When George Osborne toured China last month, few appreciated how British foreign policy had been radically realigned. But after the UK unfurled “the reddest of carpets” (in the words of the Chinese Global Times) for President Xi Jinping, the shift was unmistakable. David Cameron’s pledge to make Britain “China’s best partner in the west” could be one of the most consequential acts of his premiership.

Until recently, the UK’s relationship with the world’s second-largest economy was most notable for its lukewarm nature. In contrast to France and Germany, Britain had never made a sustained attempt to court China. Tony Blair visited just three times during his decade in office; Gordon Brown went once. Cameron aspired to shift relations into a different gear but was frozen out after meeting the Dalai Lama in 2012. The Prime Minister scorned those Foreign Office officials who had assured him that there would be no significant blowback. “This is ridiculous,” he exclaimed after a year in exile. “I’ve got to go to China!” It was only after No 10 briefed that Cameron had “no plans” to meet the Dalai Lama again that the rapprochement began.

Like a runner who stumbles at the starting line, the UK is now hurrying to catch up with the pack. Osborne’s aim is for China to become Britain’s second-biggest export market, rather than its sixth, within the next ten years. The Chancellor has unashamedly wagered that the potential gains far outweigh the risks. “No economy in the world is as open to Chinese investment as the UK,” he said during his visit. At a moment when some believe that China is destined for a hard landing, Britain is ratcheting up its exposure.

The extent to which the two countries’ fortunes are becoming intertwined is remarkable. China has taken a stake of one-third in Hinkley Point C, the UK’s first new nuclear power station for decades, and may build and design its own plant in Bradwell, Essex. Few of those not obliged to defend the deal regard it as economically prudent. “Hinkley is on course to become the most expensive power station ever built anywhere in the world,” Lisa Nandy, the shadow energy secretary, told me. “Bill payers could be paying over the odds for decades.”

Among those who agree, awkwardly for Osborne, is his father-in-law. The former energy minister David Howell has described the project as “one of the worst deals ever” for British consumers and industry. The concurrent steel crisis has heightened the charge of a government not protecting the national interest. Having tolerated the loss of thousands of jobs in Redcar, the UK is aiding China in “dumping” its subsidised stock on the market.

Britain’s dependence on the country for infrastructure investment (forecast to reach £105bn by 2025) is a product of its self-imposed fiscal rectitude. Osborne’s new budgetary charter, recently approved by MPs but opposed by Labour, commits the government to running a surplus by 2019-20 and outlaws borrowing in “normal” economic times (when growth is above 1 per cent). Just as Gordon Brown used the private finance initiative to keep investment off the public balance sheet, so Osborne is using China to mask the UK’s potential future liabilities.

Some who accept the Chancellor’s fiscal logic question the engagement on national security grounds. China’s military build-up across the Taiwan Strait, its cyber-attacks on western firms and its burgeoning alliance with Russia alarm Tory sceptics.

For others, it is the undisguised downgrading of human rights that is most galling. “This is a mercantilist approach,” Mike Gapes, the Labour MP and foreign affairs select committee member, told me. “They’re interested in trade and they’re interested in investment and they’re not interested any more in raising issues of human rights or international law with foreign governments – or at least [they do so] selectively.” Simon McDonald, the most senior Foreign Office civil servant, has bluntly admitted that human rights is “not one of our top priorities . . . The prosperity agenda is higher up the list.” In 2009, the department’s annual human rights report began the section on China by warning that its record “remained a serious cause for concern”. By contrast, the 2014 version begins: “China’s economic growth continued in 2014, leading to further improvements in the social and economic rights of many of its citizens.” It then modestly notes: “Civil and political rights remained subject to tight restrictions.”

It was such kowtowing that led John Bercow, the Speaker, to praise Aung San Suu Kyi (a “democracy champion”) and to call for China to be a “moral inspiration” to the world when introducing Xi at parliament. One of those present told me there were “audible gasps” from ministers at his words.

The Tories’ rapid pivot towards China has ensured that their stance is finally being debated. A new fault line has opened up in British politics: in future years, we might speak of Sinophiles and Sinophobes as we do now of Europhiles and Europhobes.

The divide cuts across left and right. One of the most vociferous critics of the government’s stance is Steve Hilton, Cameron’s former director of strategy. Conversely, John Ross, Ken Livingstone’s former economic adviser and a Jeremy Corbyn supporter, declared that not only the Labour leader “but the world should rejoice to see that China has been able to take the greatest step forward for real human rights of any country” (in reference to the 728 million people lifted out of poverty).

Osborne and Cameron speak hopefully – some fear with hubris – of a “golden era” of relations with China. The variables are too great to know whether it will be golden. But a new era it most certainly is. 

The death of Michael Meacher means that the first electoral battle of the Jeremy Corbyn era will come sooner than we thought: a by-election in the safe Labour seat of Oldham West and Royton. How worried should the party be?

On paper, the seat is safe as houses - Meacher held the seat with a majority of 14,738. Ukip are a distant second with 8,892 votes, and with the Conservatives just a handful of votes behind them in third place. But Labour strategists are all too aware of a by-election just over a year ago in the neighbouring seat of Heywood and Middleton, when Ukip came from nowhere to within milimetres of taking the seat from Labour. The seat is almost identical to Heywood & Middleton, although, to Labour's good fortune, it has a significantly larger south Asian population. 

That ought to make it a trickier prospect for Ukip, but party staffers fear that the party's "Ukip problem" has got worse in the year that has passed. In a way, the good news is, no-one in the party now argues that Ukip is a Conservative problem. Until the election, senior aides would still argue that Ukip "helped Labour". Now, after losses to Ukip contributed to defeats in Southampton Itchen, Telford, Plymouth Moor View, Morley & Outwood, and Gower - which Labour had held since the party was founded - no-one argues that Ukip is anything other than a threat to Labour.

But the evidence from council by-elections and from the polls - and, I'm told, from the party's own canvassing - is that Labour's Ukip problem has got worse since Corbyn became leader. Under Ed Miliband, the party was shedding votes to Ukip and the Greens - and was uncertain about what to do to fix the problem. Under Corbyn, Labour's Green problem has almost ceased to exist. The Greens are believed to have shed at least 2,000 members since Corbyn became leader and their vote has gone down in every council election they have fought since Corbyn took office. But gains among the Greens have been offset by increasing losses to Ukip. 

The good news for Labour is that Ukip are preoccupied and divided by the coming referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union, while Labour still have a Rolls-Royce operation as far as by-elections are concerned. The party's ruling NEC will select a shortlist, and Labour is likely to continue their practice of the last parliament of holding their by-elections quickly, to prevent rival parties getting their foot in the door. Labour's ground team is confident of holding the seat if the by-election is held quickly - but a longer campaign, and a well-organised effort from Ukip, could see the party given a bloody nose. 

In 1929, Frances Louise Josephy contested Winchester for the Liberals and finished third. She was the last Liberal candidate in the seat until the 1964 by-election, caused by the resignation of the Tory and former spy Peter Smithers. Her five other contests were in Basingstoke (1931), Devizes (1935/1945) and Cambridge (1950/1951).

Josephy was an advocate of both European and world federalism. At the first World Federalism Congress in 1947, she said, “Being British, I am not particularly interested in theory and not at all in philosophy,” and noted that if world government did not happen soon, it never would. She later worked at the Assembly of the Western European Union, which existed to develop a common defence policy for Europe.

The Marie Stopes office in Belfast has no sign outside but I knew I was in the right place. In front of the building, around a small table displaying posters of dead foetuses, was a group of men and women who watched as I approached. Inside, a white-haired man held open the doors for me. “You know they’re going to torch you on your way out?” he said. I laughed nervously, but he wasn’t smiling.

In June, a few weeks before my visit, more than 200 people signed an open letter to the police in Northern Ireland demanding to be arrested with a mother who was being prosecuted for buying abortion pills for her underage daughter. The signatories were all admitting to the same crime. I’d come to talk to some of the activists behind the letter, including Fionnghuala Nic Roibeaird. When we met at a café she recounted how she and others had gathered outside Musgrave Police Station the previous night. “We were basically goading them,” said Roibeaird, who is 21. “They don’t want to touch it.” Róisín Jackman, another activist, explained that “they” are Northern Ireland’s politicians, for whom “silence is compliance”.

These women have not been silent. They have lobbied politicians, presented petitions and run a weekly information and campaign stall in the city’s Cornmarket. But, faced with an intransigent government, they had decided to go further. “We have to be constantly handing ourselves in [to the police],” Roibeaird said. “It’s the only way to force them to deal with it.”

