law to be dropped and sex work treated as any other business. No one is demanding that the industry be allowed operate in legal grey area. Just as sex workers would be protected by labour, health and safety, human trafficking and other relevant law, so they would have to abide by it.

Crucially, legal systems shape public perception. While any element of an industry is criminalised, stigma is fuelled. One study suggests that men who see prostitution as just another sector of work are less likely to be violent. The ripple effect of legislation becomes “even more” significant in the global south, says Dr Prabha Kotiswaran, Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law at King's College, London.

“Stigma surrounding sexual labour is so strong in an Indian context and the criminal law adds to the stigma,” Kotiswaran says. “There’s a huge gap between what the law claims to do and what it actually does; how it’s used socially if not legally. Criminal law is frequently used to threaten a whole range of marginalised groups: transgender people, young people, gay people, sex workers.”

In their warring hearts, those in both camps share concern for the safety of sex workers. What differs is belief on how this can be brought about. It is right that debate should happen – much is at stake – but without clarity as so what each side is calling for, the conversation is nothing but farce. It is decriminalisation, not legalisation, for which sex workers around the world are fighting.

Jeremy Corbyn's ambition to talk human rights with President Xi is perfectly right and proper - good friends are, after all, always candid with each other.  But if his goal is progress, not finger-pointing, then there's five big lessons he should bear in mind as he delicately frames his talking points.

1. Remember a little history - and a lot of humility.

Chinese leaders aren't mad keen on taking lectures from British politicians about human rights for the very simple reason that unlike us, they haven't forgotten the Opium Wars; the brutal subjugation of the Chinese Empire in pursuit of our God-given to sell their citizens poison. Indeed, when President Xi took the reins of power he made a high profile first stop at a now famous exhibition - the Road to Reconstruction - at the Communist Party's museum in Tiananmen Square. There, over several floors is the story of how we helped destroy China's ancien regime, torching Beijing’s Summer Palace just for good measure, shattering China's strength and opening the way for the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, one of the most brutal and bloodthirsty episodes in 20th century history.  Mr Corbyn could do worse than open his remarks with a repeat of Tony Blair's apology.  A little humility and history can go an awful long way.

2. Don't forget the progress.

The extraordinary economic growth of China is, famously, stunning. The country has industrialised at ten times the speed on Britain - and on one hundred times the scale. 400 million people have seen their economic rights transformed as they've been lifted out of poverty. And with its new found wealth, China's leaders are building the world's biggest welfare state. Mao's 'iron rice bowl' of welfare rights melted down long ago and now China is a country that is growing older faster than it is growing rich, with tens of thousands of over 80s now needing care in cities like Shanghai. New health and welfare rights have been rolled out to hundreds of millions of people including the hundreds of millions of migrants from the country-side now living in the cities. Chinese leaders have always seen 'human rights' as a mixture and balance of political, economic and social rights. Of course, we should always lobby for faster progress with political rights - but that doesn't mean we should ignore the progress elsewhere.

3. Remember China has reformers too.

Like all national leaders, President Xi is a juggler. A balancer of opinions and forces for and against reform. Many are pushing him to go further, faster. Influential voices within the CCP argue that without political and legal reform, China will simply fail. In a slew of books, like China Is Not Happy, and Storming The Fortress, thinkers have pointed to scandals like the poisoned baby-milk saga, illegal land seizures and pollution outrages as evidence that corrupt local officials need to feel the discipline of elections and the wrath of courts. President Xi has begun with a ferocious attempt to root out corruption hitting figures big and small - 'from the tiger to the fly'. Greater intra-party democracy is likely to follow. Of course it's not as fast as we would like. But we should recognise the wheels are at least in motion.

4. Focus on reform of “rule of law”: it's the fastest way to progress.

The reform of China's judicial system is gathering pace. It's not a small task. This is a country that since the Cultural Revolution of 1970s has had to rebuild a legal system almost from scratch. That work entailed 450 pieces of legislation, training a million lawyers and building five layers of courts from the village to Beijing. Within the CCP today, there are welcome and lively debates about how as the Chinese say, they 'put power in the cage' and subject the Communist Party Untitled eventfor the first time to the full weight of domestic law. But pressure for change is building. As China's firms become creators and not copiers of intellectual property for instance, they want a legal system that protects their rights. This is one of the most unsung, but most important fields of UK-China relations; training judges, reforming prison oversight and of course, continuing to campaign for the abolition of the death penalty.  Last year, the UK-China judicial round table began the patient work of bringing judges together - and this year, the UK-China Common Law centre opened for business in Beijing. It's field where we need to step up cooperation.

5. Finally - and perhaps most important - try and spend at least a little time on the huge 'win wins' ahead.

This is the Asian century. Power is ineluctably shifting from its old home in the west, in what Premier Wen once called 'the larger trend'. If we want a genuine, plural, power-balanced world then we have a big stake in China's success. Our partnership could will help that shift happen – for instance, sharing our knowledge of welfare systems like healthcare and pensions; becoming a home for Chinese investment - which our economy desperately needs, and perhaps most important of all, collaborating in the field of science and technology. China is about to become the world's biggest science spender, and a “Red Tech Revolution” is transforming private sector growth. For a country like ours that is home to so many of China's scientists and students, there are today unprecedented opportunities for us drive forward the frontiers of science together in the battle against disease and poverty.

As a country we should be very proud of the force we put into our arguments for better and stronger rights. Unlike, Cameron we don't want to dismantle the Human Rights Act or the European Convention we did so much to author. We should always push the argument. But we must never grandstand. The necessity of progress is far too serious for that.

There were cheers from Tory MPs as Jeremy Corbyn came to the close of his first-ever response to a prime ministerial statement (in reference to its length). But the Labour leader, looking smarter than usual after a mini makeover, used his time wisely.

On the EU, the subject of the statement, he challenged Cameron to rule out withdrawing from or "diluting" the social chapter and the working time directive. Though it is likely that the government will avoid pushing for any significant changes, the PM declined to do so, avoiding any reference to the issue. Unless or until he does, it will be harder for pro-Europeans to persuade those on the left flirting with Brexit to support the in campaign. 

Corbyn also used his response to demand that Cameron raise the issue of "the dumping of subsidised Chinese steel" when he meets Chinese president Xi Jinping this week (Corbyn has own meeting tomorrow). Shortly before the statement, the news broke that Caparo Industries was likely to go into administration, risking the loss of 1,700 jobs. The PM replied by promising, for the first time, to discuss the subject with Xi. "Of course we will raise all of these issues - that is what our relationship with China is all about," he said. "It is at such a high level there is no subject off the table and all of these issues, including the steel industry, of course will be discussed."

Earlier in his reply, Corbyn referenced the Bishops' demand that the UK take 50,000 Syrian refugees, rather than 20,000, and appealed to Cameron's self-interest by suggesting that it "may create the goodwill in Europe to make headway in his other forthcoming negotiations". But the PM replied that while "no one has greater respect for the Bishops than me", they were wrong on this subject. "The right thing to do is to take 20,000 refugees from the camps and if you become part of the mechanism of distributing people around the European Union you're encouraging people to make that dangerous journey." 

Jeremy Corbyn has declared his opposition to any changes to the Labour party rulebook to make it easier to deselect sitting MPs.

