The government’s defeat in the House of Lords has triggered a U-Turn from George Osborne, who will announce measures to ameliorate the effects of cuts to tax credits in the Autumn Statement on 24 November.

But the Conservatives’ problems may only just be beginning. At the election,  the party made a virtue of tying its hands – increases to any of income tax, value added tax and national insurance were not only ruled out but accompanied with a promise to make any rises illegal for the course of the parliament.

The fiscal charter – designed as a trap for Labour – commits the government to an overall surplus by 2020, and further limits the Conservatives’ options. (The easiest – and most economically sensible – route would be to commit to a slightly slower pace of deficit reduction, giving the government the wiggle room to avoid cuts)

As Jolyon Maugham has shown, you can find the revenue without breaking any of the government’s fiscal undertakings – but that involves unraveling two of the Conservatives’ signature policies, the threshold raise – an increasingly lucrative bung to dual-earner childless couples, the only working age demographic to do better under the Coalition than Labour and a crucial plank of the Cameron-Osborne electoral coalition – and their cuts to corporation tax.

And if the government goes ahead with its current timetable for reducing the deficit, it is difficult to see where they can get the money from without cutting tax credits, as Flip Chart Rick shows on his blog:

Those gold bits at the top are tax credits - almost everything else, from child benefit to pensioners, has been ringfenced by the government, which makes keeping their fiscal promises impossible without cuts to tax credits.

What could the government do? A further increase in the threshold raise would be incredibly expensive – as it benefits all taxpayers, not just the poorest or those in receipt of tax credits – further knocking the government’s fiscal timetable out of whack. In addition, previous increases in the income tax threshold have “significantly reduced the overlap between the populations of tax payers and tax credit recipients”, in the words of the Resolution Foundation’s Torsten Bell. Households will start to lose out due to cuts to tax credits if they earn above £3,850. To benefit from increased rises in the income tax threshold, you have to earn more than £11,000. So the government can’t get out of its hole that way.

National insurance kicks in a little earlier – people earning above £8,164 pay that – but the significant costs of the raise again, cost more than the savings from cutting tax credits and once again won’t adequately compensate the poorest earners.

Well, what about an increase in the minimum wage? As I’ve set out before, increases in the minimum wage are double-edged. Osborne’s current increase – which falls 70p short of where the real living wage is today – is probably too high for small and medium-sized businesses. Trade union organisers from Usdaw – the shopworkers union – and the GMB – which represents many parts of the hospitality industry – are already concerned that the net effect of the wage rise will be job losses and reduced hours.

To compensate for the cuts to tax credits, the national minimum wage would be far higher than the £7.20 wage proposed by Osborne – to do without in-work benefits, the minimum wage would have to be £12 an hour. That would result in large numbers of job losses – which, philosophically, may be perfectly just if you think the state shouldn’t bail out employers. Good luck getting elected after making that many people unemployed, though.

What about hitting the rich as well? That’s the solution proposed by Janan Ganesh in the FT this morning. Well, frankly, while the symbolism of tax credit cuts is not great for the government, the reason why they are so unpopular – and why Conservative backbenchers and ministers alike are privately worried – is not because it looks bad, but because the £1,200 that most households will lose out represents a significant reduction in takehome pay – effectively over a month’s salary for some tax credit recipients. No-one who is pushed into poverty by cuts in tax credits will take comfort from the knowledge that a mansion tax has been implemented elsewhere.

The big political – as well as the big policy problem – is that the government’s fiscal plans force it to take large amounts of money off some of Britain’s poorest workers. The easiest thing would simply be to extend the timetable for balancing the books – having done so and won re-election in 2015, the longterm political costs would likely be low for the Conservatives. Any other solution looks next to impossible. 

With the recent developments in the UK and Jeremy Corbyn's rise as Labour leader, there has been a political movement that has captured the minds of the young and disillusioned; a movement that has taken my university campus in Manchester by storm. Coincidentally, people recall his comments on the Daily Politics where alluded to leasing back Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. This has been met by criticism from both autonomous nations,. It represented a false notion that postcolonialism and Gibraltarians' and Falkland Islanders' particular self-determination wishes were contradictory. This has led to a small but vocal alienation of the British left among Gibraltarian/British patriots.

But with a new revival of the Left in Europe, including Podemos in Spain which promises to end the populist scapegoating of Gibraltar in Spanish politics and respect Gibraltar's position in the talks, we should embrace this surge and clear up any misconceptions that might compromise the Rock's position. The point should be made that our right to this self-determining voice and a path for deciding Gibraltar's future that is set by the inhabiting citizens does not, and should not, contradict left-wing politics.

“We absolutely as the Labour Party uphold the right of the people of Gibraltar to self-determination, because there is a natural hunger, a thirst on the part of human kind to be able to take decisions about how we live and how we run society and how we deal with problems that we face and how we fulfil our aspirations for a better future. It is what has motivated people throughout human history and the Labour Party and the Labour movement has been at the forefront, both in the fight against colonialism and in the modern age to support people who are trying to resolve their differences not by guns but by argument.”

These were pronouncements made by the Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn at the UK Labour Party Conference this autumn. Some may dismiss that as empty rhetoric that could have easily been uttered by a Conservative MP, others as an example of Gibraltar's just cause and support. However, it is not always been the case that the Labour Party, when in Number 10 or otherwise, hold on to these left-wing ideals that are so obvious to many people living in Gibraltar. In last year's pre-European election piece by Dominique Searle, the irony of this is explained in a valid and detailed manner, which goes beyond the New Labour joint-sovereignty debacle. There has never been an unabashedly right-wing Government in Gibraltar. While the reasons for this are a combination of factors, the result is that to survive as a political party, you must portray yourself as, at the very least, centre-left.

There is no reason why Gibraltar should not see the affinity with left-wing civil movements in Europe, including the most recent ongoing grass roots Labour movement, and seek to make Gibraltar's position known unequivocally rather than submit to off-the-cuff statements that do not fully apply the principle of self-determination to the unique nature of Gibraltar's justified political ambition. The Gibraltarian identity, to a large part, arose from the roots of civilian trade unionism and political rights for the 'colonised' to eventually have autonomous sovereignty over Gibraltar in what ever self-determined form it chooses. This postcolonial struggle was one of many in the world, but it is unique in various ways; as you can read in my piece on the AACR.

Perhaps this is why there has, even at vital times, been a fundamental contradiction to the way the Left has read the issues of parts of the Commonwealth, most notably Gibraltar and the Falklands. But this does not mean that there is no progress to be made with the left.

The core values that relate to and justify Gibraltar's position are based in the Left rather than in what has become the posturing and sound-biting Right, who could have easily taken the New Labour route under Blair and attempt to by-pass Gibraltar's voice in diplomatic talks if they wanted to purvey a 'good European image' as Blair did (indeed, the quote on Blair and Europe goes: 'he came in as a tiger...and out as a doormat'). It is just up to Gibraltar to be pro-active and persistent. These two Ps brought about the fall of the joint-sovereignty proposals and they can now bring a renewed hope in improving the relationship between Gibraltar and the Labour Party.

As the refugee crisis continues to dominate headlines around the world, local authorities in Britain are in dispute with the government over the funding they receive for the care of unaccompanied children seeking asylum. They have understandable concerns – rules designed to protect children arriving in the UK may, in fact, be making it harder to look after them properly.

The London Borough of Croydon is considering legal action against cuts to asylum seeker funding grants that were implemented in March 2015. Croydon says the cuts will create a £4m hole in its budget, while the county of Kent, which borders London and includes the port of Dover, predicts a £5.5m shortfall.

The money only tells one side of the tale, of course. To put it in human terms, the Millbank induction and assessment centre in Kent was reportedly housing 99 children in early September 2015, despite having a capacity of around 50.

Rapid escalation

When I interviewed a senior social worker in Kent in late April 2015, the council was responsible for 376 unaccompanied children. That followed the arrival of 211 children from the beginning of August 2014 to the end of February 2015. By September 4, Kent was responsible for 730 unaccompanied children.

I made Freedom of Information requests to every local authority children’s services department in England to try to establish where unaccompanied children were living and how many each authority was responsible for. Some 146 of 150 authorities responded, revealing that in June to August 2015, one-fifth of authorities were not responsible for any unaccompanied children at all. A further third of authorities looked after fewer than ten.

The overwhelming majority (105) had fewer than 20 in their care and just seven authorities had more than 50. Of those, Kent (then with 376) and Croydon (412) between them looked after 28 per cent of all unaccompanied children in England.

The reason Kent and Croydon are responsible for so many children is that the Children Act 1989 provides that unaccompanied children must be taken into the care of the local authority where they are first found. While adult asylum-seekers are dispersed across the UK with no choice in where they go, lone children are legally the responsibility of the local council.

It means that as a key entry point for migrants, Dover puts Kent into a position of responsibility, while Croydon’s disproportionate role comes thanks to the fact that it houses the Home Office’s Asylum Screening Unit.

Prospects

The full protection of the Children Act has been hard won for unaccompanied children. They were previously often provided with a lesser level of support than they were entitled to under the Act. As a result they were also denied “care leaving” services – those designed to provide a soft landing for vulnerable people turning 18 –- until a Supreme Court judgment established that they must be looked after.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child obliges the authorities to treat the best interests of the child as a primary consideration in all decisions. Yet the UK entered an “immigration reservation” which it maintained from 1989 to 2008, to avoid that “best interests” principle when the child in question was subject to immigration control.

So there is an entirely reasonable reluctance to allow any dilution of the application of the Children Act to unaccompanied children. However, leaving aside any concerns about the financial well-being of the high-intake authorities, even in April 2015 it appeared doubtful that children’s best interests could be fully implemented in Kent.

My fieldwork revealed that children aged 16 and 17 had minimal prospects of entering foster care in Kent, while those in Brighton and Hove in East Sussex generally entered foster care regardless of age and remained there until at least the age of 18. A number of children I met did not know who their social worker was in order to ask for help and were relying on charities instead.

Eritrean children who I interviewed were fasting for the Orthodox Lent, but were unable to go to the nearest Eritrean Orthodox Church (in London) for the important Easter services because they could not obtain travel money. High-quality legal representatives had limited capacity because of the structure of contracts with the Legal Aid Agency.

Sharing the burden

While experts and children in Brighton and Hove described rapid access to good educational support, children in Kent faced long delays to start education or long journeys into London to reach college. Demand for educational places could not be met in Kent’s schools and colleges but the situation was being exacerbated by deliberate decisions to stop meeting unaccompanied children’s needs.

According to anecdotal evidence I have heard, the fear in Kent is that colleges which have been willing to offer English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) are dropping out under pressure from local councils over the numbers of unaccompanied children being accommodated in the area.

Given these multiple obstacles, it’s clear there is a need for some form of responsibility sharing between local authorities. But “dispersal” of the kind used for adults is not the answer. Any exception to the Children Act must (legally and morally) be tightly limited to the allocation of legal responsibility for the child at first arrival.

Proper funding is essential. Responsibility sharing models in France and Austria are ineffective largely because of disputes between the local and central government over funding for the children’s care. Previous attempts to develop responsibility sharing in the UK have foundered because of the Home Office’s failure to provide proper funding and the increase in duties towards children in care.

Whether voluntary or compulsory, responsibility sharing is crucial to the best interests of unaccompanied children. Proper funding, tailored to proper fulfilment of all of the duties set out in the Children Act, is the only way to achieve this.

Joanna Wilding is a research fellow at the University of Brighton

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

Let’s not beat around the bush, although that’s not the happiest phrase in light of what I’m about to say. Germaine Greer’s views on transgender people are based on the kind of quasi-Freudian cod-psychology you’d think a feminist critic would find embarrassing. In 1999’s The Whole Woman, she wrote that “when a man decides to spend his life imitating his mother (like Norman Bates in Psycho), it is as if he murders her and gets away with it”. Today, her views have the same thrust – that it’s not possible to change from a man to a woman – although their expression is usually less aggressive. She told Newsnight on 23 October, for example, that she will use whatever pronouns people ask for, and would not try to limit sex reassignment surgery for those who want it.

Still, this is normally the point where I start humming “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. In the age where Caitlyn Jenner is set to be crowned Glamour’s Woman of the Year, after living as one for less than 12 months, Greer is wildly out of step with public opinion. But then, when was she ever not? She is a controversialist, a provocateur – she has never wanted to be an unsung footsoldier of the feminist movement; she always wanted to be its Camille Desmoulins. I’ve just finished reading Gloria Steinem’s memoir, and it’s full of warm references to other feminists. A Greer autobiography would be unlikely to strike the same sisterly tone.

I mention her controversial opinions on transgender issues because they are what prompted Cardiff University Women’s Society to try to have Greer disinvited from speaking. (She has now pulled out anyway, saying she is “too old” at 76 to face protesters*.) She joins a small but growing list of feminists deemed unacceptable to address students: the NUS has an official policy of no-platform against Julie Bindel because she “is vile”. Neither of these women has advocated or incited violence, which used to be the old rationale for “no platform”. Their words are the problem.

It’s interesting that it is Greer's views on gender that are the flashpoint, because she has been flat wrong about many things in her career – FGM, for example, which she has defended given its “cultural” element – without anything like the same backlash. Put simply, trans issues are the new dividing line for progressive activism; the way for younger activists to kick against their foremothers in the feminist movement. Feminists are like Batman: they either die heroines, or live long enough to become villains.

With gay marriage now legal in America, there is also the sense among online social justice communities that trans rights are “the new civil rights frontier” (as Time magazine wrote next to a photo of Orange is the New Black star Laverne Cox). Social media has acted like an accelerant on this fire: sites like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post’s LGBT section offer uplifting tales of transgender children’s achievements and famous adults coming out, alternating with occasional three-minute hates for “TERFs” (trans exclusionary radical feminists), a group who are said to be inciting violence against trans women by refusing to accept them as women. Sharing such articles has become a badge of progressive correctness. The word “TERF” is sprayed around like confetti, with very little understanding of what it means. I’ve been called a TERF, even though I think trans women are women and absolutely have a place in feminism. I think it’s become a politer way of saying “witch”.

It’s also about undergraduates rebelling against their parents’ generation and its liberal deification of free speech. After all, the last time students tried to have Greer disinvited from addressing a university crowd, one of those defending her right to speak was Rachel Padman, the trans academic whose appointment to the all-women’s college Newnham Greer tried to kibosh in 1996. Padman said she hoped the Cambridge Union would “give Germaine a fair hearing, but of course robustly interrogate her”. Here was someone directly affected by Greer’s beliefs, defending her right to express them.