The perception of feminists today is often one of women sitting behind computer screens, lazily clicking on petitions, broadcasting from their Twitter soapbox. They lack the glamour and bravery of the famously militant suffragettes, who resisted the authorities with their bodies and their freedom. But as the feminist historian Louise Raw points out, “The suffragettes tried everything first.” Only after years of lobbying failed did they turn to smashing windows.

Knowing how to get attention is an invaluable skill for any campaigner, but particularly those outside mainstream political debate. It is often these activists who are most likely to turn to civil disobedience. “I think it’s when our backs are against the wall, as they have been for the past ten years, that we see direct action,” said Pragna Patel, director of Southall Black Sisters, a charity that assists female victims of violence. “Direct action forces a public debate which the state would rather not have.” For Patel, civil disobedience doesn’t even have to be about breaking the law. “I think it’s about shattering the idea that there’s a consensus around the law. Especially if it’s an oppressive law.”

For Southall Black Sisters, action has included turning up with megaphones to areas where immigration officials are conducting raids – partly to condemn the officers, but also to let communities know that they were not alone. Patel’s distinction is important because the consequences of law-breaking vary depending on the transgressor. On 8 June, hundreds gathered outside Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire, chanting “Shut it down” and “Set her free”. From the squat building where the womenare housed, hands waved out of windows that opened only a few inches. A few demonstrators clung to the perimeter fence and shook it. Others joined in, and eventually it came down. Protesters streamed over on to the grassy bank in front of the concrete wall.

Marchu Girma, grass-roots co-ordinator at Women for Refugee Women, told me that, as organisers, they were conflicted about breaching the fence. It wasn’t the refugee women among the demonstrators who pulled the fence down, but “middle-class white youth”. She added: “That didn’t mean the women were not cheering the fence-breakers on. But they were also fearful. Even after getting refugee status, there’s a five-year wait for citizenship. If in that five years they have any police record, they will never be able to receive their citizenship. So there is a huge risk for them being involved in civil disobedience.” Those who breached the fence had good intentions. But although their law-breaking carried little personal risk, the outcome for those they were supposedly there to help could have been dire.

Civil disobedience often seems like the bravest and most committed option, but it’s not always the smartest one. In 1914, a faction of mainly working-class women split from the Women’s Social and Political Union to form the East London Federation of Suffragettes. They were not against militancy, but the fact was that the personal cost for them was much higher than for their middle-class sisters. Often the main breadwinner in their family, they could not afford to go to prison. And, the feminist historian Sarah Jackson says, “Civil disobedience . . . to some extent confirmed rather than contradicted a stereotype that working-class women were rough and aggressive. It didn’t really have the same shock value as when polite high-society ladies were doing it.” Working-class shock value came from lobbying MPs and “by being articulate, by being intelligent, by being persuasive”.

Sometimes, just being a woman is enough to rule out direct action. “Women are never unencumbered,” said the veteran socialist Bea Campbell, referring to women’s unequal shouldering of the burden of unpaid care-work. As a result, their activism always has to navigate personal responsibilities. “It doesn’t stop them doing hugely radical things, but it doesn’t necessarily mean getting arrested.” Yet, occasionally, the politics of despair takes over. As Aderonke Apata, a lesbian from Nigeria who was involved in a protest at Yarl’s Wood, said: “When you’ve tried everything you can, what else can you do but demand freedom?”

Caroline Criado-Perez is a feminist campaigner and the author of Do it Like a Woman (Portobello Books)

Which came first, the winning or the attitude? This is sport’s version of “the chicken or the egg?”. The vivid subplot of this year’s Rugby World Cup is the contested concept of “team culture”: is it myth or reality? If winning is all about bonhomie, the former Australian captain Michael Lynagh quipped, then pick the comedian James Corden.

The England head coach, Stuart Lancaster, a devotee of holistic management, has been ridiculed. Chuck him out, the game’s great voices have thundered – and if the ­potential replacement ever mentions “team culture”, show him the door as well. Mike Atherton, the former England cricket captain, went further, implying that sporting “culture” is a conscious fraud, cooked up to attract sponsors.

“Culture” is now used so loosely that its meaning has reversed. Positive team culture, far from being a cuddly and corporate-friendly “niceness”, is straight-talking and brutally exacting. It’s not fluffy, it’s flinty.

A player who says to a team-mate, “We don’t do that here,” consciously bears the risk of unpopularity. That is how good cultures operate: senior players police values and reinforce good habits. Did you speak up when it mattered, at your own risk, to serve the team’s needs? Bravery – political and psychological bravery, not just the physical kind – trumps niceness every time.

Geniality is a tiny aspect of team spirit. A pointless surfeit of good-luck handshakes is enough to make any performer yearn for bracing cynicism.

But team culture can’t be reasoned away. It is ironic that spectators and pundits have thrilled to the practical manifestation of positive team culture while ridiculing the theory. When Wales defended against a dominant England pack in the group stages, their bodies were pushed backwards for 60 minutes. In spirit, they never yielded a step. What is that if not team culture?

Two weeks later, Wales’s 15 men threatened to bully Australia’s 13. In a definitive passage of play, it was Wales’s turn to be repelled by a titanic defensive effort. One chink in the Australian defensive line, and the game looked lost: there was no one left on the field to provide cover defence. But again, Australia’s survival was made possible by a resilient team culture.

Sceptics would say these were actions rather than words. The actions nonetheless rested on ideas: commitment, unity, co-operation, communication and bravery. Written down, they may dissolve into a series of clichés. Yet they are real.

Lancaster’s mistake was not to believe in the value of culture but to broadcast that faith. His sin was not credulousness, but piousness. The error was not trying to improve the culture of England rugby but failing to shift his focus when he’d achieved it. Strategy is dependent on context and Lancaster was fighting the previous war.

He came to power after the bleak 2011 World Cup, when the England team’s drunken “dwarf-throwing” antics prompted the
assumption that off-field ill-discipline had filtered down to the pitch. He promised to reverse the equation, off-field virtuousness percolating on to the field of play. Both theories, in fact, are retrospective oversimplifications: the former sells newspapers, the latter props up the self-help industry.

By talking too much about culture, Lancaster not only provided unnecessary hostages to fortune, he also irritated people. What about sportsmen who had triumphed without wider ideals: was theirs a lesser victory? And the losers? Must they believe that if they had spent more energy on becoming better people, they would have won more? Like any sphere of human activity, sport’s core is solidly sceptical, its fringe actively cynical. Don’t provoke them. Lancaster entered the tournament with several sporting constituencies ready to turn on him. They didn’t have long to wait.

One profession has been unfairly tarnished by the England campaign. Lancaster is a former PE teacher and his lack of nimbleness, savvy and quick thinking is widely interpreted as “schoolmasterly”. Yet those are exactly the qualities that set great teachers apart. If he had demonstrated the qualities of a truly talented teacher, England would still be in the World Cup.

What now? In appointing coaches, English sports administrators usually behave like jilted teenagers. First, they reflect on the character of the previous (and now discredited) lover, then they blindly and wildly pursue the opposite. Decisions flow from neediness rather than needs. Feeling undisciplined under the matey Steve McClaren? Bring in the austere Fabio Capello.

The short-sighted replacement for Lancaster would be an inverse Lancaster. Reinforcing the current narrative (or rationalisation) of defeat, however, would encourage overshoot in the opposite direction. If a cynical new coach were to announce, in the words of the Aussie cricketer Allan Border, “I’d rather be a prick and win,” it might inspire applause at the press conference. But it wouldn’t improve England’s passing or lack of presence at the breakdown.

Instead of a PR quick fix, England should remember that the real job of a coach is to gauge and tweak a set of binaries: between individualism and the collective, between risk and control, between consistency and surprise, between planning and openness, between the necessary fear of authority and the celebration of self-expression.

Human nature never changes. In the management of men, there can be no new ideas: just fine balances, always in flux, ­constantly tilting out of equilibrium. Those balances constitute the vital organs of the team’s body. The coach acts as the doctor of the team’s health – or, if you prefer, the guardian of the team’s culture.

There is no escaping that duty. But it’s best not to talk about it.

It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a huge step. Painstaking analysis of a small part of the brain of a juvenile rat has enabled scientists to re-create that part inside a computer. What is more, the behaviour of the digital brain sliver shows high fidelity to the original and tiny tweaks produce realistic effects.

The first lesson here is that there is nothing mysterious or miraculous about the brain. You don’t have to do things like invoke the strange quantum behaviours of its constituent atoms and molecules to get the same outputs as you would from real brain tissue. Understanding and re-creating the characteristic properties of the brain is a challenge because of the organ’s complexity. But it is an engineering, not a metaphysical challenge. When it comes to the brain, there is no need for superstition.

