Jeremy Corbyn won Labour’s leadership election with a powerful mandate for change. The excitement generated by his campaign showed that members want a new kind of politics – more radical, more engaging, more open. Labour Together is the new unity project open to everyone in our party. It’s for supporters of any of the leadership candidates, for people who know that what unites us is bigger than what divides us, and who want us to come together to win so we can change our country for good. 

Ideas are at the heart of Labour Together. The vision we offered the country at the general election wasn’t good enough. As we knocked on doors in constituencies across the country we found little enthusiasm for the Tories. The truth is, they didn’t win the election, we lost it. We lost to an out-of-touch unpopular party because we lacked credibility on the big issues. Many of the radical ideas from the Labour Party’s policy review, shaped by a wide network of supporters, activists and thinkers, never formed part of Labour’s campaign.

Big ideas like devolving power to our regions, cities, towns and communities; giving people a bigger say over the public services they use; giving workers a real voice in the workplace; connecting people with the digital revolution; recognising the importance of family, community, and national identity. We didn’t challenge a welfare system that demonises the poor and allowed ourselves to be portrayed as anti-business.  We can’t make that mistake again.

The best way to solve the huge, collective challenges we face is by involving people.  Labour councils, working with their communities, have shown us the way. Plymouth has set up dozens of community energy projects to provide jobs, skills and cheaper, greener power. Lambeth set up a community youth trust to give young people a voice over their own futures.  Rochdale mutualised their entire housing stock to give tenants a real stake in ownership. People power is the future.  At the grassroots Labour is already changing the country and opening politics up– now it’s time for the rest of the party to join in.    

After two resounding election defeats, Labour’s first task is to show the country we’re still relevant. Labour Together will build on the work Jon Cruddas led through Labour’s policy review and take it further. Using the power of community organising and the experience of our most radical councils we will find new ways to give people the power they need to change their lives, their communities and our country. We understand that an inequality of power underpins inequalities of wealth and opportunity. Finding ways that give power back to people is at the heart of a radical renewal of politics, building a fairer society and securing social justice.

We lost in 2015 because we weren’t clear enough what we believed in or what we wanted our country to become. The path back to power lies in understanding why we lost, changing ourselves, then rebuilding our credibility with the British people one by one.

It’s time to turn the page on the top-down elitist politics of the past, turn away from division, remember the values that have always driven our party, and shape a Labour future for our country in touch with the people and in tune with our age. 

This is our invitation to you to help Labour Together renew our party. Register your interest here. 

Steve Reed is Labour MP for Croydon North and shadow minister for local government.

Readers of the Financial Times will already know that Gillian Tett is a gifted, innovative and informative writer. She is the author of one of the best books on the financial crisis, Fool’s Gold, an account of the world of investment banking seen through the eyes of a trained social anthropologist. (Tett wrote her PhD about the marriage rituals of the Tajiks, and is used to living among and observing the behaviour of strange tribes, from a remote corner of the former Soviet Union to the trading floors of New York.)

She has now turned her attention to the phenomenon of silos in organisations. Most of us are familiar with the tunnel vision that afflicts people who follow the norms of their particular department to the detriment of the whole. Without silos or compartments, large organisations would drown in a sea of chaos, but unless there is a mechanism for transcending them, all manner of damaging consequences follow. Her examples of silos include the New York Fire Department, which presided over numerous tenement fires, ignoring key indicators from other departments at City Hall, until a smart official began to join the dots and predicted fires from the database of the building inspectors. Big corporations, the military, university academics and large banks are fruitful sources of examples.

The most damaging instance of silo behaviour in recent times was the failure of governments, bankers and regulators to spot the emerging financial crisis. Tett looks at the UK establishment’s wilful blindness, all the less forgivable for having the best brains of a generation in critical positions: Mervyn King at the Bank of England and Howard Davies at the then financial regulator, the FSA, among others. She examines the crisis through the experience of a top, but countercultural official at the Bank, Paul Tucker. He sensed that something was not right and noticed that some of the main indicators, notably M4 – a measure of the UK’s money supply – were wildly out of line with where they should be. No one wanted to know, particularly not the professional economists whose world-view was dominated by mathematical models that assumed efficient markets and rational expectations.

I know how Tucker felt, because at the same time I was asking questions about reckless bank lending and the apparent bubble in house prices. I was regarded as a crank, or a malicious banker-basher, or someone whose economics had got very rusty. I recall being told at a Bank lunch that the models didn’t suggest any problems and that it was none of their responsibility anyway.

In my five years in cabinet I experienced the silo problem at first hand. The cuts in local funding were having grave implications for social services, and thus for sick people’s ability to support themselves without going to hospital. But that was the problem of another department. The job of the Home Office was to protect our borders, whereas my department was there to promote overseas students, highly skilled migrants and visiting businessmen, and to proclaim that “Britain is open for business”. Occasionally we had visitors from China and elsewhere, coming here to place export orders or plan investment in the UK, being turned away in case they might become asylum-seekers. David Cameron’s otherwise commendable hands-off style of management, in contrast to the control-freakery of his predecessor, had, as one of its unintended consequences, a revival of ministerial silos.

Tett doesn’t allow herself to become paralysed by analysis. She devotes half of her book to successful examples of how creative management can overcome silo thinking. Technology companies that seem invincible today can become the dinosaurs of tomorrow if they do not constantly adapt and identify the silo mentality that can lead to extinction. Facebook is a good case of an organisation which has sought to build in defence mechanisms to prevent the firm succumbing to the silos that have emasculated Sony. Facebook was among the early users of “hackathons” to bring together staff from across the company to do collective problem-solving. A deeper problem now, however, is that its recruits, though extremely bright, are all of a similar age, nerdish disposition and personality type. It has become very good at breaking down old silos but increasingly its staff constitute a tribe apart, with distinct values and a tendency towards arrogance: not unlike the ­investment bankers of a decade ago.

Before becoming an MP, I worked for Shell, which had many of the silo problems of large bureaucratic organisations. The Upstream explorers and engineers had a different set of values from, and rather looked down on, the boring accountants and marketing people in Downstream. The scenario planning team had the job of challenging silo-based views and seeing the big picture. When I was there, 25 years ago, the team was successful in inserting the issue of global warming into an agenda dominated by relentless technological optimism about the future of hydrocarbons, and also in focusing attention on the potential of emerging markets such as China and India.

In government, silos were sometimes challenged successfully. I inherited a big department that my predecessor had put together from business policy teams and universities. At the time, critics dismissed the exercise as mere empire-building. But it worked in getting universities, which had defensive silos – “ivory towers” – to see the economic importance of what they did, and business, which often regarded “academic” as a term of abuse, to see the value of collaborating with university engineers, research scientists and others. Now, universities such as Teesside, Northampton, Plymouth, Wolverhampton and Lincoln have become the centrepiece of their regional economy.

I also witnessed the problem of “short-termism”. Savers want long-term returns and companies want long-term capital, but the transmission breaks down when there are financial intermediaries in their silos with a short-term perspective, derived from their incentive structure. A recent cultural change has prompted the main institutional investors to sign up to a more collaborative, long-term approach.

Tett writes beautifully and her book is full of insights. Those who do not know her work should make up for the oversight. 

Vince Cable was secretary of state for business, innovation and skills from 2010 to 2015. He will appear at the Cambridge Literary Festival talking about his latest book, "After the Storm: The World Economy & Britain's Economic Future" (Atlantic), on 29 November

Can women have it all? That this is still a major ethical dilemma of mainstream feminism shows how far we’ve still got to go. Yes, even though they’ve taken the nudes out of Playboy. The answer is less important than the fact that the question is vapid. Here's a better one: when did the message that ‘girls can do anything’ get twisted into the edict: ‘girls must do everything?’