Announcing the appointment of Rosie Winterton, the Chief Whip, to head up the party’s response to the boundary review, the Labour leader said: "I wish to make it absolutely crystal clear that I do not support any changes to Labour’s rules to make it easier to deselect sitting Labour MPs."

The statement will settle nerves among Labour MPs and will likely make Corbyn significantly more secure at the top of the party, and is an early victory for the “make it work” faction, the “soft right”. Corbyn's opposition to changes means that there will, for the forseeable future, be an anti-deselection majority on the party's ruling national executive committee (NEC). 

Boundary changes – which will reduce the Commons to 600 MPs and make Labour’s task at the next election even more difficult – could still force a round of selection battles. However, the NEC, which is currently finely balanced between left and right, has the final vote on whether or not a seat has “materially changed”, either allowing the sitting MP to remain in place or opening up for a free-for-all.

It is now thought highly likely at Labour party headquarters that the next election will take place with a 600-member House of Commons. The Conservatives are planning to select on the basis of a shrunken House of Commons. The change to constituency sizes will further increase the cost of parliamentary selections for the Labour party, now Britain's largest party by an overwhelming margin. 

Corbyn's opposition to reselection will reassure Labour MPs that he intends to continue on a collegiate path, likely increasing the pressure on recalcitrant MPs to behave in kind. 

For the first time since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, a parliamentarian has resigned the party whip in protest at his direction. The Guardian reports that Lord Warner, who was a health minister from 2003-2007, will sit as a cross-bencher after declaring that Labour "is no longer a credible party of government-in-waiting".

In his resignation letter to Corbyn, Warner wrote: “I have watched for some time the declining quality of the Labour Party’s leadership, but had not expected the calamitous decline achieved in 2015. The Labour Party is no longer a credible party of government-in-waiting. The approach of those around you and your own approach and policies is highly likely to to worsen the decline and in the Labour Party’s credibilty.

"I fear for the future of the Labour Party if your supporting activists secure ever control of the party’s apparatus and process, and the role of the Parliamentary Labour Party diminishes further in the selection of a leader and the formulation of policies likely to win an election."

No resignation can be spun as entirely positive. But it is helpful for Corbyn that Warner last year proposed a £10-a-month NHS patients' fee and voted with the Conservatives in favour of Section 75 (the only Labour peer to do so), opening the health service to greater private sector involvement. Few on the left will mourn his departure. 

But after Andrew Adonis, the former transport secretary and schools minister, resigned the whip earlier this month (albeit to chair the National Infrastructure Commission - he remains a Labour member), the Tories will argue that Labour under Corbyn is no home for public service reformers. 

Justin Trudeau, son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, has been elected Prime Minister in a shock landslide win, ending nine years in opposition for his party, the Liberals.

Polls had forecast a minority administration, but instead voters returned a Liberal government with a majority. The party looks set to win 184 seats, an astonishing increase on their 36 seat haul in 2011, the party's worst-ever result in its history. 

The Liberals, who governed Canada for the bulk of the 20th Century, remaining in office for 70 years out of 100, had been in a period of prolonged disarray before Trudeau's leadership, with traditional third-party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), beating them into second place in 2011. This election saw the NDP beaten back into third, with the party's leader, Tom Mulcair, coming dangerously close to losing his seat. The NDP as a whole is down from 103 seats to just 43, while the Conservative Party of Canada is down from 159 seats to potentially as few seats as 99 in the 338-seat parliament. 

The sinkhole that opened up in St Albans the other day looked rather impressive, didn’t it? These chasms are fascinating, and suggest something biblical and apocalyptic, or the opening stages of a particularly scary episode of Doctor Who; portals into hell that open, like the grave, without warning. One can goggle at images of them with an almost pleasurable frisson if they are in Florida or Beijing, but St Albans is a little close to home.

I am a little worried that there may be a sinkhole in the making near the Hovel. There’s a patch of road, about 15 inches in diameter, that would appear to be cursed. It’s on the main northbound traffic artery and takes quite a pounding, but then the rest of the road takes just as much of one and you don’t see it complaining.

I walk past this little patch pretty much every day. How to describe its life cycle? Like the chicken and the egg, one does not know exactly where to start. Let us, for the sake of it, start with a freshly laid ribbon of tarmac that has been spread lengthwise, generously, along the road. Nice bit of tarmac, you may say to yourself. Westminster City Council may suffer from a certain toxic legacy from its past under Dame Shirley Porter (not that its overwhelmingly Tory residents give a stuff about that); but you can’t say that it doesn’t know how to lay down a decent bit of road surface.

However, a few days later, you will notice that the spot the tarmac covered up has become a little depression; a pipkin, perhaps, for foxes to drink out of. And a few days after that, sooner if the weather has been wet, again there is a crumbling cavity, the once-pristine road surface now looking like something that has taken a hit from a tiny shell. One fears to put one’s weight on it.

And a few days after that, you dimly register roadworks at some ungodly hour of the morning. There is that fresh tarmac again. “Nothing’s going to get past that baby,” you can imagine the foreman saying to himself, as he waves the steamroller back to its garage; but oh! The vanity of human hopes.

It is like those wartime bridges, used in films such as Kelly’s Heroes and Apocalypse Now to symbolise the folly of war, which are blown up during the day only to be rebuilt at night. Or vice versa. If insanity is defined as doing the same thing again and again in the expectation of a different result, then Westminster City Council is – or are – insane; but then who are we to wag the finger, who perform rituals in some kind of cycle but to no ultimate purpose?

I have been going through a sine wave of health and illness which has accelerated far beyond the normal periodicity of a month or two’s robust good health followed by a couple of days of feeling peaky. I now seem to have one day on, one day off. I seem to recover enough to resume the nightly libations, but the next day one finds one has overdone it while one’s health has recovered only precariously; one has, basically, run a lorry over a stretch of tarmac that is as yet too tender to handle it.

A couple of days ago I got a call from my cousin Tim, who said he was going to be in town the next day; shall we meet up for a drink? Yes, let’s, I said – but check first, I’m feeling lousy today and I might not be able to play tomorrow. (Tim – who has been head of the NUJ in his time – is as sound a chap as you could hope to meet, for not only are his politics commendable, but he is even more nuts about cricket than I am and will not spurn the brimming glass pressed into his hand.)

So he rang at about five as I was returning home from Waitrose, wondering if I was going to die, and I said: do come over but I won’t be able to play for too long.

We eventually managed to close things down at about midnight, and had he not had a hotel to get to in King’s Cross he might well have stayed for longer, and I’d have been happy about that if everything else had been well; but, as you can imagine, the next day – that is today, as I type these words – has been pretty much a write-off, and only the drumming of my editor’s fingers, a sound that can carry over remarkably long distances, has managed to rouse me into action.

Meanwhile, I dare not even contemplate the state of the hole a few yards from my door. In my imagination it has grown monstrously overnight, and will soon yawn wide to swallow up everything. Ask not for whom the sinkhole gapes: it gapes for thee.

“You are going to cut tax credits after you promised 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.”  That’s what Michelle Dorrell, the Question Time audience member who confronted Tory minister Amber Rudd said.

No wonder that Rudd bowed her head in shame. Her party is presiding over the greatest assault on working people since Thatcher’s poll tax. A mother cried out for help on national television and all she got was silence.

