Jeremy Corbyn had David Cameron on the ropes over tax credit cuts at last week's PMQs, but allowed him to wriggle free when he switched subjects to the steel crisis. Today, the Labour leader avoided this error, devoting all six of his questions to one issue for the first time.

Following the government's defeat in the House of Lords, Corbyn challenged Cameron to guarantee that nobody would be worse off next April as a result of the tax credit cuts. Rather than confirming or denying that this was the case, the PM simply told him: "We will set out our new proposals in the Autumn Statement [on 25 November] and he'll be able to study them then". Unappeased, Corbyn went into Paxman-mode, repeating his question three times. Cameron gave no ground but the Labour leader, with greater succinctness than before (the Speaker having complained about the length of his questions), successfully exposed his discomfort. The PM had a decent quip about "a new alliance" of "the unelected and the unelectable" but it was Corbyn's response that may lead the news tonight: "This is not a constitutional crisis, this is a crisis for three million families in this country." 

Cameron moved onto stronger ground when he charged opponents of tax credit cuts with lacking a plan to eliminate the deficit. "When is he going to stop his deficit denial, get off the fence and tell us what he's going to do?" he cried, deploying the argument that proved so effective against Ed Miliband. Had the Tories stuck to this line of attack, rather than suggesting that the "national living wage" would ensure no one was worse off, the political damage would have been reduced. But Corbyn's final question, from tax credit claimant "Karen" ("Why is the Prime minister punishing working families? The tax credit cuts will push me and my family into hardship."), served to remind Cameron why the unease among his own party is so great.

To cries of "who?" from Tory MPs, Tim Farron later asked his first question since becoming Liberal Democrat leader. After visiting Lesbos yesterday, Farron challenged Cameron to take 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees. The PM rather cruelly responded by quipping that "It's good to see such a high turnout of his MPs" (the Lib Dems now having just eight), an unwise line given the graveness of the subject. Cameron went on to give his standard defence: that the government has promised to take 20,000 refugees and that it was "better to take them from the camps instead of taking them from inside Europe". 

It is usually bad form to focus a review on the length of the book under discussion. Conventionally, length is part of what Henry James called the donnée, the given of a book, which is the aspect with which critics shouldn’t quarrel. They may not admire the execution, but they should accept the novel’s premise and parameters; to do otherwise is like a restaurant critic reviewing a steak dinner and saying she would have preferred pizza: it’s a kind of category error. But when the author hauls an entire side of beef on to the table, the critic may reasonably wish for a filet mignon instead.

Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire extends to well over 900 pages. At page 600, having already finished a long novel, I felt my heart sink at the thought of another full novel to go. It is a kind of presumption, to demand that much time and attention from your reader. The story of his book becomes a matter of measurements: its heft is matched by the reported $2m that Knopf, the original publisher, paid for it. The reader is left with only one salient question: was it worth it?

Reading this ambitious, sprawling, promising, uneven debut novel, I was reminded of a story Arthur Miller once told, to the effect that a certain book, though long, was not good. In the case of City on Fire, it should rather be said: this book, though long, is not bad. But it is not great, and it might have been if it had been halved.

The setting is New York from Christmas 1976 to 13 July 1977, the start of a notorious 24-hour blackout. The approach is Dickensian, an urban panorama sweeping high and low, in search of figures who epitomise a kind of body politic, a sociocultural cross-section of New York at its grittiest, before it was sanitised. The perspective shifts across a hundred-odd chapters and a dozen or so characters, whose lives link. The main action takes place in 1977 but the story ranges forward to New York after 9/11 and back to the 1950s, offering characters’ backstories, and their futures, and even their paraphernalia, as Hallberg reproduces handwritten letters, fanzines, school reports and other detritus of modern life.

The plot hinges around a shooting on New Year’s Eve 1976. Samantha Cicciaro, a beautiful, intelligent, disaffected Long Island teenager enamoured of the punk scene, is found shot in the head but still alive in Central Park. The man who finds her, Mercer Goodman, is a black, gay aspiring writer from Georgia living with William, scion of a powerful financial family, the Hamilton-Sweeneys. William is a would-be artist and former singer in a punk band called Ex Nihilo, of whom Sam Cicciaro is a fan. Sam has been staying in a squat with other former band members, including Nicky Chaos, a self-described “post-humanist” ­nihilist with anarchist leanings. Nicky has been approached by Amory Gould, “the Demon Brother”, who is connected to the Hamilton-Sweeneys – and who sees a way to make a fortune from urban blight. William’s sister has recently separated from her husband and learns that her father is about to be indicted for insider trading. The police and a reporter begin investigating, and Hallberg’s story, which orbits around a history of the Hamilton-Sweeneys, unfolds.

City on Fire achieves the Dickensian feel of a network of lives and stories fated to intersect in the city, a fictional conceit that is unrealistic but offers a compensatory fantasy redeeming us from urban anonymity, an ameliorative vision that people are connected after all. It circles around melodramatic, even silly events: a bomb plot strains credulity, while a real-estate financial conspiracy is orchestrated by a one-dimensional, moustache-twirling villain.

The book is thoroughly researched, but Hallberg was not alive during the 1970s, and sometimes it shows. He has a talk-show radio host described as a “shock jock”, a phrase that didn’t come into popular use until the 1980s, with Howard Stern. William’s sister, Regan, spends a great deal of time at her sorority at Vassar, which has never had sororities; in 1961 she dismisses her adolescent predilection for Sylvia Plath, although Plath did not become famous until 1965. More important than small factual errors are cultural anachronisms that project millennial values and concepts on to the past: characters speak of “enabling” destructive behaviour and women jog and do yoga, all of which are recent trends that were anomalous to the point of oddity in the 1970s.

There is no question that Hallberg can write, but he can also overwrite. When one of the Ex Nihilo disciples walks into the story we are told that in “skulked a hulking punk named Solomon Grunge”. A masked guest at a party is a “horripilating Scaramouche”; a baseball glove is “scrotally scrunched”; Nicky Chaos gives a smile that “is an artful rip in the denim of time”.

This stylistic excess is symptomatic of the novel’s prolixity, and makes it increasingly difficult for Hallberg to maintain control: to cite just one example, Mercer Goodman disappears for 200 pages, the length of an entire novel, and the story doesn’t seem to notice. In addition to defending the author’s right to his donnée, Henry James once observed that life is all inclusion and confusion, but art is all discrimination and selection. City on Fire is a formidable achievement in more ways than one, but it succumbs to the gig­antism of a supersize culture – which perhaps, more than anything else, makes it a book for our time. 

City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99, 944pp)

Mohamed Soltan’s left arm is riven with scars. The middle of his upper arm bears a bullet wound where he was shot by Egyptian security forces when they violently dispersed a sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya square in Cairo on 14 August 2013. Just above the elbow and just below the shoulder are two further scars. These are where the metal rods placed in his arm to repair the damage of the bullet wounds pushed through the skin after being displaced by a police beating. The rod sat on a nerve for three months during his subsequent incarceration before painfully piercing through the skin. He was denied medical treatment.

Soltan, who grew up in the American Midwest and graduated from Ohio State University, had returned to live in Egypt in 2012, after his mother was diagnosed with cancer. In 2011, still a student, he spent a month in Egypt at the Tahrir Square protests that unseated long time dictator Hosni Mubarak. “I’m an Egyptian American, and I’ve always dreamt that the Egyptian part of my identity could enjoy the same freedoms that my American identity did,” Soltan told me when we met in London recently. “That nearly happened on 25 January [2011, the day Mubarak stood down].”

It was not to be. The last few years in Egypt have been tumultuous, revolutions met by counter-revolutions. In July 2013, the democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi – whose Muslim Brotherhood government had angered many and triggered mass protests – was ousted in a military coup. Counter-protests, centred around Rabaa, broke out. Soltan joined them, and was there on 14 August when security forces killed at least 817 people and injured many more.

Soltan’s father, Salah, held a senior position in the Muslim Brotherhood, but Soltan was not a member. “I wasn’t at Rabaa in support of Morsi, I was there in support of the democratic process,” he says. Soltan doesn’t affiliate himself with any particular movement, describing his politics as “too liberal for the conservatives and too conservative for the liberals”.

Eleven days after the protest, the police came to Soltan’s house, looking for his father. He was not there; instead, they arrested Soltan and three of his friends. This began a 21-month nightmare that only ended on 30 May 2015, after months of pressure from the US authorities and 16 months of hunger strike by Soltan.

It began in “the fridge”, which Soltan describes as “a place where they cook up a case and an arrest warrant”. Soltan and his friends were stripped to their underwear and badly beaten. Over the next few months, they were moved between different prisons. Their fate was uncertain as the authorities extended their imprisonment for 15 days at a time.

This was part of a wider crackdown on dissent by the new military-backed regime, led by former army chief Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. In July 2014, an interior ministry official acknowledged that the authorities had arrested 22,000 people in the previous year. Independent monitoring groups suggest the figure is closer to 41,000. Muslim Brotherhood members or alleged supporters of Morsi make up the greatest number (the Brotherhood claims 29,000 of their members are in custody) but secularist and leftist activists have been targeted too.

Like many cases against political prisoners, Soltan’s was a mass trial. The group – which included his father – stood accused of spreading false information internationally and belonging to a terrorist organisation, charges which mirror those in the highly publicised trial against a group of Al Jazeera journalists. Soltan believes his case gained less traction because it included a number of Muslim Brotherhood leaders, playing to the West’s squeamishness about supporting an Islamist group. “That made it a Muslim Brotherhood case, not a journalism case, even though there were 12 journalists on our case,” he said.

After 150 days in prison – the legal cut-off point for detention without charge – Soltan heard the charges against him. During the 150 days, he had channeled his anger into thinking of means of resistance, and now he put it into action by going on hunger strike. It was a move he had been preparing for, gradually cutting out different food groups.