The work started with experiments to measure the properties of real neurons, map out their interconnections using fine slices of rat brain and differentiate between the various subtypes of neuron involved. It doesn’t help that not all neurons are equal. The researchers, based in Lausanne, had to deal with 207 different types of neuron in their reconstruction. In total, they modelled 31,000 neurons and all their 2,000 interconnections. That involved
characterising 40 million of the synapses – the interconnection hardware – a task that has taken 82 scientists 20 years.

If the numbers in this small project are mind-boggling, that is only the beginning. A typical rat’s brain contains about two hundred million neurons, with a few hundred billion synapses. A digital reconstruction of the entire rat brain is a daunting task. But it is a task worth attempting, if the results of the Lausanne study are anything to go by.

Once the simulation was complete, researchers were able to switch this small section of virtual brain on and see how the neurons fired. What they saw reflected real-world neural activity. They could make the cells fire in sync, for instance, mimicking some observed firings in sleep. But they could also change the resources available to the neurons, such as the number of calcium ions, a vital ingredient in neural firing processes. This produced effects, seen in the real brain, that computer models of individual neuronal activity could not predict. The brain, in other words, is more than the sum of its parts. But not mysteriously so: you just have to build it to see it start to work.

As this work progresses we will achieve an ever-clearer understanding of how brains process signals from the senses and integrate them with other facets of our neural processing. We may even learn how they create a conscious experience. This is remarkable. Understanding conscious experience once seemed impossible: it’s why the Australian philosopher David Chalmers coined the phrase “the hard problem” to describe the scientific exploration of consciousness. But given the experimental explorations, digital simulations, technological breakthroughs and Rottweiler-like levels of tenacity we have achieved so far, there is no reason to think we can never solve the mystery.

We are mapping the brain at ever-higher resolution and are now able to discern changes in a single neuron that show memories being encoded. At some point soon – maybe in just a few decades – we are likely to build something in a computer that is probably conscious. It’s not something to worry about; it is something to welcome. We will finally overcome the last of our superstitions.

Thomas Pringle isn’t talked about any more, one of those wayside curiosities passed over by the great turnpike of history. In 1820, aged 31, he led a small group of Scottish settlers to South Africa on the Brilliant out of Gravesend. On arrival, they stopped at Simon’s Town, the British naval base in False Bay, before clipping down the coast to what became Port Elizabeth. After months at sea, the party disembarked “with boisterous hilarity”, only to learn that their tents were already occupied. Downcast, they steered back through the surf with “as much cheerfulness as could be expected”.

Pringle stayed behind on the beach, limping along (he’d been lame since childhood), casting a sour eye over the mainly English 1820 settlers. “Probably about a third were persons of real respectability of character, and possessed some worldly substance; but the remaining two-thirds were for the most part composed of individuals of a very unpromising description – persons who had hung loose upon society – low in morals or desperate in circumstance,” he later wrote.

The Pringle party finally came ashore. They provisioned themselves on government credit, commandeered ox-wagons and nosed into the interior. Their destination was the upper reaches of the Baviaans River, one of the most remote pockets of the Cape Colony. First, though, to the garrison of Grahamstown, then north over arid plains to Bedford. After Bedford the wagons rolled west before turning north yet again, snaking along the river course. They raided salt pans, marvelled at the herds of quagga and tried to stay chirpy when confronted with the rustle and occasional terrifying roar of the African night.

After 16 days on wagons, the Scots were not deterred by the first sighting of their assigned 40 hectares. It was all bush and gravel, almost desert, with few trees. The party of 24 set about damming the river; they planted orchards and surrounded their wheat fields with quince hedges. After a season or two, the party dispersed down the valley, each to his own farm. They called them Lynedoch, Glen Lynden and Eildon, bonny names for a blighted landscape. Pringle built himself a beehive hut in the shade of a witgat tree. This became an Emersonian moment, for under the shade of the witgat he conjured South African literature into being with his poetry.

He travelled on horseback throughout the colony, identifying with the settlers and their plight. The judgments formed on the beach softened. He, too, was now hanging rather loose upon society.

In the early 1970s, the Pringles of the Baviaans River valley clamoured to have Thomas’s remains returned from Bunhill Fields in Islington where he was buried, in the same cemetery as William Blake, Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan. “We’d heard there was going to be a highway built through Bunhill Fields,” says Alex Pringle, the current owner of Eildon. “We’d wanted to bring his remains back anyway, because for years we’d been feeling neglected. The Nats [the Nationalist Party] were in power and our history wasn’t important to them. We made some calls and a Safmarine vessel was involved. He was reburied in the crypt of the church here on the property.”

Pringle spent his last years in the Cape Colony becoming a professional thorn in the flesh of the then governor, Charles Somerset, whom he despised. Having moved from the valley to Cape Town, he founded a school and edited newspapers and magazines. Eventually, though, facing official wrath and mounting debt, he left town. He moved to Highgate in north London, became widely respected in the abolitionist movement and died of tuberculosis in 1834.

Paintings of Pringle show a pale, elfin man with large eyes. What they don’t show is his soulfulness – and pluck. A brave man who tried to tame bad men and bad lands with a pen.

I have long avoided video games. I lost a good part of my youth to a ZX Spectrum. When I was in my twenties I bought my first “proper” PC from a friend who left the first-person shooter game Doom installed. Two weeks later I emerged bleary-eyed from my room, vowing never to play any more games. Aside from a few chapters of Candy Crush Saga and completing Snake on my mobile phone, I stayed true to my word.

Everything changed when my eight-year-old daughter, Lotte, discovered Minecraft. I’d heard of it: a platform that allows users to build fantasy worlds out of blocks. But Lotte’s friends had got there first and she wanted to be part of the craze. We would often find ourselves with her cousins or friends engrossed in it, but we didn’t know how to play – so we would watch, transfixed by multicoloured blocks, zombies and the lethal lava.

Eventually, I succumbed to Lotte’s pleading and installed the game on my laptop. Lotte’s mother and I split up almost two years ago and, as a father, I’d been concerned that video games would not be a responsible use of our visits together. How wrong I was. Games have changed. Minecraft is essentially digital Lego – without the agony of stepping on a piece barefoot. Multiple players can participate. The Swedish company that created it was purchased by Microsoft last year for $2.5bn, and I can see why. The endless ways Lotte and I can enjoy the Minecraft world together never cease to amaze me.

At first it wasn’t easy. Lotte was more than capable of operating the main character, but initially lacked the vision to build things of interest. So I would google structures that more advanced players had created, and find blueprints, plans or, ideally, step by step guides. I would then “project-manage” the build, showing Lotte what to do, layer by layer, putting in marker bricks and keeping the workforce’s energy up with Ribena. At each visit, our “world” would grow larger.

I would build, too – often making surprise creations for her to discover the next time we loaded the game. These have ranged from mansions to stations and mazes. Despite long since overtaking me in Minecraft skills, Lotte is still thrilled to find out what I have constructed. And those night shifts building brick by brick are long. There is no cheating.

Lotte recently turned nine. Her mum made plans for a party – to which I was not invited. The two of us did manage a “real-life” visit to Bekonscot Model Village, but I wanted to give Lotte a proper surprise, with cake and all the rest. I had seen plenty of Minecraft-themed cakes: blocky swords, characters, houses, all of them looking
like psychedelic Battenbergs, but such an offering would be way beyond my skillset.

In a flash of inspiration I decided to build the cake inside Minecraft itself. I wouldn’t have to buy a single ingredient, nor worry about baking times or even pick up an icing bag. I set to work. Minecraft blocks are a metre cubed, so this was going to be big: a chocolate brownie layer, royal icing (made out of snow), red blocks that would pass for cherries and nine monolithic candles. The final touch at the top of each candle would be blocks of netherwrack: a volcanic glass which, in the Minecraft world, can be set on fire. Oh yes. Those candles had to be smoking.

My good friend David had invited us round for Sunday lunch on the day before Lotte’s birthday. He has two girls of a similar age and when we arrived I secretly told them what was going to happen. After our meal, I nudged Lotte, who was curious why I had humped my not-so-portable laptop to lunch. I asked her, in front of the others: “Do you want to play Minecraft?”

She was stunned. My question broke two rules: first, playing video games in front of company is rude. Second, after eating we usually watch Minecraft videos on YouTube, which is another story entirely (this month the 23-year-old Minecraft vlogger Jordan Maron bought himself a $4.5m mansion in the Hollywood Hills – so we can’t be the only ones watching).

“What? Now?” Lotte said. She clearly thought I’d gone mad. I started up my machine and everyone gathered round. Minecraft opened with Lotte’s character standing in the stables she had built the previous week. Except now there was a staircase leading underground with a sign at the top: “Lotte’s Birthday Ride”. Excitedly, she navigated her way down the stairs to find a minecart – one of the fastest ways to travel around the Minecraft universe.