Admittedly, it was a better response than the Conservative laughter that greeted the poverty crisis at PMQs last Wednesday. This is modern Britain, and we have a woman crying on television because the government is about to take thousands of pounds a year from her because she is working and trying to create a better future for her children – while the government’s own backbenchers sit and laugh.

This is supposed to be the demographic that the Tories represent. Indeed, the audience member spoke of how she voted Conservative at the last election. She knew that she had been taken for a ride. She recognised the mistake she had made. Some said, well that’s what you get for voting Tory. I say that is not good enough. This is a family that we need to be reaching out too and I believe that it is Jeremy Corbyn who will do so. The work penalty is clearly making its mark, and Corbyn’s clear opposition to it – from being the only leadership candidate to vote against the Tory proposal when others abstained, to the coherent policy we have today.

Until last week, senior Tory figures had refused to accept that millions of people would lose out due to their work penalty. But Treasury minister David Gauke has made it clear that there are at least “some” who will be worse off. And so, the mask is slipping. Corbyn raised the case of Kelly, a single mother, working 40 hours per week whilst also caring for a disabled child who was set to lose over £1,800 a year. What sort of aspiration does that support? Like the woman on Question Time, this is someone who has risked it all, who has “played by the rules”, who is out their fighting for a better life.

And what is the Tory response? Hit her, and hit her hard. And when people like her dare to complain about it, what should be said? Well as we saw on Thursday night – absolutely nothing. Even Tory members know that this policy is indefensible. The Tories cut corporation tax for businesses that earn one hundred thousand times what the average worker earns, and yet pay less tax than the average worker through complicated avoidance measures. The Tories are happy to label refugees and migrants as the demise of our economy, yet recently the health secretary lifted the cap on migrant nurses because we desperately need them to keep the NHS going. Now, they support the huge cut for the wealthiest one per cent in terms of inheritance tax, but they slash the pay packets of normal, working people.

This savage Tory party is not the government of working people; it is the problem for working people. Ignore Cameron’s fine words at his conference. Look instead at Michelle Dorrell’s words. The nasty party is well and truly back in power, and I am pleased that Corbyn is finally challenging the myths that they propagate head on. Just a few days ago, commentators were heralding Cameron as the leader of the new left. I hope in light of the truths surrounding how many will suffer under this latest assault on the working poor, they will choke on their words.

Europe is always a heated topic at a Conservative party conference. This year much debate has focused on David Cameron’s ongoing renegotiation of terms for staying in. By contrast, relatively little has been said about the terms on which Brexit might happen. Those advocating it oscillate between – and often treat as interchangeable – quite different and incompatible scenarios.

The truth is that anyone who works for, or consumes the products of any organisation – in other words everyone – would be affected by a UK exit from the European Union. As someone who studies organisations for a living, I believe that it is strongly in Britain’s interests to remain in; it is why I am a member of the European Movement. Now, you may disagree with that view, but it is surely vital that when it comes to the Brexit referendum, voters know what happens next if Britain chooses to leave.

One possibility is direct single market access via European Economic Area (EEA) membership (the so-called Norway option) as advocated by, for example, the Tory eurosceptic Owen Paterson.

However, it doesn’t appear that this would deliver what many Brexiters say they want: not in terms of sovereignty (Norway has almost no control over the single market rules it must abide by); cost (Norway pays more per head); immigration (there is still free movement of labour in and out of the EEA) or the ability to negotiate third-party free-trade agreements, which it does via the European Free Trade Area (EFTA). For a run through of what is meant by the EEA and EFTA, click here.

A second scenario is single-market access via EFTA membership by multiple bilateral agreements (the so-called Swiss option), as sometimes argued by UKIP’s only MP, Douglas Carswell. A Brexit on this model would have to negotiate multiple separate agreements (Switzerland has more than 120 which have developed over many years) over an unknown timescale with unknown outcomes.

As with Norway, Switzerland is in large part bound by EU law and regulation. So far as immigration is concerned, the EU Commission is in ongoing dispute with the Swiss approach to free movement of labour and it is simply inconceivable that a UK opt-out on free movement would be granted alongside EFTA membership any more than, as Brexiters rightly say, it could be re-negotiated within the framework of EU membership.

The third scenario is a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU, which is apparently the current UKIP position. It is absolutely crucial to understand that an FTA is not the same as single-market membership. In general, FTAs eliminate tariffs, whereas a single market eliminates non-tariff barriers to trade and harmonises regulation.

A particular difference from the previous scenarios, appealing to some Brexiters, is that an FTA would exempt the UK from free movement of people. But one consequence would be that British people would also lose their rights of free movement within the EU. That includes the 2m or more British people currently working or living in the EU– and the arrangements for them are unknown.

Likewise unknown are the consequences for the similar number of EU nationals without British citizenship currently in the UK. Brexit (in the FTA sense) would be a fundamental shift in which Europeans lose their right to move freely to Britain and Britons, both now and in the future, lose their right to move freely around Europe.

Would the EU sign such an FTA? Brexiters sometimes suggest that Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty defines terms of exit. In fact, it simply defines the process for exit. The terms would have to be negotiated: not all FTAs are the same and they are not quick. For example, the EU deals with Singapore and South Korea took several years to negotiate.

A UK FTA with the EU would also mean ceasing to have access to those FTAs held between the EU and other countries. In due course the UK might sign new deals. The terms are unknowable, however, and the expectation must be that they will be worse than those the EU has, for simple reasons of market scale.

One of the arguments put forward for Brexit is that EU membership precludes the UK signing its own FTAs. This is correct but there is an obvious reason. If it were allowed for the UK then it would also be possible for any EU nation to sign such a deal. That would in turn give a third-party country access to the single market, which would in turn create a trading relationship with the UK, but in which it had had no say whatsoever – surely highly offensive to eurosceptics.

Buyers' remorse

These are the three main scenarios, but it is also sometimes said that on exit it will just be a matter of trading on the terms of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). But the WTO does not establish global free trade, which is why individual countries negotiate FTAs within the WTO framework. Of course trade would not cease on Brexit, but the issue is in what volume and on what terms – and what the consequent effects on non-EU inward investment in the UK would be.

Alternatively, some float the idea of the UK joining a Commonwealth free-trade area. But there is no such entity and no foreseeable plan to create one. Another suggestion is that the UK could join the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This again is unrealistic: one obvious clue is in the name.

Flirting with fantasies like this does no one any favours. For the debate to be bona fide, we must be absolutely clear which of the different Brexit scenarios is envisaged and not to confuse or conflate them. If not, and the vote is to exit, it will be no good saying afterwards that “we didn’t understand what we were voting for” – the repeated complaint made by eurosceptics about the 1975 Referendum. By then it will be too late.

Christopher Grey is Professor of Organization Studies at Royal Holloway

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

“URGENT: Legal warning: Jack Monroe has requested you do not publish her birth name (*******) in the future.” 

I love a Google alert. That particular nugget of joy pinged into my inbox courtesy of political gossip blogger “Guido Fawkes”, less than an hour after lawyers had sent the final letter in a lengthy dispute with the Daily Mail for an article written in August claiming that “Jack” was not my “real” name. The article was eventually amended, with no apology or admittance of liability, and the correspondence marked private and confidential was leaked – as though I, not the Mail, were in the wrong. On cue, the trolls filled my timeline with my deadname, with 140-character questions about my genitalia, sexuality, parenting ability, in gifs and memes and puerile attacks.