Over the course of the next 16 months, Soltan lost more than half his body weight, regularly slipping in and out of hypoglycaemic comas. As he gained national and international attention, he was subjected to increasingly extreme physical and psychological torture. His father, held in the same prison, was tortured by proxy. Soltan was kept in solitary confinement. In one particularly brutal incident, guards threw a terminally ill man into a tiny cell with Soltan and ordered him to take care of him. The man died two hours later, but the corpse was left there for 14 hours. “They guilt tripped me about how I let this guy die. It weighed so heavily on me.”

Finally, in May this year, physically frail and psychologically pressured, Soltan was deported to the US. He had given up his Egyptian citizenship, making him eligible for a presidential decree that allows for the deportation of foreign prisoners. Before leaving prison, Soltan was not allowed to say goodbye to his father, who is on death row.

Since then, Soltan has dedicated himself to speaking out, meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry and ambassador to the UN Samantha Power to argue that western security interests are at stake. “The Egyptian regime is not facing any real substantial consequences for escalating repression. The non-violent opposition is not rewarded for maintaining its non-violence. The longer we’re turning a blind eye and being silent about this, the more likely folks inside prison will adopt more extremist ideas.”

For a time during his incarceration, Soltan shared a cell with Isis and Al-Qaeda militants. “They walked around with a victorious air: ‘look, you idiots, your model doesn’t work’. There’s a growing disbelief in freedom and democracy amongst moderate Islamists. Literally daily, things are happening that is proving the very simple arguments the Isis guys were making. You are facing so much oppression and there’s no outlet for it, no dialogue, no space for political dissent. People feel continuingly abandoned by the international community, which is legitimising this coup and giving it everything it needs to thrive.”

Despite the heavy personal cost he has borne, he has no intention of giving up. “We believers in democracy, in freedom, in the principles of the revolution – we are all very young and time is on our side. We’re going to continue the struggle non-violently and do everything in our power until the Egyptian people enjoy their God-given freedoms.”

30 October-5 November 2015 issue
Israel: the Third Intifada?

“Devotees of capitalism are often unduly conservative, and reject reforms in its technique, which might really strengthen and preserve it, for fear that they may prove to be first steps away from capitalism itself.” Those pertinent words could have been written today but were actually written almost a century ago by John Maynard Keynes in an essay entitled “The End of Laissez Faire”.

They are pertinent because opinion polling to be published next week by the Legatum Institute finds capitalism and business lacking popular support throughout the world – particularly in Britain, America and Germany. Unfortunately, the rejectionists Keynes identified are never off today’s airwaves: those trigger-happy libertarians ready to defend almost anything done in the name of economic freedom.

That includes huge corporate and individual donations to political parties, boardroom pay that bears little relationship to underlying performance, the idea that business has no responsibilities to a domestic country’s unemployed workers, a self-interested interest in the continuation of large-scale economic immigration and, for instance, a belief that sky-high interest-rate charges by a pay-day loan company are defensible if the terms are buried amid legalistic small print.

In defending almost any technically legal business activity, the laissez-faire fundamentalists are the unwitting allies of left-wing critics of capitalism. While left-wing parties did not prosper in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crash, there is some evidence they are on the march again. Justin Trudeau’s victory in Canada is a notable example.

Trudeau campaigned to raise taxes on the wealthy and increase borrowing. He is hesitant about extending free trade, and supports both trade union rights and tougher regulation – especially in the name of the environment. This son and political heir of the former prime minister Pierre Trudeau is an Ed Miliband with better hair. The handsome ex-teacher’s election suggests that the recipe rejected by Britain in May can win power if it finds the right salesperson.

While there may be plenty of apologists for economic libertarianism within British think tanks, we have a deeply pragmatic Conservative government. Although the tax credits fiasco has provided ammunition for its opponents, I would cite the pragmatic choice to eliminate the budget deficit over two parliaments rather than one, to cut the armed forces and police to fund higher aid and health spending, the embrace of a much higher national minimum wage – even if it’s not quite a “living wage” – and, in another sign that business isn’t trusted by George Osborne or the Thatcherite Sajid Javid always to do the right thing, the introduction of an apprenticeship levy to compensate for British business’s failure to invest in vocational education.

I hope the government will recognise that the crisis of capitalism is far from over. To use one of David Cameron’s favourite expressions, the warning lights on the economic dashboard are flashing red again with the return of dangerously high banker bonuses, zero-deposit mortgages and, most of all, a monetary policy that accommodates asset-price inflation, notably in housing. The interest-rate policies that prevented the recession of 2008 becoming a depression may be sowing the seeds for a new crop of problems.

Our government has done a reasonable job of steadying the Good Ship Great Britain after the global crash. With modest austerity compared to many European states and welfare policies that have facilitated spectacular rates of job creation, this government has avoided the toxic reputation acquired by Margaret Thatcher. Now, however, the focus must shift from stabilising the economy to reforming it.

The government’s promise to spend more on infrastructure and less on welfare should be a flagship of its reform agenda. So, too, should be the focus on rebalancing the UK economy away from an over-reliance on the City. But more needs to be done to force business to end its focus on short-term profit maximisation. That means governance reforms to end chief executive pay packages that encourage excessive risk-taking, new economic measures that tell us who is benefiting from GDP growth data and who is being harmed, as well as voting reforms that reduce the ability of corporate lobbyists to hinder the cleansing power of competition. There should be financial-sector reforms that hit oversized banks with progressively higher capital adequacy requirements. “Too-big-to-fail” hasn’t gone away.

Free enterprise is worth defending. If properly regulated by the courts and voters, it has a better record of lifting people out of poverty than government action. As Bono of U2 has readily conceded, “entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid”. World Bank data suggests more than 100,000 people have been lifted out of absolute poverty each day over the past two decades. The collapse of absolute poverty is probably the most important fact in the world today, yet most people in advanced countries think that hunger and poverty are getting worse.

They think this because too much of their daily experience of big business is negative. If capitalism’s excesses can be tackled, a clearer picture of its successes might be established in the public mind.

The Legatum Institute’s prosperity-for-all.com website launches on 29 October

Okay, let’s start with my honestly declared position on this. I don’t think that a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn is likely to win in 2020, and winning in 2020 must be the absolute priority if we are to protect the most vulnerable in our society from what will, in effect, be a third Conservative government. Dismantling public services and institutions is easier than building them and a third Tory term would see the end of any local authority role in education, a decapitated NHS and the end of the welfare state as we know it. As Labour’s candidate in Hemel Hempstead at the general election and somebody who fought virtually a full-time campaign for the six months leading up to the election, I found no appetite on the doorstep for a profoundly more left wing proposition in precisely the kind of setting where Labour must win if it is to form a government with a decent majority again.  A hearty conference speech may stir the souls of delegates but, for me, it doesn’t change this reality.

Nonetheless, all my instincts tell me that for those stunned by Corbyn’s election to simply fight much of what Labour’s new leader stands for, and that his election has delivered, would be utterly the wrong response. The “give us (nearly) the price of a pint and we’ll give you a vote” approach to the leadership election was comic in its conception and execution and leads me to the conclusion that our party now has the best democracy that money can buy, but its consequence has produced, or at least could produce, unintended outcomes that stretch beyond the election of “Jezza”, and one of these could be good for politics, even if it is bad for Labour.

Whatever happens to our party over the next few years, Corbyn’s election is another manifestation of the same phenomenon that has given us Nigel Farage on the right, the rise of the SNP in Scotland, and Donald Trump in the US. Domestically, I’m tempted to call it the “Corbage Factor”, a combination of names that is likely to upset each of these arch political opponents in equal measure, but not a suggestion that they either agree on policy or on strategy. Whatever his failings – as judged by this self-confessed recovering Blairite who remains proud of much of what the Blair and Brown governments achieved - Corbyn is a man of integrity and sincerity with none of the nasty selfish nimbyism that is at the core of everything Farage stands for.

The Corbage Factor is not about a congruence of politics or motive; it is about a rejection of the mainstream, same-age, same-suit, production-line politicians that adorn both front benches. The supply lines that gave us John Prescott on the left and Ken Clarke on the right no longer exist; the ladders into modern politics – internship, PPE or something similar (usually at one of three or four elite universities), a post in a think tank and then, without a blink, a safe seat have given us our smartest, best qualified politicians ever, but our most unworldly and disconnected – identikit clones that look and sound the same and whose advisers have given us everything from the Tory’s “Pasty Tax” to Labour’s “Tombstone”. In popular culture, voting has never been more popular – think X-Factor, Strictly and Big Brother - but formal politics itself has never been less respected and, this time, the charge that “you’re all the same” has some truth, at least at first glance.

This is the terrain in which the Corbage Factor flourishes, even if the apparently working class heroes who give it it’s name are anything but that: a prep school boy and a city commodity broker. How ironic that the three SpAd-ish clones – for that is how they came across and are seen as - that Corbyn beat can genuinely claim just the kind of working class backgrounds that the victor might have romantically wanted for himself.

But there is good in this, and a real opportunity for our politics: an enormous number of people in party membership, a level of discussion in pubs and cafes about politics that I can’t previously remember (one that seems to still be flourishing several weeks after his election), a new youthfulness to many in these discussions and a promise to do politics differently. Of course, Cameron and Clegg promised something similar in the Rose Garden five years ago, but nobody expected these inauthentic production line leaders to deliver.  With Corbyn they think that this serial rebel might just do so (even if the past few days have shown that he’s not quite sure how to deal with his own rebels). No more the ‘retail offer’ of what I have previously called the spadocracy. Corbyn’s attraction isn’t just his policy offer; indeed, it might not even be his policy offer - it is the way in which this offer is being made. Middle England might not buy his policy, but some will buy the compassion, kindness and honesty that he has pledged to bring with it. 

I still don’t think that this will be enough to help us to win in places like Hemel – a town that by origin should be Labour to its core.  To win in places like Hemel we need to capture the support of those who have been the very beneficiaries of the innovations of Labour governments of the past – free universal health care, comprehensive education, access to good quality social and private housing significantly before the onslaught of middle age – and we need to support the aspirations and hopes of those voters today.  I don’t think that Corbyn’s policy offer does that, but his impact on our politics might be a fine legacy, one that none of the other candidates could have delivered.