 Ann-Marie Slaughter’s new book ’Unfinished Business’ claims to solve the problem of ‘work-life balance’, extrapolating from Slaughter's much-discussed article in the Atlantic, where she revealed why she quit a prestigious washington career to spend more time with her two sons. The piece was titled 'Why women still can’t have it all.' ‘’Having it all,’ to be clear, does not mean ‘time to write a book, the total destruction of capitalist patriarchy and my very own puppy,’ which is what I’d have if I had everything I wanted. No, the ‘it all’ that every girl is supposed to want has a very specific meaning: it means the ability to simultaneously meet the demands of marriage, children and a high-powered career. Slaughter fails to ask whether this is what all women do want, or should want - but even within such a narrow scope, her solutions are timid. 

The message of “Unfinished Business” is that in order to keep everyone happy, you must simply try harder. It’s difficult to please your boss, your husband and your kids at once, so you must think harder about how you’re going to do it without dissolving into a tangle of shredded nerves in a crumpled skirt-suit. All of this is just an updated version of what we have been told for centuries: women are supposed to work twice as hard as men, for half the reward, a saying I've always understood as a coded threat.

Somehow, modern women have allowed ourselves to be convinced that the right to work outside ‘the home’ is the only liberation that matters - never mind that working-class women and women of colour have always worked outside the home. Slaughter isn’t really talking to them, a fact that she acknowledges in three lines in the introduction, before going back to reframe the debate towards those women lucky enough enough to have a supportive partner, a lucrative career, and the option to pay other people to look after their kids sometimes. Note that nobody is asking whether the nanny can have it all, even if she wants it.

For those few women who might be able to have ‘it all’, the programme sounds utterly exhausting. As I toiled through the latter chapters of career advice, wondering exactly when this notional working mother is meant to sleep, I realised with horror that Slaughter is talking to me. Specifically to me, and to people like me- middle-class, largely white women in professional careers who are at the stage of thinking seriously about how we might to juggle work and children. We’re not supposed to ask if we want to do that, only how we’ll manage.

I’m twenty-nine years old. It is possible that my biological clock is ticking, but I don’t know, because I can’t hear it over the racket of propaganda from the media, the movies, friends and relatives, all of it exhorting me and every other woman of so-called ‘childbearing age’ to settle down and make babies before it’s too late.  

Actually, I’d love to have a child someday. But in this unequal world, my circumstances seem to be aligning so that what I would have to sacrifice in order to make that happen is more than I'm able, or willing to give. That’s not an admission of weakness. It’s a statement of priorities of the kind which women and girls are encouraged not to make in public. Instead, we are supposed to hoard up our guilt in private - whatever it is we eventually choose. If we put our careers first, we’re selfish. If we devote ourselves to children and care work, we’re lazy, or we’re spoiled. If we try to juggle both at once, we’re unable to give either our full attention.  The engine of capitalist patriarchy runs on the dirty fuel of women’s shame, so whatever we choose, the important thing is that we blame ourselves. That way, we don’t blame the system.

Little boys don’t get sold this nonsense They’re not encouraged to worry about how they’ll balance their roles as husbands and fathers with paid work. Family life, for men, is not supposed to involve a surrendering of the self, as it is for women. Young men do not worry about how they will achieve a 'work-life' balance, nor does the 'life' aspect of that equation translate to 'partnership and childcare.' Not for men. When commentators speak of women's 'work-life balance', they're not talking about how much time a woman will have, at the end of the day, to work on her memoirs, or travel the world. ‘Life', for women, is simply another word for work, a route-march through child-rearing and domestic labour which is assumed to be the ultimate destination of every woman’s passions. 'Life', for men, is meant to be bigger than that.

It’s not that I don’t respect the choice to devote yourself to raising children. On the contrary - I can't stand the overplayed phobia of maternity that has become fashionable amongst parts of the young left, the sneering at ‘mummy clothes’ and avoidance of ‘nappy valley’. The more of my friends and colleagues that have children, the more I respect the enormity of the project, the tremendous efforts and risks involved. Childcare is vital, demanding work, work that we urgently need to stop devaluing- and we can only do that when we start giving women and girls real alternatives.

More than anything, Slaughter’s book is a missed opportunity. The radical truth at the core of her story is that even a woman with all of her privilege - a lucrative, prestigious career, a loving, supportive husband and a boss who happened to be Hilary Clinton- even she could not make it work. She could not ‘have it all’.  The obvious conclusion ought to be that that the ‘work-life balance’ is a lie of leviathan proportions. Instead, Slaughter falls back to a type of magical thinking, at once tragic and predictable: we can achieve ‘work-life balance’ if we just work harder. 

There was, until quite recently, a powerful movement within women’s liberation to acknowledge enforced ’reproductive labour’ - childcare, housework and caring for husbands and elderly relatives - as a source of women’s oppression. There was a demand, in Judith Butler’s words, not just for equal work for equal pay, ‘but for equal work itself.’  It is not these words that spring to mind, however, so much as the mantra of Bartleby, the Scrivener, the stubborn clerk in Herman Melville's famous story of workplace dissent. Whenever he is asked to perform a routine task, Bartleby replies: 'I would prefer not to.'

At a time when womanhood is still presumed to involve endless, exhausting work, it strikes me that the young women of the 21st century need to rediscover our inner Bartleby. Every page of ‘Unfinished Business’ makes me think: I would prefer not to.  Spend eighteen years raddled with guilt and exhaustion, trying to fulfil all the expectations of paid work and motherhood at once? I would prefer not to. I’ve got things to do. I still haven’t finished season 5 of Battlestar Galactica! I still haven’t been rascally drunk in a Moscow gay bar! I’ve got books to read! Adventures to have! And sure, I could do some of that whilst balancing a baby on one knee and a briefcase on the other….but I would prefer not to. 

The truth about ‘work-life balance’ is that it doesn’t exist. It never has existed, and unless we radically rethink our attitude to work and care, it never will. There it is. That’s the truth nobody wants to acknowledge. You can’t ‘have it all,’ not even if you’re in the lucky minority who can afford to pay someone else to take care of your kids, so stop trying, and stop blaming yourself. There. Now we’ve got that sorted out, it’s time to think about other options.

This is still an unequal world. But women are freer than we’ve ever been to build independent lives, to refuse to be bullied or shamed into lives we did not choose.  We can’t ‘have it all’ when the system is broken. It’s time and beyond time for women to start asking what else we want- starting, perhaps, with a fairer deal.

Bill Bryson is a wonder. Here is a man who can write a page about ordering a cheese sandwich – and make the reader care about the sandwich. And the server of the sandwich. And the eater of the sandwich. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: for the cheese sandwich lies behind Bryson’s love of Britain.

He arrived here in the early Seventies, an accidental pilgrim, and discovered a country entirely different from the place he might have imagined. A place where, in those dark days, ham and cheese could never be found between the same two pieces of bread; and where a cheese sandwich, if eventually you got hold of one, was served with “what looked to me then like what you find when you stick your hand into a clogged sump”. The mystery sump-stuff turned out to be Branston Pickle, of course. “Gradually it dawned on me that I had found a country that was wholly strange to me and yet somehow marvellous. It is a feeling that has never left me.”

Now, Bryson’s readers – that is most of us – know quite a lot about that feeling already, not least thanks to Notes from a Small Island, his bestselling travelogue published 20 years ago. Bryson frankly says that this sequel arises from a suggestion made by his publisher who, in these lean times for the book biz, is keen for a hit. (“In his eyes I could see little glinting pound signs where his irises normally were.”) And so Bill, who is a nice chap, and not the sort to let anyone down, obliges, setting off from Bognor Regis on a winding journey that reflects but does not duplicate his adventure of two decades ago. From Bognor to London, from the far west to the far east (not China but north Norfolk, which feels nearly as far as Beijing, if you’ve got to travel with Abellio Greater Anglia), to Cambridge and Oxford, the Peaks and the north and finally up to Cape Wrath, Bryson’s journey has the oxymoronic air of an energetic amble. Sometimes he’s too tired to have much of a look at anything beyond the welcoming door of a pub; sometimes he’s happy to lace up his walking boots and stride along for miles.