The fact that the trans rights struggle is the first progressive cause to come of age in the time of Twitter leaves anyone who wants to explore the thorny issue of gender and biological sex, and the meaning of both and the differences between them, in a difficult position. I accept completely that transgender people face difficulties in their life that I, with a far less uneasy relationship with my body, struggle to comprehend. Last week I invited an educational organisation called All About Trans in to talk to the editorial team. Some of the stories were difficult to hear: family rejection, suicide attempts, street harassment.

But several guests also said things which have become unsayable on social media, even by trans people themselves: one referred to using the term “trans*” (the asterisk denotes that the term includes not just transgender people, but those who reject the gender binary, or are otherwise genderfluid) and was told, laughingly, by others that this was very two years ago. There are places on the internet where you will be told to “die in a fire” if you write “transwomen” instead of “trans women”. (Not pressing the spacebar is said to indicate that you don’t believe they are real women).

After a while, you begin to wonder if the opacity of language isn’t accidental at all. Trans activists, tired of being treated as objects of curiousity, fear or pity by outsiders, have decided to seize control of the discourse and develop their own ways of talking about how they feel. This is understandable, but it also means that everyone is constantly making mistakes. This would be OK - in everyday life, people slip up and get corrected, and the world keeps turning - but because it's happening in the crucible of social media, where women's opinions carry a higher cost, censure for those mistakes is distributed unfairly. There are phrases that a man could say - "female socialisation" springs to mind - with no comeback, but would be read as Deep TERF Code coming from a feminist's mouth. I've lost count of the number of times that male friends have expressed surprise that their normally quiet, polite Twitter experience suddenly turns into a hornet's nest if they chat with me about a controversial divide in feminism.

Even trans people who do not have the “correct” opinions feel worried about broaching the subject; I know a group of “gender critical” trans women who are castigated regularly as “TERF tokens” and “Uncle Toms”. (Putting paid to the flatulent piety so often circulated on social media: “Why don’t you just listen to trans people?” Because it turns out, O Wise One, that minority groups are not homogenous.) Like so much of modern activism, the urge here is to conflate identity and opinion. It's a useful, forceful rhetoric tactic - it personalises the fight - but it's also allows all kinds of sleight-of-hand. If you "listened to women" on abortion, you'd hear a much higher level of anti-abortion views than if you listened to men, for example. What people mean when they say that is "listen to mainstream feminist opinion". But that doesn't have quite the same snappy righteousness, though, does it?

Although trans issues have benefited hugely from the speed and reach of online activism, in other ways they have been ill-served by being the first progressive cause to blossom fully in the social media age. Nuance is impossible. Dare to write anything other than a saccharine celebration of diversity, or solemn sermons about how brave trans people are, and your opinion is read as an attack on the very idea that they should be allowed to carry on living at all. But rainbow avatars and “inspirational” stories will only get you so far. There are hard questions that we need to address as trans people become more visible and we try to take their needs into account in public policy. Should we abolish single-sex schools, for example, when they make life so much harder for teenagers who decide that they wish to live as the opposite gender? Should trans women who have gone through puberty as boys be allowed to compete in women’s sports and are cis women who do not want to compete against them bigots? Should a person with a penis and beard (no surgery or hormones are required to legally transition) be allowed into a women-only rape shelter? Should gender non-conforming children have access to "puberty blockers" at 16? At 12? At eight?

In my Pollyanna-ish way, I hope that all of these questions can be resolved with respectful negotiation; but there will have to be compromises between competing interests. It’s not – as many people on Twitter seem to believe – as simple as identifying the group you feel is most fashionably oppressed and sprinting to shout: “Solidarity!” And God save us from all the progressive men who will never face the sharp end of such questions – who have never had to think about rape shelter policy, for example – using this issue to show how right-on they are. Come on, feminists, they chirrup without self-awareness. Stop being so uptight!

You can see this in the way the word "TERF" has moved way beyond its initial, perhaps useful meaning - to describe a political position - to encompass any woman who disagrees with or even questions others who have strongly held views on gender. It is, sadly, a thought-stopping cliche. Being a TERF is bad. I don’t want to be called a TERF. I should not speak to TERFs in case people think I am one too.

But here is a list of things which can get you called a TERF, if you are a woman with a public profile: a) believing that biological sex is different from gender, ie that the penis is a male sex organ, even when attached to someone who identifies as a woman; b) believing that being raised as a boy gives you a different experience of life to anyone raised as a girl; c) believing that you need to transition using surgery or hormones to be trans (a recent Buzzfeed piece was headlined “This Trans Women Kept Her Beard And Couldn’t Be Happier”) d) believing that someone who transitions at 45 has not “always been female”.

I’d argue that those positions are far removed from the hateful, discriminatory behaviour and speech which most of us would accept is transphobic. And it is entirely possible that some or all of them will seem completely outdated in 50 years as our ideas about sex and gender move on. But they don't seem to me to be in themselves vile or beyond the pale.

Yet there is now a strange conflation of rhetorical with actual, physical violence. Such views are said to lead directly to the dehumanisation of trans people that puts them in danger of street attacks and death. It is a difficult point to argue when confronted with the facts: the only person convicted of murdering a trans woman in Britain this year is Joaquin Gomez-Hernandez, who killed his wife Vanessa Santillan after finding her in bed with a client. He had no job, and lived off her earnings as a sex worker; a familiar tale of a bruised male ego curdling into rage. Not an avid reader of Germaine Greer, I would guess.

This is a subject I have been reluctant to write about, for several reasons. The first is the abuse and shouts of “TERF” that will follow; despite having views on the issue which I’d guess are more progressive than 95 per cent of the population, there might be attempts to no-platform me in future. The second is a desire not to alienate trans activists, many of whom I personally know and respect, or to make their lives harder.

From the trans perspective, I can understand the feelings that the gains the movement has recently made are both recent and fragile, and the desire to set the terms of the debate after so long being treated as objects of pity or ridicule. After all, the challenges of transition are a daily task for many people, not a theoretical debate. But the subject has become part of a society-wide conversation; to move on, it must be something that ordinary people, outside the charmed circle who know that trans no longer takes an asterisk, can have an opinion on.

The current orthodoxy is that issues should be left to those directly affected by them to discuss, but consider this for more than a minute and the absurdity reveals itself. The rights of severely disabled people who cannot communicate would, under this logic, never get discussed. Plus: gender affects us all; free speech affects us all. Men have the luxury of not needing to have an opinion on whether it is a good idea for women’s sports to be opened to trans women, or for women’s refuges to be accessible to those with penises; feminists do not. Plus: I'm a journalist. My job is to write about other people. The rise of the First Person Industrial Complex is not an unalloyed good.

Can we all be honest here? No one has a bloody clue how much of gender is innate, and how much is socially constructed. Scientific research shows some differences between male and female brains in aggregate, but if shown a random brain, it is impossible to say it definitely belongs to someone with XX or XY chromosomes. In any case, brains are incredibly plastic, responding to their environment. Perhaps studies of identical twins could clear this up, but they haven’t done yet for sexuality, so don’t pin too much hope on them. Let’s treat everyone with dignity and respect, while preserving the space to explore this subject scientifically.

Can we also be honest about something else? This battle against Germaine Greer is driven, at least in part, by sexism. After all, the world is full of academics with bad opinions, happily going about their business. Richard Dawkins, for example, is obsessed with proving that a teenage Muslim American boy suspended for bringing a clock to school should not be an object of pity and is instead a cunning hoaxer. David Starkey went on an extraordinary rant on Newsnight a few years ago about how "whites had become black" (i.e. were getting involved in street violence). No one is trying to ban him from talking to British universities.

The same students who tried to stop Julie Bindel from talking about free speech (the irony) at Manchester university this autumn did not simultaneously attack her fellow speaker Milo Yiannopolous, even though his views on transgender people are more extreme than hers. (He believes they are mentally ill and should be denied surgery.) Brendan O’Neill writes almost weekly on the Spectator website that transgender politics is “hocus pocus”. Where’s the NUS motion condemning him?

On the day the Greer row kicked off, I received a press release from the Cambridge Union, saying that students had voted overwhelmingly to offer a platform to Julian Assange, who is an interesting speaker on the subject of internet surveillance . . . and a rape suspect, hiding from a European arrest warrant in the Ecuadorian embassy. Because he is a man, he gets to be both.

It is ironic that this debate has focused around the idea of accepting trans women as women, because it also seems to me that we have a problem accepting non-trans women as fully human – a mixture of good and bad, wrong and right. Because, of course, Germaine Greer wasn’t even booked to talk about trans issues at Cardiff: the title of her lecture was “Women and Power in the 20th Century”. As with other feminists, it is assumed that her bad opinions on one subject render her persona non grata on everything else.

Look at the history of no-platforming: it started with organisations like the National Front and the BNP, who trailed thugs and incited violence; then it spread to being used against figures like David Irving, the Holocaust denier – crucially, when he was talking about Holocaust denial. The new no-platforming of feminists means that one duff opinion sees you bundled off the stage, whatever you planned to talk about. Germaine Greer could go to a university and talk about her LP collection and there would be students desperate to ban her.

So yes, trans women are women. They are as much “real women” as I am, given it’s an arbitrary, ever changing, socially constructed category. But trying to silence those who disagree with that simple statement will dent all women's right to speak. Let she who is without unpopular views cast the first e-petition.

* Update: 2pm, 27 October: Cardiff University have been in touch to say they have subsequently spoken to Greer's representatives, and the event is still scheduled to go ahead next month.

“Cricket writing about Pakistan has sometimes fallen into the wrong hands. It has been carried out by people who do not like Pakistan, are suspicious of Pakistanis, and have their own preconceptions.” So begins Peter Oborne’s Wounded Tiger, published in paperback this year – a book that seeks to do more than merely tell the rich story of Pakistan cricket. It also masquerades as a history of “British condescension”, as Oborne puts it, towards Pakistan and its most successful sporting team.

Ian Botham once described Pakistan as “the kind of place to send your mother-in-law for a month, all expenses paid”. Oborne detects similar sentiments among English cricketers as far back as the MCC tour of Pakistan in 1956. Blaming the bias of an umpire, Idrees Baig, for their impending defeat, the English players forcibly took him to a player’s room and poured buckets of water over him. No more dignified was the England captain Mike Gatting gesticulating in the face of another umpire, Shakoor Rana, during a row in Faisalabad in 1987.

The book is above all contemptuous of the British press and devotes a section to “media stereotypes of Pakistan”. The Sun reacted to the Shakoor Rana affair by producing a “Sun Fun Dartboard” with the umpire’s face. When Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis wrecked England’s chances with reverse swing in the 1992 Test series, one Daily Mirror journalist wrote, referring back to Botham’s comment: “I thought they’d laugh their curly slippers off . . . Laugh, not them, they’re too prickly and nationalistic . . . Pakistanis being even hotter on apologies than they are on vindaloos.”

Oborne sees the spread of such images as a manifestation of how Pakistan’s cricketers had been reduced to “caricatures”. The country’s two leading stars of the 1980s are a case in point. While the pugnacious Javed Miandad was depicted as “a hooligan”, the Oxford-educated Imran Khan was seen as a “princely scion”.

But Wounded Tiger is about much more than the West’s mistrust of Pakistan and its cricketers. It is an account of how the sport came to represent, “in an untrammelled way, the national personality”. This extends even to women’s cricket, which belatedly gained an association and a national team in 1996 thanks to the Khan sisters Shaiza and Sharmeen (no relation of Imran), daughters of a carpet manufacturer who sent them to study in England. Those trying to develop the women’s team encountered staunch resistance from conservative Islamists and even death threats, but the side today regularly takes part in the Women’s World Cup.

Osman Samiuddin’s The Unquiet Ones shares the ambition of Oborne’s work. Both are magnificent as stand-alone histories of Pakistan cricket; happily, the subject matter is so rich that there is little overlap between the two. Where Oborne’s value lies most in his account of how the game took hold in Pakistan, Samiuddin, widely regarded as the finest writer on Pakistan cricket today, uses the sport as a window on the country. Along the way, we learn about the neglect of Balochistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) as well as the identity of the only US president to sit through an entire day’s Test cricket (Dwight Eisenhower).

Neither author is oblivious to the faults of cricket in Pakistan. Samiuddin gives a sharp account of the report into match-fixing by the Qayyum commission in 2000, which almost tore the team apart. Whispers of corruption have remained ever since, especially after three cricketers were imprisoned for spot fixing after a News of the World sting in 2010, colluding to bowl no-balls to order during a Lord’s Test against England.

The saddest tale was that of Mohammad Amir, who had emerged from a remote village in the Punjab to bowl pulsating left-arm pace, and became the youngest bowler in history to take 50 Test wickets. He was 18 when he was banned for five years from international cricket; his suspension ended on 2 September, and he intends to return to the Pakistan team. “On the one hand is the gift, Amir prolonging a legacy that has somehow sustained Pakistan even in its most fallow days,” Samiuddin writes. “On the other is the curse that has stained the game over the past 20 years. Fast bowling and corruption: the richness of Pakistan in one, its poverty in the other, two strands that have kept Pakistan alive and taken the life out of it.”

Meticulously as Samiuddin dissects the cancer of corruption (we learn of Imran Khan betting all of Pakistan’s winnings in a tournament on victory in the final against Australia after being told that four players were in the pay of bookmakers; Pakistan won the match easily), he is even better at teasing out the side’s intoxicating quality. “For all that professionalism has enhanced sport, it is sometimes heartening to acknowledge that a team like Pakistan still exists, a strong jerk in the straitjacket, a little blip of chaos to the straight lines of order.”

In many ways we are living in the age of Pakistan cricket’s greatest challenge. Since the horrific attack on a bus carrying the Sri Lankan team to a game at Lahore in 2009, all foreign teams, save Zimbabwe for three one-day and two T20 international matches this year, have refused to tour Pakistan. This “Age of Isolation”, as Oborne calls it, has cost Pakistan about $100m. It has also deprived them of a base; instead, to play “home” internationals, they have resorted to England, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and, most frequently, the United Arab Emirates, where Pakistan are playing England now.

Yet none of this has undermined the role of cricket in Pakistan. Samiuddin contends it “has never felt more central to life” and that “death would it be for Pakistan to go quiet”. For all the turmoil of the nation’s cricket, there is no danger of that. That opinion is shared by Oborne, who salutes a sport “enjoyed by all of Pakistan’s sects and religions”, part of the country’s “history and also its future”. Long may it remain so.