In sport there is the notion of ‘taking a hit for the team’; in electing Jeremy Crobyn as leader – and through embracing the tens of thousands of predominantly young people previously un-attracted by our over-professionalised and managerialist politics – Labour may have risked consigning itself to opposition for the medium term, but if politics is re-energised in the process, Labour may just have taken a hit for democracy, and given it a boost that is long overdue. 

It was Monday that the case of Tara Hudson, a trans woman sent by Bath Magistrates to a men’s prison to serve out a 12-week term for assault, first streaked across my Twitter feed. Within two days a petition, now tracking 50,000 signatures, had begun, alongside a hashtag campaign of support: #ISeeTara.

The issue is also being raised with the Ministry of Justice by Hudson’s local MP, Ben Howlett, and Lib Dem leader Tim Farron. A letter-writing campaign has begun: demos outside the prison and outside the MoJ are being planned.

How did we get here? At the individual level, the issue is either the failure of Hudson to change the gender recorded on her passport or, acccording to the MoJ, the fact that she does not have a gender recognition certificate (GRC), which is awarded by a panel once a person has lived in their new gender for two years. The MoJ have not said this in so many words: it’s just that every time they are asked why she has been sent to a men’s prison, they respond by talking about “legal gender” and GRCs.

Why Hudson would not have a GRC is unclear: we do not know precisely what surgeries she has had, nor why she has not got a GRC. I don’t have one. I will not, because I absolutely refuse the right of the state to demand money from me for the simple purpose of acknowledging who I am. In that sense, the GRC is NOT like a passport or driving license. Because it says that my gender is dependent on the ratiocination of some state apparatchik, who obviously knows who I am better than I do.

A growing number of trans men and women agree with me, objecting to this imposition for a variety of reasons. It’s a gender tax. State intrusion. The fact that flawed equal marriage legislation effectively creates a “spousal veto” over obtaining a GRC (because your spouse’s agreement is needed to convert a heterosexual marriage to a same-sex marriage, or vice versa). One trans woman I know simply will not obtain a GRC until this veto is removed. Her spouse doesn’t object. She does. In principle.

Many in the trans community worry that the decision is punitive on the part of the Ministry of Justice – an implicit rebuke to trans people, who questioned the legitimacy of the gender recognition system in a petition this summer. (The Ministry of Justice dismissed the petition curtly earlier this year, but the issue is likely to come up again as the women and equalities select committee investigates transgender issues.)

The situation is troubling enough for us binaries (those of us who consider ourselves to have a gender); the Gender Recognition Act, passed in 2004, offers nothing at all to the fast-growing numbers of non-binary trans people. They have to pick a box.

 Even if we accept that the situation over GRCs is under review, the most troubling aspect of Tara Hudson’s case is that the MoJ are apparently ignoring their own guidelines, published in 2011. 

These rule that someone with a GRC should go to the prison appropriate to their new gender. But the guidelines go on: where there is no GRC, there are many factors to take into account. Identity. Steps taken. Risk to the prisoner. To other prisoners. All of which are meant to be addressed before the guilty party arrives at prison.

And on what is known so far, Tara Hudson ticks each and every one of these boxes. Hormones. Treatment. Some surgery. At serious risk in a male prison. Combined, these factors make the decision to incarcerate her in an all-male prison questionable.

In the general prison population she is at immediate risk of assault, of rape. Which, of course, is why she almost certainly won’t be placed in the general population: will be consigned to a euphemistically named – and expensive – segregation regime.  Otherwise known as “solitary confinement”. Otherwise, “cruel and unusual” punishment that in many peoples’ books amounts to a form of torture.

The mere fact of being deemed a man, after an entire adult life spent as a woman is serious knockback to Hudson’s psychological health, too. Behind the story there are hints already of depression: what price Tara’s state of mind after three nights in all-male Horfield?

That is why this case has provoked so much rage. Tara Hudson must now endure cruelty because those who sat in judgment of her deemed they had no alternative but to follow the rulebook. Except they didn’t: they only read half of it.

For trans people, that is the reality of justice in Britain today.

Can you ever really escape your digital identity?

Mark Farid thinks so. On Monday night, at a panel discussion of digital privacy hosted by the University of Cambridge's Festival of Ideas, Farid handed out a stack of A4 pieces of paper to a befuddled audience. Typed out on each were his login details. All of them. All five email addresses. Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, Amazon, Apple ID.

Even if he'd missed a password out, we'd be pretty safe in the assumption it was something to do with Leicester or The Strokes:

After a moment of shock, the audience, me included, busied ourselves on our phones. One man raised his hand to announce that he'd already logged into Farid's Facebook page and changed the password. Within minutes, his Hotmail password was changed, too. I managed to log into LinkedIn, and wondered what to do next. Endorse someone's skills? Send off a scattershot round of connection requests?

From this moment until next April, Farid will try to live without a digital footprint: he will use only pay as you go phones with little or no internet connectivity ("I want a flip phone") and Oyster cards, and will create dedicated email accounts for anything he needs to do online. As far as possible, he hopes to be untrackable. 

 * * *

Farid and I spoke last week about a different, far less personal project, out of which the password stunt grew: Data Shadow. Data Shadow is basically a shipping container, sitting in a Cambridge garden outside the room where we're watching Farid commit privacy kamikaze.

Visitors step inside the container, and meet one of several scenarios, depending on which parts of the technology are working. Farid's favourite runs thus: once inside, your phone automatically connects to a wifi network, which poses as your phone provider. It pulls out your name and recently visited locations and projects them on the wall. At the same time, two more projectors beam outlines of your body on to the walls. One is filled with recent text messages; the other with your photos. “The algorithm is trained to pick up flesh tones,” Farid tells me. “We’re trying to find the most embarrassing pictures we can.” 

You're then asked to make a phone call to someone. As you do, another phone outside the container starts to ring. If a passerby picks up, they can join in on - or simly listen to - your conversation. When the door of the container shuts behind you, your data is wiped from the system, and you receive a text explaining what just happened. 

The project, funded jointly by technology agency Collusion, Cambridge University, The Technology Partnership and Arts Council England, cost £30,000. Only a small portion of this was spent on the technology it takes to hack into a phone. 

Before the talk, Farid and I visit the container, and he hacks into his phone and shows me his own data shadow. As the body-shaped messages and photos flicker around me, I ask Farid if he’s nervous that he’s about to hand over his online identity to the public. Almost no one knows what he’s planning – not even his housemates. “To be honest, I’ve been too stressed to be nervous,” he says. He has deleted emails containing sensitive information sent to him by others, but everything on his Facebook, for example, is still there. We’ll be able to look through his messages, friends, history, photos, and texts.

Farid tells me he's taken out three types of insurance against whatever we, the audience, might try to do with his social media. But there's no insurance against friends and family getting angry about the indirect access the public will have to their life too; the pictures and messages we'll all be able to see. "No, I suppose not." 
 

* * * 

The seed for these artworks was planted when Farid stopped getting stopped in airports. On a school trip to New York aged 15, Farid was held back at border control for over an hour. "They basically asked whether I was a terrorist - 'do you have any firearms', 'do you play with explosives'." 

Over the next few years, something changed: Farid got social media. Now, he is never stopped. Part of the investigation he's carrying out by giving up his online identity is how this will affect the state's treatment of him - now they can no longer assume they know what he's doing, perhaps that level of suspicion will return.

Online surveillance gives those watching the sense that they know what we're up to. Employers may find questionable pictures or posts on your social media, but they'd be even more concerned if they couldn't find you at all. In 2012 German newspaper Der Taggspiegel, pointed out that neither James Holmes (the murderer of 12 in a Colorado cinema) nor Anders Behring Breivik had Facebook profiles. A lack of online presence is, in a word, suspicious. 

* * *

At the talk, Farid explains to the audience that big companies want us to relinquish our privacy, and that this is incredibly dangerous. “Privacy is the most important thing we have. Without it, you can’t do anything. You start to self- censor.” In the US, he tells us, the courts have ruled that the fourth Amendment - the right to privacy - does not apply to non-US citizens. The US can (and does) monitor an endless list of groups and individuals without warrants, including Angela Merkel and Amnesty International. 

During the panel discussion, two examples come up which seem to outline our contradictory approach to privacy. One audience member raises something called the “chat room paradox”, which was first raised in 2007 in the early days of forums and social media: if your child enters a chat room, you want them to be totally anonymous, yet at the same time, you want to know everything about the identities of the other people in that chat room. 

Then there's the fact that discussions of privacy and state surveillance often come down to the phrase "I've got nothing to hide". We assume that only criminals would want privacy from the state. Yet as Daniel Thomas, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, points out, it's no coincidence that Germans are far more cautious about giving up their privacy than we are. "They know - they remember - that the state is willing to collect your underwear to keep in jars in case they needed to train dogs to chase you”. (Ironically, German authorities used this tactic again to track down violent protesters at 2007's G8 summit). In a basic sense, these "odour jars" were collections of "data" used by the state to track individuals. In Soviet-run East Germany, individuals were encouraged to spy on their neighbours. If that state existed now, it wouldn’t need them to.

As a demonstration of this, Farid asks the audience to go onto our location settings on our iPhones or Androids, and see whether our phone has been tracking our locations. I was under the impression I'd switched my location services off, but no such luck:

(To check yours on an iPhone, go to settings - > privacy - > location services - > system services, right at the bottom of the page.)

As it stands, we give up our data in exchange for the convenience free online services and our smartphones give us. "But what happens if you subvert this situation?" Farid asks us, gathering up the stack of papers containing his passwords and preparing to hand them out. "What happens if you give it all up?" 

Earlier, I asked Farid why he decided to take the project to such a personal extreme. “What we’re trying to do with Data Shadow is show that this could have been you. Your data could be mined by anyone. People need to start taking responsibility for that.”  