Lotte hopped in. The cart trundled into a tunnel deep beneath our world and lit only with torches, eventually emerging to reveal an epic roller coaster circumnavigating all of our past creations. The ride climaxed by rising into the clouds before launching free fall on to a platform that provided a perfect view of Lotte’s birthday cake – candles blazing.

On cue, everyone began to sing “Happy Birthday”. Lotte, however, had opened the in-game inventory of blocks and tools. “What are you doing?” I asked, between singing lines of the song. “You’ll see,” she said. I watched in amazement as she selected a bucket of water, closed the inventory and flew around putting out all nine of the candles on the cake. She might have even made a wish.

Everyone cheered. At the same time I pulled out an actual chocolate cake that I’d picked up on the way to add a bit of real-life sustenance to the proceedings – though if I still had any doubts that Minecraft was a real-life experience as far as Lotte was concerned, they’d been extinguished in a flash along with nine gigantic netherwrack candles.

What makes a piece of music timeless? As a founding member of the Pogues, Jem Finer was responsible for co-writing a lasting Christmas anthem, the rousing and rancorous “Fairytale of New York”, in which Shane MacGowan and the late Kirsty MacColl trade barbs of love and fury beneath the city skyline.

As a solo artist, Finer is also the brain behind Longplayer, a piece of music that is about as close to timelessness as it is possible to get. It began playing 15 years ago, at the dawn of the millennium, and will continue until the end of the year 2999, when it will reset and begin again.

I met Finer at a warehouse in London’s Docklands by the mouth of the River Lea where Longplayer is currently based. His words were punctuated by the beautiful, pealing chimes that rose from the painstakingly arranged Tibetan singing bowls that perform the piece. The sequencing is driven by a bank of Apple computers, each element composed and programmed by Finer.

Looking back on his unusual career, he said: “Longplayer is where everything comes together.” Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1955, Finer moved to Knutsford, near Manchester, in 1966. He was an avid music fan as a teenager, especially loving “the rough stuff, rock’n’roll and soul”, though he was made to feel he “had no aptitude at all” and quit learning the guitar, assuming that he “couldn’t play music”.

After an abortive attempt to study accountancy, he went to “Keele University as a student and ended up studying computer science”. He recalled an inspiring lecture given by Brian Eno, entitled “something like ‘Guerilla Warfare and Its Relationship to Popular Music’”, which focused on avoiding conventional approaches to composition by “using systems to create something new”. Later, in London, Finer discovered the punk scene.

“Suddenly there was this idea that you didn’t have to be very good at all. It was liberating. That changed everything and I started to play music,” he said.

He ended up sharing a flat with Shane MacGowan. “He’d always play the Dubliners [the band] when he came in late at night. One day he said he wanted to play these songs like punk. I thought this was a really good idea.” The view of the Pogues as boozy figureheads for stormy Anglo-Irish relations is somewhat misplaced, Finer said. “The band’s always been totally misunderstood,” he insisted, maintaining that it had myriad influences other than Irish folk: “Rockabilly, country, the Velvet Underground . . . We were all making it up on instruments we couldn’t play.”

After mainstream success, the Pogues began to dissolve as the millennium approached. Finer had maintained an interest in “sound as material” and while on a tour bus in 1994 he noticed: “Nothing seemed to exist beyond the year 2000 other than the next World Cup.” He hit upon the idea to “create a 1,000-year-long piece of music”.

Although there is no rush to catch Longplayer – the project will outlive us all – the installation in the Docklands has been abetted by an app that is a “totally independent, self-contained performance” of the piece, albeit one that is precisely in time with all other performances.

As the ambient harmonics continued to hover around us, Finer ended our conversation by mentioning a memory from childhood, perhaps the true origin of Longplayer: “I remember looking through a telescope with my dad, him pointing at a star and saying, ‘That light has taken millions of years to get here.’ I thought, ‘Wow, this is weird.’ Then I began to try to fathom what that actually meant.”

THE SURGEON’S epiphany came out of the blue one Monday morning. Matt Jameson Evans, an orthopaedics specialist in a National Health Service hospital in Chelmsford, UK, found that more than 30 patients had been booked into his back clinic. That meant he had only 7 minutes to assess and treat each of them. “It was just impossible to do any kind of effective analysis or treatment of chronic back conditions in that amount of time,” he says.

“On top of this, many patients had travelled a long way and waited months for their consultation, yet all I could do was provide a semblance of care,” Jameson Evans says. “It was not what I spent years training to do.”

Pincer movement

This workload prompted Jameson Evans to launch his own tech-mediated healthcare service. His approach is showing how technology can overcome the all-too-familiar problems facing healthcare systems like the NHS. Indeed, the service’s problems were recently concisely summed up by Bruce Keogh, medical director for the NHS in England, speaking about healthcare innovation in Manchester. “We are caught,” he said, “in a quadruple pincer of increasing demand, escalating costs, rising expectations and a constrained financial environment.”

If nothing is done to control demand and costs, the NHS will be spending £30 billion more than its projected budget by 2021. Add to that the pressures of an ageing population, and the problems become profound.

There is hope, however. Keogh and his colleagues have established the NHS Innovation Accelerator, a collective of healthcare entrepreneurs – including Jameson Evans – who believe a raft of emerging digital and mobile technologies could put people in charge of their own healthcare. This “patient power” is a key plank of the NHS’s five-year plan, announced in October 2014, to refocus healthcare towards the prevention of illness – and so keep people out of hospital.

The NHS plan includes giving patients online and mobile access to their own medical records by 2018, allowing them to correct errors or check their medical histories, prescriptions and surgeries. “It’s a vast change from focusing on diagnostics and treatment. People should be able to manage their healthcare in a more proactive way,” says Neil Mesher, Managing Director with Philips Healthcare UK & I, a medical technology firm headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

And people are already carrying around some of the technology that will allow this: the smartphone. Containing sensors that know more about us than our friends do – when we move, how we move, whether we are hot or cold, indoors or outdoors – phones will carry a new generation of medical apps plugged into body-worn sensors that will allow patients to beam data to doctors, and sound the alarm if predictive software spots trouble. 

“The mobile phone is going to be one of the major disruptors in the way we develop healthcare,” says Keogh.

Making the transformation to a prevention-led health service, one that encourages people to live healthier lives, is vital, because dealing with the preventable illness load is becoming nonviable. Fully 50 per cent of NHS health-related spending now goes on treating just 5 per cent of patients – the very sickest, many of whom owe their pulmonary, cardiac or renal conditions to preventable factors like smoking, obesity and alcohol abuse.

Here, digital mobile healthcare opens up a new frontier. Digital cloud-based platforms such as the Philips HealthSuite have already seen the first clinical applications for lifestyle-related illness such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Clinicians are provided with greater access and analysis around patient data whilst patients are empowered to manage their own health at home, supported with proactive reminders to take medication. This is particularly important given that in the UK over £150 million is lost due to people deviating from drug regimes each year.  If technology can help keep at least some people out of hospital, more resources will be available for those who really need them.

Hospital at home

Those technologies are proliferating. For instance, Jameson Evans’s start-up, HealthUnlocked.com, is a social network that lets people with similar medical conditions get support from each other in dedicated communities – from people with obesity seeking weight-loss help, to those with cancer understanding their chemotherapy. It’s working: the site has 350,000 people regularly blogging and 3 million visitors per month. Philips, too, has recently unveiled a smartphone app that helps people with type 1 diabetes to better monitor and control their condition. The prototype enables patients to send private messages to healthcare providers as well as share posts about their health with other patients, clinicians and caregivers.

But it’s telehealth – the supporting of patients living at home by medical professionals via smart devices – that has some of the greatest potential for empowering patients and resource savings. At Philips Healthcare UK & I, Alan Davies runs “Hospital to Home”, a remote telemonitoring  service for people with COPD, chronic heart failure, epilepsy, diabetes and hypertension. “People who are in and out of hospital the most tend to have a combination of these conditions,” Davies says, so by adopting supported self-care programmes, patients can safely manage their health and retain at-home independence. This improves patient experience and relieves pressures on the healthcare system.

Mobile tech is also making its presence felt. To use such a system, a patient has a smartphone or tablet running apps designed to connect via Bluetooth to a raft of different wireless sensor types ranging from weight/body-fat scales to pulse oximeters for measuring blood oxygen. At intervals, the person takes a measurement prompted by an alert from an app, and data is sent over landline, broadband, or the mobile phone network, to a hospital server that can alert medical professionals to any data deviating from the norm. This type of technology is now rapidly entering the home and helping to prevent, not just manage, the onset of chronic diseases.