The result is a grumpy paean of praise to a place we’ve grown used to doing down. Bryson can be as grumpy as any of us when faced with the moron in the ticket office or the dog owner who refuses to scoop the poop, but still and all he reminds the reader what an extraordinary place this island is. Yes, he’s done it before; but it all bears saying again. Did I know that if you were to visit all the medieval churches in England – England alone – at the rate of one a week, “it would take you three hundred and eight years”? I did not. According to his calculations, it would take 11,500 years to visit all the known archaeological sites in Britain. Bill, I’ll take your word for it.

He knows that Britain’s wonders are often not dramatic: “agreeable” is one of his favourite words. Like Bryson, I am an America expatriate; I, too, know that the coast of Northumberland, say, falls lower on the scale of jaw-dropping astonishment than the Grand Canyon. But that is precisely the point.

He notes that in the United States national parks are vast tracts of land where no one but a few rangers live; in beautiful little Britain, farms and houses and villages thrive in our national parks. Wonder is all around us. Sometimes his dyspepsia can go just a step too far; and it’s probably lucky that I’m not an economist, as I have a feeling that some of Bryson’s financial arguments and rationalisations (“Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland”) might not stand up to close examination. But never mind.

Bill Bryson (OBE, FRS, former president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England) is a modest fellow. He does not mention in his new book that perhaps one of the things that makes his adopted country so remarkable is the willingness of its people to accord the status of Living National Treasure to a fellow from Iowa. (“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.”) But somehow that willingness is of a piece with the items and elements Bryson lists, towards the end of The Road to Little Dribbling, as critical to his love of this place. Shall the Brits allow Bryson to settle in somewhere between “jam roly-poly with custard” and “the 20p piece”? I believe they will.

The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson is published by Doubleday (£20, 385pp)

Supporters of the government's cuts to tax credits claim that the cost has increased beyond expectations. Here's George Osborne in the summer of 2015:"The original Tax Credit system cost £1.1 billion in its first year. This year, that cost has reached £30 billion"

The claim was repeated in the Telegraph a few days ago.

"A system that cost just over £1 billion in its first year ended up costing £30  billion a year."

A thirty-fold increase in costs would certainly suggest things gone awry. But a thirty-fold increase is hard to reconcile with the government’s own research.

"In most years [1997-2011] spending on working age people and children accounted for between 12 per cent and 13 per cent of Government spending"

The truth is that Osborne is comparing two very different things.

The history

When Labour came to power in 1997, government provided support for families with children:

• via the (at that time) non means-tested child benefit
• via family credit, a means-tested benefit for working families with children
• via the married person’s tax allowance, and the additional person’s tax allowance available to unmarried parents
• via child personal allowances paid as part of income support and income-based jobseeker’s allowance, these being means-tested benefits paid to out-of-work claimants

In addition, a relatively small number of people with disabilities received in-work support via disability working allowance.

The 1999 scheme – the first tax credits

In October 1999 the Labour government introduced two new benefits:

• working families tax credit, replacing family credit
• disabled person’s tax credit, replacing disability working allowance

These were essentially a re-badging of family credit and disability working allowance. Structurally very similar, they were substantially more generous than the benefits they replaced:

• increased amounts could be paid for adults and each dependent child
• the income figure at which benefit began to be withdrawn was increased
• the taper rate at which benefit was withdrawn due to rising income was reduced from 70% to 55%
• child-care support began to approach realistic levels

It’s this 1999 scheme, which covered low-income working families only, to which Osborne refers when he talks about expenditure of £1.1 billion.

What he doesn’t say is that that figure:

• only covered six months – from October 1999 to March 2000
• only covered three months of tax credit payments for a typical claimant

The latter applied because family credit was awarded for six months at a time. Claimants were not permitted to end their award early in order to switch to working families tax credit. In October 1999, on average, a family credit claim had three months left to run. By the end of March 2000, former family credit claimants had therefore only enjoyed the increased income from working families tax credit for an average of three months.

Children’s tax credit

In 2000-2001 the government replaced both the married person’s tax allowance , and the additional person’s tax allowance with the short lived children’s tax credit, a tax allowance aimed specifically at parents.

The 2003 scheme – working tax credit and child tax credit

In April 2003 Gordon Brown introduced a new tax credits scheme, structurally very different to anything seen before in the UK.

Child tax credit replaced all of:

• the per child allowances in family credit; and
• the child personal allowances in income support and income-based jobseeker’s allowance;and
• the children’s tax credit – this effectively became the family element of child tax credit which could be paid to claimants earning well over £50,000.

Working tax credit replaced the remaining parts of working families’ tax credit and disabled person’s tax credit. It extended entitlement to some workers who were neither parents nor disadvantaged due to disability.

The personal allowances for children which formed part of income support and income-based jobseeker’s allowance were not immediately removed from existing claims – migration to child tax credit took place over several years, with the cost of child tax credit rising accordingly. Now nearly all state child support other than child benefit is delivered as child tax credit.

The comparison

So £1.1 billion represents the cost of:

• in-work support only
• covering a six month introductory period
• with only three months on average being paid under the new scheme

£30 billion: the full-year bedded-in cost of:

• in-work support for low income workers and their families
• support for children in non-working families
• replicating support previously given to parents as a tax allowance

And of course no adjustment has been made for inflation or changes in the composition and numbers of households.

None of this is to say that tax credits did not become more generous – and undoubtedly the 2003 scheme had many faults. But Osborne’s comparison is neither useful nor fair.

The Sun and the Spectator have come out against George Osborne’s proposed tax credit cuts. Both publications, which supported the Conservatives ahead of the election, are highlighting the negative impact these proposals would have.

Spectator editor Fraser Nelson revealed in a column today that most workers claiming tax credits “will be worse off in 2020 than they are today”, even with the minimum wage rising to £9 per hour. In the most extensive analysis undertaken on the cuts so far, Policy in Practice (the group that conducted this research) also showed that “[f]amilies who respond to the cuts by trying to earn more will be worst-hit by the current reforms”. These conclusions, Nelson writes, “ought to stop these reforms in their tracks”.

His column follows the Spectator’s leader last week:

"Now, Osborne is coming after the very people whom his party pushed towards work. Those on the breadline, trying to work their way up, are finding themselves treated like benefit cheats as a result of the Chancellor’s tax credits crackdown. A mother of two children who is paid £20,000 stands to lose £2,000 a year due to his reforms. Some seven million working families stand to lose an average £1,200 a year. Some workers may claw back almost £150 a year by the proposed minimum wage increase. But they also face a bitter headwind blown by a Tory Treasury."

Meanwhile the Sun, which argued earlier this year that "cuts were essential", has published data showing how the “blue collar workers championed by the Tories will suffer the biggest hit” if the reforms go ahead as planned.

From a cleaner, who will be £1,805 worse off, to a bricklayer who stands to lose £2,399, the Sun reports that the cuts – which could cost some low-income working families £26 per week – are “ten times as damaging” as Gordon Brown’s 10p tax rate abolition.

The Sun has previously published research showing how 100,000 families could face poverty when the reforms come into place next April, and have launched a campaign to help low-paid workers threatened by the “bonkers” cuts.

As far as this mole's concerned, when even the right wing press are calling your cuts "blistering" and "a weapon aimed straight at the strivers", it might be time for a quick rethink.

Whenever we speak to people up and down Britain about London, they talk about it like another country, with its “crazy” house prices and rents cited as proof positive. Inside the capital the housing crisis is felt so acutely that our research for London Councils, published last week, finds a third of adults saying that costs are pushing them to consider leaving.