* * *

As I walk back to Cambridge train station, I open Google Maps. "Google Maps neeeds permission to show your location on the map. Turn on location services to navigate." I hesitate, still holding Farid's list of passwords. Eventually, I turn it back on. 

The government won a victory in the House of Lords on individual electoral registration last night, meaning that just people who registered within the last year will be included on the new electoral register, which will form the basis of the coming boundary review. As YouGov’s Anthony Wells explains, it will mean the loss of 1.9m voters from the electoral register, largely at the expense of Labour in inner-city areas and to the advantage of the Conservatives.  

But the boundary changes were already bad for Labour.  At the heart of it are two things - the reduction in the number of seats in the Commons to 600 - and the switch to individual, rather than household electoral registration. Constituency boundaries in Britain are drawn on registered electors, not by population - the average seat has around 70,000 voters but a population of 90,000, although there are significant variations within that. On the whole, at present, Labour MPs tend to have seats with fewer voters than their Conservative counterparts. These changes were halted by the Liberal Democrats in the coalition years but are now back on course.

The new, 600-member constituencies will all but eliminate those variations on mainland Britain, although the Isle of Wight, and the Scottish island constituencies will remain special cases. The net effect will be to reduce the number of Labour seats - and to make the remaining seats more marginal. (Of the 50 seats that would have been eradicated had the 2013 review taken place, 35 were held by Labour, including deputy leader Tom Watson's seat of West Bromwich East.)

Why will Labour seats become more marginal? For the most part, as seats expand, they will take on increasing numbers of suburban and rural voters, who tend to vote Conservative. The city of Leicester is a good example: currently the city sends three Labour MPs to Westminster, each with large majorities. Under boundary changes, all three could become more marginal as they take on more wards from the surrounding county. Liz Kendall's Leicester West seat is likely to have a particularly large influx of Tory seats.

The pattern is fairly consistent throughout the United Kingdom - Labour safe seats either vanishing or becoming marginal or even Tory seats. On Merseyside, three seats - Frank Field's Birkenhead, a Labour seat since 1950, and two marginal Labour held seats, Wirral South and Wirral West - will become two: a safe Labour seat, and a safe Conservative seat on the Wirral. Lillian Greenwood, the Shadow Transport Secretary, would see her Nottingham seat take more of the Nottinghamshire countryside, becoming a Conservative-held marginal. 

The traffic - at least in the 2013 review - was not entirely one-way. Jane Ellison, the Tory MP for Battersea, would find herself fighting a seat with a notional Labour majority of just under 3,000, as opposed to her current majority of close to 8,000. 

But the net effect of the boundary review and the shrinking of the size of the House of Commons would be to the advantage of the Conservatives. If the 2015 election had been held using the 2013 boundaries, the Tories would have a majority of 22 – and Labour would have just 216 seats against 232 now.

It may be, however, that Labour dodges a bullet – because while the boundary changes would have given the Conservatives a bigger majority, they would have significantly fewer MPs – down to 311 from 330, a loss of 19 members of Parliament. Although the whips are attempting to steady the nerves of backbenchers about the potential loss of their seats, that the number of Conservative MPs who face involuntary retirement due to boundary changes is bigger than the party’s parliamentary majority may force a U-Turn.

That said, Labour’s relatively weak electoral showing may calm jittery Tory MPs. Two months into Ed Miliband’s leadership, Labour averaged 39 per cent in the polls. They got 31 per cent of the vote in 2015. Two months into Tony Blair’s leadership, Labour were on 53 per cent of the vote. They got 43 per cent of the vote. A month and a half into Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour is on 31 per cent of the vote.  A Blair-style drop of ten points would see the Tories net 388 seats under the new boundaries, with Labour on 131. A smaller Miliband-style drop would give the Conservatives 364, and leave Labour with 153 MPs.  

On Labour’s current trajectory, Tory MPs who lose out due to boundary changes may feel comfortable in their chances of picking up a seat elsewhere. 

Occasionally it has been rumoured that James Bond might go into therapy, or come out as gay, or be played by a black actor (or all three). The most tantalising story doing the rounds about Spectre was that it would show 007 on his toughest mission yet, despatched to locate a tune or melody in Sam Smith’s theme song. Some tasks, though, are beyond even Bond. There is nothing as exciting in Spectre as the arrival of a female M (Judi Dench) in GoldenEye. But he does finally receive some therapy, administered by Dr Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), who
then helps him track down Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), the head of an international network of super-villains. Bond baddies have distinguishing emblems of evil (a scar, a deadly bowler hat) and Oberhauser, with his shamelessness in the wearing of loafers without socks, is no exception.

Suggestions that it will be Daniel Craig’s swansong in the part have been fuelled no end by the actor confessing he would rather be strapped to Goldfinger’s torture table with a laser pointed directly at his quantum of solace than ever play Bond again. The film drops hints to this effect. Bond is first seen wearing a skull mask during Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico City. Back in London, he learns that plans are afoot to sack him. Switching on a radio, he gets a blast of “New York, New York” (“Start spreading the news/I’m leaving today”). It’s like combing the cover of Abbey Road for clues that Paul is dead.

The air of mourning contributes to the film’s plodding, funereal pace. Yet there is something to be said for its desolate look. It has an eloquent cinematographer in Hoyte van Hoytema (Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), whose work has a powdery, granular quality. The colour scheme runs almost to sepia at times, but there is also a stark funeral scene among Roman pillars where the attention to architecture recalls Antonioni.

Should Craig play Bond again, he could scarcely push his minimalism any further. He is pared down to samurai essentials: striding and scowling, he is frugal even in violence, never throwing two punches where one will do. At one point, he stems an attack simply by telling his assailant: “Stay.” If looks could kill, he wouldn’t even bother drawing his gun. But then the emphasis in Craig’s four outings has been on the psychological. Sam Mendes is not the only director to have been called back for multiple assignments in the series but he may be the first to have nurtured a theme over consecutive films. Skyfall was essentially a dysfunctional family drama where M betrayed one of her former spies (or sons). In Spectre there is more domestic scar tissue. Oberhauser is fatherless, as is Dr Swann, while Bond is mourning the death of his adoptive father. It’s a support group waiting to happen.

Bond’s professional family is also in tatters now that the weaselly mandarin C (Andrew Scott), as boss of the Joint Intelligence Service, is increasing remote surveillance powers. The new M (Ralph Fiennes) gives a speech about the value of old-fashioned spying over drones. “A licence to kill is also a licence not to kill,” he says. It’s a romantic notion, easy enough to stand by when you’ve got a team of screenwriters to ensure that Bond never puts a bullet wrong (there are four credited, including the playwright Jez Butterworth). In the realm of the spectacular, they are not always so confident. Even fantasy needs verisimilitude, and if you’re going to have your hero producing planes out of thin air, miles from any apparent airstrip, as Bond does, why stop there? Surely no need for a plane. Just have him zoom through the air, arms outstretched.

M establishes himself as Bond’s surrogate father the moment he grounds him at the start of the film. But the children of MI6 all rally round when Dad is in trouble, so that C must face down both M and Q, which is, at the very least, the start of an unpromising hand in Scrabble. It all descends to the level of the schoolyard when C says that M means “Moron”. Bond speculates naughtily on what C might stand for, and tells Oberhauser: “Nothing could be as painful as listening to you talk.” (All that’s missing is a “Nur!”.) Taunting Bond about his affection for Dr Swann, Oberhauser even draws a love-heart on steamed-up glass. It’s at times like these that you miss Judi Dench as M. She’d have sent the lot of them to bed without any supper. 

Millions of households this week have reason to be grateful for the House of Lords. Its rejection of the government’s £4bn cuts to tax credits, which would have cost three million households as much as £1,300 a year, has intensified pressure on George Osborne to reconsider a plan that would have punished the working poor. The action of the Lords has reinforced the importance of having a second chamber that can amend and delay legislation as well as hold the executive to account.

Yet the peers’ intervention on tax credits cannot disguise that the Lords is an anachronism: it is Europe’s only upper house with no openly elected members. Nor should an unelected chamber have the power to decide on matters of finance and taxation. “The principle of no taxation without representation is fundamental to our parliamentary system,” the constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor wrote this week.

The Parliament Act 1911 was introduced to prevent the Lords (then stuffed full of hereditary peers) from overturning government, as happened in 1909 with the rejection of David Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget”. It was the resistance of the Lords, too, that prevented William Gladstone from introducing home rule for Ireland in the late 19th century. Had he succeeded, Ireland might never have left the UK.

Today, with 816 members, the Lords is the largest parliamentary chamber in any democracy. It has no term limits, no retirement age and not even a cap on how many members it can have at any one time. As governments expand the upper house with their own appointments, the Lords becomes ever more bloated: the number of peers has risen by 147 in the past 15 years. While one accepts that there is genuine expertise from beyond politics in the Lords, too often peerages are given to time-serving former MPs or other political appointees.

The Lords costs taxpayers £87m a year, which could be reduced by cutting the number who sit in the upper house. A few peers exploit the generosity of the daily allowance of £300, plus travel expenses, that can be claimed whenever they turn up at the House. Between 2010 and 2015, £360,000 in attendance fees and expenses was claimed by peers in years they failed to vote even once.

At a time when the governing party was elected by only 24 per cent of eligible voters, the House of Lords provides a crucial check on executive power. Yet the chamber is not representative of the wider British population. Just 24 per cent of peers are female and less than 7 per cent are from ethnic minorities. And it can be easily manipulated. Smarting from its defeat, the government has suggested that it might create 100 or more Tory peers to secure a majority in the upper house. That would be a democratic outrage.

Reform of the second chamber is long overdue. When the House of Lords Act 1999 limited the participation of hereditary peers to 92 members, it was envisaged as a first step in democratising parliament, not an end in itself. But 92 hereditary peers still sit in the chamber. (Lord Strathclyde, who will be leading a review of the upper chamber, is himself a hereditary peer.) Our preference is for the Lords to be abolished or radically reformed as part of a far-ranging programme that would result in the creation of a fully federal United Kingdom.