In hindsight, they did me a favour. Psychiatrists sometimes use a technique called “flooding” to help conquer phobias, exposing their client to their particular fear again and again and again until they have the coping mechanisms to deal with it. If I were being generous, I would thank Paul Staines and his griping band of internet warriors for saving me hundreds of pounds and several painful hours in therapy, as a seven-letter proper noun that once immobilised me now bounces off me. I recently had a group of bees tattooed on my forearm, a tribute to the English translation of the name given to me shortly after I was born. It was for my parents, and for the years spent in that skin.

I wasn’t the first in my immediate family to change my name. My older brother adopted his middle name from the age of five, and my youngest brother, now nine years old, changed his name the year before I did. My parents have excellent taste in knitwear, but I think by now they’ve resigned themselves to their offspring exchanging their names for new ones. Everyone knows that Caitlyn Jenner’s real name is Caitlyn Jenner, and any media outlet who refers to her by her deadname is an insecure bullying asshole. And by the way, Guido, my birth name was “Baby”. I was a few months premature, and my parents kind of weren’t ready for me. I’m not sure they ever will be.

Three days before the Mail-Guido-Twitter triumvirate, I had come out as transgender. Non-binary, transgender, to be precise. It was National Coming Out day, I was on my way home from a 1,000 mile round trip from Southend to Glasgow via Manchester and back again to to talk about austerity at Scottish Green Party Conference, and I was tired of my closet full of Underworks binders and denial. I typed the words, saved the tweet as a draft, and tried to call my Dad. He didn’t answer, so I texted him instead before I lost my nerve. “How are things?” he asked. “Ok. I’m about to come out as transgender. I hope we can talk about it some time.” He replied three minutes later, three minutes I’m not ashamed to admit I spent gripping my phone so hard that the small crack in the screen now splits from top to bottom. “Of course you can talk to me. It matters not one jot how you express yourself. Unless you become a Tory. Then you can fuck off :)”

I breathed out, reassured him via Aneurin Bevan that “no amount of cajolery, no attempt at ethical or social seduction” would make me join the Conservative Party, and came out to the world with the prod of a finger. Love poured in, drowning out the few predictable hurtful, hateful messages, and many nonchalant but supportive messages of actually-not-surprised. I changed my Instagram username to MxJackMonroe to match my surprisingly progressive bank details, dropped the “A Girl Called…” from the title of my Facebook page, and am working on doing the same for my blog. I love and am proud of my first cookbook, as a reflection of where and who I was at the time, and have no regrets about the title, but my third won’t carry the “A Girl Called…” branding. I’m not a girl. I’m not a boy either. As Ruth Hunt, CEO of Stonewall said at Labour Party Conference earlier this year, “not all transgender people will transition in the way that you think you understand it”. 

Non binary, in simple terms, means outside of the binary gender norms of “male” and “female”. It’s somewhere in between, one of the many many shades between the society-imposed candy pink and baby blue. It’s being shoved in bars for looking like a “pretty fucking poof” with a skinhead and a short sleeved shirt and standing at 5’3’’. It’s being thrown out of female bathrooms in nightclubs by confused and sometimes angry toilet attendants. It’s the “What ARE you?” from ignorant, belligerent officers at US airports time and time again as my name and appearance don’t quite match up to the gender stated on my passport. It’s more than teenage tomboy angst, although that’s how it manifested itself for years, as I stole my brother's poloshirts, gave up ballet for martial arts competititons, and prayed to a God I half-believed in to turn me into a boy “for a day”. If the book Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl? by Sarah Savage and Fox Fisher had been around when I was growing up, I might have understood myself before the age of 27.

I legally changed my name by deed poll immediately after leaving Essex County Fire and Rescue Service at the end of 2011. I had been thinking about it for years, but found the thought of strolling into the mess room and demanding that my colleagues call me something else terrifying – for all the questions I knew I would be unable to answer, for the potential for deadnaming and bullying in a not-particularly-tolerant organisation. Not a great place to be gay, let alone genderqueer. I missed my own passing out parade in 2008 because “female” dress uniform was a knee length skirt, sheer tights and high heeled court shoes. I asked the tailor to measure me for trousers. He refused. “It’s the way it’s always been,” he shrugged. “Old chief liked the girls in skirts.” He laughed. I didn’t. When I asked to change the rules, my Watch Officer handed me my copy of the Code Of Conduct, pointing out the uniform regulations that I had signed. I hung my skirt in my locker and let it gather dust, and stayed in bed while the squad I had trained with for 12 weeks proudly held their heads high for friends and family. I’m missing from my team photo, all for the want of a pair of trousers. I wore combat trousers to work every day, but my value on the parade ground was measured in a denier, a skirt length, a heel height, rather than personal qualities and attributes, skills, and rigorous training.

And so, with nobody to finally answer or explain to, I changed my name. I cut my hair short. I revelled in my hard, masculine body – before I left, I had been training hard with the hope of moving from the Control room to the fireground full time, spending break times and down time in the gym, downing protein shakes, visiting Service Training Centre in Witham regularly to test myself against the firefighter fitness standards and meeting them with flying colours. I was strong, broad shouldered, I could bench press the Queen*, I had earmarked two trees in my local park that were the right distance apart for the bleep test. I was fit. I looked like this:

But this wasn’t new. This wasn’t a 2011 reincarnation born of being spat into a world of unemployment and the loss of identity that my uniform gave me. I recently insisted on digging out the family photo albums one Sunday at my parents house – my mother is an impressive documenter, and an entire cupboard bulges with grainy snaps annotated in her intricate joined-up hand. Me, aged seven, in a baseball cap and jeans. Me, aged twelve, with a one-inch crop all over my head. Me, aged thirteen, insisting on wearing trousers to school like my friend Z. Sixteen brought the first of many skinheads, seventeen was my first bandages wrapped around my chest, forays into mens clothing stores with my meagre wages from whatever café or coffee shop I was working in at the time for ill-fitting suits from bemused middle aged men who harrumphed into their tape measures and shook their heads.

Yet the increasing collection of tight vests, flamboyant ties, too-small sports bras and oversized suit jackets was punctuated with occasional “femme flails” into charity shops for tea dresses and sky-high heels, an enviable collection of costume jewellery and red lipsticks, rarely worn past my own front door. I gritted my teeth and put a frock on for a few hours for my parents wedding vow renewal, running home to change into my trusty ill-fitting suit after the official photos had been taken – though the gritted teeth did me no favours for those, and neither did my self-shaved head. We live and learn.

I found non-binary friends opening up to me about their feelings again and again, ranging from surgery questions to querying sexuality and gender dysphoria – and I answered them with ease, not stopping to ask myself why I was awake at night researching a double mastectomy on the internet, or foods with high testosterone levels, or bodyweight exercises for building shoulders and arms. I have spent about ten years as a sounding board for friends' transitions and expressions, while burying my own. I confided in one former school friend down the pub one night while watching their boyfriend’s band, and they wrote down where they bought their waistcoats, taught me that a big scarf can hide a multitude of unwanted lumps and bumps, and that two pairs of thick insoles in a-size-too-big loafers can do wonders for your confidence.