For Jameson Evans, this revolution is unstoppable. “The technology is waiting to be used,” he says. “Patients will provide the momentum for this change to happen.” 

---

This article was first published by the New Scientist on 22 October and is re-published here with permission.

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, was welcomed lavishly and deferentially to London this week for a state visit supposedly heralding a “golden decade” of Sino-British relations. Britain has one of the most open economies in the world and, as ardent globalisers, David Cameron and George Osborne are eager to encourage Chinese investment in grand projects such as the building of a new nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset. Not all of the Prime Minister’s ideological allies are happy, however. Steve Hilton, the former Downing Street policy guru, scathingly denounced “our obsession with economic subservience towards China”.

There are reasons to be concerned about the development. In absolute terms, Britain already has the world’s second-highest current account deficit after the United States: it is unusually vulnerable to the whims of foreign investors. It is self-evident, too, that China, the ultimate extractive state, is not greatly concerned with the security of British jobs, nor indeed with the promotion of human rights and democracy.

The crisis in Britain’s steel industry – more than 1,700 jobs have been lost at the Redcar steel plant on Teesside (owned by the Thai company SSI) and further losses are expected in Scunthorpe and at Dalzell and Clydebridge in Scotland – is partly the consequence of cheap Chinese imports flooding the market. It has been suggested that state-owned Chinese companies even dumped excess production on the international markets at a loss.

The Cameron government is indulging in what John Gray, in an essay on page 24, calls a variety of mercantilism, “with government not retreating from the marketplace but actively reshaping it so that it better serves the interests of trade and wealth accumulation. The current push to expand Britain’s economic links with China shows Osborne and Cameron using the power of government to guide the market in a way that would horrify any disciple of Milton Friedman. Strangely, this neo-mercantilism goes with a remarkably sunny attitude towards globalisation. It is hard to envision Margaret Thatcher being happy with the role of Chinese money and expertise in Britain’s strategically sensitive nuclear industry.”

Britain’s openness to world markets has direct social and economic costs; and geopolitical risks, as well as human rights abuses by the Chinese, are being disregarded casually. It is also curious that the Conservatives are so willing to embrace investment from foreign governments in British industries yet staunchly oppose state ownership of essential services and utilities in the United Kingdom.

Ideology provides an explanation. As the British government is guaranteeing China’s investment, it has to borrow, in effect, from China. But this debt will not become part of the deficit balance sheet. The Chancellor’s target of achieving a fiscal surplus in 2019-20 is unaffected.

There are no easy answers to the challenges that globalisation brings. Australia’s foreign investment review board, which assesses investments over a certain threshold, has been criticised for deterring overseas companies, particularly those from China. But few would argue that protectionism provides an answer.

It would also be wrong to sell off British institutions and companies without paying heed to the dangers of doing so, or enacting safeguards to ensure standards of behaviour among foreign investors as well as security for workers. Foreign investment should be encouraged but not at any cost. 

The left returns in Canada

It is just four years since the Liberal Party of Canada endured the worst election defeat in its history. It finished third behind the left-wing New Democrats, winning only 19 per cent of the vote and 34 seats. Its then leader was the Harvard academic Michael Ignatieff, who became the first leader of the opposition to lose his own constituency since 1878. From this nadir, the Liberals surged in the general election on 19 October, achieving a majority with 184 seats and winning 39.5 per cent of the vote. The victory ended nearly a decade of Conservative rule under Stephen Harper.

The new prime minister, the 43-year-old Justin Trudeau (whose father, Pierre, served twice in that role), ran an optimistic campaign that eschewed the divisive tactics adopted by the Conservatives. He pledged to double infrastructure investment (running a modest deficit for three years), raise taxes on the top 1 per cent and reduce them for middle-income
earners, agree to new climate-change targets, legalise marijuana and launch a public inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women (as Mr Harper had refused to do).

For defeated centre-left parties, including our Labour Party, the Liberals’ triumph is a reminder of how quickly the pendulum can swing – if they make the right choices. 

That man of mystery Michael Ashcroft’s dramatic announcement that he’d cheated death was worthy of James Bond’s nemesis Blofeld. Whispers of “swine flu” accompanied a video at the Call Me Dave launch made for Belize’s Channel 5 – a TV station owned by the Tory billionaire. No Georgi Markov poisoned umbrella nor Alexander Litvinenko polonium-210 were, as far as we know, involved. And so heroic of Ashcroft to send 39 tweets and write newspaper pieces during the 27 days since he first succumbed (including 18 days we were told he was in intensive care). Pig-gate’s David Cameron would need a heart of stone.

You’ve got to admire the honesty of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Tory MP for the 18th Century. The merchant banker was overheard saying of Chancer of the Exchequer George Osborne’s charter gimmick: “It is complete nonsense but we just had to vote for it.” John McDonnell infamously reached a similar conclusion before realising too late that Labour had a choice.

“We will force people like Starbucks, Vodafone, Amazon and Google and all the others to pay their fair share of taxes,” the same McDonnell declared in his speech at Labour conference. The shadow chancellor has since agreed, I hear, to meet Starbucks, after the coffee seller insisted it had mended its ways and is now a model corporate citizen. The assembly will presumably be welcomed by frontbenchers such as the Eagle twins, Angela and Maria, Michael Dugher, Luciana Berger, Heidi Alexander and Lisa Nandy – plus Corbyn’s spinner James Mills. All were clocked sipping free Starbucks coffee the week McHammer condemned the company.

The Scottish separatist Mhairi Black’s party piece attacking the drinking culture at Westminster prompts mischievous rivals to wonder if she’s enjoying a sly dig at her thirsty SNP colleagues who colonise the Sports and Social Club. My spy muttered the 21-year-old former student, who once tweeted, “Smirnoff Ice is the drink of the gods – I cannae handle this c*** man,” is also no stranger to the bar. Only to sup, I’m sure, Irn Bru.

Promotion to the front bench is not without cost for Labour’s Conor McGinn, the Northern Irish whip. The MP for St Helens North, in his early Westminster months, positioned himself behind the DUP’s Nigel Dodds so that the Speaker couldn’t identify the heckler with an Ulster brogue. No longer. Bercow can now put McGinn’s face to the Irish sniping as he moves closer to the Speaker’s chair.

“Grammer School Head’s Association”. Perhaps the Commons official behind a notice directing school guests to a room booked by the Tory eleven-plus champion Graham Brady had a sense of humour.

Kevin Maguire is the associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror

I recently visited Aizuwakamatsu, a ­rural rice-farming region in northern Japan. The scenery was storybook Asia: precipitous hills, dense with greenery, dipping into narrow-cut rice paddies hedged by brooks and streams. At the onset of dusk one evening, our ­minivan rounded a hillside overlooking the Tadami River. A cluster of homes emerged through the mist, pastel green, pink and pale blue roofs huddled on a patch of land jutting from the shore. With the mountains mirrored in the water surrounding it, the village looked as though it were floating.

One of the local guides told me that the coloured roofs were made of tin or aluminium, covering or entirely replacing the original thatchwork, an icon of traditional Japanese architecture. Upkeep had become too expensive, and the risk of fires or snow collapses too much for elderly inhabitants to bear. But what is really sad, she said, is that no one wants to live here any more. Rural Japan is dying.

Japan boasts the highest female life expectancy (86.8 years) and the world’s greatest number of centenarians per capita (the country is home to 61,568 people aged 100 or older): signs of achievements in health care, diet and societal stability. But it is no net positive. The perfect storm of declining rates of marriage and birth – in 2014 only 1.001 million babies were born, the lowest number since data was first collected in 1899 – is such that Japan’s population is not just ageing faster than anywhere else, it is also disappearing.

One consequence is that the country has an estimated three million deserted homes, according to the Japan Times. The Nomura Research Institute projects that a fifth of all Japanese homes will be abandoned by 2023. Nationwide, residential land prices have plummeted for seven years straight.

The impact of Japan’s greying population has been most evident outside its main cities, where the young can’t find sustainable jobs, whether or not they want them, and so decamp in droves for urban centres.

The opposite is happening in Tokyo, where the population of the metropolitan area has increased for 19 consecutive years, growing by roughly 100,000 in 2014 to 38 million. New high-rise hotels and condos puncture the skyline ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, drawing moneyed young professionals and retirees, as well as free-spending tourists, mostly from China.

But beyond the capital’s glow lies a wasteland of abandoned houses, schools, resorts and theme parks. “The prime reason [abandoned buildings] are legion is because they are in the wrong place,” says Richard Hendy, whose blog Spike Japan documents the decline of the emptying villages and towns. “Emigration to the big cities is the biggest culprit,” he tells me about Japan’s hollowing out. “Absolute household numbers are not expected to peak for about a decade, as more and more people live alone or in one-or two-generation nuclear families with one or no children.”