The welcome resistance of peers of all parties to the Chancellor’s egregious plans to reduce tax credits should not disguise that the UK’s upper house remains an undemocratic club. Perhaps anger at the role of the Lords in opposing their plans to reduce tax credits might convince even the Tories of the urgency and necessity of progressive reform.

The right surges in Poland

European electorates are specialising in delivering the instability that EU leaders so long to avoid. The triumph of the right-populist Law and Justice Party in Poland is the latest instance of voters’ revolt against the mainstream. After winning an overall majority, the party has a mandate for its programme of Euroscepticism, tighter borders and higher social spending.

The prime minister-designate, Beata Szydło, may refuse to accept the 7,000 Syrian refugees whom Poland is due to receive under the EU’s relocation scheme, allying with the chauvinistic Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán. For David Cameron, the result also bodes ill. The Conservatives sit with the Law and Justice Party in the European Parliament, rather than with the more mainstream, centre-right European People’s Party grouping, but Mr Cameron’s pledge to impose a four-year ban on benefits for migrants (which would penalise the 700,000 Poles in the UK) will be fiercely resisted. To avoid defeat – every EU member state possesses a veto – he will need to court Poland far more assiduously than before.

Benjamin Disraeli, Margaret Thatcher’s 19th-century predecessor as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, hinted that he preferred biographies to history books on the grounds that biography is “life without theory”. At the risk of provoking unrest among any surviving members of the Primrose League, I am not sure that this is correct. There is plenty of theory about biography, above all the question of whether there are great leaders who shape history or whether such figures are simply history’s foundlings, at most listening out, as Bismarck said, for “the rustle of God’s cloak”.

That this question comes immediately to the fore on reading the second volume of Charles Moore’s superb biography of Margaret Thatcher – covering the period of her pomp, from the aftermath of the Falklands campaign in 1982 to her third election victory in 1987 – reflects how she was the most partisan and domineering British prime minister in the period since the Second World War. You can avoid having a view on most people and things (even, unless you are Australian, on Marmite). But I know no one who does not have a view on Lady Thatcher, from those who in Ian McEwan’s phrase “liked disliking her”, some of them celebrating her death, to those for whom she has been a totemic focus of almost spiritual devotion and inspiration. The forceful expression of these judgements brings to mind the tripartite distinction of strong opinions offered by the authors of Yes Minister: “I am principled. You are an ideologue. He is a mindless fanatic.”

The question of Thatcher’s place in history – whether she was great and, if so, how great – can come in a moment but first what is clear is that this is a very fine biography. It is definitive and raises the question of who on earth would want to tackle this extraordinary life in the future. How much more information about “the Lady” can be loaded on to the page? Moore tells us all that most people will ever want to know. While avoiding hagiography, he is sympathetic to Thatcher’s opinions and self-image, more than some of her Conservative colleagues would have been. Yet his book is far from uncritical, not least about the way she behaved to her colleagues and the way that some of her most professional acolytes behaved, presumably with her understanding and implicit support.

Overall the book is beautifully written and very readable, even when traversing bleak economic terrain. The masses of complex detail are well organised. This marshalling of the argument is a minor triumph, given that Moore has trawled through so much material, assembling rich pickings (and some more humdrum offerings) from previously unpublished records, memoirs and conversations.

The extent of the often primary sources inevitably puts in the shade Kwasi Kwar­teng’s slim book about the six turbulent months after the 1981 Budget, culminating in the bloodletting of the autumn cabinet reshuffle that year. This has already been covered in Moore’s first volume. So far as I could tell, Kwarteng brings no new information to light, writing as he does apparently from secondary sources. The story is perfectly well told, though there are occasional lapses into “garagiste” mini-sneers about the toff-ish backgrounds of some of Thatcher’s cabinet critics. Since Kwarteng is an Old Etonian, one’s eyebrows do occasionally steeple at this. A clever MP and historian, he has written much better books than this and will doubtless write more.

Kwarteng leaves the tale at the moment when conventional opinions hold that fortune sailed to Margaret Thatcher’s rescue in the shape of General Galtieri’s invasion of the Falklands. Certainly success in the south Atlantic helped to turn a party leader into a national prime minister and gave the Conservatives unstoppable momentum in the 1983 election campaign. Thatcher might have won anyway: the economy was starting to show signs of life by the end of 1982 and Labour, under Michael Foot, was haemorrhaging support to the “Gang of Four”.

If Galtieri’s invasion was a stroke of luck for Thatcher, it was not one that anyone welcomed at the time. Yet it was one that she seized with both hands, giving bold and competent leadership to the armed forces during the six-week campaign. She was at her best that summer. It is difficult to believe that Britain would have been better served by early surrender or later defeat. Victory helped to raise British self-confidence and international esteem, a point immediately recognised by the patriotic Michael Foot.

This is surely an example of Isaiah Berlin’s argument that greatness is often the result of making the right choices when there are other options on offer. We see that selectively in the successes and failures of what came to be called, in an un-Conservative way, Thatcherism – un-Conservative because almost the last thing a sceptical Tory should want to be associated with is an “-ism”.

There was, as Moore points out, no statement defining Thatcherism; its vagueness was part of its strength. It was for prudent financing of smaller government, for lower taxes, for choice, for free markets, for tilting the balance from the state to the individual, for Nato and for the nuclear deterrent. It was against powerful trade unions, against communism, against the “professional belittlers” of Britain who had, Thatcher believed, dominated the years of decline in the 1970s. She looked back to a golden age of British greatness founded on national sovereignty, the rule of law, hard work and distrust of foreigners (except Americans). She had deep convictions but little intellectual empathy or understanding for any other view of our island story. I imagine that she would have been horrified by much of the sentiment that underpinned the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

Some of that “-ism” was translated into success. Both she and Ronald Reagan – from whom she could have learned a lot about man management – heard (to quote Berlin again) “the hoof-beat of history”. Privatisation and the City’s Big Bang were part of a global renaissance of capitalism that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown never wanted or dared in office to try to roll back.

It was not all good. There was insufficient competition for private-sector cartels and later events showed the folly in many cases of knocking together high-street and investment banks. Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney was funny on television but pretty deadly and very expensive when running a bank.

Overall, however, I believe that Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy helped to prevent the relative decline of Britain becoming absolute. In particular, her defeat of Arthur Scargill and his unballoted industrial action in some of Britain’s coalfields (outside Nottinghamshire, that is) helped to make the country more governable. The carefully planned campaign to defeat Scargill – the build-up of coal stocks, the salami-slicing of the laws on trade unions’ privileges – led to a bloody victory on the picket lines, which was, alas, both necessary and deeply troubling. Without that “victory”, industrial progress and worries about climate change might well have eventually closed down much of a business that put so many brave men in danger underground. But the political (and probably the economic) cost would have been much greater. For two democratic governments to have been turned out of office by the National Union of Mineworkers would have changed Britain and our economy significantly. Thatcher saw this struggle through to the end, the very bitter end. Other leaders might have given up the fight.

Elsewhere the story is more mixed. Although her relationship with Reagan and Gorbachev put her firmly on the right side of geopolitical change – and even perhaps managed to hurry it along a little – Lady Thatcher had an instinctive dislike of the virtues of internationalism and consensus-building. In practice, nevertheless, she did not scupper developments and agreements that she probably knew were inevitable, however personally disagreeable to her.

For example, she went along (with much ill grace) with the negotiation of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland, which paved the way to the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998. (The Brighton bombing in October 1984 made that Hillsborough negotiation more difficult.)

Her dislike of the European Union – its politics of compromise and the windy rhetoric about unlikely and even undesirable destinations – did not prevent her from accepting the single market, with its requirement of a big extension in majority voting. She accepted that we would have to quit Hong Kong but understood better than others that there was a human dimension to this and that it was pretty disagreeable for a democracy to have to hand over the territory to a totalitarian regime without ever consulting its citizens. As I discovered in due course, this admirable instinct stayed with her to the end.

In all these areas, Thatcher did what she knew she had to do, though not without a degree of self-delusion about what was happening. She also liked others’ fingerprints to be all over whatever agreement eventually captured her head – though not her heart. It was in those areas that civil servants and ministers had to try to rein in or at least inform her prejudices and convictions and not indulge them. The heroes were men (there were few women about except her personal staff) who would go along with her final decisions but not without struggling to make these decisions more sensible. They were part of an establishment that leaned heavily in the direction of intelligent compromise and international agreement: men such as the cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong, her private secretary Robin Butler, her political secretary Stephen Sherbourne, platoons of smart diplomats and – as Charles Moore describes him – the “almost saintly” David Goodall, who was the principal Promethean pushing the Anglo-Irish boulder up the hill. Goodall’s private reflections on Thatcher and her treatment of her entourage are elegantly written and full of acerbic insights. He notes the general view that she behaved like “everyone’s mother in a bad temper” but adds that she was never as rough with civil servants as with ministers.

Some of the civil servants closest to her plainly thought that the instinctive attempts by their colleagues to persuade her to shift the ground into which she had invariably dug her bunkers and artillery positions justified going beyond the customary bounds of civil-service behaviour. They were clever and industrious but they usually amplified and augmented her opinions and undermined ministers who might be in disagreement with her.

The worst example came during the Westland row, over whether Michael Heseltine should be allowed to put together a European bid to buy the ailing helicopter company. The trade and industry secretary Leon Brittan was thrown to the wolves (some of whom in the Commons plainly fed on a diet of anti-Semitism) and an excellent and honourable civil servant, Colette Bowe, was hung out to dry by some Downing Street officials. Stephen Sherbourne recalled (rather understating the point), “They were too personal to [Thatcher] and too powerful.”