I was living with a former girlfriend when I first said the words out loud a few weeks later: “I’ve been thinking about getting top surgery…one day.” She hit the roof. “I fancy GIRLS babe, GIRLS. What the fuck?” She accused me of deceiving her, I retreated to the sofa for the remainder of our shattered relationship, our wedding plans reduced to whether I would wear a suit or a dress and her pre-emptively mourning the loss of my double-Ds. When someone tells you that the core of your relationship is your bra size, you hightail and run. When I was cast in a Sainsburys advert a few weeks later, I wore a chest binder to the audition to eliminate any awkward surprises later on.

A life lived in public is both a blessing and a curse. I am humbled and awed by the messages I receive from readers about learning to cook and their own stories of survival. People lay out their histories and their futures in my inboxes and letterbox every single day. As I said in a recent interview for the Women Of The Future award, I don’t consider myself a leader. I live my life and do what I love and feel strongly about, and every now and again when I turn around there are people behind me helping me on. I am here, writing and talking about this at last, because I stand on the shoulders of giants, those pioneers who have gone before me and pushed for these conversations, the activists who have tirelessly lobbied Parliament for changes to laws that unfairly affect transgender and non binary people, those who told their stories years ago, before Channel 4 had a “trans season”. Thank you to Ruth Hunt, Ruby Rose, Fox Fisher, Sarah Savage, Paris Lees, Rebecca Root, Captain Hannah Winterbourne, Laurie Penny, Bethany Black, Fish, and CJ especially.

*my weightlifting chart was, for motivational purposes, set at benchmarks like “12 tins of beans”, “a small marsupial” and “The Queen”.

It’s general election year in Gibraltar once again and the politicians are understandably starting to feel tense. The size of the Rock means a lot of the candidates, ministers and would-be ministers are known personally to a great many of the electorate, so the criticisms can feel that much more personal.

Is isn’t intended as a look at political debate, however. When there is an election on the way a lot of interest groups start making suggestions as to what they’d like to see from the new administration, in much the same way as the Gib government itself has been making noises about the UK staying in Europe.

So, what have the Gibraltarian interest groups been asking for?

First on the list is the Heritage Trust, which comes first because it’s been frank enough to issue a list formally. Reported in the Gibraltar Chronicle, its main points include investment in heritage (naturally enough) and tightening up on what might be called “brand Gibraltar”. It is asking for a “heritage champion” as well, to safeguard the reputation of the territory.

The Gibraltar Chamber of Commerce has also published a list. Chamber President, Christian Hernandez commenting on the publication of the Chamber’s wish list said in a press release: “My board has been developing this document over several months having taken soundings from members in various business sectors. We believe that the suggestions which are contained within it make good economic sense and would also help Gibraltar to become more competitive and more resilient. The Chamber will be engaging with the leaders of all political parties in the weeks and months ahead and we hope to convince them to adopt all of the measures proposed by the Chamber for their own manifestos when they are published ahead of the general election.”

The suggestions are a little more politically coloured than those of the heritage people. For example, a wish for economic growth to be led by the private rather than public sector will chime with some and not with others; a corresponding wish to see more employment in the private than public sector is consistent but again, agreement or otherwise will depend on the reader’s political views.

In terms of published wish lists, environment group ESG has published a PDF that usefully incorporates previous wish lists and the government’s performance against them. Aims include better management of climate change issues, careful consideration of the placement of phone masts and notes on air quality in the North West of the Rock, as industry and residential properties proliferate.

Smaller groups have offered their views too. Action for Housing is independent of any political party and wants more accommodation for single homeless men, ongoing construction of government funded flats for renting and antisocial behaviour legislation.

No doubt other views will proliferate. A general election is serious of course, and not always the place for levity. However, we can’t help but feel that if the general political discourse were as polite and constructive as the groups around the politicians, we’d end up with a more civilised debate than we’re likely to get.

At the Women's Equality Party policy launch this morning, we got our first glimpse of how the party aims to improve the lives and representation of women in Britain. The launch - and the accompanying policy document - flesh out the party's six core goals: equal representation in politics, business and media; equal education; equal pay and work; equal parenting; a reevaluation of women’s portrayals in the media; and an end to violence against women.

Yet as anyone involved with feminism knows, it's easier to agree to these goals in the abstract than it is to agree upon solutions. The specific policies launched today were agreed in consultation with the party's new membership base, but one in particular is likely to cause division in its ranks: sex work. 

As the policy document notes on page 24, the party believes that the problems around the trafficking and abuse of sex workers can be tackled in one of two ways: "decriminalising and regulating the sex trade", which legalises the purchase of sex with registered sex workers; or "criminalising the purchase of sex and providing women who sell sex with support services including help to those who wish to exit the sex trade" (we ran a good piece on the difference between the two yesterday). WE has opted for the latter. 

Under WE's proposals, those who sell sex will not be criminalised, and the party would remove from law the few scenarios, such as kerb-crawling and soliciting in a public place, under which sex workers can currently be prosecuted. Sophie Walker, leader of the party, said at the launch that the party would aim to begin criminalising sex buyers within two years of establishing support and exiting services for current sex workers. 

The approach, as the document notes, "recognises sexual exploitation as a form of violence mainly directed at women and children":

Many women entering the sex trade are living in poverty and many more have been sexually abused as children. This leaves women exposed to exploitation and coercion by pimps and creates vast power imbalances that drive the commercial sex industry.

The document also argues that only a "small percentage" of sex workers work voluntarily and independently of pimps or drug abuse. 

This approach runs contrary to the views of many campaigning sex workers, who are pushing for decriminalisation of the industry. A recent (and controversial) Amnesty report on sex work also called for decrimanilisation, as opposed to the Nordic approach. 

The WEP policy acknowledges that this topic is very divisive, and calls for more debate and education around the issue of sex work: 

WE also recognise that this issue divides individuals, organisations and political parties across the UK. There needs to be a national debate that raises awareness of the realities of the sex trade, so that anyone buying sex understands the likelihood that women who sell sex may well have been trafficked, forced or abused, and understands how the expectation that women and girls can be bought and sold feeds into wider misogyny. The status quo cannot prevail.

Elsewhere, the policy document proposes various costed measures to tackle violence against women. These include:

• Use the £800m currently spent on the Married Couples' Allowance to restore Legal Aid for domestic violence cases and use perpetrator programmes accredited by domestic violence charity Respect in cases where the abused partner wishes to continue the relationship.
• Maintain and strengthen Claire's Law, which gives individuals a right to ask police whether their partner has a record of abusive offenses, and introduce GPS electronic tagging to enforce restraining and non-molestation orders. 
• Introduce a national monitoring system to record incidents of forced marriage, Female Genital Mutilation and honour-based violence to "deepen our understanding of these crimes and better target prevention resources". 
• End the practice of detaining pregnant asylum seekers. 
• Make sex and relationships education, including consent, a compulsory part of the curriculum. 

What’s going on?

As steel plants across the UK are closing, it looks like the beginning of the end of Britain’s steelmaking industry. In the Seventies, more than 200,000 people were employed in the UK steel sector, but the number is now at 30,000. Unions warn that one in six of the remaining jobs are now precarious.

Why is this happening?

The international price of steel has plummeted over the past year, from $500 (£330) a tonne to about $280 by September, a 45 per cent drop in just 12 months – the lowest level in over a decade. This is because steel markets around the world are oversupplied relative to current demand. Cheap raw materials also contribute to this.