Hendy adds: “You won’t find abandoned houses in my corner of [Tokyo].”

Cultural sensibilities may also be at play. Japan has long embraced the new over the old. The archetypal Japanese home consists of what westerners would consider transitory materials – wood, paper, straw – not built to last, partly because Japan is buffeted by natural disasters: earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and typhoons.

Every two decades the Grand Shrine at Ise, among Japan’s most sacred, gets demolished and reconfigured. This summer, the destruction of Tokyo’s beloved modernist Hotel Okura, featured in the Bond novel You Only Live Twice, drew howls of futile protest. A new high-rise with 21st-century amenities will take its place.

Many of the structures now abandoned to rot and ruin – “ghost homes”, in the phrase coined by the New York Times’s Tokyo correspondent Jonathan Soble, in an article this summer – were hastily erected during the postwar years, as Japan’s economic juggernaut took flight. A 30-year lifespan was the standard target. It would make more sense, both technologically and economically, to destroy and build anew, meeting the safety specs of the future and keeping the real-estate market humming.

The postwar imperative to build created a property tax that is today completely at odds with Japan’s real-estate crisis: the government will punish you if you demolish a house without building a new one, raising taxes on your empty land up to six times if you leave it that way.

There are marginal efforts under way to turn the emptied houses into living homes. In Kyoto, the “Machiya [traditional wooden merchant townhouses] Machizukuri Fund” has drawn increasing numbers of overseas investors, attracted by the weak yen and the chance to revive the dying art of a Unesco-blessed aesthetic.

Closer to Tokyo, I met Yoshihiro Takishita, a 72-year-old architect, this summer at his restored farmhouse in the seaside city of Kamakura. He has created a career out of dismantling, moving, restoring and modernising the materials and techniques of Japan’s rural builders. To date, he has completed over 30 projects, spanning four countries.

For Takishita, who discovered his love of traditional Japan with his adoptive father, the late American AP journalist John Roderick, the art of keeping old homes alive is more spiritual than practical. “My kind of a traditional Japanese farmhouse is like a Shinto shrine, a shrine to nature,” he says, as we survey the sea from his pitch-roofed balcony. “Young Japanese only want the cheap and the new. But there is a mystery to the spaces inside these homes that has a healing power. It’s very comforting.”

Roland Kelts is the author of “Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US” (Palgrave Macmillan). He will be writing regularly from Japan for the New Statesman

Crikey, what’s this? A load of hipsters in particularly urgent need of a flat white? No. It’s an army of ruddy-faced Danes come to fight the pasty Saxons for the kingdom of Northumbria – though the two are, I agree, easily confused. The male denizens of Hackney and Shoreditch and these blokes straight off their longships are strikingly similar: the beards, the passion for red meat cooked over charcoal . . . Both are invaders, not wanted, and never mind that they might improve the locality. All that separates them is their footwear (the Vikings favour dirty puttees over box-fresh Adidas Stan Smiths), and their idea of heaven (the hipsters think Valhalla’s a new dirty steak joint in Hoxton Square that doesn’t take bookings).

In truth, I am unexpectedly gripped by The Last Kingdom (Thursdays, 9pm, BBC2), the BBC’s adaption of a series of novels by Bernard Cornwell (yes, he who gave us Sharpe). But then, I was a kid who loved Noggin the Nog. There are those who regard this festival of rape and pillage as a rather feeble attempt by the BBC to move its tanks on to Sky’s enviable lawn, most of which is inhabited at the moment by various dragons and psychopaths in the form of Game of Thrones, its huge international hit. But this isn’t quite right, for here be no dragons – thank God, or Odin, or whoever. The Last Kingdom, which is set in 866AD, is quasi-historical, some of its characters being based on real figures (King Alfred, Ubba the Viking, a certain Lord Uhtred). The nearest it gets to fantasy is in the complexions and teeth of its characters. Wipe off the mud and blood, and Vikings and Saxons alike would do well as GQ cover stars.

The story turns on a cuckoo-in-the-nest. After young Uhtred’s father (an excellently shouty cameo from Matthew Macfadyen) is killed by the Danes, they take the young man hostage and use him as a slave. In time, though, he goes native, and Earl Ragnar (Peter Gantzler) and Ravn (Rutger Hauer, cobwebby tattoos all over his face) bump him up to son status, admiring his pluck. This is just as well, because back in Bebbanburg (this is Saxon for Bamburgh) his dastardly uncle has pinched all his lands. But then . . . here it comes: yet another reversal of fortune. Renegade Danes kill Ragnar, Ravn and all the other people whose names begin with R, leaving Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon) with no option but to return to Bebbanburg to bag what’s rightfully his. The only problem now is that everyone regards Uhtred as a Dane, including himself. He belongs nowhere. He doesn’t know whether he fancies shepherd’s pie and peas, or gravadlax.

The Last Kingdom has been adapted by Stephen Butchard, who wrote the brilliantly nasty BBC/HBO miniseries House of Saddam (2008), and his dialogue is both murderous and quite witty. I don’t know if “turd” was a favourite Saxon insult, but Chaucer must have got it from somewhere. Butchard can’t have seen the British Museum’s big Viking exhibition, because we never see his Danes carving a walrus tusk or playing chess. But the flipside of this is that he has managed to keep a fairly tight rein on the emotional anachronisms; 21st-century sentimentality punctures their almost cartoonish brutishness only occasionally. Most of the Danes, incidentally, are played by Scandinavian actors, their fluting English a reminder of their otherness. Plus, in real life, Gantzler et al probably do know how to chop wood. In the authenticity stakes, this helps.

The whole thing looks OK, too. The battle scenes are shot so cleverly that you half believe you’re watching a vast army, rather than six extras and some cut-price CGI. Muddy, misty and generally grim, the landscapes take you straight back to those camping holidays you endured with your parents in the Seventies, when a Viking state of mind was all that stood between the guy rope you were holding and the force-nine gale that threatened to send all your possessions spiralling across the Yorkshire Dales. My stepfather’s battle cry as we tried to pitch our tent at the foot of Ingleborough in 1980 was quite the equal of anything Ragnar the Elder could produce – which is, perhaps, one reason why I’m already in the thrall of this somewhat peculiar series.

For years after leaving university I always read books with a pencil in one hand, underlining “important quotes”, making notes in the margin, highlighting paragraphs that seemed to encapsulate the key themes. Until one day it occurred to me that I probably didn’t need to do this any more. That in fact I was now just reading for pleasure, and it was unlikely that anyone would suddenly say to me: “Beneath the surface disaffection of Eliot’s poetry lies an almost Romantic desire for transcendence. Discuss.”

I felt a bit bereft for a while, not sure how to read if I wasn’t reading in order to answer questions. I worried that I would forget books once I’d finished them; that they wouldn’t leave their mark on me if I didn’t leave my marks in them. And I began to notice how differently we talk and think about books outside of academia. For instance, if a friend asks what a book is about we answer, “It’s about a woman who leaves her husband and goes to Berlin to become a painter,” or, “It’s a murder mystery about two friends on a train.” But for students and reviewers there’s a different meaning to “about”. There, you say: “It’s a book about love, loss and friendship.” Or: “It’s a book about grief and history, about time and forgetting, about the very act of writing.”

Now, after years of reading casually, I find myself back on firmer ground, with a pencil and a notebook, as I take on the role of judge for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Launched in 1996, the annual prize “celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world” and so, with those criteria in mind, I am reading my way through a mountain of novels, mentally marking them out of ten, trying to sort them into piles of Yes and No. My notebook devotes a page to each novel, and already tells a clear story. A Yes on page one, a No on page two; a Definitely Maybe, followed by another two sharp Nos. At this point the character called Doubt arrives in town. Page six has a No with two question marks, page seven a Yes with a row of them. This is going to be harder than I thought.

Already I’m noticing my prejudices, or perhaps just preferences. A sense of irritation with novels where all the main characters are exceptionally beautiful, as if that makes them more interesting. A profound relief whenever the opening pages reveal a sense of humour, or at least the presence of wit. A dislike of certain terms that recur in cover blurbs – the word “haunting” now fills me with dismay.

Above all, I’m determined to take this seriously, because it is no small thing to win an award, and I say this from my vantage point of experience, having never won anything at all. Well, that’s not strictly true. In 1984 I won the City Limits magazine Best Female Singer award. I still have it, in a box in a cupboard at home – a six-inch garden gnome holding a tiny placard bearing my name. I was thrilled, thinking that was just the beginning, when in fact it was the end of my award-winning run.