Both Machiavelli and Sun Tzu believed that a leader should behave well to advisers and magnanimously to the defeated. These sentiments were foreign to Margaret Thatcher and her blind spot on this contributed significantly to public attitudes to her and her ideas. Writing about her colleagues in her memoirs, she admitted, “My biggest area of weakness was among cabinet ministers.” She had, we should remember, chosen them. Moore writes at one point, “She might have persuaded colleagues to readier collaboration if she had given them a bit more flattery and credit.”

Relations were fractious not just with Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine but with her presumed soulmates Nigel Lawson and Norman Tebbit. She behaved recklessly towards all these colleagues, insulting and belittling them, as though conviction and determination obliged a leader to be ungenerous and even offensive. Howe was a particular target for her rude rages. Described
by her closest Foreign Office adviser, Charles Powell, in a minute to his boss as “the plump chap with glasses who used to work across the road and whom we haven’t seen for a long while”, Howe was obliged again and again to eat the toads of humiliation.

The seeds of Thatcher’s downfall were planted and watered by these events – on the Exchange Rate Mechanism, on South Africa, over Northern Ireland and Europe, on industrial policy, on Westland. That particular catastrophe and the subsequent election campaign in 1987 (with Thatcher using David Young and Tim Bell to undermine the then chairman of the party, Norman Tebbit, whom she no longer trusted) show a hysterically dysfunctional party and government. Even the prime minister’s integrity, not simply her leadership competence, came to be doubted. It is hardly surprising that the disastrous poll tax emerged from this chaos.

We still live in Margaret Thatcher’s shadow. She helped to turn the tide of Britain’s accelerating decline; she redrew the lines between the state and the individual; she gave a boost to blue-collar ownership; she gave Britain a new standing and status in central and eastern Europe and elsewhere; she made Britain safe for social democracy – and then the Labour Party threw away the chance to build on this with Tony Blair’s grim adventure in Iraq and his party’s subsequent disavowal of him and all his works.

Thatcher’s Eurosceptic followers, motivated by what they thought she had done, rather than what she had actually put her name to, and increasingly egged on by her, made John Major the scapegoat for her defenestration and poisoned the Conservative Party with divisive debates that get worse by the year. Perhaps she saved Britain. The Conservative Party was not so lucky. That story awaits Moore’s final volume – fire, water, ravens, fate, doom, trumpets, drums and cymbals, Götterdämmerung. Quite something for the scholarship girl from Grantham with strong views, a whole heap of attitude and the never-ending hurt of being sneered at and patronised.

Chris Patten served in Thatcher’s cabinet as minister for overseas development and secretary of state for the environment, and was the last governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997

Margaret Thatcher: the Authorised Biography, Volume Two - Everything She Wants by Charles Moore is published by Allen Lane (£30, 880pp)

Thatcher's Trial: Six Months That Defined a Leader by Kwasi Kwarteng is published by Bloomsbury, (£20, 272pp)

Does the non-fiction book world have a gender problem? Look at prize shortlists, or review coverage, or some publishers’ lists, and the answer would seem a resounding yes. It is male-dominated – and most particularly in the vital, society-shaping fields of economics and politics. We need to see that change. But blaming individual publishers, awards judges or editors is not the answer: a wider cultural change is required. We want to identify, encourage and promote new women writers, and the New Statesman is delighted to be partnering with Virago for a prize that we hope will do just that.

With the Virago/New Statesman Women’s Prize for Politics and Economics, launched today, we are looking for a new writer on economics or politics who shows originality and rigorous thinking. The winner will have her work published by Virago, the imprint founded in 1973 to publish writing by women. The award will give a debut writer a contract for an essay to be published as a Virago ebook – and an option to make a second contract, for a full-length book.

To enter, writers must submit a 3,000-word proposal. This will be judged by Gillian Tett, the US managing editor and award-winning columnist at the Financial Times as well as author of books including The Silo Effect; Helen Lewis, the deputy editor of the NS; Lennie Goodings, publisher at Virago; and Tom Gatti, NS culture editor. Entries – consisting of an outline of 1,000 words and a sample extract of 2,000 words – must be submitted by 31 January 2016. The winner will be announced in April 2016. The winner will then be asked to develop her proposal into a 20,000-word essay for publication by Virago. For full details of how to enter and terms and conditions visit: virago.co.uk/prize.

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

Read up on episode 3 here.

“Samuel Johnson,” muses Alan Sugar, flicking through an 18th-century manuscript of the most influential dictionary in the English language, planning his next Apprentice task. “He had a cat didn’t he?”

“Yes, Alan!” nod Karren and Claude simultaneously, both too afraid to anger their Lord by pointing out any other reason the great man of letters has a place in British history.

“A beloved cat called Hodge,” Sugar continues, his eyes lighting up in feline inspiration.

And an episode is born.

Any remaining smidgen of a link between the locations Apprentice candidates are dragged to at dawn and the task they’ll be doing for the rest of the day has been destroyed, at last, by the fourth episode of the 11^th series.

For the candidates turn up at Dr Samuel Johnson’s house – “Samuel L Jackson?” pants Mergim – to find Lord Sugar standing proudly behind a bronze statue of a cat. “This is his beloved cat, Hodge,” he reports. As if they needed to be told. “So I’m sending you to the London pet show.”

But of course.

The teams are shuffled around and split off into separate rooms in Dr Johnson’s house to negotiate their best pet-based buying and selling strategies, as the history of scholarship dictates. Scott, a sales manager with expressive cheekbones, takes the lead for team Connexus. Because his dog is his “pride and joy” and he’s “heavily in sales” (Scott, that is). Wide-eyed marketing child David heads up team Versatile.

Brett, probably still fuming about his substandard fishcakes, breathes: “We need to be upbeat on what the rabbit sector has to offer.”

The teams have to vie for pet products they’d most like to sell at the show. A chicken called Henrietta wearing a hi-vis jacket faces a world of rejection. But a man selling t-shirts with enormous, dead-eyed guinea pig faces on them gets more attention.

Other animal products our human contestants find attractive are sofas for dogs, customisable cat towers (“with a modular system”), walking balloons in the shape of pugs, penguins and giraffes, and an LED tube cat toy.

“I am very much a high-ticket item salesperson,” says Richard – in the most Apprentice sentence since “that was myself, Lord Sugar” – adding, “two words: ‘dog sofa’. I’ll be able to sell it.”

“I don’t know anything about cats, but I do know about selling,” asserts Ruth.

“We decided as a team we would go for the cats and feline market,” Scott explains, in an explanation.

David’s team manages to bag the disturbing vermin t-shirts and walking balloons – which somehow merits an “OI OI” from the ladz.

His rivals are stuck with some tat that doesn’t have a use for humans. And most pets don’t wander around the Excel Centre in Greenwich, ready to splurge. Nevertheless, Scott makes the best of the situation, giving his team some encouragement. “Ruth, your energy is amazing,” he cries. “And Gary. You’ve got cats.”

Sam sells some throws for dogs. “They’re faux fur,” he yells – an off-putting pitch for anyone who wanted to lay their pooch down on a bed of pure labrador skin.

When they return to the boardroom, Sugar works out what he’s made them all do for the past couple of days. “Selecting products and selling them at the pet show,” he concludes.

“These guys interacted with the balloons whereas we talked more about business,” Scott says desperately defending his team. “We conducted ourselves in a professional manner...the cat toys done well,” adds Brett.

Obviously, David’s team wins because of its t-shirt and balloon sales. As all business tycoons know, you can only succeed in sales by selling items intended for your key target market – humans.

Sugar tells Ruth she was too chatty to sell. “Your sales technique was talk talk talk talk,” he says, apparently also admonishing her for leaking customers’ data.

“I came in to help assist,” Scott adds, additionally.

Claude, dressed this week as a concerned Lib Dem egg, tells the team it wasn’t “exhibiting enthusiasm” enough to win the task.

In the end, they fire Ruth, just for the pun. “Ruthless – maybe less Ruth would’ve been the best thing.”

But Selina, who wasn’t keen enough, is on her final warning. “[Claude’s] not very happy with you,” warns Sugar. “Karren – she was wondering why you have this demeanour also.”

Candidates to watch:

David

How many of those t-shirts did he buy for himself?

Richard

He’s awful.

Selina

She’s in trouble also.

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

When George Osborne interviewed Margaret Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore on 15 October, he asked of the poll tax: “What’s your advice to a chancellor who finds that there’s a terrible policy being implemented by the government? Do you try to make it work or do you kill it off?” Osborne’s quip was greeted with much laughter, some of it nervous.

The Chancellor’s joke betrayed his confidence. His Conservative party conference speech had been well received, confirming his status as the early front-runner to succeed David Cameron as prime minister. The House of Commons had voted in favour of the tax credit cuts by a majority of 35, with just two Conservative MPs rebelling. Frank Field, the Labour chair of the work and pensions select committee, presciently warned that the issue would “catch fire”. But to every objection, the Chancellor and his allies replied that there would be no concessions.

Eleven days after his conversation with Moore, Osborne found himself desperately trying to make a “terrible” policy “work”. Less than an hour after the House of Lords defeated the government over tax credits, he announced that there would, after all, be help “in the transition” to the new system. The peers’ rebellion was the proximate cause of his volte-face. Yet it merely hastened an outcome that was regarded as inevitable.

The Conservatives knew from the outset that cuts to tax credits would be politically hazardous. It was for this reason that they denied their existence during the general election campaign. Osborne’s pledge to cut £12bn from the welfare budget, while protecting pensioner benefits, made the £30bn tax credits bill an unavoidable target. Had the Tories formed another partnership with the Liberal Democrats, they would have modified their plans. Yet their unexpected majority of 12 forced them to implement policies that had been designed as negotiating positions.

When the Chancellor delivered the first Conservative-only Budget in 19 years, he unveiled what seemed to many an ingenious solution: a “national living wage”, which was scheduled to reach £9 an hour by 2020. Ed Miliband was among those startled by Osborne’s audacity, telling one MP that he felt “sick to [his] stomach” (Labour had promised a lower minimum of £8). But his mood changed when the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) announced that three million families would lose an average of £1,000 a year due to the cuts – even after the introduction of the national living wage. It was Osborne’s refusal to acknowledge the losers, let alone to compensate them, that proved his undoing.