Tim Wigmore is the co-author (with Peter Miller) of “Second XI: Cricket in Its Outposts” (Pitch Publishing)

Wounded Tiger: a History of Cricket in Pakistan by Peter Oborne is published by Simon & Schuster (£12.99, 624pp)

The Unquiet Ones: a History of Pakistan Cricket by Osman Samiuddin is published by HaperCollins India (£31.99, 510pp)

I had my first child back in the Stone Age, long before broadband and smartphones were everyday phenomena. This made sharing photos of him a right pain. I’d have to disconnect the phone and plug the lead into my laptop, then connect the laptop to the camera via a USB cable, then find the folders in My Computer... honestly, you young ’uns wouldn’t believe what life was like in 2007.

And yet I went through the whole process on a daily basis. No Facebook friend of mine was going to go 24 hours without being updated on my precious little poppet’s progress. I’m sure they all appreciated it, just as they do now when I whizz through photos of my newest baby, my phone now allowing me to make several uploads during the course of one day. 

I am what is pejoratively known as an “over-sharenter”. According to a recent Telegraph article by Tanith Carey, I have joined countless other parents in “invading” social media in order to meet the demands of “our increasingly inflatable parenting egos”.

Whatever our children are doing, whenever it’s happening, we want you to know about it. Whether it’s Arlo eating his first solid food, or Chloe attending her first dance class, rest assured that it’s coming to a timeline near you.

Prepare to be distracted from the serious business of looking at cat GIFs and completing quizzes that will tell you your Hogwarts house based on your favourite corgi puppy. You need to gawp at my baby and you need to do it now!

The general consensus on over-sharenting is that it is a) all to do with vanity and b) bad. I’m not convinced of either of these things. Clearly I think my kids are the cutest – because objectively they just are – but I also think there’s something other than boastfulness at work.

While there can be legitimate concerns about a child’s privacy (I am careful in the pictures I select and where I upload them), I think that, for parents, the act of sharing can be important. It’s a way of seeking not just approval, but support. It’s a way of showing other adults your world and having them respond, even if only by means of a simple “like.”

Ultimately, sharenting can help us to recreate a sense of community (you know, the kind of thing we once thought social networks could be about).

Caring for a baby or small child is hard and lonely, particularly today. As Ari, the main protagonist in Elisa Albert’s After Birth, puts it, “two hundred years ago – hell, one hundred years ago – you’d have a child surrounded by other women: your mother, her mother, sisters, cousins, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law”:

“You’d share childcare with a raft of women. They’d help you, keep you company, show you how. Then you’d do the same. Not just people to share in the work of raising children, but people to share in the loving of children.

“Now maybe you make a living, maybe you get to know yourself on your own terms. Maybe you have adventures, heartbreak. Maybe you nurture ambition. Maybe you explore your sexuality. And then: unceremoniously sliced in fucking half, handed a newborn, home to your little isolation tank, get on with it, and don’t you dare post too many pictures. You don’t want to be one of those.”

Yes, God forbid that you end up becoming “one of those”. The way in which we shame parents – women in particular – for becoming “baby bores” only serves to increase isolation and insecurity. We make mothers feel embarrassed to be opening a window on a world that used to be far more integrated than it is today.

When a woman shares a photo of her infant on Instagram or Facebook, it is highly unlikely that she is doing so in the expectation that her friends will find the child just as cute and adorable as she does. Mummies are not total idiots. It’s not a question of one-upmumship; more often than not, the dialogue a mother is seeking is much more subtle than that.

I notice that many of the baby and toddler pictures I see (and those that I send) are not group photos or family gatherings. It’s someone caring for an infant alone, watching the hours pass by with no one else to witness them. Most of the time this person may be bored out of her skull. Then there may be something special – the hint of a smile, or the beginnings of a word – and she desperately needs someone else to share in it. Otherwise everything evaporates into thin air and she’s left wondering, “what do I do all day? Does mothering mean anything at all?”

In this regard I see over-sharenting as both a feminist and a political issue. It’s to do with how society is structured so that childrearing is performed in small, private units, usually by women working alone. I don’t think this is the ideal way of doing things but this is the hand we have been dealt right now. The least we can do is neither mock nor vilify women who create a social narrative to present to their peers online.

The images they choose to upload may not be an accurate representation of what parenting is “really” like but that is not the point. They still make visible aspects of something incredibly valuable that modern capitalist society would like to persuade us does not count.

Mainstream feminism’s focus on reproductive choice at the expense of reproductive justice has led to having babies being presented as a consumer choice, no more or less important than any other and with no particular relevance to anyone other than parent and child. Yet it is nothing of the sort.

In the grand scheme of things, having and raising children deserves to be acknowledged as a big fucking deal. It is fundamental to human life, and when its fundamental nature is used to suggest it is unremarkable – “it’s not as though you’re the first woman on Earth to have kids” – this devalues a hugely important activity that happens to centre women.

As the philosopher Mary O’Brien observes, “reproduction has been regarded as quite different from other natural functions which, on the surface, seem to be equally imbued with necessity”:

“… eating, sexuality and dying, for example, share with birth the status of biological necessities. Yet it has never been suggested that these topics can be understood only in terms of natural science. They have all become the subject matters of rather impressive bodies of philosophical thought; in fact, we have great modem theoretical systems firmly based upon just these biological necessities.”

If pregnancy and parenting lack meaning, then so, too, does everything else. If, as a society, we have no collective interest in the raising of children – if we look askance because one baby photograph looks much like another – then we distance ourselves from a large part of what it is to be human.

It is ridiculous to judge the sharing of baby and toddler snapshots on the basis of whether or not they entertain us. That’s not what they’re for. They’re part of the way in which nowadays, with mothering communities fragmented and work patterns relegating childcare to a hidden, private zone, we still seek some communal, non-commercial way of sharing the meaning – both the joys and the boredom – of the early stages of life.

All of which I’m sure is profoundly irritating to child-free Facebook friends who cannot bear the thought of seeing yet another snotty, toothless grin. But to them I would say – just “like” the odd photo, make the odd comment. It could mean a great deal more than you’d think.

I first met alcohol in the late Eighties. It was the morning after one of my parents’ parties. My sister and I, aged nine or ten, were up alone. We trawled the lounge for abandoned cans. I remember that we were methodical: pick one up, give it a shake to see if there’s anything inside and, if there is, drink! I can still taste the stale, warm metallic tang of Heineken (lager; 5 per cent alcohol by volume) on my tongue. Just mind the ones with cigarette butts in.

Other times we’d sneak a sip of Dad’s Rémy Martin VSOP (cognac; 40 per cent) when he wasn’t looking, even though we didn’t like the taste. It came in a heavy glass bottle that he kept in the sideboard. He’d pour himself a glass at night, the ice cubes clinking as he walked to his small office to make phone calls. On special occasions – family birthdays, Christmas lunch – we even got to drink legitimately: usually half a glass of Asti Spumanti (sparkling wine; around 7.5 oer cent), served in the best glasses.

In my mid-teens I started to drink drink. It was easy enough to get our hands on booze, even though it’s illegal in the UK to sell alcohol to anyone younger than 18. The bigger chain pubs checked IDs, so we stuck to the ones we knew to be less stringent. My older boyfriend would buy me Archers (schnapps; 21 per cent) and lemonade in the pub opposite the supermarket where I worked on Saturdays. Trips to music festivals and birthday parties always involved booze, invariably in violently flavoured and oddly coloured forms. Standouts include Apple Sourz, a neon-green fruit liqueur with an ABV (alcohol by volume) of 15 per cent, and Hooch, a classic alcopop that looked and tasted like lemonade but was stronger than many beers.

Yet it wasn’t until university that booze and I became properly acquainted. My memory of my first week is of social anxiety offset by cheap alcohol. It was a harbinger of the next four years. On Friday and Saturday nights, the air in Flat G4, Devonshire Hall, University of Leeds would be heavy with perfume and hair products vaporising from hair straighteners. The five of us girls who lived there would sit on the plastic-tiled floor of our kitchen, backs against cupboard doors, drinking from mismatched glasses and mugs. We were pre-loading: priming ourselves for the cheap spirits and pints that lay ahead with even cheaper vodka and red wine.

I found that drinking made being a human easier. It wasn’t that alcohol made my social anxiety disappear; that feeling would show up again the next morning, accompanied by a headache and bottom-of-a-bird’s-cage mouth. But drinking meant I could talk to people more easily, sometimes even dance. Still, there was always that one last drink that tipped me over the edge. At one ball I drank so much free wine that I vomited the stud out of my nose and down the sink. My diary entry that night consisted of four oversized words scrawled in turquoise biro: “drunk + sick / Freshers’ Ball”. But that was how it was: sometimes you were the one bundling people into a taxi, sometimes you were the one being bundled. We’d always make it home eventually, armed with a greasy box of Hawaiian pizza, carrying our shoes, our hair stinking of cigarette smoke.

After I graduated, I found myself in a new city but with the same habits. I ended one night by tripping over my own feet and grating my face along a north London pavement. The next morning I had a black eye and a need for a tetanus injection. Getting into a serious relationship didn’t change things, either. I started seeing my now-husband in 2003 – a courtship unofficially sponsored by Stella Artois (lager; 4.8 per cent) and Smirnoff (vodka; 37.5 per cent). We’d go to a pub near one of our houses, get drunk on lager and then, when we should have been calling it quits, switch to spirits. 

None of this seemed particularly remarkable. I didn’t feel that I had a problem with alcohol, nor did any of my friends. We got drunk, sometimes too drunk, and then suffered the consequences. We were just doing what young people did. But recently, with getting on for 20 years of drinking under my belt, I started to wonder if my generation’s relationship with alcohol was abnormal. When I looked into the numbers I realised that it was. I discovered that 2004 was Peak Booze: the year when Brits drank more than they had done for a century, and more than they have done in the decade since. Leading the way to this alcoholic apogee were those of us born around 1980. No other generation drank so much in their early twenties. Why us?

* * *

Everyone in alcohol research knows the graph. It plots the change in annual consumption of alcohol in the UK, calculated in litres of pure alcohol per person. (None of us drinks pure alcohol, thankfully; one litre of pure alcohol is equivalent to 35 pints of strong beer.) In 1950, Brits drank an average of 3.9 litres per person. Look to the right and at first the line barely rises. Then, in 1960, it begins to creep upward. The climb becomes more steady during the 1970s. The upward trajectory ends in 1980, but that turns out to be temporary. By the late 1990s consumption is rising rapidly again. Come Peak Booze, in 2004, we were drinking 9.5 litres of alcohol per person – the equivalent of more than 100 bottles of wine.

It’s impossible to untangle the forces behind the graph’s every rise and fall, but I’ve talked to researchers who have studied our relationship with alcohol. They told me how everything from recessions to marketing to sexism has shaped the way Brits drink. This is the story of that research, and of what it tells us about the ascent to Peak Booze. In many ways it is not a story about how much we drink, but about who drinks what, and where. It begins well over half a century ago, in the pub.

During the late 1930s, a group of observers set out to record what went on in British pubs. The result was a book called The Pub and the People. The part of the pub where working-class men gathered was known as the vault: “Along the base of the bar counter, whose top is of well worn, well wiped mahogany, runs a line of scattered sawdust, about six inches wide, on to which people spit, throw fag ends, matches and empty cigarette packets.” The authors list the activities that took place there and elsewhere in the pub: talking, thinking, smoking, spitting, playing games, betting, singing, playing the piano, the buying and selling of goods, including hot pies and bootlaces.

And drinking, of course. In postwar Britain, much of the drinking took place in pubs. It was mainly men that drank there, and they generally drank beer. Relatively little changed in the two decades after The Pub and the People was published. It wasn’t until the 1960s that British drinking culture began to shift in more fundamental ways, and the beginnings of the era of Peak Booze can be seen.

Part of this change was about Brits learning – or being persuaded – to enjoy a drink they had long shunned. Josef Groll made the first batch of Pilsner, the light, golden beer we know as lager, in the Czech town of Pilsen in 1842. Word spread and, thanks to Europe’s developing train network, so did the drink. Soon brewers from Germany started to make their own Pils, and ‘Pilsner’ no longer meant just a beer from Pilsen, but a new type of beer.

Lager spread around the world, but British drinkers of the time stuck to their home-brewed pale ales. These drinks were weaker than the 5 per cent alcohol content of many lagers, and suited British drinking habits. “Mild [a type of beer] was about 3 per cent,” says beer writer Pete Brown. “Men who worked in factories and mines would drink pints and pints of it after work, partially to rehydrate without getting hammered.” It also suited the UK tax system, under which beer is taxed in proportion to its strength. Even Prince Albert enthusing about lager after a trip to Germany wasn’t enough to get British drinkers to switch.

But you can’t keep the drinks industry down. The brewers promoted lager intensively after World War II. In the generation that came of age in the late 1960s – one thirsty for change – they finally found an audience. “Lager suddenly exploded, very quickly, after years of unsuccessful marketing,” says Brown. What changed? “We were still doing most of our drinking in pubs, they were still male-dominated environments, the beers were still the same strength. But [Dutch brewer] Heineken in its advertising used ‘refreshment’ as a key benefit for the very first time in British beer advertising.” When the ads first aired in 1974, the campaign was doing “okay”, says Brown. But when Britain experienced unusually hot summers in 1975 and 1976, the refreshment angle gelled with consumers. Suddenly lager started selling.

Heineken’s television ads are now seen as game-changers. They promised a lager that “refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach”. In one, a man sits in an armchair reading a newspaper, surrounded by furniture covered in sheets. Hearing someone approach, he leaps up and pretends to study the wallpaper. Enter his wife, angry. The decorating must be done by the time she’s back. The man waits until he hears the car door shut, then sits back down and lifts a small dustsheet to reveal a tankard of foaming Heineken. Off to his side, we see his pet dog whistling, roller in paw, painting the wall. A Scandinavian-sounding voiceover says, “So you see, Heineken even refreshes the pets other beers cannot reach.” It’s bizarre but distinctly British: the nagging wife and recalcitrant husband, and the absurd painting pet, which references the “Dulux dog”, an Old English Sheepdog used in the UK to advertise a popular brand of paint.

Decades later I can still recall the slogans from other lager ads of the time: “I bet he drinks Carling Black Label” and “Australians wouldn’t give a Castlemaine XXXX for anything else”. On holiday with my cousins, some time in the late 1980s, I remember one of the older boys emulating the swaggering walk of the bear used to promote Hofmeister.

The ads paid off. Between 1971 and 1985, annual sales of ale and stout fell by 10 million barrels, while sales of lager grew by nearly 12 million barrels. Lager now accounts for some three-quarters of total UK beer sales. Indeed, the drink is firmly lodged in the British identity: it’s the pint of choice for banter-loving, football-watching blokes. And that helped the alcohol industry realise the extent to which it could reshape drinking traditions – something it has been doing ever since.