The issue has been bubbling up in London for some time now. It has been more top-of-mind in London than it has elsewhere in Britain for at least as long as the Conservatives have been in Number 10 (with and without the Lib Dems), and is trending upwards as a national issue. In 2013, we found 39 per cent of Londoners giving a range of housing issues, mainly affordability, as “the most/other important issues facing London”. Last month it was 54 per cent, much higher than London’s perennial issues of transport (41 per cent) and crime (16 per cent). While the salience of housing has increased fifteen points in two years, economic issues have gone the opposite way by a similar margin.

Mindful of voters’ concerns about housing, both Sadiq Khan and Zac Goldsmith have put it centre-stage of their early pitches, Goldsmith calling next May’s election a “referendum on housing”. But in doing so, they might want to heed the cautionary findings from our research. In particular, there is considerable pessimism in the capital; only one in 10 anticipate affordability will get better in the next two years or so, while two-thirds of private renters think they will never be able to buy. The candidates should be careful not to further stoke aspirations without certainty that they can intervene to solve a crisis prey to strong market forces.

We also know that in the electorate’s mind the issue of housing is not simply about supply, although clearly this is important and recognised as such by voters. For example, our research for both Berkeley Group and Create Streets shows that Londoners are not willing to entirely sacrifice quality for quantity. Tenure is an important issue too. While the aspiration for most people is firmly ownership, there is also appetite for mixed tenure provision, reflecting diverse needs and situations.

Housing offers huge electoral potential. It has got to the point where everyone thinks it important, whatever age, whichever class and tenure, inner or outer London. Thus, it cuts through all demographics and areas and, in contrast to the national picture, housing has as much traction among owner-occupiers as renters. This is significant because homeowners and mortgage holders are significantly more likely to vote, but in London their voting power is relatively weaker given the sheer number of renters (the majority in some London constituencies).

Candidates will need to have their tactical wits about them. For example, they will be mindful of sensitivities around both house price inflation – nationally, owner-occupiers think house price rises are good for them personally albeit bad for the country– and wary of any state intervention being seen as either depressing the value of many people’s prized assets, or feeding a wider impression that candidate’s instincts are anti-business.

In 2012 Ken Livingstone’s Living Rent proposal was apparently popular, but, this year Labour had a lead on housing policy at the general election and didn’t prevail. Talking to an issue is one thing, but for it to bite electorally, voters must perceive a difference between candidates and a capability to tackle the issue. Perceived competence on housing, as on other policy areas, will be central to next year’s election, and there is some convincing to be done to get past voters’ natural cynicism about promises.

The election is some way off, and Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan are in start-up mode. There is a lot for them to work through, but housing looks sure to be a big part of their plans and of the election itself.

I didn’t go on my local Reclaim the Night march last year. I wanted to, but then I looked at the event page on Facebook and saw how many of those planning to go were men, and I thought: who, exactly, do these guys think they’re reclaiming the night from? Reclaim the Night started in the UK in 1977 as a specific response to male violence and institutional disregard for women’s lives and freedoms. In Leeds, the indolent Ripper investigation had allowed Peter Sutcliffe to go on killing for years. The police, it appeared, simply didn’t care enough about the lives of prostituted women to mount a proper manhunt, and it was only when Sutcliffe murdered a student that they took action. That action was to tell women to stay at home after dark.

The message from the police was clear: the streets at night belonged to men, and any woman who expected to stay unbutchered had better stick to her allotted hours of public life. RtN was the feminist response: women with banners high and torches lit, striding through their cities, declaring that they would not let male violence keep them safely in their domestic place, declaring that they would not be made to be afraid. Now many marches, including my local one, explicitly welcome men.

I saw the pictures from the march that I’d decided not to join. There, front and centre, was a smiling man, bravely staking his claim to exist in public in a world that had never told him to do anything else. He’d never had the hand up his skirt in a nightclub, the catcall or the dog bark. His presence was meaningless, and worse, it made the whole march meaningless: what could really have been “reclaimed” by women if a man had led them? I am not particularly interested in arguing about whether men can be feminists. I am much more concerned by the kinds of feminism that men seem to feel drawn towards: it is, in so many cases, the kind that costs them nothing.

Going on a march and shining your right-on credentials entails no danger and no loss for a man. In fact, the “glass elevator” effect (whereby men are promoted within female-dominated environments simply because they are male and so perceived to be more competent) means that men often enjoy an unearned escalation in their own importance when they join such protests. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard about vigils or marches where women, having done all the tedious admin to make the event happen, have seen the press magnetically drawn towards a man who just happened to show up on the day. Men, who somehow couldn’t get excited about printing leaflets or liaising with police, suddenly had boundless enthusiasm for the cause as soon as a camera appeared.

Feminism is a redistributive project. It entails, ultimately, men giving up the power they hold over women. But understandably, many men would rather not surrender power – cannot even comprehend that there is any injustice in the power they bear simply on account of their possession of a penis. Yet those men would still like to be “feminists”, because we live in an absurd world where, rather than see feminism as a political movement, we see it as a badge worn in evidence of individual niceness. (I once gave a talk in which I suggested that feminism was a matter of action rather than identity. “But I can be a feminist even if I don’t do anything!” choked an affronted audience member. “I am a good person!” As if “feminist” were just another word for “good person”.)

And so men find ways to claim “feminism” at no hazard to themselves. It is easy for a man to support abortion access under the current paternalistic laws, because it doesn’t mean giving up any great degree of control, and it does ensure that women are (bluntly) more fuckable, by ameliorating the reproductive consequences of the fuck. It is easy too for a man to endorse a “sex-positive” feminism that enshrines his right to use pornography and prostituted women, because this is a kind of “feminism” that will cause him no annoyance whatsoever. He still gets off. He never has to question the ethics of obtaining his orgasm through supremacy over women. Everything continues to revolve around his penis, and he can call it women’s liberation.

So too for the men who support the no-platforming of women such as GermaineGreer, JulieBindel and KateSmurthwaite on the grounds that the words they speak or have spoken can somehow produce violence against sex workers or transwomen. The fact that rape, murder and assault are overwhelmingly – almost exclusively – perpetrated by men is conveniently ignored here. It is punters and pimps, not supporters of the Nordic model, who harm women in prostitution. It is men, not gender critical feminists, who commit transphobic assaults. But why acknowledge the violence done by men when you could pin responsibility on a woman and concentrate on telling her to STFU?

A man whose “feminism” involves silencing women has lost precisely nothing. By criticising female behaviour rather than male violence, he naturalises male violence: that is treated as an inevitability, to which women’s boundaries and women’s beliefs must bend. In this way, male supremacy is reinscribed into the political script, and men’s position as the dominant sex class stands unchallenged.

Men who want to be feminists should expect to be uncomfortable. They should feel the hot shame of realising that their power and position have been taken at the expense of women. They should know the inconvenience of not being able to indulge their sexual pleasures, because they have learned that women’s pleasure matters too, and they can no longer guiltlessly enjoy an orgasm beaten out upon a minimally resistant female body. And if they feel no shame, no inconvenience, no loss at all? Then what they are doing is not feminism. It is just patriarchy all over again. 

“Oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them”, as the saying goes. You could be forgiven for thinking that George Osborne’s Tax Credit cut - a plan to pinch an average of £1,350 a year from three million families - is driven by a desire to prove that statement correct.

Labour’s research has found that 71 Tory MPs are in seats where the number of people claiming tax credits is higher than the Tory majority, while David Davis is concerned that the measure could be “our poll tax.” 

Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with Labour’s research and glee over a “government in chaos”. While there may be many voters who are hit by cuts in these seats, increased poverty is no initial indication support might switch to Labour. Cornwall is the poorest region in England, yet all six MPs are Tories, while Iain Duncan’s Smith’s seat, Chingford and Wood Green, has the fifth highest proportion of low-paid workers in Britain, with half earning below the living wage. Moreover, those who are hit may already be Labour voters. Unsurprising then that the tax credit cut hasn’t harmed the Tories in the polls, even slightly.