This hasn’t caused me any undue angst. I console myself with the thought that awards aren’t everything, though my favourite acceptance speech is that of Kingsley Amis on winning the Booker: “Until just now I had thought the Booker Prize a rather trivial, showbizzy caper, but now I consider it a very serious, reliable indication of literary merit.” That made me laugh out loud, and I imagine it is precisely how those of us who pretend not to care would feel if we actually found ourselves up on the stage, cradling some sort of little statue.

So, with this in mind, I am committed to doing this properly, and what a joy it is, being given an excuse to read books non-stop. Do not disturb me, for I am working, here in my armchair, doing extremely important reading. You remember that lovely scene in Gregory’s Girl, with the headmaster (Chic Murray) merrily playing rinky-tink piano to himself in a quiet room, pausing only to say to a gaping teenager, “Off you go, you small boys.” That will be me, with my books.

“Any mention of the gold lamé trouser suit and the boobs?”

I’m in the basement of the Royal Opera House in London during a Radio 3 recording of a new production of Gluck’s 1774 tragedy Orphée et Eurydice, featuring the esteemed Monteverdi Choir (24 October, 6.30pm, BBC Radio 3). Everybody is looking through the monitor at the American soprano Amanda Forsythe playing the god Amour while dressed like something out of Boogie Nights.

Having assumed that capturing live opera demands a series of mikes attached to the lapels of singers and someone pressing Record, I find it in fact involves a sound balancer, Susan, and her assistant, Adele, continually talking fast and low, minutely fading up and down the acoustics emerging from over 60 places in the theatre where microphones have been positioned and repositioned (“Was that a slight crash?” “Yes, a cello kicking”). The singers rarely wear radio mikes, Susan tells me, because “it can sound too close. You need to hear space and separation and distance. The sense of something happening on an actual stage.”

One of the challenges tonight is the long sections of dance in the production, which must be captured to suggest the bounce and flux of feet yet never overwhelm the ear. The listener must not be too frustrated about things they can’t see. Such diligence was sobering, the love in the room so evident: not just for the music, but for the latticework of tiny decisions that go into making perfect music radio. As the producer, Ellie, sits bent over her score – a dusty great, 1967 library edition, full of pencilled notes and crossings – it is evident that she has seen this particular production several times already, every onstage gesture mentally logged, how each particular performer moves, or even likes to breathe.

The running commentary is spookily prescient, as if these women are mind-readers (“He’ll shift now”). Most memorably, when the Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez, as Orphée, embraces the British soprano Lucy Crowe’s Eurydice, there is a muffled, lip-smacking noise, very subtle and unusual, open to aural interpretation.

“A kiss,” murmurs Susan, narrowing her eyes. “A kiss. Yes . . . let’s keep that in.” 

The first UK Women’s Liberation Movement Conference took place in Oxford in 1970. It was to result in the Women’s National Co-ordinating Committee making the following four demands:

1. Equal pay

2. Equal educational and job opportunities

3. Free contraception and abortion on demand

4. Free 24-hour nurseries

Forty-five years later feminists can debate how far we’ve come in achieving the first three of these. As for the last one, I think we can all agree that we’re nowhere near it.

Even with vouchers and a limited number of free hours for pre-schoolers, the cost of childcare in the UK is extortionate. A recent study released by the Family and Childcare Trust shows that nursery and childminder fees constitute a significant barrier to mothers finding employment. Many women return to work after having children to find they’d be just as well off staying at home.

Moreover, the hours offered by nurseries are usually inflexible. You might be able to fit pickups around a nine-to-five job, but shift work, a long commute or a zero-hours contract can make finding a suitable childcare provider impossible.

Enter the Women’s Equality Party. This week, the party launched its first policy document, which included a call for “government-funded free childcare for all children at nine months old, with the first 15 hours free and all extra time available at £1 per hour.” My instant reaction to this was “thank God someone’s suggested it!”

I don’t believe for a minute that such a policy will be adopted by any of the major parties any time soon, but part of me is still glad that the idea has re-entered the public domain. The WEP’s proposal sends the message that care work isn’t just a private matter to be resolved behind closed doors; it’s an equality issue, and one with which we all need to engage.

But not everyone is happy. For instance, in a blogpost responding to the proposal Vanessa Olorenshaw argues that the WEP “is giving every impression that women need liberating from full-time mothering, and that only participation in the workforce can lead to ‘equality.’”

We come back to that familiar face-off between stay-at-home mother and mother in paid employment. The WEP appears to be taking the latter’s side while forcing the former to join her ranks. “It is,” writes Olorenshaw, “as though the price to pay for a party seeking to end violence against women is the surrender and trade-off of any ‘privilege of motherhood’ and the denial of the existence and value of maternal care – for mothers and children, and, indeed, society at large.”

I have a great deal of sympathy for Olorenshaw’s viewpoint. I too am uneasy with the WEP’s casual embrace of gender neutrality in their approach to family policy, as though the transition towards a more equal division of labour can take place without attention paid to more deep rooted power imbalances. The trouble is, whatever policy a party offers can be read as a form of interference, with implicit prescriptions being made for how mothers should raise their children. And as long as we are faced with a broad range of other inequalities – to do with sexuality, class and race – some mothers will have to play by the rules more than others.

How we raise our children is not simply a matter of individual preference, but one in which privilege, cultural values and economic pressures intersect. While feminism’s engagement with reproduction is often seen only through the lens of choice, many writers and thinkers – particularly women of colour such as bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins and Dorothy Roberts – have demonstrated that we also need to look at the issue of justice.

When governments “help” in the raising of children, they can be seeking a way to assume control of the values transmitted to disadvantaged groups. It is not just a matter of them deciding “what mothers should do”; it is a matter of some mothers and children being subject to correction and others remaining exempt.

Last week, for example, the Tory think tank Bright Blue made the suggestion that receipt of child benefit should be conditional upon parents enrolling their children in pre-school education. Clearly such a measure will have no impact upon those not in receipt of child benefit, and the greatest impact on those on the lowest incomes. While children do benefit from early years education, one cannot help feeling that this form of encouragement veers towards coercion. And while coercing parents into sending their children for government-approved indoctrination is perfectly normal – we all have to send them to school – there is the question of where we draw the line. Education and childcare breach the boundaries we set up between public and private spaces and responsibilities. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing (but as the kind of mother who is not under a huge amount of scrutiny, that’s an easy thing for me to say).

What free childcare really means depends on the society in which it is embedded. Under the current government, I have little doubt that it would mean that women with children under one would suddenly have “no excuse” not to be in paid work (unless, of course, they were independently wealthy, in which case staying at home would miraculously turn into a virtue). While this may be fine for women in comfortable, stable jobs with regular hours, it would prove hugely disruptive for those forced into low-paid, irregular work. Moreover, the effect on the child would depend not only on the quality of childcare available, but the stress to which the family as a whole was being subjected.

If the WEP want women to get behind their childcare policy, they need to have an approach to employment, wealth disparities and class inequality that would mitigate the potential negative effects of “freeing up” mothers for paid employment (at the moment, broader socioeconomic issues seem to be considered “outside of their remit” of bringing about equality for women, a position which makes little sense). In addition, they need to show an understanding that women of all classes experience caring for their children as more than just unpaid work. To offer a woman the chance of taking a different path is not necessarily a form of liberation. The case for change has to be made elsewhere.

As a feminist I desperately want the unpaid caring work that most women do – both in the UK and globally – to be given a clear value. But however this is arranged, whether through outsourced childcare or through stipends to individual carers, it will involve a form of interference and certain value judgments being passed on what caring is and how it should be done. Moreover, as long as power is not in the hands of those who do caring work, they will not be the ones making these judgments. It will be “the privileged” (as ever, the final say in feminist policy-making devolves to the privileged while feminism shoulders the blame).

I still believe that free childcare can offer more benefits than disadvantages to women and children. The work of raising children needs to be made public, visible and valued, and there are ways of achieving this while still nurturing personal bonds and supporting collective action by and for mothers. Nonetheless, the implementation of any free childcare policy will require compromise on the part of individual women who have their own ideas on how things should be done. The cost will be more than just financial and some women could end up paying more than others. While there’s nothing wrong in reviving some of the idealism of Seventies women’s liberation, we need to be ready to shoulder and share the burden of change. 

The rise of the "internet of things" (basically, objects connected to the internet) is quietly rubbing the rough edges off our everyday routines. The average smartphone can now be a light switch, control your electricity meter, and turn on your toaster. Soon, if so inclined, you'll barely need to engage with anything outside an app. 

But what does connecting everything to everything else actually mean? Take the iKettle. It's a kettle which lets you boil water by touching a button on an app, thereby saving yourself the precious seconds it takes to, er, walk over to it and press a different button. To do so, it connects to your WiFi network. And that's where things get a little sticky. Because once things are connected, they can also be hacked. 