* * *

Around the same time that pub-goers were sipping their first pints of lager, many British drinkers were also developing a taste for another foreign import: wine. In 1960, wine accounted for less than a tenth of British alcohol consumption. But a few years later the government made it easier for British supermarkets to sell wine. The amount drunk nearly quadrupled by 1980, and then nearly doubled again between 1980 and 2000. In a survey published early this year, 60 per cent of 4,000 UK adults said they chose wine over other alcoholic drinks.

This extra drinking helped push us to Peak Booze, but wine is also important because it’s mostly drunk at home. It’s one reason why the pub is no longer the sole focus of British drinking. “The popularisation of wine represents one of the most significant developments in British drinking cultures over the last half-century – and it has been driven primarily by sales in off-licenses and supermarkets,” writes James Nicholls, Director of Research and Policy Development at Alcohol Research UK.

The story of wine in Britain is also the story of women drinkers. Pubs were traditionally not particularly welcoming to women. As the authors of The Pub and the People noted in the 1930s, women were excluded from certain rooms: “Vault and taproom are for men only, [taboo] to women, who drink in the parlour. And beer is a penny a pint more in the parlour.” Another custom was that women didn’t stand at the bar. Even the researchers who compiled the report used language we’d now consider sexist. One observer described a pub waitress as “a plump piece well painted”. The book also features a “dossier on some of the pub whores”.

“Drinking spaces always excluded women, until fairly recently,” Clare Herrick, a geographer at King’s College London, told me. There was also the idea that “women should drink sweet sherry, or have a half-pint, not a pint.” This, she argues, came from the fear of women becoming more masculine than men, competing with men, drinking the same drinks as men. I remember experiencing the tail-end of this culture when ordering beers as a student. The barman pulled a pint for my male friend and then reached, without asking, for a half-pint glass for me.

Today, the fact that a woman can walk into a pub in the UK and order whatever she wants is something we take for granted. It’s largely the result of the profound change in women’s financial and social status over the past half-century. It’s also a big part of why my generation drank so much. Alcohol consumption by women almost doubled in the three decades leading up to Peak Booze. Researchers who looked at the data a few years ago identified that change as one of the “key drivers” of the increased consumption seen in the UK.
 

* * *

The 1980s were an unusual time for the drinks industry. After 30 years of near-continuous increases, British drinking pretty much levelled out between 1980 and 1995 – the nation’s thirst reined in, perhaps, by the high unemployment that gripped the country. But the alcohol industry had not pressed pause. It was preparing to target a new generation of drinkers, and would go on to transform the places Brits drank in. These changes would set the scene for one of the most rapid increases in alcohol consumption seen in the last century.

One of the industry’s initiatives was the introduction of a new category of drink – a drink that had origins in a culture that originally posed a threat to alcohol companies.

I didn’t go to raves: as a Kentish schoolgirl I had limited desire, and even more limited means, to buy illegal drugs and dance all night in a dark field. Still, rave culture was part of my generation’s adolescence, even if the closest we got was buying glow-in-the-dark bracelets and smiley-face T-shirts. I read the newspaper stories about illegal parties in warehouses and watched the news footage of people gurning on ecstasy. I remember the Shamen’s number-one hit, with its “Es are good” chorus. My friends and I sang along, even if we didn’t know for ourselves.

There wouldn’t have been many smileys in the boardrooms of the drinks companies, because ravers didn’t want beer when they had ecstasy. That’s probably part of the reason pub attendance fell 11 per cent between 1987 and 1992. The industry’s solution wasn’t long in coming, however. It began when the government used new legislation to force rave entrepreneurs into what Phil Hadfield, an alcohol policy consultant, calls a stark choice: “work within the system… or be closed down”. Some chose the latter option, but the more successful started licensed indoor dance venues, such as the Ministry of Sound in London.

The drinks industry wasn’t going to miss an opportunity like that. It saw a chance “to reposition alcohol as a consumer product which could compete in the psychoactive night time drugs economies,” according to alcohol researchers Fiona Measham and Kevin Brain. The industry launched new and stronger drinks, which it targeted at a young and culturally diverse crowd. First were strong bottled lagers, beers and ciders. Then came alcopops, including Hooch, in the mid-1990s. A few years later, drinks containing stimulants such as caffeine and guarana arrived. It was all part of the industry’s desire to recast alcohol from a bloating depressant into a pleasant-tasting, stimulating drink that fitted the youth culture. The dance scene, say Measham and Brain, helped bring about a “revolution in the 1990s alcohol industry”.

The industry was also hard at work transforming British pubs. We still use the phrase “spit and sawdust” to describe pubs that are old, rundown and rough, but the pubs of the 1940s are long gone. One of the most dramatic stages in this evolution took place soon after alcopops were introduced, when pub chains such as the Firkin Brewery decided to convert old buildings – banks, theatres, even factories – into new drinking warehouses, often in city centres. Expanses of glass replaced external brick walls. This overhaul, argue Measham and Brain, was designed to attract “a new customer base… whose leisure sites were to be found in dance clubs, gyms, shopping centres”. Not just old men, in other words.

Shots were popular in these new pubs. Whisky chasers had accompanied beer in Scotland for years, but shots for shots’ sake were new to the rest of the UK. Also new were members of bar staff coming to tables to sell the shots, which they sometimes dispensed from guns or holsters. I remember waiting excitedly in the queue outside the Leeds branch of a new bar called Vodka Revolution. We drank shot after shot of flavoured vodka that night, from cherry to watermelon to chilli. I didn’t find one that I actually liked.

What the industry calls “vertical drinking” was the norm in these new venues. Smaller, higher tables replaced lower ones surrounded by seats, because drinkers are thought to consume more when they stand rather than sit. The loss of surfaces forced punters to hold onto drinks, which made them drink faster. Noisy surroundings made chatting harder, so people drank instead. “Most bars have cleared out their interior walls and furniture to accommodate more of what the industry names ‘mass volume vertical drinkers’ (with the heart-warming humanistic touch for which it is famous),” write Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, a sociologist and a criminologist who have studied Britain’s night-time economy.

Marketing practices in pubs, bars and clubs, including happy hours and other drinks deals, encouraged us to drink more. In 2005, when changes in the law allowed pubs to stay open for longer, managers at some large vertical-drinking pubs were reportedly offered bonuses of up to £20,000 if they used sales techniques – upselling singles to doubles, for instance – to exceed revenue targets. All this was happening as the real cost of purchasing alcohol, allowing for inflation and changes in disposable income, fell every year from 1984 to 2007. As one liver consultant put it to me: “My patient who’s drinking 100–120 units per week can afford to buy three times as much alcohol now as they did in the mid-1980s.”

These changes, from the falling price of alcohol to the marketing of stronger, more easily consumed drinks, are thought to be behind the rise of what researchers call “determined drunkenness”. Fortysomethings might get drunk on a night out, but it wouldn’t be their explicit aim. It increasingly was for those in their twenties. Young people “regard alcohol itself as crucial to a ‘good night’,” say the authors of Alcohol, Drinking, Drunkenness: (Dis)orderly spaces. They deliberately try to accelerate their drunkenness by preloading at home before they go out, playing drinking games and mixing drinks.

As the new century began, alcohol was easier to access, cheaper to buy and more enthusiastically forced into our consciousness than it had been for decades. By 2004, Brits were drinking well over twice as much as they had been half a century earlier. The nation stood atop Peak Booze, and my generation was drinking the most. Most of us were too busy having a good time to notice.

* * * 

Gemma died young. We’d been in the same year at school and, like me, she’d gone to university afterwards. One night in 2001, my sister told me that Gemma had been killed. The car she was in was hit by a van that crossed onto the wrong side of the motorway. The driver was reportedly more than four times over the legal alcohol limit. I remember thinking that it seemed impossible that someone our age was gone. She wasn’t alone, of course: more than 500 people were killed by drunk drivers on British roads that year. Young drivers were most likely to have drink-drive accidents, and while a large majority of those drivers were men, women made up nearly a third of the casualties.

Drinkers do all sorts of other damage. Alcohol makes many of us unpleasant: verbally abusive, angry, destructive. Minor disagreements can become violent – part of the reason why around half of violent offenders are thought by their victims to be under the influence of alcohol. There’s a horrifying scene in the 1996 film Trainspotting where one of the characters, Begbie, attacks a man in a pub by thrusting a full pint glass straight into his face. It’s called “glassing” and it’s a common enough problem that some pubs have started using pint glasses made from plastic or strengthened glass that are very hard to smash. (It says something about British drinking culture that images from Trainspotting were used in the tenth anniversary press campaign for Revolution Vodka bars.) “Alcohol intoxication is a powerful driver both of violence-related injury and violent offending,” say the authors of a 2014 study from Cardiff University.

It’s tempting to link the amount we drink with the frequency of alcohol-related harm, but it’s hard to do so definitively because many factors are involved. Drink-driving casualties have been falling since the 1970s, for example, probably due to better education for offenders and media campaigns. British roads might also be safer because more of our drinking now takes place at home. Still, the steady decline in drink-driving fatalities of the last 40 years was temporarily reversed between 1999 and 2004 – a period that closely matches the rapid rise in alcohol consumption that led to Peak Booze. We just don’t know if this is coincidence or causation.

Crime statistics suggest a similar link to alcohol consumption. The authors of the Cardiff study attribute a fall in the number of assault victims treated in emergency departments in England and Wales to a number of factors, including the recent decrease in overall alcohol consumption and pubs using plastic glasses.

The members of generation Peak Booze may well have harmed themselves, too. Our bodies don’t help us much on this front: there are no pain fibres in the liver, so we can’t feel the harm that we may be doing there. But the statistics roughly track consumption: annual alcohol-related liver deaths in England and Wales climbed steadily until around 2008, when the numbers levelled off. Several experts told me that changes – since reversed – in alcohol policy that made booze less affordable were having a positive effect on liver deaths. The incidence of alcohol-related deaths, which includes nervous system degeneration and poisoning as well as liver disease, also began falling a few years after Peak Booze. Again, we don’t know if these are linked or not.

Things seem to be different in the generation that followed mine. Not so long ago, I gave a careers talk at a university for a lecturer friend. There was wine on offer afterwards, but the undergraduate students left, declining the free drinks. We five panellists felt the only decent thing to do was to drink all of it, and then go out to drink more. I remember trying several different beers at the first pub. We moved on, and that’s when things start to go hazy. At some point we got food; I remember a chilli-eating contest that I lost, painfully. My final memory is of a prohibition-themed cocktail bar, and of being handed a jam jar with rum in it. The next morning I crawled into university with my friend, to watch her give her 9am taxonomy lecture. The students filed in and, while not exactly bright-eyed, seemed in better condition than me.

This generational difference isn’t just anecdotal. Young people are drinking less frequently, and more of them are teetotal. We don’t know why: it could be financial hardship, an increase in the proportion that don’t drink for religious reasons, or increased time spent online. Nor do we know whether the decline will continue. Still, this generation’s relative reluctance to drink is part of the reason UK alcohol consumption in 2013 was only 7.7 litres per person, the lowest since 1996 and nearly 2 litres lower than Peak Booze.

For many of us in the Peak Booze generation, it’s still normal to go to the bar after work on Friday. The weekend starting on Thursday is normal. Drinking because you’re happy, because you’re sad, because there’s a random beer in the fridge – all normal. Even in our thirties, with partners and babies and jobs and mortgages, we understand when someone loses their purse while drunk, pukes in a taxi, or sleeps in their clothes and crawls into work with a hangover. In fact, drinking isn’t just normal to our generation. In some ways, it defines us. It’s hard not to think that this isn’t partly because we grew up watching alcohol adverts on the TV, surrounded by plentiful, cheap booze in the supermarket. Today the drinks commercials are more tightly regulated, but the wine-sponsored TV cookery contest and beer-branded football shirt are here, reminding us that alcohol is a normal part of everyday life.

Beyond the health risks and potential harm from drink-fuelled crime, there’s the more insidious aspect of Peak Booze: the mental baggage it has left us with. I wouldn’t say any of my close friends are alcoholic, but a fair few of us are more dependent than we’d like on that cold glass of white wine or cheeky gin and tonic at the end of the day. It’s important to me to know that drinking is a choice, not a need. I want to be in control of what I do. Yet if I choose not to drink for one night out, I find myself rambling an explanation, assuring people that, no, I’m not pregnant. The fact that staying sober for a month is seen as a feat of willpower, and the subject of charity campaigns such as Dry January, shows just how embedded alcohol is in our lives. It’s the grease that keeps many of our days moving. This would be fine if we chose to be part of the drinking culture. Sometimes it feels like it chose us.

This story first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

On October 20th 2015, Philips released their report into the health of the United Kingdom.

Like most developed nations, the UK is faced with an ageing population; 1 in 6 is aged over 65, which is set to rise to 1 in 4 by 2050. At the same time, there is a rise in chronic and lifestyle-related diseases. Against this backdrop, prevention has a major role to play in ensuring people stay healthy for as long as possible. The Hippocratic Oath states, “prevent diseases whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure”.  Indeed, this model is critical to reducing unnecessary burdens on the NHS, and the Picture of Health Report highlights the benefits of empowering people to monitor and manage their own health through technology.

Download the full report here. 

Yesterday was a historic day for the House of Lords.

Not because we had a bishop using an iPad from which to deliver his speech. Not because Andrew Lloyd Webber flew first class across the Atlantic for a rare visit so that he could vote for cuts in tax credit for working families, alongside his millionaire colleagues. Nor because the main protagonists were feisty, able women – Baronesses Smith of Basildon, Hollis, Meacher and Manzoor.

But rather because Labour and Liberal Democrat peers, together with the Archbishop of York, combined to defeat the Government plan to axe tax credits without any compensatory measures.

David Cameron and George Osborne are furious, claiming we have overstepped the mark. Yet this was a statutory instrument and not primary legislation, so any convention would not apply.

They did not have a proposal to cut tax credits in their manifesto. Indeed, at an election Question Time, Cameron specifically ruled out such a cut. So we in the Lords were both acting within our powers and enabling Cameron to keep his word.

The Hollis motion was practical and positive, which is why it was carried by cross-party and crossbench support. It was designed to help the poorest in our society who work hard and do the right thing. It called upon the government, on the Prime Minister and Chancellor, to listen to the concerns being raised about their cuts to tax credits, and the impact this will have, and to provide full transitional protection for those hardworking families who stand to suffer, through no fault of their own.

If the Liberal Democrat amendment had been passed instead, the government could have returned with primary legislation, to which a veto would not apply.