For Labour to block Tory policies like these (which they have an opportunity to do again today), they must reject the idea “governments lose elections” themselves, and understand that Westminster votes are not communicated to the marginals on their own. After all, a viciously right-wing Tory-led government were re-elected with a majority in May, and four million people, many of them working-class, voted for a party to their right. Without a mass movement from 2010-15 energising people against austerity, many who could be convinced otherwise simply stuck with what they saw on the news.

Labour must take the national lead on a series of issues as and when they arise in Parliament, from tax credit cuts, to the Trade Union Bill, to expected rises in tuition fees and the abolition of the student maintenance grant.

Jeremy Corbyn  has to exploit a thin Tory majority by getting backbenchers to do what they didn’t in the Tax Credit debate on Tuesday - and rebel. Zac Goldsmith has a mayoral election to win, David Davis seems up for rebelling on anything these days, while even crusty right-wingers like Philip Davies have rebelled on tuition fees. 

Local campaigns must be run in concurrence with parliamentary votes, encouraging people to mobilise in their constituencies to inform people about the votes and try to swing the result by getting sitting Tory MPs to rebel. Local meetings, rallies, petitions and marches can be used to popularise the issue across a constituency and reach into non-voting areas, provided a local and national media strategy is joined up. This requires a lot of activists and a lot of campaigning - but isn’t that precisely what earned Jeremy Corbyn his victory this summer? His campaign’s new organisation, Momentum, could be decisive here.

The central party has already started this with its petition on the Trade Union Bill and has given out campaign packs at Conference on Tax Credits, but the crucial work on the ground must be done so Tory defeats begin to happen, and a national narrative of a divided ruling party is combined with local mobilisations against a sitting Tory MP. 

Campaigning in many CLPs has become synonymous with canvassing, to the detriment of any wider political mobilisations. Canvassing is, of course, vital. You identify who your supporters are and then on polling day, you get them to a polling station. If you have a constituency where you can turn out more Labour voters than Tories, then great. In my university constituency, Oxford East, a great canvassing operation has meant that Andrew Smith increased his majority in 2010 and 2015 - but only because of a large, active membership.

Widening out the party’s base, growing the membership towards half a million, and bringing new activists in through these localised, single-issue campaigns, will not harm canvassing, as many Labour veterans fear - in fact it could revitalise it. 

If the 2015 General Election was in many people’s eyes a re-run of 1992’s shock victory for the Tories (complete with abysmal polling), then Labour must make this Parliament resemble that under John Major. Only by mobilising against Tory MPs at the base with creative, visible and effective campaigns, combined with leadership from the top, does Labour have any chance of stopping policies like Tax Credits. It may also be our only chance of seeing power again.

The derelict building of the Jean-Quarré school in Northern Paris, which became a key refugee camp housing over 1,300 people in the summer, has been closed during a huge eviction process ordered by the Paris administrative court.

The evacuation began at 5.30am on Friday 23 October when police entered the grounds and began directing the inhabitants towards the 26 buses waiting to take them to various areas of accommodation in Paris and elsewhere in France. By 9.30am, all roads surrounding the building had been blocked by at least 500 officers wearing full riot protection. One refugee, Ibrahim, discussed his shock at the volume of people exiting the building; despite living there for one month he had no idea this many people were cohabiting inside.

The Jean-Quarré camp was judged unfit for human inhabitation in September following health and safety concerns. The grey, concrete building is four stories high and situated among various high-rise residential buildings. The playground became a meeting place where French lessons were delivered by local volunteers. The benches around the perimeter hosted numerous groups endeavouring to help the camp residents, who originated from a variety of countries including Sudan, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Pakistan and many others. It was a melting pot of individuals who survived the perilous journey across the Mediterranean and had mostly travelled through Europe on foot.

Tensions within the camp were inevitable and were usually the result of a perceived lack of respect. There was also the issue of newcomers; people arrived daily at the camp, each holding a plastic carrier bag containing all their worldly possessions. These new arrivals sometimes unknowingly violated unspoken rules of the camp. Some expected a bed inside, or a mattress for themselves, not aware that things were arranged in a type of organised chaos in which they were at the bottom of a ladder others had been climbing for days, weeks or months.

During a visit I made to the camp earlier this month, such tensions resulted in serious unrest; the usual games of football or basketball had been replaced with a riot-like scene. Rocks the size of house bricks were launched from the upper windows of the building, those on the ground attempted to dodge the objects raining down upon them, quickly retaliating by throwing back whatever objects were to hand. Police, unwelcome and mistrusted by the refugees, entered the grounds once the trouble had ended. They asked if any injured needed attention before leaving.

Despite the squalid conditions of the camp, it had become something of a home for many exhausted refugees who were beginning to feel part of a community again. Bakhit Yagoub Abaker, for example, left Darfur, Sudan following the brutal slaughter of his father, elder brother and thousands of others by the Janjaweed militias operating with impunity in Darfur. Bakhit arrived in Italy one month ago, as one of 450 people crammed onto an overcrowded boat, before being violently forced to provide his fingerprints by officials. He subsequently managed to walk from there to Paris, where he was relieved to find a community of around 400 fellow Sudanese refugees at the Jean-Quarré camp, following an arduous and isolated journey.

Subsequently, when the eviction began, some were reluctant to leave; feeling apprehensive about the unknown nature of their destination and whether it would in fact be worse than the current conditions. The closing of the camp has been reported as peaceful, however, one refugee I speak to who asked not to be named claims that although their treatment by uniformed police officers was "OK", their plain-clothed counterparts were decidedly more aggressive, "grabbing and shoving" some refugees.

These desperate individuals have been assured there are 900 accommodation places ready to receive them. However, as the buses left the area there was severe confusion as to their destination, with numerous worrying rumours circulating. Some are thought to be being relocated as far from their new home as Marseille or Lyon, others only a few miles away in Belleville.

Despite earlier pledges to the refugees to rehouse them, there were allegedly at least 100 people unhoused by the end of the operation, many of whom I've seen sleeping in parks or streets near the Jean-Quarré site. Wherever these people now find themselves, what is clear is that they are not welcome in central Paris – not on this scale, at least.

The government could face an embarrassing defeat in the House of Lords over cuts to tax credits later today, likely triggering a war of words between peers and the Conservative government about the constitution and the Salisbury-Addison convention. What’s going on?

It all comes down to a legislative manoeuvre called a “statutory instrument” – effectively a device that allows the government to move legislation through parliament more quickly than passing a new Act. If, for example, the government wanted to amend a law on cellphones to include, say, tablet computers – it might opt to do so with a statutory instrument, avoiding the months of legislative back-and-forth that a new Act would entail.

The government has chosen, rather than a full-blooded Bill, to amend aspects of previous legislation on tax credits. This made the passage through the Commons easier and quicker – avoiding more scrutiny and perhaps helping to avoid further outbreaks of nerves on the part of Conservative backbenchers.

But that means that the House of Lords is also able to vote on the measure – as Britain’s unelected second chamber isn’t allowed to vote down finance bills, but can vote on the statutory instrument. In fact, government defeats on statutory instruments, once rare – prior to 1997, the Lords defeated a statutory instrument just once, in 1968 – have become increasingly common since Tony Blair partially reformed the Upper House, removing the bulk of its hereditary peers. Since then, the Lords has voted down statutory instruments in 2000 (twice), 2007 and 2012.

But what about the Salisbury-Addison convention, the agreement between Lord Salisbury and Lord Addison. Salisbury led the Conservative peers in 1945, when the Labour government had a landslide majority in the Commons but just 16 members of the House of Lords. He did a deal with his Labour counterpart, Lord Addison, that the Lords would pass the Labour party’s manifesto commitments, no questions asked.