According to Ken Munro, who works at Pen Test Partners, which basically tests the hackability of different technologies, it's pretty easy to hack into the iKettle. Over an incredibly comprehensive series of blogposts covering the various incarnations of the iKettle, the company has shown how to hack into the iKettle and turn it on from afar: "If you haven’t configured the kettle, it’s trivially easy for hackers to find your house and take over your kettle". Part of the problem is that if you set up the kettle with an Android phone, the authentification code is automatically set as the incredibly secure "000000", unless you reset it yourself. 

This isn't a new technological problem - journalists and private detectives were able to hack Milly Dowler's voicemails because, like most voicemail mailboxes, hers was accessible by an automatically set and easy to guess passcode. Yet as Munro demonstrates in a later blogpost, this all gets more serious once your hackable kettle is connected to other things. As he told tech site The Register, the hack can be used to find our your WiFi password: "I can sit outside of your place with a directional antenna, point it at your house, knock your kettle of your access point, it connects to me, I send two commands and it discloses your wireless key in plain text.". 

Munro then plotted vulnerable iKettles on a map of London to show how easy it would be for hackers to share the data. The security on most Internet of Things products is, he says, “utterly bananas”. 

This is just the latest in a serious of revelations about how these new connected products are actually relatively insecure: you can hack fridges, and thermostats, and probably toasters, too. Yet as Klint Finley points out at Wired, the real problem isn't these objects themselves, but the huge amounts of data they send off to servers which may be equally vulnerable, and also far more attractive to hackers. He writes:

We’re putting ever greater amounts of data into the cloud. Nest knows which rooms in your house you spend the time in, and when. Smart appliances transmit our voice commands to their manufacturers. Car insurance companies deploy tracking devices to gauge driver safety. Fitness trackers know our heart rates and how many steps we take each day. The photos we upload to Instagram may include geographic coordinates. 

Alone, these data points may seem unimportant - who cares if a hacker knows where you're standing in your living room? But together, they paint an entire portrait of a life - a life that's now accessible to anyone with a tech background and an axe to grind. And that's before you think about how governments could use these "smart" objects and the resultant data. As digital rights campaigner Cory Doctorow told my colleague Ian Steadman last year, it isn't hard to imagine a dictatorship which turns off protesters' heating via a smart thermostat during a bitterly cold winter. 

Whether we're willing to risk our data for the sake of a WiFi kettle may well be a turning point in the story of internet privacy. Either we give up, and accept that our digital footprints will soon exactly mirror our real ones, or we demand more: better security from companies marketing these connected objects, and better education on how to keep your data secure. Meanwhile, it's worth weighing up whether each new technology is worth the risks it poses to your privacy - a smart thermostat is helpful for your bills and the environment, but perhaps kettles were fine as they were. 

The Black Panthers have been the subject of one passable dramatised film (Mario Van Peebles’s Panther) and a slew of documentaries, most of which have soft-pedalled the party’s less progressive qualities as blithely as they have fetishised the roll-neck/beret/leather jacket combo. Stanley Nelson’s new documentary exhibits these and other problems but it does at least function as a primer to the Panthers. No mention is made of parallels between then and now, even in describing the police brutality that helped necessitate and nurture the movement. The relevance is fiercer for being left unstated.

Stitching together new interviews with party members and copious amounts of archive footage, the film traces the Panthers’ beginnings in Oakland, California, where they launched self-defence operations, welfare initiatives such as the children’s free breakfast programme, and the armed monitoring of arrests of African Americans. The police and FBI retaliated vigorously; displays of aggression against the Panthers were coupled with a sophisticated use of informants. One leader, the charismatic Fred Hampton, was shot dead without him knowing his own bodyguard was a snitch.

The film isn’t best placed to offer any critical commentary on, say, the Panthers’ idolatry of Stalin and North Korea. It’s wall-to-wall icons instead – from Huey P Newton tearing off his shirt, rock-god-style, to Eldridge Cleaver giving a bizarre speech in which he promises to beat Ronald Reagan to death with a marshmallow. At a fundraiser at Jane Fonda’s townhouse, party members lined the walls as guests sipped from champagne flutes. “We folded our arms and looked like we were ready to kill someone,” recalls one Panther, adding with a chuckle: “The stars loved that!”

It’s not quite as glossy as an episode of MTV Cribs– we don’t get any Panthers showing us into their bedrooms and saying, “This is where the magic happens” – but nor is it noticeably more probing. A jukebox soundtrack (James Brown, Gil Scott-Heron) bestows a conspicuous neatness on the material. If there is a corrective to that, it lies in the contrast between the snaps from the 1960s, showing lean, defiant young men and women staring into the camera to see who blinks first, and those people today. Age has not withered them exactly, but many now look dazed by the magnitude of their own contribution to history.

In other instances, the film doesn’t shake our suspicion that the stories being told have calcified into legend. A chunk of screentime is rightly set aside for the murder of Bobby Hutton, a 17-year-old shot by police while surrendering. But if Nelson asked about Alex Rackley, a 19-year-old tortured and killed by fellow Panthers who suspected him of being an informant, then it didn’t make the final cut. Rather misleadingly, the picture begins with the parable of the blind men and the elephant, which is intended to show, as Ericka Huggins explains, that “we know the party we were in but not the entire story”. On the contrary, the documentary presents the smoothest possible reading of history; if this is an elephant, the wrinkles on its skin have been ironed out.

African-American culture figures strongly in another documentary, Fresh Dressed, about hip-hop fashion. The fun, fizzy images make The Warriors look austere – the 1970s Bronx gang get-up (cut denim jackets over leather, festooned with hand-sewn lettering and mink fur); the Mondrian prints by Cross Colours that went stratospheric after being worn on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; the rappers’ laces that were stretched, starched and ironed to look fat as well as phat. And the stories are illuminating, from Tommy Hilfiger handing out clothes in the ghetto, much as a dealer might give that first clinching hit for free, to the lightning raids made by poor kids from the projects on Fifth Avenue stores selling Polo gear.

Despite some goofy animated inserts, this would all work better as a DVD extra than a fully fledged film. It lacks an arc – it’s a rise-and-rise story. And the film-makers’ love for the fashions precludes any serious take-down of the corporations that made billions from exploiting the DIY street look. A-list interviewees are on hand to supply Z-grade quotes. “Fresh is more important than money,” Kanye West declares from his private beach, and Pharrell reminds us: “By the time we hit the 2000s it was kinda like, ‘wow’, you know . . .” Unlike the baggy fabrics, the material is stretched a little thin. 

The most revealing moment of George Osborne's appearance before the Treasury select committee came when he declared that he was "comfortable" with the "judgement call" that he had made over tax credit cuts. As with David Cameron saying that he was "delighted" when MPs backed the measure, the choice of word was unwise (inviting Labour MPs to quip about just how "comfortable" the Chancellor is). But it was a sincere reflection of Osborne's mood.  

The pressure on the Conservatives over the cuts, which will cost 3.2m families an average of £1,300 a year, has significantly increased this week. Tory backbenchers, such as Heidi Allen and London mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith, Boris Johnson, work and pensions select commitee chair Frank Field, the Sun and the Adam Smith Institute are among those demanding that Osborne modify or abandon his plans. But the Tories are comforted by what they regard as Labour's weakness. One No.10 strategist said of the pressure on the government: "Corbyn has not created any of it". The Tories believe that an alternative opposition leader, such as Yvette Cooper, would have made this week's PMQs far tougher for Cameron. Under Corbyn, they expect Labour to struggle to land blows, and to struggle to exploit those landed by others.

The Tories do not dismiss the possibility that they could fall into mid-term unpopularity, and some expect to. But they are comforted by the experience of the last parliament, when the double-digit leads that Labour enjoyed became a seven-point Conservative advantage. The opposition has highlighted the 71 Tory seats in which the number of families facing significant losses outweighs the party's majority. But of the 60 constituencies it similarly identified in 2012, it won just five. 

Even if Osborne does soften the cuts for the lowest-paid in his Autumn Statement on 25 November, as some expect him to, there is now no easy way to avoid major reductions. As Resolution Foundation director Torsten Bells notes in a forensic analysis, even with the immediate introduction of a living wage of £9.35 (which won't happen), a couple with children and one full-time worker would still lose £620 (down from £1,500). Were this coupled with an increase in the personal tax allowance to £12,500, from £10,500, the loss would be £320. 

Osborne's pledge to eliminate the deficit by 2019-20, to avoid rises in general taxation and to protect spending on the NHS, schools, defence and international development has left him with little room for manoeuvre (unless he once again allows his targets to slip). It is the inevitability of the cuts that makes the Chancellor's "comfortable" position all the more striking.