The Lords is a revising chamber, and that in effect is what we have done. We have asked the Government to think again. But the supreme irony is that this has been done by the Lords, the composition of which has only one party defending it – the Conservatives.

Both the Liberal Democrats and Labour are in favour of replacing our unelected House with a more representative second chamber. Indeed, if Ed Miliband had become Prime Minister, a Labour government would now be legislating for a Senate of the Nations and Regions.

This manifesto commitment was foreshadowed in a report – A programme for progress– produced by a committee of Labour peers published in March 2014. We proposed two-stage reform. The first immediate stage would bring in a retirement age, an attendance requirement, and other mechanisms to make it more modern and effective at once.

More important was the second stage. A constitutional convention would devise a scheme for the second chamber after wide public consultation. Options including direct and indirect election would be considered, with the pros and cons of each spelled out in the consultation. We agree that, in the 21^st Century, it is no longer acceptable for the second chamber in our legislature to consist of appointed, and a few remaining hereditary, peers.

Until however, such time as the Lords is replaced by a representative chamber, we must exercise our right to hold the government to account.

One irritation for anyone involved in Sino-British diplomacy over the past 15 years has been the various attempts by the UK to “rebrand” itself in China. Surveys show that the Chinese regard Britain as conservative, swathed in smog and littered with ancient castles. Whoever first introduced this suite of stereotypes was a marketing genius, because millions of British taxpayers’ money has done nothing to reposition Britain in the minds of the Chinese as the cool, creative, modern place it claims to be.

For all the hype, the Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit merely the latest in a series of attempts to get the Chinese to see the British in a different light. The odd thing is that this time all the established stereotypes are being redeployed. It was Prince William, during a visit to Beijing in March this year, who carried the invitation for Xi to come here. And it will be Xi’s temporary accommodation in Buckingham Palace and the images of him marching in to a state banquet with the Queen that will figure most in media coverage in China. The British tactic seems to be that these hoary old symbols are worth exploiting to win the bigger prize: economic engagement.

To achieve this, Chancellor George Osborne, the chief China zealot in the government, is taking a great diplomatic risk. He played every trick in the book to grant Xi an imperial-style reception in London. Lord Macartney’s delegation to China in 1793, the first ever from Britain, was doomed when the Brits refused to kowtow to the emperor. But there is a good chance, were Osborne to travel back in a time machine, that he would tell them to swallow their pride and bend.

There is the potential that cash will come. The world’s second-largest economy has been a penurious trader and investor in the UK. China has accrued trillions of foreign reserves (though these ebb by the day) and it may be poised to unleash its investment across the world through state and non-state vehicles, but the UK seems to belong in the “action tomorrow” box rather than receiving any of this largesse today. For a decade, a stalwart constituency of the faithful here has been eagerly awaiting the arrival of mountains of renminbi. But so far, only 0.1 per cent of the stock of foreign investment in Britain is from China.

That it is so small might prove to be a blessing for Osborne. Doubling, tripling or quadrupling it in a year would be a feat worth declaring from the rooftops, even if it will have little impact beyond the symbolic. There will, of course, be long-term consequences. Osborne has had to expend huge political and diplomatic capital on this visit, dealing with brickbats from the media, other allies and trading partners, as well as his own party, over human rights in China and its difference in political and social values from the UK. He needs big returns fast in order to maintain this position and prove he was right.

The pressure is on Xi, too. His visit will be judged a success if it resets attitudes towards China in the UK – and the UK in China. Xi is ambitious. The idea that this visit will appear materially different from the campaigns in the past that have tottered along and then fizzled out will appeal to him.

To ensure that his visit differs from those of other high-level leaders, he will need to cut through the remarkable indifference towards China by the British public and political elite. In Australia, China inspires strong emotions – in the words of the former prime minister Tony Abbott, “fear and greed”. In America, it stirs antagonism and pushback (not least from Donald Trump). In the UK, China hardly registers one way or the other. The default response seems to be curt and measured acknowledgment that China has come a long way in the past decade – but so what?

Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, may be able to energise some of that indifference. A seasoned singing star in her own right, she has been deployed as a soft-power weapon. But Xi, with his refusal to hold interviews while in London, and his imperious manner, will probably reinforce the notion that China is a huge country run by inscrutable-looking men.

For television viewers across China, the Britain they see will be similar to the one they have been watching, or imagining, for most of the past few decades: a stately, formally dressed, unelected elderly lady, marching in step beside their own unelected national leader. These are hardly the ingredients for a magnificent relationship to blossom: rather the slicker, image-conscious delivery of more of the same.

Kerry Brown is the director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London

The row over Germaine Greer's right to speak at Cardiff University is in fact two. (i) how do we define sex and gender? and (ii) what are the limits of permissible speech?

It is important to disaggregate these questions. 

The question of how we define sex/gender has, of course, produced an enormous academic, including feminist, literature to which Greer herself has made a notable contribution. For present purposes, let us consider her two main objections to accepting transgender women as ‘real’ women: (i) transgender women are not ‘real’ women at some fundamental level (let us call this a biological argument, albeit that its logic is not grounded in biology) and (ii) transgender women have not been socialised as girls from a young age and therefore have not had to contend with ‘negative’ gendered experiences through which the right to call oneself a women is earned (let us call this the socialisation/victimhood argument). OK, so we understand the arguments. Do they stack up?

Let’s begin with biology. Obviously, there are some anatomical birth differences between cisgender and transgender women. The question is, should these differences be viewed as crucial in defining sex/gender?  And, if the answer to that question is yes (as Greer thinks it ought to be), can sex/gender change if those differences are eliminated or reduced (Greer says not)? Both these positions reveal a highly essentialised view of sex/gender, now given little credence within the humanities and social sciences, not to mention medical science. In the first place, a view of ‘woman’ as a particular configuration of chromosomes (XX), gonads (ovaries), genitals (vagina) and hormones (estrogen) overlooks the problem that there any many intersex women who lack one or more of these biological characteristics at birth. This raises the problem of which biological characteristics, if any, should count.

By the same token, transgender women who have undergone genital reassignment surgery and a regime of hormone administration (let’s put to one side growing evidence within the field of endocrinology suggesting a biological account of transgenderism) are essentially no different anatomically to cisgender women, apart from lacking an XX chromsome (though, in reality, hardly anyone ever discovers their chromosomal make-up). In relation to female reproduction, it is true that, currently, transgender women (and many intersex women) lack this capacity. However, no cisgender woman would be denied membership of the“woman club” on this basis. The only difference between transgender and infertile cisgender women is the different degrees of empathy they illicit from people like Greer.

In any event, what might be described as her “olfactory feminism” ("real women have smelly vaginas”), tends to conceal Greer’s more dominant objection, which travels along axes of socialisation and desert. This is a feminism rooted in victimhood and so welded is it to victim status that it resents the arrival of “new” women whose personal stories are, to say the least, always likely to give cisgender women’s pain a run for its money.

The socialisation argument is faulty because transgender women undergo a female socialisation experience as soon as they transition, and increasingly this occurs at younger and younger ages (let us not forget trans kids). In relation to desert and relative victimhood (an unhelpful approach to social justice), the argument is that transgender women have enjoyed “male privilege”. The difficultly with this claim is that it elides the very real and debilitating effects of having to deny who you are, especially over a prolonged period of time, a fact attested to by the high rates of suicide within transgender communities. 

Taking on Greer is a little like taking on someone who believes the Earth is flat. Which, of course, brings me to the second important issue. Does she have a right to say it?

When it comes to this issue, I should perhaps state from the outset that I have some difficulties with censorship and, to that extent that a distinction is drawn, no-platforming. To this extent, I am perhaps in a minority among my trans sisters. This issue is a very important one, and needs to be situated within the context of growing concern about the closing down of debate within universities, and society more generally, across a range of issues, as illustrated by the recent case of Maryam Namazie and Warwick University. However, in relation to Greer, we should not concede too much on this score. We need to recognise that Greer does not have a right to inflict her bigoted views on audiences at large. She does not have a right to an audience, crave one though she does. By the same token, other people have the right to protest and demonstrate when bigots speak. However, what if she is invited to speak at a university by a particular faculty or, more typically, a student society?

For me, this is when things become difficult, given the idea of the university as a marketplace of ideas, especially unpopular ones. That said, it must be recognised that for many young trans people, university is where coming out is first possible and this is not supported by a hostile environment which Greer engenders. And yet, we need to balance potential offence and distress caused against the right to say unpopular things. Of course, if speech incites violence or intimidation it has met its limit. Beyond this we need to be more robust (albeit that this is not always, if ever, an easy thing for vulnerable groups).

If Greer wants to say that I am a man because I do not conform to a definition of sex and gender which she and an ever-shrinking number of people subscribe, so be it. She will not be the first, or the last.

At the end of the day, if we restrict Greer’s right to speak it will likely prove counter-productive. Censorship always tends to electrify the mundane, and Greer is a case in point. In one sense, she is gaining a reputation for being the kind of celebrity who possesses a secret that can never be told.

On the other hand, and contradictorily, whether she is denied a podium or not, her views spread like wildfire. Indeed, censoring or no-platforming Greer serve only to make what is really banal, newsworthy.

To the more censoriously inclined, I say: for God’s sake don’t encourage her. Let her speak, for her speech will travel in any event. It cannot be contained or put back in a bottle. Rather, let us meet her arguments with more convincing ones - it is an easy, if somewhat tiresome, task - and as importantly, let her hoist herself on her own petard. 

It appears we live in desperate times for social democracy. We face a government which combines extreme policy with a rhetorical lock on the centre ground. Our movement is wrought by internal mutual fear and resentment. The Labour Party is now betting the house on circumventing conventional politics –  no longer courting the mainstream media, and disregarding weighty think tank reports.

If we are to triumph, we must understand why our opponents do what they do, why it is successful and why it puts us in a difficult position. We can then plot a radical but pragmatic course back to power.

We do not just face a crisis in the UK. Social democracy is in crisis across its heartlands in northern and western Europe. It is true that there is a Socialist President in the Elysee Palace, the Social Democrats are in power in Sweden and, arguably, the Italian Prime Minister, the Democrats’ Matteo Renzi is second only to Angela Merkel in being the continent’s most impressive politician. But they are chinks of light amid a sea of darkness.

Even these strongholds have severe weaknesses. President Hollande has been disastrously unpopular during his tenure, switching from being the spearhead of anti-austerity politics to pursuing liberal economic reforms with his Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

The once dominant Swedish Social Democrats came to power following their second worst result since universal suffrage in Sweden. And Renzi’s party is actually the inheritor of both Social Democratic and Christian Democratic traditions, and faces an opposition of far rightists and anti-systemic populists.

Traditional social democrats would have problems with his curtailing of trade union rights in the Jobs Act, and many liberals – who would rather tax wealth than work, consumption or investment – would disagree with his plans to abolish Italy’s tax on first properties.

Elsewhere – from Denmark to Spain to the Netherlands – social democratic parties find themselves with historically low levels of support. They are constrained by both the limits of government power – both hemmed in by supranational bodies like the European Union, in particular the demands of the Euro and global capitalism – but also by public opinion.

The European political turn to the politics of “them” and “us” with aggression directed at the “them” – Muslims and migrants – is particularly deadly for egalitarian social democrats. The puzzle on how to reconcile themselves to these realities is increasingly splitting the supporter base of these parties.

In a further uncomfortable irony, social democrats have been wrongfooted by an increasingly anti-elitist attitude among voters. Although social democrats may consider themselves as taking on the elite, their identification with the state and, in their Third Way form, accommodation with powerful traditional and private sector actors, makes them vulnerable in such a political atmosphere.

So it should not be surprising therefore that the Labour Party is struggling in the United Kingdom . In 2010 the party had its second-worst result since the advent of universal suffrage in this country. Despite five years of economic torpor and cuts to government spending, it barely made any ground in the recent elections.

Studies into the loss – from Lord Ashcroft, to Jon Cruddas MP, to, to the TUC– found that Labour appeared to be too close to the unions, immigrants and benefits claimants. As Jon Cruddas put Labour didn’t lose because it was seen as austerity-lite but because it was anti-austerity. 

In fact, it sounded like the bell tolled. In one of its heartlands – Scotland – it was all but wiped off the map. In another – the former coalfield – Ukip ominously waits. Although both parties bridle at the comparison, the SNP and Ukip are both fuelled by anti-elitism. And they are both thriving in areas whose Labour support may be due mostly to a historic legacy, rather than present conditions.

Ed Miliband in conversation with Tony Blair. Photo: Getty Images

The heavy industry unions that undergirded Labour culture in these areas are all but long gone, leaving the Labour structure without foundation, waiting to be blown away by the populist wind.

The question is often asked in terms of the centre-left’s problems – what has it gone wrong? But what happens if we are looking at the issue through the wrong end of the telescope. What if the real question is why are Conservatives doing so well? The oft-given answer to this – by Conservatives and Labour centrists – is that Thatcher was basically right about economics and/or more in tune with the British people. The more Labour deviates from a basic Thatcherite frame, the less electorally successful it will be.

I think the reality is more complicated than this. We can again, turn the telescope. Maybe we can discuss the conditions under which a conservative regime does badly, to understand the conditions under which it does well.

The economist Amartya Sen, looking at famine in India under the British Raj, argued that even the most benevolent non-democratic regime was prone to famine, in the way a seemingly incompetent democratic regime was not. His argument was that in a democracy, there is conduit of information going from the smallest villages to the technocratic elite. Things can never become too truly awful, because if they are heading that way, politicians will be voted out.

That gives the politicians an incentive to instruct their civil servants to sort things out before they become took disastrous. It also means that politicians should prize correct information above anything else – as they don’t want to get to polling day to find out that in fact, people are very dissatisfied.

However, in a modern democracy, it is not just election results that give signals back to politicians as to the mood of communities throughout their nation. Freedom of speech means that newspapers reflect opinion, even if it is filtered through the prejudices of their owners and staff.

 Furthermore, in the internet age, everyone can be their own publisher, instantly announcing how they feel. There is a steady stream of polling data as well as qualitative research, not just on headline voting intention figures but on voters attitudes to everything under the sun.

These it turns out are very good conditions for a conservative centre-right party to retain power. I take it that the actual purpose of the Conservative Party is to maintain, to the greatest extent that is politically possible, the concentration of wealth and power in as few hands as possible – but that ‘as possible’ is pivotal.

Even if individual Conservative politicians do not see that mission as their life’s work, the donorbase of the Conservative Party certainly does. They fund the Conservative Party to safeguard socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. A lightly-taxed, lightly-regulated environment where unions are weak, but where the state is always there to support the rich and powerful through bailouts or money printing if required.