Labour and Liberal Democrat peers believe that the guarantees made by various Conservative ministers during the election campaign that tax credits would escape the axe mean that the measure is very far from a manifesto commitment. Labour notes, too, that their amendment to the statutory instrument doesn’t reject the cuts entirely – but asks the government to come up with measures to soften the blow, well in keeping – they argue – with the role of the Lords as a revising chamber.

The Liberal Democrats, however, are going further. Their amendment would vote down the bill entirely – a measure that appears unlikely to draw support from Conservative backbench peers or the “crossbenchers” – peers who do not take the whip from any political party.

As I've written before, the defeat may pave the way for the government to create a Conservative majority in the Upper House through creating a large number of Tory peers. Theoretically, of course, there's nothing that would prevent them from doing so. But their central argument - that members of the House of Lords are behaving unconstitutionally - doesn't quite wash. 

Last week's cyber attack on mobile and internet provider Talk Talk has been surrounded by confusion. The company wasn't sure how many customers' data was stolen – first, they thought 4m; later, they said 40,000. When the BBC asked CEO Dido Harding if customers' details had been encrypted (converted into code only crackable by those with the key), she said: "The awful truth is, I don't know."

As it turns out, they seem not to have been encrypted. The hackers, who also appear to have issued a ransom demand to the company, probably have access to the names, birth dates, addresses, account information, phone numbers, email addresses, and partial credit card numbers of those 40,000 customers. Alone, these details aren't enough to leave you financially vulnerable – but various reports suggest the hackers have called up customers and found out their bank details using the details they already had to pose as banks or other businesses. 

So was Talk Talk lax in its security? It's unquestionable that Harding should have known more about the company's data security policy, especially as she remains the only company representative to speak out about the breach. But legally, as she told the Sunday Times, companies are not required to encrypt customer details – the Data Protection Act only states that companies must take "appropriate technical and organisational measures" to protect customer data. 

The encryption contradiction 

Harding's brushing off of the encryption question has not gone down well with customers or commentators. However, Alan Solomon, a computer security expert, argues that, in this case, encryption may have been largely irrelevant. In a blogpost published on Saturday, he writes:

"Data encryption is, in this case irrelevant. Standard practice, is to store sensitive data on an encrypted file system.  That way, if the computer is physically stolen, the data is safe. 

"But in a scenario of "authorised user accessing the data", the encrypted data will be decrypted and supplied, because the authorised user gave the correct decryption key."

Solomon is referring to the fact that the hackers seem to have accessed data via an SQL injection, where they used a weakness in the company's website to access databases. He's arguing that if you hack into a database by posing as an authorised user, you'll therefore be able to get around any encryption, too. 

However, the details of the hack still aren't clear, and encrypted data, is, by definition, more secure than non-encrypted infromation. Joe Sturonas, CFO of smart encryption company PKWARE, says by email:

"I do believe that many companies have only focused on encrypting devices and networks, but have largely avoided encrypting the data itself . . . Encrypting the data means that the data is persistently protected, even if it moves from device to device, and across the network."

All this depends on how many people have access to encrypted data, and how much of it is encrypted. This is a balance, of course, and one companies are free to strike for themselves, as encryption isn't required by law. The most worrying aspect of the Talk Talk breach, however, is that the company didn't seem sure what its policy was, and hasn't acknowledged that perhaps it should do more than stick to the letter of the law when it comes to protecting customers. 

A group of friends and I have just shut down England’s largest opencast coal mine. Production has ceased and no coal is leaving the mine.

Currently I’m locked onto a 500-tonne excavator, sitting in the middle of a pit that makes Mordor look like a Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

But it’s not Mordor, it’s a coal mine in otherwise-beautiful Northumberland, and it’s on land belonging to a Peer of the Realm, Viscount Matt Ridley.

You heard that right. I’m sitting in a filthy opencast coal mine that’s already dug up a million tonnes of the black stuff, on land belonging to a Conservative member of the House of Lords.

The days when coal mining paid a wage to millions of working-class men in flat caps is long gone. These days, it lines the pockets of landed millionaires and rich private businesses.

And that’s why I and my friends have decided to break the law to shut this coal mine down. Because it’s destroying the planet to feather the nests of an elite few.

Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel. Our continued burning of it is cooking the planet.

But Viscount Matt Ridley – who calls himself an “ecomodernist” and “rational optimist”, and who was chair of Northern Rock when the bank went bust – doesn’t care too much for global warming. He declares himself a “lukewarmist”, says fossil fuels are “not a bad thing” and argues that “climate change is good for the world”.

He admits to having not just one, but two enormous coal mines on his 12-square-mile ancestral estate in Northumberland. But that doesn’t stop him shamelessly spouting his climate-sceptic nonsense from a weekly column in the Times and from the red leather benches of the House of Lords.

And whilst Lord Ridley is relatively open about his vested interests, he remains rather coy about the precise sums he earns from these vast opencast coal mines. One investigation estimates his earnings from coal to be between £3.1 million and £4.1 million annually. If the venerable Lord can disclose differently, I would be delighted to make the correction.

But Lord Ridley’s coal mines merely illustrate the wider problem we have with coal in the UK.

There are, astonishingly, still some 30-odd opencast coalmines operating in Britain today. They scar landscapes and disrupt communities from south Wales to the Scottish borders.

The millions of tonnes of coal they produce power our 10 remaining coal power stations, which belch both noxious poisons and greenhouse gases into our air, adding to lung disease as well as dangerously altering the world’s climate.

The British government has made some tentative hints that it might, one day, phase out the frankly Victorian practice of burning coal to generate electricity.

But so far, it’s been too shy to say when it will do so, and what its plan is for ending coal in the UK.

The coal mining companies aren’t waiting for the Government to act. They’re ploughing ahead regardless, putting in fresh applications to dig up Britain’s countryside to devour still more coal.

The wealthy company that operates the coal mines on Matt Ridley’s estate, Banks Mining, has recently made a proposal to open a new, 3-million tonne opencast coal mine at Druridge Bay – an exquisite stretch of coastline just north of where I’m currently locked on to an excavator.

The local community are up in arms about the proposal, which will, they fear, devastate the landscape and wreck the region’s tourism – quite apart from adding to the stock of fossil fuels we simply can’t afford to burn.

None of this need happen if the government grows a backbone, stands up to the coal companies and puts in place a clear plan to end coal.

So these are the reasons why I’m breaking the law today, sitting in a hole in the ground in Northumberland, locked onto a coal mining machine as the rain falls gently around me. To issue a small protest against the unreason of opencast mining, and defend a patch of England from its blight. To demand Lord Ridley come clean about how coal fuels his climate sceptic views. And to call on the Government to get some guts, and end our outdated reliance on Old King Coal.

To more information and live updates, visit www.endcoalnow.com and follow @ViscoutRidley on Twitter. Guy Shrubsole is participating in this action and writing in a strictly personal capacity. 

***

Fiona Sampson’s next collection, The Catch, will be published in 2016.

The Tories claim they are the Workers’ Party. They also want to be the Black People’s Party. They had just two ethnic minority MPs in 2005. Two elections later they are into double figures. And that’s good – diversity in parliament on all sides is desirable. 

During the election David Cameron remarked on the progress the Tories were making and claimed that the first Black or Asian Prime Minister would be a Tory.

Impossible? I know at first hand that the Tories are serious about making a breakthrough. A Tory, who heard on the grapevine that I was running into a headwind in my efforts to get re-selected to fight Brent Central, whispered that if I defected I would be virtually guaranteed a safe seat.

I politely rebuffed the offer. If I had been tempted I would have found myself being whipped to vote for George Osborne’s tax credit cut, and later for the anti-trade union bill and required to support Jeremy Hunt in his fight with junior doctors. From the labour benches I spoke out against the cuts and will oppose the Trade Union Bill and support the doctors.