What’s it got to do with China?

The commodity has been caught up in China’s market crash – the country supplies about half of the 1.6 billion tonnes of steel made worldwide per year, and its steel exports have been growing as its economy slows. In China, the state subsidises its steel production because of its huge scale, which sustains its domestic production, increases the global supply of the raw material iron ore for steelmaking, and results in prices falling even lower. In July, it was reported that steel was cheaper per tonne than cabbage as part of the fallout from China’s share market plunge. The flood of excess cheap Chinese steel has had a devastating effect on UK steel manufacturers. Kevin Brennan, the Labour MP and shadow business minister, has condemned this as “blatant Chinese dumping” on the global market and on “our shores”.

Why is the UK affected by Chinese steel?

UK steelmakers condemn the British government for failing to introduce protectionist measures against cheap Chinese imports. The government’s defence is that it cannot intervene in the global steel industry. Replying to an urgent question on British steelmaking in the Commons, Business Secretary Sajid Javid insisted: “No government can change the price of steel in the global market.” The government stresses the need to work within the EU to come up with a plan to take on cheap Chinese steel.

But the government seems quite keen on China at the moment?

Indeed. It must be galling for those who have lost their jobs due to Chinese steel to see its president Xi Jinping currently on a state visit to the UK, welcomed to London by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and David Cameron during a ceremony in Horse Guards Parade. Plus George Osborne has just returned from a jolly tour of China. Cameron says he will bring up the subject of steel with the Chinese president during his visit.

Is it all China’s fault?

No. UK steel producers also complain about energy costs being higher in Britain than elsewhere, as well as the extra costs of environmental levies and high business rates. They feel that if these were relaxed, the industry would be hit less hard. The government points out that the steel industry crisis has not only been caused by China, citing the recession in Brazil, for example.

Which plants are affected, and how many will lose their jobs?

One of the UK’s biggest steelmaking plants, at Redcar on Teesside – owned by the Thai company SSI – has gone into liquidation after a century of production, with the loss of 2,200 jobs. Tata Steel, an Indian steel company owner, has just announced nearly 1,200 job losses at its plants in Scunthorpe and Lanarkshire. This comes on top of 720 jobs lost at the firm's Rotherham plant in July. Caparo Industries, the steel products company that is part of Labour peer Lord Paul's Caparo Group, has filed for administration, putting 1,700 more jobs in British steelmaking at risk.

At first glance, the politics of Star Wars are, for people of a left wing persuasion, extremely troubling. Our hero – Luke Skywalker – is basically a counter-revolutionary, who, over the course of the three films, re-entrenches the inherited privileges of his family – the ability to use the Force – at gunpoint.

The prequel trilogy only confirms that the Jedi are Tories: it reveals that Jedi have the ability to use the force due to their “midichlorians”, sentient microscopic beings that are present in all life but exist in greater numbers in Jedi. As the greater Force abilities of Jedi dynasties – that of Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and his sister Leia – show, the Jedi are the science fiction of a family that puts its assets in a trust.

The Galactic Empire, in contrast, seems to be a meritocracy, albeit one with a fairly violent set of penalties for failure. Skywalker himself dreams of signing up to train in the Empire’s navy: compare and contrast with the forces of the Rebel Alliance, who give Skywalker a ship thanks to a favourable report from a family friend, Biggs Darklighter.

However, when you look again, Star Wars is not a call for the establishment of inherited privilege – but a confirmation of the left-wing values of solidarity and collective action. Skywalker is born a farmer of limited means and establishes a cross-class coalition to defeat the Empire, comprising Han Solo and his Wookie friend Chewbacca – a pair of sole traders, equivalent to white van men – as well as the aristocratic Princess Leia. In the final defeat of the Empire, they are assisted by a grassroots uprising in the shape of the Ewoks, and even – in the manner of New Labour – succeed in winning over big business, with even Lando Calrissian, a dispossessed energy magnate, participating in the assault upon the Death Star.

The success of Skywalker’s broad coalition is in direct contrast to the failure of the narrow, elite-based grouping that Obi Wan Kenobi assembles in his doomed attempt to prevent the rise of the Sith in the prequel trilogy. Kenobi, far from building a broad church, recruits a narrow band of Jedi, Galactic Senators, and constitutional monarchs in order to stop Darth Sidious from destroying the Galactic Republic. Predictably, a movement drawn only from the metropolitan elite meets a failure even greater than that of the Yes side in the 2011 referendum on the Alternative Vote. 

The unmet need for mental health services is reaching an unprecedented level thanks to rising demand and continually falling NHS resources. Monthly referrals to community mental health teams increased by 13 per cent in 2013, and by 16 per cent for crisis services. Yet more than 200 full-time NHS mental health doctors and 3,600 nursing positions have been lost over the same period.

As so many of us now have access to and rely on smartphones, one increasingly popular solution to this problem is apps which provide automated forms of mental health treatment. Apps are relatively inexpensive, widely available and, unlike traditional NHS mental health services, can be used by more than one person at any one time. Some apps, such as Big White Wall, offer a community support service with access to trained healthcare professionals at any time of the day. Others provide automated cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and methods for mood tracking or self-reflection.

Only one half of people have a choice about when they receive conventional mental health therapy and just 13 per cent can choose where. Using mental health apps would allow people to access a form of treatment on their terms and could even extend therapy to people who are currently unable to engage with it. This could include the teenager who is too anxious or stigmatised to discuss his or her condition face-to-face, the armed forces serviceman who needs anonymity, or the single mother who struggles to schedule an appointment around her childcare and work commitments.

No hard evidence

The reality is that there is a large gap between the theoretical benefits of mental health apps and what they are likely to deliver in practice. Of the 27 mental health apps endorsed and recommended through the NHS health apps library, 14 are designed to treat or manage the symptoms of depression and anxiety. They are frequently described as helping users to do things like control stress, improve well-being and beat depression.

Yet only four of these apps currently provide any hard evidence of results reported by real-world users. And just two make use of NHS-accredited ways of measuring the effectiveness of mental health treatments, such as the Generalised Anxiety Disorder 7 questionnaire. This leaves a question over the effectiveness of the remaining 12 out of 14 (85 per cent) of NHS-accredited mental health apps.

In 2013, there were 1,536 depression-related apps available for download but just 32 published research articles studying their effectiveness. This pattern of high availability and a low evidence base can also be seen in apps for treating bipolar disorder, bulimia nervosa and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

But the real problem is with the apps that come with a seal of approval from a world-leading healthcare system. Accreditation by the NHS gives apps an appearance of quality, and the reputation and legitimacy of an app correlates with how many people are likely to download it.

Three in ten people with an untreated mental health issue choose to pay for private treatments, and apps that have yet to demonstrate any measurable benefits are a potential waste of their money. But they could also compound levels of anxiety in those with the greatest need and the least access to effective NHS-led mental health services. Unsuccessful attempts to resolve any mental health issues are only likely to make sufferers feel that no solution is possible.

The NHS usually provides a regulatory framework that is second to none, and winning over its guidance body, NICE, is usually seen as a major hurdle for developers of new medical products. Unfortunately, it seems as though the same level of evidence-based decision making has not been applied to the apps that the NHS has been recommending to mental health patients.