Some may argue that Conservatives have deeper principles, like defence of the union or sound money, But after employing a "Netanyahu’strategy" against the Scots during the general election and repeated printing of money through rounds of quantitative easing, making uncosted spending pledges or putting the taxpayer on the hook for homes that buyers could not afford otherwise through the help to buy scheme, it is hard to make the case with a straight face.

Obviously any Conservative programme that was solely dedicating to concentrating wealth and power as much as possible would be wildly unpopular. However a steady stream of election results, media reports, polling findings and qualitative research enables Conservatives to gauge exactly how much they need to redistribute, and no further, in order to maintain power.

George Osborne. Photo: Getty Images

Such redistributive moves in times of stress may be difficult, as it threatens to split the party. However, in times of strength, this task can be applied to with gusto. If there is a defining feature of Cameron’s Conservative party from 2010 to 2015 it is how they accepted the New Labour settlement on anti-poverty measurers for pensioners including the winter fuel allowance, free buss passes and TV licenses even as the axe cut deep elsewhere.

They have gone beyond that original settlement to introducing a triple lock on the state pension, and have extended welfare for more prosperous pensioners through the so-called ‘silver bond’, where government borrowed from pensioners at a higher rate than the open market, but only if they had a minimum of £500.    

After the election, emboldened by a majority, they have extended this into more controversial territory with the party faithful and donorbase, such as the rise of the minimum wage, apprentice levy and tax on non-domiciled residents. Cameron’s speech at conference was the culmination of this strategy. His analysis is that the ‘as possible’ clause demands a deep, if uneven and mostly rhetorical raid, on Labour territory.

The more information that is available, the more refined the process becomes. So while in the 1950s, the Conservative party had to make great big clunking moves to the left on Welfare and trade unions to be sure of retaining power, today with much more information the party can zero in on exactly how much more they have to give and remain viable, but no more. The tendency of central planning in all this by a supposed free market party, especially in the context of Messina-style data-driven politics, is almost deliciously ironic.  

So while they can move dramatically to left on, for example, pensioner welfare and even childcare to support those inside their voter client groups, for those outside the tent, the Conservatives can be more extreme than ever. In fact they have to be. In order to be able to afford the extra welfare where they need to give to their voters, the cuts elsewhere have to be deeper if they are to defend the wealth piles of their donors.

Is this just a very complicated way of saying that Conservatives have moved to the centre? Perhaps - although it’s worth analysing the central process of what’s going on. And it could be argued that ‘moving to the centre’ for Conservatives in recent years actually obscures two different processes. One is outlined above. The other is in welcoming into the establishment those businesses that rely on public sector contracts and pour millions into lobbies and think tanks, to work towards ensuring there is a constant stream of taxpayer money going their way.

But if this is just an analysis of Conservatives moving to the centre, why can’t Labour just do the engage in a similar process of moving from the left to the centre? However, it may be deadly for Labour to move to act in a similar way.

One possible frame to think about this through is Anthony Down’s Median Voter theorem. Downs famously projected that all the voters could be lined up on a right to left axis.

Therefore, in a two party systems, both parties should converge towards the centre to capture as many votes as possible. If the parties are equidistant from the centre,  and voters are symetically distributed from the centre of the left-right axis, you would expect them to receive the same number of votes.

However, it may be the case that if Conservatives and Labour are equidistant from the centre, we would expect the Conservatives to win and Labour to lose. Crudely put, we can think of the Right-Left axis traditionally in Britain as based on redistribution of income and wealth – those on the right wanting as little as possible and those on the left wanting more.

For the sake of simplicity, say these can be aligned to self-interest, with those on the right generally holding wealth and income  and benefiting from wealth and income being held privately and those on the left generally holding little or benefitting from it being held collectively.

If redistribution of wealth and income was carried out from what set of citizens as citizens, to another set of citizens as citizens, then a Downsian theory of political convergence, where both parties would benefit equally from such movement would make sense.

But it maybe that while we are taxed in general, we receive benefits in particular. Therefore, the Conservatives can make a pitch to be on the side of ‘taxpayers’ and be making a pitch for most of the country. As the Conservatives move towards the centre, one might expect the very rich to benefit less from their potential governance. But they still can identify with the general principle of a low tax party, and they can still be expected to be taxed less under the Conservatives than Labour.

However, we tend to receive benefits in particular. We receive support from the state because we are unemployed, or are ill, or have disabilities, or require support to access the legal justice system etc.

As Labour moves towards the centre, it could “salami slice”, taxing less and therefore having to cut similar amounts from the receipts of all beneficiates to redistribution.

But in practice, it decides to preserve the benefits of some, and reduce considerably or entirely the benefits of others. Voters in those groups with reduced or eliminated benefits have a much reduced or entirely eliminated incentive to vote Labour – it is less likely to matter to them now who gets elected.

We saw with the Conservatives that as they move towards the centre, those on their “wing” still have an incentive to vote Conservative. However, if Labour engages in a similar process voters on their wing increasingly do not.

The reality may be even worse than that. Because as the Conservatives move towards the centre ground by being willing to raise more taxes, they can redistribute that in particular, rather than in general, targeting certain voter groups who benefit from redistribution such as poor pensioners. Therefore they can “vault over” the Downsian median voter, and take some voters from Labour’s wing.

Labour could promise tax breaks for certain groups – like small business people for example, to vault similarly over the median voter, but can only do that at the expense of less revenue, which would mean reducing benefits for certain groups in particular and therefore losing voters on ‘their wing.

The only way that the Labour Party – or any left of centre party can win under such circumstances, is if the Conservative wing is ‘split’. Traditionally the fault line of the Conservative party has been over free trade versus protectionism, which has been partially reborn as an argument over the European Union.

In addition, the Conservative’s wing can be split over whether the Conservative Party is competent or not. But absent such a split, or worries over Conservative competence, it is hard to see how Labour wins.

Jeremy Corbyn listens to John McDonnell deliver his conferece speech. Photo: Getty Images

This may ultimately flag up a central problem with the democratic state as a vehicle for equality, or maximising the welfare of all its citizens. If the above theory does describe how politics works, then it means that the democratic state does not work to maximise the welfare of all its citizens but a plurality of its citizens - that is a plurality of its voters.

Usually that would be a plurality of its voters needed for the party that represents the mission of leaving wealth and income as concentrated as possible to retain power.

Depressingly, there are reasons to believe that the plurality needed is smaller than it was previously. First of all, turnout in elections is one a general downward trend, meaning that the centre-right party needs to attract fewer votes than it did previously to attract a plurality of votes.

Second of all, the sheer amount of research done by the civil service, think tanks, and polling companies means that while making cuts to services, any centre-right Chancellor can carefully adjust the severity of the cut and the number of people who suffer the cut to maintain plurality support.

The result we are left with is a sort of zombie social democracy which is alive and dead yet neither alive nor dead. Centre-right politicians can use the clunking levers of state to redistribute wealth and income in the economy, but only so far. But the cuts elsewhere must be deeper to satisfy the rich and powerful that that party ultimately serves.

The tools of social democracy remain sharp and strong, ready for use, but are used in a way that entrenches inequality. And they are used in a way to safeguard the country against a social democratic party winning.

Meanwhile, the danger for the social democratic party is that it mistakes the deep cuts that must occur outside the centre-right’s party client base for a extreme free market or so-called neoliberal ideology, and campaigns against perceived extremism. However, this fails to resonate with the centre-right’s protected voter base. The alternative for Labour, to move towards the centre opens up dangers of splitting the party. The fact that the centre-right party uses progressive means for conservative ends merely adds extra torture for a social democratic party.

As long as social democrats see the state as the sole or even primary tool for achieving its goals, it will fall into this trap, because the democratic state is a plurality-serving, not a universal-serving institution.

Those who want to achieve a more equal society, where there are realms of our life not governed by market relationships, should not seek to capture the state in order to use it to promote welfare, as it tends to promote the welfare of a plurality of voters.

Instead they should seek to use the state to protect and promote those intuitions which are universal-serving, not just plurality serving. By a universal-serving institution, what I mean is one that has an incentive to expand continuously as well as enhance the welfare of its users, clients or members.

For consumers, this can take the form of co-operatives, entering markets where there is a lack of competition to keep it honest. For employees, this can take the form of unions or co-operative forms of business.

So for example, I doubt that organising cab drivers to resist Uber, through lobbying to increase government regulation will achieve much for social justice. Most straightforwardly, Conservatives will rally consumers who far outnumber cab drivers. Or they will agree to regulate for cab drivers, but having been co-opted into the Conservative voter coalition, those cab drivers will no longer be open to voting Labour.

It is better for Labour to introduce legislation to make it easier to create co-operatives. In Denver, Colorado for example, cab drivers have formed an app-based cab co-operative to challenge Uber. Once those cab drivers have a general incentive to sustain a pro-co-operative government, they may continue to support Labour even after their initial grievance has been settled.

Tony Blair on the campaign trial in 1997. Photo: Getty Images

Although such a pro-co-operative and pro-union agenda would involve strengthening such institutions, this should not be in a way that enables them into become a plurality-serving institution – or for insider groups, in the terminology of centre-right public choice theory.

So for example while it should be made dramatically easier for unions to organise – bringing in a employer neutrality rule during organising drives, as they have in Israel for example, there should be no bringing back of the closed shop. Unions should be able to investigate regulatory adherence in non-union workplaces as they do in Los Angeles, but not engage in restrictive practices in general.

Unions must also innovate. Iain Duncan Smith has floated the idea of voluntary income protection, which many on the left see as a threat to a universal welfare state. But arguably, income protection allows an avenue for unions to organise among the temporary and self-employed. This does start to blur the line between union and co-operative, but that is the way unions must head anyway. In an increasingly services-based economy, much of the means of production and distribution is merely the information held linking producer and consumer. We should be able to socialise this.

Furthermore, the more workers employed – and self-employed – are organised into unions or co-operatives where their welfare is dependent on those institutions, the harder it is for the Conservatives to minimise the number of voters required for the ultimate insider group – the number of voters required to return a conservative government. If voters are sticker – that is their welfare is bound with the welfare of other voters – then it may be impossible to support the 37 per cent of the voters the Conservatives need without supporting far more.

This emphasis on workplace protection and welfare being delivered by non-state groups that have an interest in continually expanding, obviously can only work for those of  working age who are able to work a substantially proportion of hours per week. It does not give an answer for the working age with disabilities, children or pensioners.

For these groups, the answer is still likely to come through the state. However, the state can come closest to being a universal-serving institution through the idea of a basic income that it provides all citizens. This idea has had advocates across the political spectrum from Martin Luther King to Milton Friedman, who supported as the welfare system least likely to create disincentives to work and safe.

It could be argues that the government does guarantee a basic income to pensioners, and that is one reason why the group that American and British government have been most successful at reducing poverty among is the elderly, from Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Societies to the New Labour reforms.

However, one may want to complete the process by merging all the universal benefits, from the pension, to the free TV licence and the Winter Fuel allowance. The more pensioners’ interest in government welfare act as a single bloc – with the wealthiest benefitting as much from pro-pensioner policies and the poorest, the more likely it is any government, including a Conservative one, will help the poorest. It would make the votes of pensioners “stickier”.  

Children and those who are of working age but suffer from disabilities is far more difficult. Frankly put, children can’t vote in a democracy and with some projecting that a majority of voters will be over the age of 55 at the next election, their parents do not matter as much as when Tony Blair made his famous child poverty pledge.

Those with disabilities, demonised by the Conservatives and the mainstream press to the point where many of those with disabilities believe the myths themselves also make extending government support difficult. There could be interesting policy ideas here from replicating Osborne’s pensioner bond to families with children with a much lower threshold or introducing a carer’s leave, but frustratingly, most work here would may have to involve redistribution by stealth.

Another key plank of a Labour platform at the next election should be devolution. This is because although the Conservatives may only need 37 per cent of the vote nationally to win a general election, that 37 per cent is unlikely to be distributed evenly across the country. Therefore, by introducing widespread devolution, the Conservatives cannot afford to whittle down their voter coalition too small, or else risk losing vast amounts of power across the country. This is not just an electoral point – Parties help those they need to help to retain power. If you increase the number of people who are needed for a Party to retain power, then number of people who are helped will increase.

So the basic platform for the next Labour election bid, should include the empowerment of unions and co-operatives, and widespread devolution. Elsewhere it, unfortunately be thin gruel, especially for the ultimate non-voters in a democracy, prospective immigrants.

One possible way to thicken the gruel is by hugging Cameron, rather as Cameron hugged the Blairites on academies. Labour should offer joint committees with the Conservatives on raising rages, equalities and prison reform, which, of course include civil society, business and trade unions. The Conservatives could either turn this down – in which case they look phony – or accept – in which case they further legitimate this political space, and allow Labour to run as ‘the real thing’ in 2020.

However, much good work elsewhere in a Labour first term will have to occur by stealth. But during that first term, if unions and co-operatives can be built, and devolution delivered, then the Conservative strategy of utilising the tools of social democracy to help the minimum number of voters needed to retain power, and shutting other groups out will be blunted. Labour would be able to take more risks in its second term

It’s a harsh truth that social democracy has been reduced to a zombie. It’s a harsher truth for the millions who depend on it, than elected Labour politicians on comfortable salaries. But ignoring the facts won’t get us anywhere. It’s time to lay social democracy to rest, and rediscover solidarity.  

Whither the macaroon? I concede that, for those of you condemned to the provinces, this may not seem a pressing concern – unlike being forced to accept elected mayors with spurious powers so that the Chancellor of the Exchequer can burnish his credentials as a devolutionist. However, in this metropolis and many other cities besides, the worst has already happened in terms of local governance, while the bourgeoisie are ascending in a giddy, spiralling fugue-state of hyperglycaemia caused by overindulgence in small, almond-flavoured sweetmeats.

Time was when a macaroon was a perfectly sensible thing, roughly the size and shape of a large, home-baked biscuit; the consistency was a little chewy, there was a suggestion of almonds in the dough, with perhaps a sliver of one such nut pressed into its upper surface, and a disc of rice paper adhered to its underside. I cast the preceding sentence in the simple past rather than the present, because that is what we associate the macaroon with: an innocent era, when bat-eared boys rolled their hoops down the back alleys where bat-eared girls were being done to death by illegal abortionists. And everyone loved a nice Eccles cake, or a Bakewell tart, or a macaroon with a cup of tea so strong that if you were to draw 5ccs off with a hypodermic syringe and then inject them into Roger Bannister he’d run the mile in well under three minutes.