Because, of course, there’s a big gap between the reality of Tory policies and their ambition and rhetoric about being the Workers party or the party for ethnic minorities.

When I spoke against the cuts to tax credits, I did so shortly after the impressive new Tory MP Heidi Allen who waited five months to make her maiden speech, delivering a devastating attack on Osborne’s cut. Clearly a compassionate politician in the months ahead she will find her conscience tested again and again.

But the Labour Party needs to reinvigorate its role in encouraging and embracing voters of colour – and getting more of them in elected office. That is why we need Bernie’s List an organisation that will target support on members of the African Caribbean community seeking selections as MPs, councillors and other elected positions.

It is modelled on Emily’s List which helped bring about the surge in women MPs and councillors.  It is named after the inspirational Tottenham MP Bernie Grant who entered the Commons in 1987 along with Paul Boateng, Diane Abbott and Keith Vaz. That was a great day but the fact is that further progress has been much slower than we hoped. We have not got as far as we should have.

Bernie’s List will be an important tool in Labour’s equality toolbox looking to advance people from an under-represented group. In particular we need to reach to women and the younger generation.

In the 2010 election, the Conservative Party only won 16 per cent of the ethnic minority vote but elected 11 Black and minority ethnic MPs, because they made the conscious effort to select BAME candidates in safe and winnable seats. They now have 18 MPs to Labour’s 24. We made our big breakthrough in 1987 but our progress has been sluggish. The Tories were nowhere until 2010 but they have been catching up fast.

Labour needs to speed the pace of change so we can make a major advance in 2020. That’s why we need Bernie’s List. 

It’s that time again: the one where the tax on sanitary products is headline news, and everyone can once more be on the look-out for the entertaining sight of certain male politicians trying to wrench the word “tampon” out from between their cripplingly repressed lips.

The problem is longstanding but simple. Tampons, EU regulations rule, are “luxury, non-essential” goods, unlike flapjacks (fair), bingo (okay), Jaffa Cakes (deeply wrong) and “exotic meats” (absurd). Thus they are subject to VAT at a rate of 5 per cent -- a fact that feminist campaigners have long taken issue with.

The “tampon tax” comes up so often you might call its appearance cyclical – a particular highlight being alleged adult man and then-Chancellor Gordon Brown being too embarrassed to say the words “sanitary products” in the House of Lords when he cut the tax to 5 per cent in 2000. (“We tried to get him to say 'sanpro' . . . but even that didn't seem to appeal,” an MP told the Guardian).

A Change.org petition of over 250,000 names is urging George Osborne to recognise the “essentiality” of tampons. In response, David Cameron has promised to “go away and have a look and get back to [the campaigners]”.

Now, two MPs – Labour’s Paula Sherriff and Alison Thewliss of the SNP – have tabled amendments to the finance bill, demanding respectively that the tax be abolished and that the Treasury publish a report setting out the impact of such a move. “Sanitary protection products are not an optional luxury,” Thewliss told the Guardian, calling it “absurd” that razors, which many men feel it is socially necessary to use regularly, are free from VAT, while tampons, which many women feel it is socially necessary to use regularly, are not. More than 50 Labour MPs have supported Sherriff’s motion.

The problem, Cameron claims, is that there’s little he can do, with the VAT being an EU – not a national – ruling. As a result, some eurosceptic Tory MPs, already frustrated with what they see as Cameron’s pro-EU stance, are likely to vote for the amendment, meaning there is a chance the Prime Minister will be defeated despite his majority in the Commons.

Bernard Jenkin, a vocal opponent of the “EU superstate” and one of the 11 MPs to support the amendment, has told the Express and Starthat he believes many of his fellow Tories “would be prepared to vote with the opposition”.

"This is an example of where the EU has taken over jurisdiction over our tax where it should not have. The UK Parliament should be able to set whatever taxes it wants," he added.

Ukip is also a vocal opponent of the tax, with its former head of policy Suzanne Evans calling the policy “outdated and outrageous” in the run-up to the election. Any actual change to the rate would require a proposal to the European Commission and the unanimous agreement of the EU’s 28 member states – an unlikely outcome give that France recently turned down a proposal to cut the tax on tampons there.

In practice, then, the most the amendment can do at this stage is secure government support in taking the fight to the EU. In the meantime, feminists and eurospectic Tories can enjoy their unlikely alliance. It just goes to show: the “enemy of mine enemy” principle can take you to strange places.

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

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The Links

On The Lobster

Ryan Gilbey's review of the film.

Mark Kermode and Peter Bradshaw's reviews at The Guardian.

On Lorde

The videos for Magnets and Yellow Flicker Beat.

This interview by the wonderful Tavi Gevinson.

On As Time Goes By

We love the outtakes from the show.

Next week:

Caroline is reading the seminal feminist memoir, I Love Dick.

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:

The B-52's - Rock Lobster

Disclosure ft. Lorde - Magnets

Lorde - Yellow Flicker Beat (Kanye West Rework)

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

See you next week!

PS If you missed #15, check it out here.

In a dramatic assertion of its authority, the House of Lords has defeated the Conservatives over the planned tax credit cuts. Peers voted in favour of a Labour motion, which demanded full compensation for the low-paid for at least three years, by 289 to 272. An earlier motion, delaying the cuts until the government responds to the Institute For Fiscal Studies' assessment, was also approved by 307 to 277. The IFS warned that the cuts would cost three million families an average of £1,000 a year even after taking into account the new "national living wage" and planned increases in the personal tax allowance. Under the Tories' plan, the earnings level at which tax credits start to be withdrawn would be reduced from £6,420 to £3,850 from next April.

The government avoided complete defeat - the Liberal Democrats'"fatal motion" was rejected by 310 to 99 - but this is still a remarkable reversal. Peers overrode the constitutional convention that the Lords does not oppose the government on financial matters on the basis that the tax credit cuts had been introduced as a statutory instrument, rather than as primary legislation (meaning they received less Commons scrutiny). But only five times over the last century has the Lords rejected statutory instruments and never over a fiscal measure.

The failure of the Tories to include the cuts in their manifesto, and their refusal to offer any compensation to the low-paid, led peers to conclude that it was both legitimate and necessary to defeat the government. Briefings suggesting that David Cameron could respond by curtailing the Lords' powers, or by flooding the upper chamber with new Conservative members (to give the Tories a majority), only hardened their resolve. 

The result is the greatest political reversal that Osborne, the favourite to become his party's next leader, has suffered since his "omnishambles" Budget. He must now decide whether to accept peers' demands (eroding some of the forecast savings of £4.4bn), or to reintroduce the tax credit cuts as primary legislation, rather than as a statutory instrument. Peers concede that it would be unconstitutional for them to block the former. But this would consume significant government time, with no guarantee of victory. 

It is now certain that Osborne will have to make some concessions - the only question is how great they will be (he will respond tonight and will face John McDonnell for the first time at Treasury questions tomorrow). But if he avoids staining the Tories' reputation by inflicting unprecedented cuts on the working poor, he may yet have cause to thank the Lords. 

Update: Following the government's defeat, Osborne has promised in an interview with the BBC that he will make transitional arrangements to "help" tax credit claimants, with full details to be announced in the Autumn Statement on 25 November. "I said I would listen and that is precisely what I will do," he commented. But this is a major concession by the government, which only earlier today was insisting, in the words of No.10, that "the policy is the policy, it is not going to change".

In 1989 Isaiah Berlin celebrated his 80th birthday. Radio 3 marked the event with a four-hour tribute. Two Oxford colleges held dinners in his honour; there was a symposium in Jerusalem and a special concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London. “Now the decline,” he wrote to an old college friend.