After an interregnum in which Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader dominated the news, an array of individuals and institutions challenged the Chancellor. Boris Johnson used his Conservative conference speech to warn, “We [must] protect the hardest working and the lowest paid.” The Tories’ London mayoral candidate, Zac Goldsmith, and the former leadership candidate David Davis also protested. To the Conservatives’ surprise, the Sun, under its combative new editor, Tony Gallagher (formerly of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail), denounced the tax credit cuts as “bonkers” and demanded compensation for the low paid. Frank Field, the IFS and the Resolution Foundation, now led by Labour’s former director of policy and rebuttal, Torsten Bell, continued to produce an arsenal of statistics showing the losses that the working poor would suffer.

The dry data was given a human face on 16 October when a Question Time audience member, Michelle Dorrell, who voted Tory in May, tearfully lambasted the party for cutting tax credits “after promising you wouldn’t”. As Conservative MPs endured similar protests from their constituents, they questioned Osborne’s judgement. The newly elected MPs Heidi Allen and Johnny Mercer made Commons speeches appealing to the government not to betray “the vulnerable”. After Osborne’s concession, Mercer, a former soldier, told me: “This is how democracy works and we should celebrate it. At no stage have I ever found a minister who doesn’t want to listen to his MPs, who are reporting ultimately what they hear from constituents.” In contrast to the sharply Thatcherite 2010 intake, many of the newest Conservatives are unashamed pragmatists, less preoccupied with theory than with voters' experiences. 

Davis, one of the two original Tory rebels, believes that Osborne may simply have been unaware of the losses that claimants would suffer. “It was probably a technical mistake, because they didn’t do the full impact assessment,” he told me. “The Chancellor was not conscious of what the actual impact would be on relatively impoverished people. We got too far down the pipe before it was realised what the consequences were.” Stephen McPartland, his fellow rebel, said: “Conservative MPs were concerned because they didn’t want to be in a position where they were punishing people who get up and go to work and try to do the right thing.”

Osborne now has a small window, before the Autumn Statement on 25 November, in which to calibrate his response. Tory sources suggest that he is likely to use the fiscal headroom provided by the forecast budget surplus of £10bn in 2019-20 to reduce the tax credit cuts, currently due to save £4.4bn. Conservatives privately express relief that they are facing Corbyn, rather than Yvette Cooper, who they believe would have been a far more formidable opponent.

The Chancellor’s opponents both inside and outside the Conservative Party have drawn satisfaction from his humbling. Yet Osborne is rarely as formidable as suggested in his moments of triumph, nor as feeble as suggested in his moments of defeat. He has been written off before - after the Oleg Deripaska affair, after the "omnishambles" Budget and after the "1930s" cuts  - and recovered each time. His fate is not set. It will be some time, however, before he can once more joke about the “terrible” policies of his predecessors.

You don't get more British than James Bond. On the big screen this week he'll be showing the world how it's done. Tough, fearless, likes a drink and loves his country. For many of us, he's Britain at it's best.
But ask people what they love about Britain and you'll hear a lot more than the qualities of the world's greatest super-spy.
I've been asking people for years just what it is they love about our country. What I tend to hear is a brilliant list of old favourites. The BBC. Beer in a decent British pub. Fashion and fish and chips. Our stunning countryside, chocolate, cider, our seasons and our sense of humour. The great English language. Family, friends, friendliness and football. Law and order, common sense, community spirit. The Royals and rugby. Good manners, queuing and a nice cup of tea. All the things you'd miss if you were scooped up and plonked on a desert island to talk musical favourites with that nice Kirsty Young.
This term, the government has asked schools to step up their work teaching British values to our children - and the nice people from Ofsted will be wandering round with their clipboards to make sure everyone is “with the programme”.
The government's list of British values does indeed have many of the things we want to teach our children. Set out in the 2011 Prevent plan, the 'official' list includes democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, and this is the list schools are asked to teach. It's vital work, because as the prime minister says, we're in a generational struggle with extremism - and our values - not James Bond - are ultimately are most important weapon.
But is the Government's list of “British values” right? And does it work in every corner of the country? My constituency has the biggest Muslim community in Britain, and I've been asking asking residents - young and old alike - what are the values they hold dear?
In multi-cultural Birmingham, people hold the same values dear as the rest of the country; freedom, equality, diversity “tolerance”, and “respect”. Brummies love our city’s people, history, diversity and sense of community spirit. They believe that what makes Birmingham great is that people work twice as hard because of the challenges the city faces.
But all my research tells me, the government is missing something fundamental from the list: good old-fashioned British compassion.
In every survey I've ever done on “British” values, kindness, compassion, “looking after the needy” - and indeed one another - is something people think makes our country special. It's why in poll after poll on our favourite institutions, up there with the Queen and our magnificent armed forces is the amazing NHS. It's compassion in action.
So why don't we add “compassion” to the official list of British values? I think there would two distinct advantages.
First, it would honour the role of faith in our national life. For many, faith is the source of the compassion they put to work making our country an amazing place to live. As one of my constituents put it to me: “Respect for one another, kindness, helping our neighbours, working to do good in our community these are human values that are British and Christian and Islamic”.
But second, compassion is one of the ways we can bring people together in civil society, volunteering and charity work. As the former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks once out it, compassion teaches us how “to build a home together”. What better lesson could we teach our children - never mind each other.
On Monday I asked Nicky Morgan to add “compassion” to the list; in a somewhat lukewarm response, she's promised to “look at it” - and now there's now growing support amongst MP's for an Early Day Motion calling for the change. “Compassion” may not be very James Bond. But “compassion” is Britain at its best. 

When will it come out?

The report is due to be published in the summer of 2016, a letter from John Chilcot on the Iraq inquiry website has announced. The final version is likely to be done by mid-April, then published in June or July after security checking.

Just how long has it taken?

Longer than the Iraq War. The inquiry was announced in June 2009, and began hearing evidence in November of that year. The final report is likely to run to around 2m words, and aims to examine the UK’s involvement in Iraq and “identify lessons that can be learned”.

Why has it taken so long?

Aside from the fact the terms of the report, and the amount of evidence, was vast, Chilcot has also blamed delays on “Maxwellisation” – a legal procedure where individuals are permitted to respond to criticisms in an official report before its publication. According to The Times, accusations that the first draft was “riddled with errors” also caused delays.

The inquiry was originally expected to last around a year.

What will we expect to find out?

The Iraq inquiry website makes it clear that the inquiry “is not a court of law”, and so cannot discuss criminal culpability. “But,” it adds, “if the Committee finds that mistakes were made, that there were issues which could have been dealt with better, it will say so.”

No, seriously though...

All we really know is that the inquiry is going to focus on the run up to the Iraq War. According to the Daily Mail, “Downing Street insiders said . . . that they expect to the report to be a ‘devastating’ indictment of the Blair Government and large sections of the Whitehall establishment”.

You can look at some of the evidence the inquiry has considered here.

Chilcot in their own words

“We are talking about the biggest foreign policy mistake since Suez.” 
Nick Clegg, 2009

“The inquiry needs to be, and needs to be seen to be, truly independent and not an Establishment stitch-up.” 
David Cameron, 2009

"The primary objective of the committee will be to identify lessons learned. The committee will not set out to apportion blame or consider issues of civil or criminal liability."
Gordon Brown, 2009

“I can say that I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong."
Tony Blair, 2015

"My colleagues and I remain committed to producing a report that will meet the very wide ranging terms of reference we were given."
John Chilcot, 2015

Many of the most fervent opponents of the EU are also among the most committed Atlanticists. Uncomfortably for them, the US doesn't share their view. For decades, Washington has favoured more European integration, not less. Henry Kissinger never actually said “Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?” but the line captures the US's view. A country of its size prefers to deal with a bloc of 503 million people than 28 individual states.

At every opportunity, Barack Obama has signalled that he wants the UK to remain a member of the EU. In an interview with the BBC in July, he stated: "Having the UK in the EU gives us much greater confidence about the strength of the transatlantic union, and is part of the cornerstone of the institutions built after [the second world war] that has made the world safer and more prosperous. We want to make sure that the United Kingdom continues to have that influence."

Obama's comments were significant but did little to alter the terms of debate. Now, however, the US has inflicted a far more grievous wound on the Brexit camp. In an interview with Reuters, the country's trade representative Michael Froman has warned that the US would not pursue a free trade deal with the UK if it left the EU (it is close to securing one with Brussels through TTIP). "I think it's absolutely clear that Britain has a greater voice at the trade table being part of the EU, being part of a larger economic entity," he said. "We're not particularly in the market for FTAs [free trade agreements] with individual countries. We're building platforms ... that other countries can join over time." He added: "We have no FTA with the UK so they would be subject to the same tariffs – and other trade-related measures - as China, or Brazil or India". 

One of the great contentions of EU opponents is that withdrawal would improve, not hinder, the UK's trade prospects. They envisage a world in which a swashbuckling Albion strikes bespoke deals with the US and others. Froman's remarks are a hammer blow to this argument. It is precisely for reasons like this that David Cameron, a lifelong eurosceptic, has no intention of campaigning to leave. As Reuters notes: "The US is Britain's second-largest export market for vehicles outside the EU. If Britain is not part of the EU and therefore not part of TTIP, British cars exported to the United States, such as those made by Jaguar Land Rover, would face a 2.5 percent tariff and could be at a disadvantage to German and Italian-made competitors."

The Brexiters can of course accuse Froman of bluffing. Since the US wants the UK to remain in the EU, why wouldn't it take a hard line? Were the UK to actually leave, they will argue, Washington would think again. But their inability to offer this guarantee means the risk attached to exit has dramatically increased. 