But these modern macaroons are quite a different matter, a ghastly Gallic import redolent of decadence, absolutism and maximum frou-frou. They’ve arrived in London piggybacking in the tote bags of French wanker-bankers come to luxuriate in our low-tax regime. Paul (which as we know is the French equivalent of Greggs) began stocking them first, and so ignorant was I that I thought they were miniature and brightly coloured hamburgers. Because that’s what they look like, although the “buns” are egg white mixed with sugar, and the “meat” is a dollop of some still sweeter goo, or “ganache” (which is what I believe goo is called nowadays).

I asked a French friend what he thought the origin of this macaroon madness was – because if it’s bad in London it’s way worse in Paris, where a new macaroon shop opens about every three minutes. (I envision Roger Bannister sprinting from one to the next.) My informant didn’t hesitate: “It started after Sofia Coppola made that movie about Marie Antoinette. All the courtiers were eating macarons, and the Parisian bobos thought it looked cool.” Of course, there’s a long and illustrious tradition of eating macaroons in France; they get a mention from Rabelais in the early 1500s, and by the time Marie Antoinette’s head was being severed they were far more popular than cake among the bon ton.

Indeed, some culinary scholars believe the reason the throwaway line “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche . . .” became so very notorious is that the peasants already suffered very badly from irritable bowel syndrome and coeliac disease because of the vast amounts of cake they were eating; whereas the Versailles court dined exclusively on macarons, which are made without flour and hence are entirely gluten-free. I’ve no idea if this is true, but what I do know is that nowadays if you aren’t fashionably wheat-intolerant you have no business in public life on either side of the Channel.

George Osborne clearly has issues in this area; I’ve been observing him, and over the past few months he’s been losing weight steadily, while his features (never exactly generous to begin with) have puckered up and puckered up still more, until they resemble nothing so much as that portion of his anatomy which I suspect bothers him the most.

Poor George! His relentless drive for personal preferment and status . . . Sorry, I mean: his selfless labour on behalf of the commonweal . . . condemns him to factory tour after company visit, and at each and every canteen he’s obliged to choke down another greasy bacon sarnie stuffed with gluten, so becoming ever more bloated and flatulent. How he longs to get home to No 11 and the fragrant Frances, whose magnificent books – memoirs, novels, cookbooks – all contain plenty of macaroons. I like to imagine the entire Osborne family – George, Frances, Luke and little Liberty – tucking in to a supper of Pierre Hermé’s finest, which Harrods have just delivered. “Ooh, Daddy,” Liberty cries, “can I have the last white truffle and hazelnut one?” And George, ever the Solomon-like paterfamilias, gently teases apart the two toothsome hemispheres, hands one to each of the children, then sits back with a faintly constipated smile as they smear ganache on their downy cheeks.

I have often had cause to remark in these pages that there’s only one word for a culture which is as obsessed with what it puts in its mouth as this one, and that word is “infantile”. The macaroon is only the latest nursery nourriture to grab our febrile imaginations. Who knows, if things keep on this way, Britain may well become the sort of country where the outcome of a televised baking competition becomes a matter of high social and political importance. But then that could never happen; any more than Gideon Oliver Osborne becoming prime minister.

Next week: On Location

They say that people often keep dogs that look like themselves; certainly they chose pets with a temperament that matches their own. In Boris Johnson’s case it’s his new Routemaster pet project which offers quite a good mirror on its creator’s soul.

After eight years at City Hall I understand the secret hidden depths of Boris Johnson. 

There aren’t any. Stop searching for them.  The man is deeply superficial and is defined solely by his insatiable appetite for profile and publicity.

In September 2007, Boris Johnson announced that if he became Mayor he would scrap his bête noir the bendy buses and would replace them with a new Routemaster- cue a press release and photo op.  After the election a competition to design a New Bus for London was held (another press release) and once the winning design had been selected (glitzy press launch) Wrightbus were given the contract to build the bus (pause for a trip to Northern Ireland for a media tour of the factory). 

In May 2010 the final design of the bus was announced and finally in February 2012, five years after it was first mooted the first of eight prototypes new Routemasters went into service on route 38. All of course accompanied by photoshoots and interviews with Boris on the “Boris bus”.

Since then, TfL have ordered 800 of the new buses  With press launches, announcements and photoshoots firing off like bangers from a sausage machine you’d think the finished product would be a marvel, sadly as with many Boris projects there was far more style than substance.

On the most basic level Boris’ sums just don’t add up. The first 600 new Routemasters cost TfL £212.7m, that’s £354,500 per bus, the next 200 cost £69.9m a slight discount at £349,500 per bus. But look at the cost of an equivalent double decker bus and it all becomes a bit murky. A conventional double-decker costs £190,000 to build, almost half the cost of the New Routemaster.

Of course just because something is expensive it doesn’t mean it’s not value for money. So what do we get?

·         Less space - The capacity of the New Routemaster is 87 people, whereas the capacity of other double decker buses is higher, such as the Volvo B7TL EL DD, has a capacity of 96.

·         Overheated passengers - Having been fitted with an air cooling system, rather than an air conditioning one, the New Routemaster is well known for being unbearably hot during the summer months. Old technology solutions (like openable windows) spoiled the aesthetics of Boris bus - so for years its passengers were denied relief.  After three years of boiling bus journeys the Mayor was forced to announce a refit to add in openable windows, at a cost to the taxpayer of £2m.

·         Rocketing costs – One of the key reasons the new bus was introduced was to bring back a jump-on, jump-off service with constantly open rear doors. To do this he bought back conductors in an attempt to replicate the experience of the old Routemaster buses, and ensure the safety of passengers when the rear door was left open. Each extra member of staff costs TfL £62,000 a year.

So after spending millions on a new bus with a openable rear door, the Mayor is scrapping the staff and closing the rear platform door for good. In fact eight of the 12 routes have already scrapped conductors all together with the remaining four only having them at specific times of day. Unsurprising given that in October 2014, TfL confirmed that all future New Routemaster routes would run “entirely” in One Person Operated (OPO) mode, meaning the rear platform will be closed while the bus is running and only open when the bus pulls up at a stop.

What about the new bus' environmental credentials? The oft repeated but empty claim that the Routemaster is cleaner has helped the Mayor disguise the fact  that London is still running a largely old and ageing bus fleet, while other world cities - and some European provincial ones, are making big strides on cleaner hybrid buses and electric only single-deckers. London’ s polluted air is at crisis levels  and all the photoshoots  in the TfL press portfolio can’t disguise  the heavy unhealthy feeling you experience walking or cycling along London’s major roads.

The Mayor’s proposed Ultra Low Emission Zone should mean that buses which don’t meet emissions targets must pay a daily charge of £100 to enter Central London from 2020. However, in a very Boris Johnson’s like make-a-rule, break-a-rule fashion, he has exempted all of his new Routemasters. Despite knowing about London’s air quality crisis there was little effort made to control the emissions standards of the new buses, which would now cost between £7m and £15m to bring up to standard, a price Boris believes is too high so it will not be done. This means they can go on pumping out more harmful emissions in central London.

Add that to the fact that the failure of the hybrid battery technology has meant dozens of Routemasters  running solely on polluting diesel  and what you’re left with doesn’t look that green at all. 

It costs more than an equivalent hybrid double decker, and because no other City in the world wants to buy them they will always remain at a premium cost, it has less capacity, has problems with the air conditioning, has conductors that are being phased out, a rear platform that is superfluous and is due to be the most polluting TfL bus on our roads in central London in 2020.

Sadly though Boris has ploughed on throughout, focused more on the photo-ops and press releases than the millions of pounds of public money being wasted.  It can be a massively expensive rip off, not work properly, be polluting, uncomfortable and too small for purpose but if you can stand on the back platform with your blond locks blowing heroically in the wind for the cameras then for Boris Johnson, it’s got to be a deal. 

Confused by the fact there was apparently a “constitutional crisis” – but nothing seems to be different, bar the newspapers featuring more photos than usual of George Osborne looking palely furious?

We were too. Here’s what’s going on: on Monday night, the government’s proposal to cut tax credits went to the House of Lords, which, unlike the Commons, does not have a Tory majority (there are 249 Conservative peers, where Labour and the Lib Dems have a combined total of 324).

Two motions passed in the upper house. The first, to give low-income families most likely to be affected by the cuts “full transitional protection” for at least three years, went through 289 votes to 272.

The second, which called for the tax credit cuts to be delayed while the government responded to recent analysis of their likely impact published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, passed by 307 to 277.

The controversy is thus: while the Lords are empowered to send proposals back to the House of Commons, there is a convention that they don’t block financial legislation – a measure introduced in 1911, after a Tory House of Lords sent back Lloyd George’s budget. Hence Osborne telling the Commons that the rebuff raised “clear constitutional issues”, and Downing Street announcing that it would examine, as the BBC reported, “how to protect the ability of elected governments to secure their business”.

As our own Stephen Bush explained, though, the tax credits are not a finance bill but rather a “statutory instrument”, meaning the Lords are free to vote on them. This blurs the lines of whether doing so is “unconstitutional” .

So what’s next? There’s two things to look out for: potential reforms to the House of Lords, and Osborne’s response. The key date here is 25 November, when Osborne will present new, revised plans for the cuts in his Autumn Statement.

Until then sit back, relax, and enjoy surviving the “constitutional crisis”.

The life of the professional newspaper film critic can, in the UK at least, be an odd and demanding one. It is a dream job for anyone who loves and lives movies and can write well about them on cue and like clockwork. But the routine of it can turn sane women batty, tall and hopeful boys into gnarled and resentful homunculi, bright-eyed youths into blinking moles fearful of the afternoon light. If you’re not up to the task, it can really take the spring out of your step.

The daily routine is set up like so: you see three or four films on a Monday, the same again on a Tuesday, you write all day on Wednesday, file late that day or the next morning (depending on your deadline and on the tenderness of your editor) and then, if the following week is to be a particularly heavy one, there will be more screenings on the Thursday and Friday as well, for films opening the next Friday. Somewhere in between, there may be time to eat or to see your loved ones, or merely to contemplate your complexion and wonder casually who it was that put Max Schreck’s face in the mirror in place of your own.

I have met many critics whose blood was long ago turned to vinegar by years or decades spent on this treadmill for the senses; who regard the cinema screen with pre-emptive scorn and bitterness; who respond to the film-related question “What’s it about?” with the weary answer “It’s about an hour too long.” But the late Philip French, the legendary and long-serving film critic who died this week, was not one of them. Not even close. After stints at the Times and at this parish (where he reviewed film and theatre), he settled in at the Observer for the long haul – not that he knew it then – in 1979. He left only when he reached his 80th birthday in 2013. He had been at the Observer, reviewing with equanimity, enthusiasm and warm but weather-beaten wit every film that came his way for 34 years.

There may have been the occasional bump in the road. (In the late-1990s, the paper launched an ill-advised and abortive challenge to his supremacy by drafting in a squadron of reviewers to share the workload, parcelling out different films to each; it didn’t last.) But there were never any dips in the quality of French’s prose. There was no end to his knowledge and no sign of fatigue in his filmgoing habits. Where others might have been diminished by the constant grind of screenings separated only by a toilet break and an inadequate sandwich, French never waned.

Some reviewers take bad films as an affront, internalising the awfulness of what they have seen. French kept his spirits sprightly, like his writing. And the sense of balance and good humour was evident in person as well as on the page. He had an abiding silliness that sat alongside the erudition. He was famous for his puns and wordplay (yes, his review of David Mamet’s Heist really did conclude with the phrase “heist by his own petard”). Humour came off him in waves. I remember walking with him after a screening in 1997 of Adrian Lyne’s film of Lolita, which had reminded him, he told me, of one of those road signs you see nowadays: “Humps for the next two miles.”

Readers will have appreciated his inclusive, welcoming personality, as well as his limitless knowledge and measured writing. As someone who saw him mostly at screenings throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, when I too was working on a daily newspaper, I can say that he lightened the load greatly. He was friendly and encouraging to younger critics like myself; a compliment from him on your work was to be cherished forever. In those pre-IMDb days, you could go to him for a casual enquiry about some art designer from the silent era, and you would come away not only with the answer you wanted but a feeling of enrichment. If anyone knew who did the catering or served as clapper-loader on a forgotten early-1960s bedroom farce, it would be Philip. In fact, I’m not sure the word “forgotten” could be applied to any film where he was concerned. He absorbed it all and it stayed absorbed. 

He seemed to me back then to be the polar opposite to the excellent and acidic Standard critic Alexander Walker (who died in 2003). Where Walker jangled his keys impatiently or sighed extravagantly at whatever follies were projected before him, French bore it all with coolness and warmth. He never left a film before the final credit had vanished from the screen. He stayed right until the end – in every sense.

Every time I sit down to try to write this story about death, life intervenes.

What I mean is, I have a friend who died far too young. In one of the fevers she was in, in hospital, she thought she was being abducted by art thieves. She believed that what was happening to her wasn’t that she was so ill she was hallucinating, but that she was a work of art and she was being stolen by unscrupulous people.

When she was recovering – before she caught an infection, became gravely ill all over again then, weak from having been ill for so long, died – she sent me a very funny text about thinking she was art and was being stolen and how deluded she’d been. She couldn’t eat or drink at this point but she could send texts. The texts were very much in her voice, and now that she’s dead I hear that voice in my ear a lot, what about you? that was her way of saying hello; she was Irish; and more and more I’m coming to understand that she was a work of art and that she has, after all, been stolen by art thieves who are keeping her hidden until they can work out how to make a fortune from her, or maybe they already have, maybe she’s been sold already to a massively rich art collector who keeps her out of the public eye, shows her only to a select number of extremely rich and equally unscrupulous colleagues.

That art collector’s lucky to be anywhere near my friend. My stolen friend will enhance that collector’s life. She will also alter his or her library shelves for the better; she will add a stack of bent old paperbacks, so well read that they barrel like accordions, to the shelves of stolen first editions and filched rare texts; she will add books by people that that collector’s never thought to read. She will fill the collector’s house with unimagined resonances, unexpected mythological, cultural, ancient and contemporary information and understanding, about which she was a walking library of rare things herself. She’ll change that person’s heart, whoever stole her, so that simply by dint of being in her presence he or she will soon be showing all the dodgily come-by artworks in the palazzo or mansion or wherever the collector lives to the public for free, and letting homeless people sleep in the 49 extra rooms that nobody else uses in that house – even sleep at the foot of his or her own bed.