He was quite wrong. That year the Berlin Wall came down and barely another two years later Soviet communism had collapsed. Berlin’s ideas became more relevant than ever. Nationalism and ethnic violence returned to Europe; the fatwa against Salman Rushdie had already raised questions about tolerance in a liberal society. A biography, a two-part BBC interview and now four volumes of letters by Berlin, superbly edited, have confirmed his place as one of the leading British intellectuals of his time.

Berlin wrote as he spoke. The arguments pour out. The range of reference is apparently effortless. He was a leading political thinker and cultural historian, but also passionate about literature, music and opera. He knew many of the leading figures of his age. There are letters here to thinkers such as Noam Chomsky and Karl Popper, but also to poets such as Joseph Brodsky and Stephen Spender and to the musicians Alfred Brendel, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern.

The best letters unite his erudition with evocations of the people he knew. In a long letter to Alistair Cooke, Berlin begins with the causes and nature of anti-Semitism and the limits of assimilation, moves on to portraits of Arthur Balfour and Chaim Weizmann and speculation about whether Lenin’s mother was Jewish, and then to reminiscences about Churchill (who “certainly did not particularly like Jews”).

Jews are one of the central subjects of the letters. There are fascinating reflections on Israel, Zionism and the Holocaust, T S Eliot’s anti-Semitism and, perhaps most interestingly, a set of defensive letters about what he knew (or claimed not to know) about the Holocaust when he was in Washington during the war. The editors’ footnotes here, suggesting he knew more than he let on, are admirable and judicious.

Then there are Berlin’s beloved Russians, that unbroken liberal tradition of writers and thinkers from Herzen, Tolstoy and Turgenev to Akhmatova and Pasternak. In one of the first letters in the book, he writes about how Akhmatova and her friends “remain uncontaminated, unbroken, sensitive, articulate, dignified, morally impeccable”. This last phrase stands out. As he reflects on the horrors of his time, he asks again and again who behaved decently. The great Russian writers in the Stalin years? Certainly. Hannah Arendt when she accuses the Jewish councils in Nazi-occupied Europe of being complicit in the destruction of their own communities? Absolutely not.

What impresses here is not the intellectual argument but the humanity. Sometimes Berlin was wrong about important matters but often he was on the side of the angels. He was a passionate critic of Soviet communism. He agonised over Israel. A lifelong Zionist, he was a critic from the inside, especially during the Begin and Shamir years.

People, Berlin said, were his landscape. He was as fascinated by pompous Oxford dons and left-wing historians whose ideas he hated as he was by his great heroes. He couldn’t stand the “murderous hatred” of Wagner, yet acknowledged that he was “the most powerful cultural influence of the entire 19th century”. This helps explain his interest in the enemies of the Enlightenment.

“I am drawn to the extremes,” he writes, “to the irrationalists, to those who upset, and not to those who smoothly assert.” He continues: “I’d rather read the critics, the sceptics, the enemies, however extravagant, because they uncover the cracks, the flaws, the places between the ribs where the dagger can successfully be inserted.”

Berlin could be garrulous, self-pitying, gushing. “No one has lived more truly than you,” he writes to Anthony Eden’s widow. “No one has lived a better or nobler life.” He was also a feline gossip, turning on people behind their backs. There’s a hilarious moment when Chomsky catches him at it after a private letter from Berlin is leaked to him. Berlin twists and turns, but Chomsky is unforgiving.

Berlin was also a lifelong fence-sitter, but perhaps precisely for that reason he had a terrific intuition for the agonies of moral choice when values clash. “Ultimate values can be incompatible,” he writes to the political philosopher Michael Walzer. Sometimes we can’t “seek for an overarching objective order, true for all times, in all places, and for all men”. On these occasions, when there is “a conflict between ends of life”, we are “forced to plump”.

The letters on philosophy and the history of ideas are the best of all. He ranges from the Enlightenment to reflections on human nature and pluralism, the conflict of values and freedom of the will.

As the torrents of words pour out of the man (“I really must not go on”) we realise how these ideas speak to us today as we anxiously negotiate conflicting values at home and abroad. Should we intervene in Syria? What should we do about refugees drowning in the Mediterranean? The letter to Walzer ends: “Anyone who does not understand the conflict of Antigone, or the Jewish leaders under the Nazis . . . is morally blind.” It is Berlin at his best, reminding us that he was one of the great liberal thinkers of the postwar period.

Affirming: Letters 1975-97 by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle, is published by Chatto & Windus (£40, 704pp).

This column does not, on the whole, suffer from insomnia. If it has a sleep-related complaint, it is the opposite condition, hypersomnia; but the other night, the still watches of the night were haunted by your correspondent, reading, listening to Bach, counting Mousies: indeed, anything short of work to try and nod off.

What was keeping me awake was the wording of a notice planted outside the Baker Street branch of a well-known chain of coffee shops. (Not that one; the other one.) “Our baristas,” ran the sign’s slogan, “are only ever perfectly happy when you are.”

This started off a long procession of internal philosophical inquiries, many of which were still bothering me later that night between the hours of 3am and 6am. The first feeling was a kind of helpless guilt, as hitherto I’d not realised that the happiness of a coffee outlet’s front-line staff was so dependent on my own mood. I’ve been in what we may as well call a bad place lately, what with one thing and another, but had I known that my low spirits were having a knock-on effect, observable to the point where the shop’s manager was feeling compelled to make a public announcement about it, I’d have made more of an effort to count my blessings and generally pull my socks up.

After a while, it dawned on me that actually what the sign might have meant was that the shop’s baristas were only truly happy if you – that is, the customer – were completely happy with the coffee you’d ordered. In the days when I frequented coffee shops, which were called cafés and pronounced “caffs”, and mainly chosen as places you could smoke in with impunity while bunking off school, you had a choice of coffee with something a bit like milk in it, or coffee without; whether you put sugar in it was, of course, up to you. Oh, OK, you could order a cappuccino, and that was what we truants did, in order to look sophisticated, but we didn’t know at the time that the Italians who were serving us did so with either pity or contempt, because we were drinking it in the afternoon. Our happiness, perfect or otherwise, was not an important consideration for them, beyond the matter of giving us more or less what we wanted. As for their happiness – well, all we thought about the matter was that they were getting our money and that should be enough for them, and besides, as schoolboys in uniform who were also smoking, we were pretty used to dirty looks anyway, so they were as the water off a duck’s back to us.

Now, of course, it is impossible to go into a coffee shop and simply order “a coffee”. This observation has been made by many others before me, so I will dwell on the term “barista” instead. For some reason, when I see the word I don’t muse on its teasing distance from the differently stressed word “barrister” but instead think of how, should I need to earn more money, it would be impossible for me to get a job as one. Or in any of the other service industries. And it is this which keeps me awake at night: my superfluity to the economic motion of the country.

Imagine if the person serving you behind a bar, whether licensed or not, is a man in his early to mid-fifties who looks as though he has pretty much seen it all, and yet who’s been chewed up and spat out by life. You do not see men my age serving people any more, unless it is in the haberdashery department of John Lewis. (In which case, one is disconcerted not to be served by a man in the autumn of his life.) You might, in the summer, get a man in middle age serving ice cream out of a van; but these men usually look as though they’re regretting it.

However, I continued. (This is now about 5am.) Imagine, for the purposes of argument, that I do manage to convince the manager of a coffee shop that my presence behind the bar serving caffeine addicts’ ridiculous drinks will lend the establishment gravity. Do I then find that I have, finally, found my way to perfect happiness? Being lonely and miserable, I would consider imperfect happiness to be a Christmas and birthday present rolled into one. But perfect happiness? I’m not sure I could handle it. “Call no man happy until he is dead,” as the saying goes. Call no man perfectly happy until he is perfectly dead.

At which point I finally drift off, and dream of a horribly embarrassing debut on Just a Minute. There is no refuge, even in sleep.