Luckily, it would appear that this subject is now being taken more seriously. As of 16 October, the NHS health apps library officially ceased to exist and the organisation is looking for new ways to assess and regulate such products. A framework to help app developers understand what level of clinical quality and evidence they need to reach would be highly beneficial.

Spotting the good ones

In the meantime, there are some clear signs of quality that users can look out for to ensure mental health apps do not do more harm than good. Firstly, apps that are supported by a mental-health practitioner are on average more than twice as effective as those developed without professional expertise.

While the NHS itself may not have enforced such rigour, well-established regulatory bodies such as NICE and the US Food and Drug Administration can help highlight apps that offer real solutions. It is also worth checking how much information the app developers provide about their products. Is there any proof that their claims of “beating depression” are anything more than marketing?

Finally, it is worth remembering that some mental health apps are designed with clinical quality and effectiveness in mind and provide real support to their users. For example, Big White Wall boasts a recovery rate of 58 per cent, better than the 44 per cent recorded by the NHS’s flagship initiative to increase access to traditional mental health therapies over the same period. So apps can improve people’s mental health, at a low cost and from the comfort of their own home, but only if done properly.

Simon Leigh, Health economist, University of Liverpool

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

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

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The Links

On Suffragette

Anna’s article on what the Suffragette movement in Britain really looked like.

Helen's interveiw with Abi Morgan, screenwriter of Suffragette.

On Chewing Gum

The trailer for the series.

Chewing Gum on All4.

An interview with writer and star Michaela Coel.

On Selfish

This is the book.

Sam Riviere on the technological progress documented by Kim Kardashian’s selfies.

This Twitter thread about Kim Kardashian vs Paris Hilton is very informative.

Next week:

Anna is watching the BBC sitcom starring Judi Dench, As Time Goes By.

Your questions:

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

Music

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

Trills - Oh Freedom

Amerie - 1 Thing

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

See you next week!

PS If you missed #14, check it out here.

Jeremy Corbyn has appointed the Guardian's Seumas Milne as director of communications and strategy.

Milne, who has been a columnist at the Guardian for many years, also served as comment editor from 2001 to 2007, and as labour editor. He has joined "on leave" from the Guardian, suggesting he will be able to return to the paper should he stop working for the Labour party.

Kevin Slocombe, recruited as interim press chief, is likely to join the campaign team of Marvin Rees, Labour's candidate for the Bristol mayoralty, rather than stay on in a junior capacity. 

But Milne's appointment has been criticised in some quarters. In 2013, Milne wrote that the killing of Lee Rigby in Woolwich, "wasn't terrorism in the normal sense", as Rigby had served multiple tours in Afghanistan. Luke Holland, formerly a press officer for Labour headquarters and for Yvette Cooper's campaign for the Labour leadership, tweeted that "if he [Milne] was trying to stand as a Labout councillor, he'd be blocked", and added that he could not see how Milne's appointment "could stand".

On the face of it, Helen’s employers are looking after her well. She’s head of HR, and her package of benefits includes an annual health screen, presumably to head off any incipient problems that might affect her ability to render the company good service. She’d attended one recently, expecting to be assured she was fighting fit. Instead, she had been told it looked like she had ischaemic heart disease, and she’d been urged to see her GP.

She was keeping calm, but was understandably disconcerted. I was puzzled. In her mid-forties, she was a never-smoker, with blameless blood pressure, a healthy weight, a moderately active lifestyle and an unremarkable family history. It was difficult to conceive of a candidate less likely to develop angina, or be struck down by a heart attack.

The problem was, as part of her screening, she’d undergone a stress test. This involved her being connected to an electrocardiogram (ECG) – which records electrical activity in the heart – and then being put through progressively more strenuous exercise on a treadmill. Some way into the test, Helen’s ECG had registered changes that are associated with the heart becoming starved of oxygen. This condition is called ischaemia, and it occurs when an artery supplying the heart muscle is critically narrowed by fatty deposits known as atheroma. It is usually accompanied by chest pain or tightness. Helen assured me she had felt nothing. And, no, she never experienced such things, not even when running or doing aerobics. By now I was convinced she was in danger of becoming a victim of the health screening industry.

Stress tests, like all medical investigations, can generate “false positive” results, in which the condition tested for is mistakenly detected. Estimates vary, but it probably happens in about one out of every ten cases. That’s OK if you are performing the test to make a diagnosis. Say you have ten patients, all complaining of chest pain; a good proportion (let’s say 50 per cent) will have underlying ischaemic heart disease. When you test all ten, five will generate a true positive result but a sixth might be a false positive. So, five out of six positives reflect genuine heart trouble, meaning a positive result has an 85 per cent chance of being “right”. Not perfect, but useful when deciding who to investigate further.

But look what happens if you use the same test to screen ten healthy people like Helen, none of whom has anything wrong. You’ll get one positive result, but it will be false. Even if one of the ten symptomless people does in fact have unsuspected heart disease (and that’s a big if), you will end up with two positives, only one of which is true – so a positive result has only a 50 per cent chance of being “right”. You might as well flip a coin. To cap it all, false positives are very common in pre-menopausal women such as Helen.

Helen wasn’t to know any of this. From her perspective, she’d been to a reputable medical company, which wired her up to some impressive gadgetry that had raised grave concerns about her health. Even once I’d explained the ins and outs, a part of her mind was still thinking, “Yes, but. What if my result was true?” There are invasive investigations that could settle the question definitively but they involve exposure to radiation, or risk of stroke.

There was no way out of the conundrum created by the unethical use of a diagnostic test for screening. The private screening industry is essentially unregulated, and causes substantial worry and sometimes physical harm, all in the pursuit of profit. The same issues apply to its misuse of other diagnostic tests such as CT and MRI scans. And it’s the NHS that is left picking up the pieces when the inevitable false positives turn up.

In time, Helen regained the health confidence that her brush with the private screening industry had undermined. It will be interesting to see whether she politely declines her next invitation to be screened – or, indeed, whether her employers allow her to do so.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour and the Green party. At first glance it seems obvious, inevitable even. The classic trope of a mutually destructive, symbiotic relationship between friends that agree on so much, but always end up falling out over the little things. And, just like Hollywood, in the end they put aside their differences for the sake of a radical agenda of social justice, a united left and a convincing front from which to battle Tory hegemony.

Yet, if you asked political figures as diverse as Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair, Ramsay MacDonald and Winston Churchill, they would all agree with that purveyor of wise words, Cosmopolitan: “pulling off a friends with benefits arrangement might be trickier than you think”.

After all, the idea of electoral pacts between parties has actually been touted more often in Britain than folk memory may suggest. The Liberal party and the burgeoning Labour party combined in the elections of 1906 and 1910 to great effect. In 1950 Churchill suggested that the Liberal party, a rump of nine MPs - one stronger than their eight today - join forces to defeat Clement Attlee’s Labour. The SDP/Liberal Alliance of the 80s was at first standoffish, awkward, and self-consciously distant before electoral failure precipitated a merger, and the creation of the Liberal Democrats.

Ashdown and Blair’s flirtation with the creation of a Progressive Alliance was, as Andrew Rawnsley puts it: “like an old fashioned romance between two would-be lovers. It was up to Blair to propose, he didn’t”.