A ludicrous article written by the Prime Minister in the Guardian on Monday, claiming that "the Conservatives have become the party of equality," is so far-fetched as to appear to be a bad April Fools' joke come early. David Cameron's particular brand of Conservatism, implemented with even greater verve and vigour since May this year, has created the most unequal society I have seen in my lifetime. And yet his outlandish assertions seem to have been allowed to pass under the radar with little more than a whisper of discontent.

The Prime Minister's self-congratulation stems from the thin claim that it is the Conservatives who are pushing for better protections and fairer treatment for aspiring young people from black and ethnic minority communities, for same-sex couples and for Muslims vulnerable to Islamophobic attacks. Yet it is entirely misleading to suggest that such measures are in any way novelty or can be claimed as the Conservatives' own, and as a Labour Member of the European Parliament, I not prepared to let them get away with it. It was core equality legislation introduced by the European Unio in 1999 which for the first time gave the European community a specific and legal base upon which to take "appropriate action to combat discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation." And it is these very communities that have been hit hardest by coalition and Conservative government action since 2010.

Nor, as a political representative of the North East of England, am I prepared to stay silent over the glaring omissions in the Prime Minister's definition of equality, over his failure whatsoever to mention the economic disparity in the UK that has accelerated at an alarmingly rapid rate under his leadership. My constituency has been disproportionately hit by austerity measures implemented since 2010, ranking highest in terms of poverty, long-term unemployment and young people out of work, and where a further 2,200 jobs are to be lost following the devastating closure of Redcar's steel plant. These people need a voice, and it's my job to ensure that voice is heard.

Before dealing with the holes in the Prime Minister's equality manifesto, it would be helpful to begin by unpicking some of the policies he proudly holds up as evidence of this new brand of "compassionate" Conservatism. First to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, which has allowed more than 15,000 same-sex couples to tie the knot since its implementation in 2013. A victory for the LGBT community, certainly, and one which should be celebrated as one of the greatest achievements for equality and progressive politics in the past century. But no Tory victory.

Perhaps unsurprisingly from the only party not to have gone into the 2010 general election with a single policy on gay rights, whose leader in 2003 voted against the repeal of Section 28, the Conservative wing of the coalition government showed that they wanted as little to do with the Marriage Bill as was humanely possible, leaving it to their Liberal Democrat colleagues to take the lead in announcing its planned implementation. Handed a free vote by David Cameron, more Conservative MPs voted against the legislation than for it. So far, so unimpressive.

What about David Cameron's decision to place racially motivated crimes against Muslims on a par with anti-Semitism? Racism and hate crimes against ethnic and religious minorities are on the rapid rise in the UK, with Islamophobic attacks in London up by 70 per cent in the 12 months leading up to July: any move to tackle such heinous crimes head-on would be laudable if it didn't come from a man whose government has actively stoked the fires of frenzied tabloid scaremongering as Europe faces its biggest refugee crisis since the second world war. "Go home or face arrest" vans, razor wire in Calais and warnings of swarms of marauding migrants flooding our shores demonstrates a party much more content to snuggle up with far right forces than to attempt in any meaningful way to tackle racial and religious prejudice. 

On seeking equality for women Cameron's article is pretty thin, merely stating his party will force company directors to publish data on wage disparity between their male and female employees. That's probably because this government has done more damage to women than any that has preceded it. Whereas the EU has since its inception been fighting to establish equality in the workplace and close the gender pay-gap, the Age of Austerity under David Cameron and his majority male cabinet has seen a series of brutal attacks launched on the female British population on a scale never before seen. According to calculations by the House of Commons Library, 85 per cent of all cuts have been at the expense of women - and that's even before we consider the latest round of planned measures. Women, as primary caregivers and often the lowest earners in society, tend to rely on multiple public services: when social housing, early years education and tax credits are cut, it is women who suffer most. Even worse, the reduction of state funding for women's refuges to its barest bones and a commitment to the outsourcing of local provision for vulnerable women has left these key services struggling to survive, with several being forced to close since 2010.

Indeed, it's the complete and utter failure to include any mention of cuts that make the Prime Minister's assertions about his party's equality credentials are so terrifying. That he published his article on the eve of a House of Lords vote on the future of tax credits for working families is a brazen act of shameless duplicity. George Osborne's plan to slash this support is an unabashed assault on the working poor in our society: escalating rents and the meteoric rise of zero-hours contracts in the UK mean that tax credits for many are the lifeline that ensures they have enough money to feed, clothe and heat themselves and their children. If implemented, it is estimated that three million lower-paid household will lose on average £1,350 per year, plunging 200,000 children into poverty in 2016.

Tax credits are simply the latest in a line of austerity measures that have forced women, the young, the poor and the disabled to shoulder the burden of a crisis not of their making. We are living in an age where "fiscal discipline" means tax cuts to heirs, corporations and high earners, while the sick and disabled are declared fit for work and threatened with a 30 per cent in their weekly benefits. Where young people must pay £9,000 per year to go to university in order to prepare for a 20s spent at home navigating the world of Job Seeker's Allowance, zero-hours contracts and unpaid internships. Where food back use has tripled and the number of people sleeping rough has risen by 55% since 2010. Where the poor die on average seven years younger and become disabled 17 years earlier than their richer neighbours.

The government's planned cuts to tax credits were delayed on Monday in the House of Lords, but they were not defeated. And with a further £7.6 billion worth of welfare cuts still in the pipeline, the worst is surely yet to come - this in the only G7 country already with wider inequality than at the turn of the century. David Cameron's claim that his is the party of equality is based on a paucity of evidence at best and sheer deception at worst, conveniently ignoring any consideration for the people who have been so brutally hit by his five years of leadership. Such a claim would be laughable if it wasn't so tragic.

I've always considered myself to be a gaming aficionado, but the meaning of that has changed in recent years. Because, like many of you, I can't imagine having the time to sit for hour-long digital killing sprees despite the comfort of my sofa.

For gamers, this is the time of the year they've been waiting for, as the new autumn releases continue to pile up like a scene from a Fast and Furious film. There were many blockbusters released in 2015, including The Witcher 3, Metal Gear Solid 5 and Halo 5. Littered between these sequels were genuine originals, such as Her Story and Ori and the Blind Forest.

Ori and the Blind Forest

However, you'll find the unique games are on your phone or tablet's app store from unknown developers, secretly harbouring the real creativity within this massive entertainment industry.

Indie games have come a long way in recent years. There's no denying the latest Witcher game might look great as an enemy's face melts away in pixel-heavy detail. But that adrenaline rush will come and go in waves until you've eventually completed the storyline, and then what? Shouldn't we hold games to a higher standard given they're free to attack more of our senses at once, unlike music and films? Games should be transcendent.

Until Dawn

There are plenty of examples that show games can make you think about things in a much more meaningful way than any book or song. Something like Antichamber is able to freakishly play mind games, by forcing the player to change perspectives in a given situation, which is ultimately the message of the game itself. Others, like Heavy Rain and the recently released Until Dawn, are basically interactive movies, driving this message even further. These titles allow the play to follow the story as multiple characters and make key decisions – however small – which eventually produce one of multiple possible climaxes.

Although these are unique, the biggest shift in more recent years has been due to the prominence of touchscreen phones and tablets with enormous computing power. The total absence of game controllers has led to an explosion of original ideas in the gaming world, mostly from newcomers. Traditional heavyweight developers such as Electronic Arts (EA) and Ubisoft have been pretty much absent. Given the lack of fresh ideas from both of them in recent years, this might actually be a good thing.

Wave Wave

Mobile games are continuing to arrive thick and fast and in all shapes and sizes. Want something that can last five seconds or five hours? Try Wave Wave, which confidently assaults your eyes and ears as you carefully try (and subsequently fail) to guide a line away from obstacles. Or Dark Echo, which cleverly uses the sounds of footsteps and nothing more to create an excellent, faceless horror game.

Other developers successfully tap into the sights and sounds of a previous era to recreate a feeling of nostalgia not experienced by your stereotypical teenage gaming addict, with examples such as Bean Dreams and Downwell.

Bean Dreams

This is a smart way of tapping into the so-called "casual gaming" market, drawing in people who aren't necessarily interested in console-based games anymore, but once were. At first, it may seem as if something like Bean Dreams is emulating the happy charm of Sonic the Hedgehog. However, today's retro-style titles are able to take advantage of the ubiquitous technical horsepower which wasn't available in such abundance in the good old days.

But the mammoth lesson from this new era of gaming is that mobile – and not console  – games are the ones making us really feel in our ever-growing guts.

TouchTone

Just look at TouchTone, a puzzle game with a powerful narrative, forcing you to make morally questionable decisions as an American national security spy. You solve short puzzles that allow you to peek into the emails and internet data of "ordinary" citizens, particularly those with names sounding similar to mine. During the tutorial, messages of encouragement, telling you how important and valuable your work is, are interspersed with others such as, "this is a Wall Street trader, thus not a threat," when monitoring bankers. This satirical zinger makes you think about who really is causing damage to the world in which we live. But before you know it, you're happily investigating private communication with no qualms.

Last Voyage

Some games are so refreshing and bizarre, you can't imagine them ever having a successful place on an Xbox or Playstation. For example, Last Voyage is a dizzying spectacle of visuals which look to have been directly inspired by the space exploration film Interstellar. The developers, Semidome, released this trippy title in April this year.

We're seeing such dramatic change in the industry due mainly to rapidly changing economics. Whereas the latest Grand Theft Auto game cost approximately $260m, something small and beautiful like Monument Valley had a budget of $1.4m and took only a team of eight to create.

Monument Valley

Console games are becoming bigger, more bombastic and riskier to make, just like Hollywood blockbusters, and publishers are pushing to squeeze what they can from their investments, with downloadable extras produced after the initial release, exhausting the potential to focus on new ideas.  

Those games will always contain guns, grey skies and aimless travels. Just leave me in the corner as I glare at my iPhone. I'm so close to finally getting an eagle in Desert Golfing.