Or if she’s been filched by amateurs, then right now somewhere in Europe an old woman is swearing to the prosecutor that she never saw her son do anything wrong, she knows he hasn’t, she’ll swear on her life he hasn’t, he never brought home anything or anyone untoward, and that those long rolled-up canvas things she burned in the brazier weren’t precious original artworks at all – and all the time she’ll be longing to get out of the police station and home again simply to sit by the empty brazier with my dead friend who, having saved the da Vincis and Matisses and Cézannes and Munchs from any such fate by persuading her not to burn them, is sitting alongside her and distracting her with story after story, stories maybe a bit like this one:

listen to this, an old woman who’s been fighting with all her closest relatives almost all her life, in fact hasn’t spoken to or had any contact with any of them for more than a decade, goes to the doctor and finds out she’s got terminal something. She comes home from the doctor’s and she’s troubled. Not about her death, she doesn’t think about that for a moment, she doesn’t give a toss about dying – except when it comes to who’s going to inherit her considerable wealth and belongings and estate. More than anything she wants to make sure none of what’s hers is going to go to any relatives she particularly dislikes.

The thing is, she can’t remember which of them it is she dislikes most. Or least. She decides to choose one of them and leave it all as incontestably as possible to the person of her choice. But which one?

So she writes and invites all five of her relatives to come and stay with her for a week. In that week, she thinks, she’ll be able to sort wheat from chaff. Because they all know she’s quite rich, and because they guess she might be dying, her relatives all write back immediately saying they’ve accepted her invitation and her offer of free plane tickets (they live in America or Australia, somewhere far away). The day approaches and she’s got everything ready for them, all the beds made up, all the food in the fridge. They arrive safely. One of them phones her from the airport to tell her they’ll be with her in a couple of hours.

Then the taxi they’re in on the way to her house crashes on the motorway and they’re all killed.

The old woman is more annoyed about her plan being ruined than that they’re dead. She arranges for a group funeral for them and doesn’t attend it. The week after that, she advertises in the papers and online for five actors. One of the conditions is that applicants must be able to sacrifice their Christmas holidays.

She turns on the radiators in the front room of her house and holds the auditions there. She provides each person auditioning with a list of attributes and characteristics. She chooses the five she imagines most resemble her dead family members.

Next, she hires a theatre director and tells him exactly what she wants the actors to do in the ten days they’ll spend with her.

The director schools the five actors she’s chosen for a week in the roles she’s outlined.

On Christmas Eve the five actors move into her house with her. The heating stays on in the front room throughout. On 2 January she pays them all handsomely as promised and waves them all out of her house.

She turns the radiators in the front room back to their off positions.

As she goes upstairs, her house feels cavernous. She realises she’s dying.

The doorbell rings when she’s halfway up the stairs. Two of her actor family members are at the door. They’d got as far as the bus stop. They’d looked at each other and they’d turned back to the house.

One of them says that they’d noticed their aunt isn’t keeping as well as she might.

They ask if they might move in with her.

In reality, it wasn’t my friend who died young who told me that story. It was told to me by a different friend, still as alive as you and me (well, me right now). The postscript to her telling me was funny. My (live) friend had heard half this story on the radio, come in halfway through and heard it maybe as a story or maybe as a dramatisation, and she had loved it, and had congratulated the writer Angela Huth (who’s a friend of hers and who she thought she heard the announcer credit at the end) the next time she saw her at some function or other, on writing such a good story.

Thanks, but it wasn’t me. I don’t know that story. I didn’t write it, Angela Huth said.

Ah well, my (live) friend said to me when she told me it, never mind whose story it is,  I stole it off the radio and now I’m giving it to you.

And now I’ve passed it on to you, whoever you are, reading this story. We’re all in receipt of stolen goods, which is probably the only conclusion I can draw in a story meant to be about death, a story which, when I sat down today to write it, I’d decided would be about the terrible beauty of a French woman dead in a ditch in 1940, after a German plane has sprayed a line of people walking along a treelined road trying to get away from bombardments in the city. I’d planned that it would be all about her, that this is what I’d write about, before my friends (dead and alive regardless) intervened.

There she is, her coat flung open, her blouse still pristine, for five seconds or so, it’s not long after her death, on an episode of The World at War, playing yesterday lunchtime on BBC2 (you can see it on iPlayer catch-up for the next fifty-three days). I stole her; I’d thought this might be a story about how beautiful she was, and about how the realising of the fact of her beauty, as I watched the programme, filled me with disgust at my being able to see, and so effortlessly, not one, not two, not three, but five whole seconds of her life and just-happened death in a way that was so far beyond that woman’s power or choice – never mind my being able to have the luxury of any aesthetic response. Most obscene, though, is the knowledge that there was a future, and that I, or anyone, could so casually inhabit it after such a thing happening even to just one person of all the millions and millions and millions and so on whose ends were futile and foul in a war several wars back, seventy-five years ago.

And since we’re talking violent unfair death: is it easier to feel fury and hurt, or simply just to feel, about something like that woman’s death so long ago, than it is when it comes to the ubiquity of deaths, deaths on deaths, in the world in all the papers and on all the news sites right now in the form of the most up-to-date of our dead: a pilot burned alive, a poet shot in the square by the police where she was laying memorial flowers, the journalists and the aid workers filmed in the act of their dying, the students, the townfuls of kidnapped and casually executed people, all the hundreds of stolen lives just over the past ten days – and those are only the ones we know about?

What about you? There’s my dead friend again, nudging my arm. Hello. Yesterday, after I saw that episode of World at War, I was on a train reading the paper all about the latest deaths and thinking how I’d like to kill the man behind me who kept coughing in that way that meant that probably he’d got a contagious cold and that my chair jolted every time he coughed since he had long legs, he was too big for the train seats, his knees were jammed up the back of my seat. To stop myself minding, I played the game on my phone, the one where you cancel all the dots of the same colour to win points, Two Dots, which ought to be called Thanatos, not Two Dots, being the perfect example of the stasis at the heart of the death-drive —

which reminds me. Here’s a story about death, etc. I once went to Greece with a friend (I don’t know whether this friend’s alive or dead. I could look on Facebook to try and find out – though there’s a chance I’d still be none the wiser since so many people on Facebook who are in reality dead still get happy birthday wishes year in year out from automated Friends on their automated birthdays). We stayed in a tiny village a couple of miles inland on an island, and on the second day there, having failed to find our way to a beach or even just to the sea, we started asking locals to point us in the right direction. It was a tiny island, a place there weren’t many other tourists, and no one we met in the street spoke English. My friend could speak a little Greek. But people kept treating us strangely. One woman took us to a church; it was very beautiful, full of freesias for Easter. An old man put his hand on my friend’s arm. He looked at us kindly, he patted us both on the back. By the end of the day the whole village was nodding at us as we passed, and people kept coming out of houses to give us gifts – halva; a picture of a saint with a blackbird bringing him things to eat; a collection of little tin rectangles, one with an eye imprinted in it, one with a heart, one with a leg.

At the airport in Athens, on our stop-off on the way home, the waitress who served us laughed out loud.

That’s not the word for sea, she said. You’ve been asking people the way to death and demise.

Ha ha!

I wish I could tell my friend who died that story. But then, if she was still alive, I probably wouldn’t think to, wouldn’t want to in the same way. And in some ways here I am doing exactly that, telling all this in the direction of my friend who died young and was a work of art, no: a work of life, though she died so roughly, and wherever those thieves are hiding her till they can sell her, they have to tape blankets over the windows because the light coming off her mind, even though she’s dead, gives away her whereabouts, and they have to keep pulling up and cutting back the flowers and tendrils and green stuff that persistently crack the stone of the floors of wherever they’ve got her. That’s the art of dying all right.

Pretty soon that whole place will resemble I don’t know what, probably a library, one with trees growing right through its floors up past its shelves and piercing its roof. They’ll try and stop it happening; they’ll move her to the next empty cave or mansion or cellar or wherever, but it doesn’t matter where she is. She’ll do the same to it and to the one after it and to the one after that, and so on.

Illustration by Rohan Eason.

Ali Smith’s “How to Be Both” won the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize. “Public Library and Other Stories” will be published next month by Hamish Hamilton. She will appear at the Cambridge Literary Festival on 29 November

This week is half-term. Parliament is sitting as normal. The week after next, once children have gone back to school, parliament goes into recess (our version of half term). You wouldn’t have thought coordinating the dates the House of Commons with school terms would be too difficult, but the fact they aren’t shows how much consideration is given to being a “family-friendly” parliament.

My first experience of this came three weeks after being elected to parliament this year, when I made my first speech in the House of Commons. I wrote to the Speaker of the House beforehand to request that he call me to speak relatively early in the debate, as my son was travelling from the constituency and back in a day, so he’d be tired and, as is common with eight year olds, he’s not great at sitting still for lengthy periods of time anyway. There was no confirmation about this –so I and my family had to wait. In some ways I was fortunate – some colleagues invited their families to watch but didn’t get the chance to speak at all. Eventually after about three hours I made my speech – and raced out of the chamber to say goodbye to my son, as his granddad took him back to Kings Cross. He was not impressed. He told me he’d rather have been at school. So it must have been bad!

Since then, I’ve discovered that working in Westminster also means having to arrive early or to stay late at very short notice, and there is very little thought is given to people’s particular circumstances. I’m not looking for any kind of sympathy – honestly I’m not. I know MPs never deserve it. But this really does matter.

During the last Parliament there was a worrying trend of women standing down, and 2 in 3 MPs say that their job has a negative impact on their family life. One MP surveyed by Mumsnet complained they “have a 2 year-old daughter and no-one cares if I don’t see her.” Another more senior MP said "I never saw my children grow up and I'll regret this to the day I die." It’s not just an issue for parents. Parliament is ill prepared for disabled people too. Most doors on the estate are heavy and can’t fit a mobility scooter through them, for example. I have never been asked if I had any special needs that might need to be accommodated, or reasonable adjustments that might need to be made. Our democracy is worse off if parents, women, and disabled people don’t think the life of an MP is for them.

A House of Commons which is truly representative of the population of Britain will in general be more attuned to the needs of the public. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the issue of equal pay only began to be acted upon properly once a significant number of female MPs entered parliament. The issues which have been neglected for too long, by successive governments, are exactly those which parents will be directly conscious of: the need for affordable childcare, or a housing market which works for our children’s generation.

This isn’t just about MPs. While there are 650 Members of Parliament, over 2,000 staff are employed by the House of Commons alone. The unpredictable hours, difficulties with parliament sitting during school term times, and childcare issues matter just as much to them. We should be leading by example and showing what a modern working environment can be. It’s hypocritical for politicians to lecture business about flexible working and childcare provision, if we can’t get it right ourselves.

However, it was revealed this week that black and minority ethnic workers are four times more likely to occupy the worst paid jobs in parliament - while every single senior staff member in the House of Lords is white. This should not be the case in any 21^st century workplace, let alone the Houses of Parliament.

There have been improvements. The introduction of “family-friendly” hours has made a difference for some; the House of Commons published a strategy this year to improve the representation of BME staff in senior positions; and one of the bars was converted into a nursery. Even so, when parliament sits past its scheduled time, the nursery doesn’t extend its hours. Hardly ideal if you have to be in the chamber to vote, or you’re working a shift.

I asked the Deputy Leader of the House of Commons last week what her plans were to make parliament a more family-friendly place to work. She told me that decisions were made in the last parliament, and a committee of MPs had decided not to recommend any further changes. I think there needs to be an annual review of the changing needs of MPs and parliamentary staff. There is a lot more to be done to make parliament a modern working environment.

Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s genial leader, read what (for him) passes as the riot act to staff recently, pleading that they be more professional. The cycling vegetarian dislikes confrontation but my snout in the Norman Shaw Buildings whispered that a frustrated Comrade Corbyn was forced to “have a word” with his apparatchiks, winning enemies and alienating friends.

The chats took place as party officials stroked their chins, wondering how to defuse a potentially explosive complaint from the Labour banker and former parliamentary candidate Emily “niece of Hilary and granddaughter of Tony” Benn, demanding the expulsion of Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s shoot-from-the-lip policy chief. At the general election, Fisher urged the citizens of Croydon South to back an anarchist from Class War instead of her. Corbyn, busy massaging the egos of critics including MPs John Mann and Simon Danczuk, is embarrassed. Tony Benn was his political hero.

The Tory merchant banker Sajid Javid’s star is on the wane without having burned particularly brightly. The Out-of-Business Secretary was initially omitted from a Downing Street sales pitch to China’s president, Xi Jinping. On the list of invited ministers reeled off by No 10 were David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Philip Hammond, Jeremy Hunt, Justine Greening and even Greg Hands. Jilted Javid was included only after hacks raised awkward questions about his absence.

The consolation knighthood for the Lib Dem Danny Alexander, Osborne’s “useful idiot” through the coalition years, was another nail in the satirical coffin. Sir Danny still feels poorly treated, I hear, by the people of Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, who ditched the former Treasury chief secretary, despite his pork-barrel politics that provided £2m in the constituency for Loch Ness and its monster. Sir Danny, whispered my informant, is bracing himself for a return to the ungrateful Highlands. After his party’s rout across the entire UK, his unpopularity is not restricted to the Highlands.

Sartorial standards are down. Alan Duncan is hanging up his Privy Council uniform. The pint-sized Tory MP resembled the head of a military junta in the black outfit, lined with gold braid, with white-plumed admiral’s hat. Dinky wore it to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral but, I am assured, is now to leave it in the wardrobe for good. Privy counsellors are no longer required to wear court uniform at gatherings.

The M&S Europhile Stuart Rose loves the continent so much, slurs my source, that he collects its finest vintages in one of London’s best wine cellars. To avoid the expense of a referendum, I propose a drink-off with Nigel Farage.

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

Energy news website Drill or Drop took the opportunity to ask the recently appointed Energy Minister Andrea Leadsom about her views on fracking. Last week, Averil Macdonald, chairwoman of UKCOOG (UK Onshore Oil and Gas) said women are less likely to support fracking because they trust their gut. Responding to this claim, Leadsom, MP for South Northamptonshire, was dismissive, but revealed: “When I first came to this job one of my two questions was: ‘Is climate change real?’ and the other was ‘Is hydraulic fracturing safe?’ And on both of those questions I now am completely persuaded.”

The fact we still have politicians questioning the most fundamentally important challenge of our time shows the uphill battle we face as a country in tackling climate change successfully, especially as scientists call for us to become more alarmist with our concerns. And fracking has a whole host of problems such as causing earthquakes and contaminating water with carcinogens.

Although Leadsom's views on climate change prior to her post-election appointment are unknown, she is considering going ahead with the government's plans to cut subsidies to the renewable energy sector and has attacked Labour for signing up to an EU target of using 15 per cent of energy from renewable sources, despite being confident of the current Conservative government in being able to reach that target.