Three clear threads run throughout the history of political co-operation in Britain that cast doubt on the possibility Corbyn and the Greens can breach the broad trend.

Firstly, it is not policies but views of politics that decide if co-operation can work. Corbyn romanticism isn’t grounded in pluralism – notably absent from his offer to the Labour party, undeniably expansive and fearless in many other respects, was any engagement with electoral or constitutional change. Corbyn’s noises about supporting reform, if it maintains the link between MP and constituency, fly in the face of his support for the No2AV campaign in 2011. The “doctrine and ethos” of parliamentary socialism has often been intertwined with the swinging pendulum of two-party politics, rather than the muddy compromise associated with social democracy and its European cousins.

John Prescott, unfairly or otherwise seen as an emblem of the old left at the heart of the New Labour project, acquiesced on changing Clause IV. But, he gave whole-hearted opposition to a deal with Ashdown’s Lib Dems in New Labour’s early years and warned “the day that man walks through the door is the day that I walk out of it”.

It’s not just Natalie Bennett who remains perplexed and frustrated by Corbyn’s intransigence. Undoubtedly Corbyn’s favourite Miliband, Ralph, was by the end of his life in favour of changing First Past the Post for the better. However, the elder Miliband felt the essential condition for the electoral systems continued was that ‘Labour, as the alternative party, should remain an essentially 'moderate' party, whose activists should remain under the firm control of its 'moderate' leaders’. If Corbyn views electoral reform as a key test of a radical agenda, perhaps this may change.

But secondly, even if Corbyn were to rethink he would need to persuade those who he’s placed at the heart of his project, the “soft right” who are in many senses more tribal than the hard left of the Labour movement. If loyalty is your cornerstone, short-term dalliances don’t hold much appeal.

Tom Watson’s call for the head of Nick Clegg, in the face of sophisticated micro-targeting operations that suggested operations were better placed elsewhere, is emblematic of a Labour party that sometime struggles to see the woods for the trees. The symbolism trumped the politics; centre-left voters that had flirted with Clegg now needed to return home. Jonathan Ashworth, another key figure at the heart of the party in all senses, has been keen to remind people that the Lib Dems have no role in any leftwing alliance.

Similarly, senior Green activists were non-too-surprised that Labour missed the open goal of regaining Brighton Kemptown in May. The 690 votes they needed were far more likely to be won if they’d focused their coachloads of volunteers there, rather than directing swathes to Lucas’ Pavilion seat.

Thirdly, this unprecedented political summer has meant the political tides are as hard to read as ever. And if Corbyn fails, it will be the soft right faction that picks up the pieces. While the benefits for the Green party right now are clear, the potentially ephemeral nature of Corbyn’s leadership means any strategic reading of party competition is still compromised. The danger of being gobbled up by larger competitors has always haunted smaller parties, and it is unclear if the gains currently outweigh the risk.

Better, perhaps, for the bitter acrimony of the Labour family to erupt, then to pick up the scraps. Because, while the promise of electoral gratification without the strings attachment is hard to resist, “eventually, one of you will become too attached or get hurt”.

The art of futurology – predicting what future society might look like – is plagued with difficulties. Books, films, TV shows and plays that feature such efforts are all judged through the prism of hindsight.

The 1989 film Back To The Future Part II (BTTF2) saw its characters travel in time to 21 October 2015 and experience a world hugely different to the 1980s one they came from. Now we have reached 2015, it is clear that some of the predictions have proved surprisingly accurate – while others have fallen woefully flat. But we’re also surprisingly close to seeing a few of the film’s wackier technologies become reality.

Fashion: self-tying shoes and auto-fitting jackets

The film sees teenage Marty McFly (played by Michael J Fox) and inventor Dr Emmett Brown (aka Doc, played by Christopher Lloyd) travel to 2015 in a fusion-powered DeLorean time machine. Of course, McFly needs the right outfit to blend in as he violates the law of space-time causality, so in the film’s 2015, he sports an automatically fitting and self-drying jacket with self-tightening high-top trainers. This kind of outfit still sounds distinctly like science fiction but it’s actually closer to fact than you might think.

Bringing this technology to a department store near you will involve integrating novel materials with everyday clothes. But instead of mechanical systems that can automatically change the size of a jacket, we’re more likely to see the use of something called memory material. This is a material that can be bent or stretched into different shapes but then return to its original programmed design. Memory material is already used to create glasses that if squashed will recover to a perfect fit.

While we might not yet have jackets with built-in blow-dryers, in other ways real world clothing technology will soon far surpass that of BTTF2. Flexible materials that can generate electricity from body heat, sunlight, and motion already exist in research labs and it won’t take much to integrate them into our everyday clothing.

The last couple of years have also seen an explosion of wearable technologies that can monitor our vital signs. Soon, flexible electronics and transducers will enable our clothing to know what we are doing, how we are feeling and our state of health. The list of possibilities is endless.

The home of tomorrow, today

In the 2015 of BTTF2, the technologies in and around McFly’s house are manifold, including rehydratable pizzas, a hydroponic garden dining table centrepiece, and Skype-like video calls made with what looks suspiciously like Google Glass.

But what about today? We’ve had rehydratable food since the advent of the space age but its use on Earth isn’t really clear. Besides, rehydratable pizzas would be disgusting.

Home hydroponics certainly exist but are mostly used for growing, well, not vegetables. And while video-phone glasses exist in the form of Google Glass, so far consumers have roundly rejected them.

The film rather absurdly predicted that fax machines would be essential in every room of the home, while failing to see the enormous impact that the internet and social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, now plays in our day-to-day lives.

Where’s my hoverboard?

The two main modes of transport in the movie have to be among the most desired by its child (and adult) viewers: hoverboards and flying cars. Earlier this year, Lexus unveiled a real-life working hoverboard that uses liquid nitrogen to create a superconducting magnet that lifts the board above a specially designed track. It’s effectively a mini magnetic levitation train for your feet.

Unfortunately, the need for dedicated tracks and regular liquid nitrogen top-ups mean that the Lexus device in its current form probably wouldn’t be worth the large pricetag it would come with.

Likewise, several companies have developed what they call “flying cars” but so far they look more like roadworthy planes with fold-away wings and have yet to find a market.

Mr Fusion

Even with the reality-check that comes with a few decades' physics experience, I still dream of a world where Mr Fusion, a kitchen appliance-style home nuclear power generator, provides cheap and clean energy for everyone. Such an invention could enable some of the more speculative ideas in BTTF2, plus a whole bunch of innovations not even dreamt of yet, to become reality.

Scientists are currently building what they hope will be the first experimental fusion reactor to produce more energy than it uses, with very little radioactive waste compared to existing nuclear fission reactors. The International Tokomak Experimental Reactor (ITER) will be housed in a 60m-tall building in southern France and use superconducting magnets to manipulate plasma made up of hydrogen ions heated to 150 million℃. The ions will fuse together to create helium and release large amounts of energy, replicating the reaction that powers the Sun but at temperatures 10 times hotter.

ITER will start operating around 2020 and test ideas in fusion research for 20 years, hopefully confirming that we can harness this energy production mechanism here on Earth. But it’s hard to imagine fitting something like ITER to the back of a DeLorean or keeping one on your kitchen counter, let alone fuelling it with rubbish. We might have to wait a bit longer for that.

Stewart Boogert is professor of physics at Royal Holloway

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