Paris was stuck in tragedy on Saturday morning. Terrorists wreaked havoc, murdering 129 and injuring approximately 350 civilians. Now is the time to mourn and grieve for the victims of the attack, so it makes me slightly uncomfortable to write a piece arguing that we shouldn’t let Islamic State define what Islam is.

However, to be clear, I write this not to win a theological debate. I write this, rather, because I fear anti-Muslim bigotry rising considerably in the West as a consequence of this attack. 

The Paris attacks have left us feeling devastated, confused, and powerless. Fear can lead to irrational acts, and already there have been some reports of Islamophobic attacks. A mosque in Peterborough, Ontario, was set on fire Saturday night -- an act that police say was intentional. At a bus stop today in UK, it has been reported that a man shouted: “They need to all die, these Muslims need to die. Look what they're doing in Paris.” 

It can be hard not to fall for simplistic narratives fed to us by mainstream media during such times. After all, it seems more convenient to believe that the Paris attacks demonstrate that there is a war between the West and Islam as it provides a relatively straightforward answer to a largely complex problem. However, such rhetoric, whether we realise or not, only strengthens the narrative of IS.

"Attacks like the ones tonight in Paris are committed to purposely trigger an Islamophobic backlash," writes Nader Atassi, an anti-IS blogger. "That backlash is not an unintended consequence of such attacks; it is part of their logic. Isis wants an Islamophobic backlash because it lends credence to their narrative that there is a war between the West and Islam. By strengthening and emboldening the xenophobic right-wing in Europe, they strengthen their own worldview as well. And the most tragic irony is that the backlash may target refugees who themselves had been fleeing Isis' reign of terror."

As productive citizens who wish to play our part in combating Islamofascism, we must start by acknowledging that the vast majority of Muslims, whether they are conservative or liberal, reject this terrorist ideology. Muslims, after all, are themselves the biggest victims of Islamofascist violence. Ergo, in the fight against Islamofascism, we are together and not against each other.

It can be tempting to see Islam as the problem by cherry-picking certain “violent” verses, and to argue that IS represents “true Islam” since the group happens to take the Quran “literally”. However, literalism was never really the issue; selectivism is.

After all, a literal reading of the Quran would also take into account the fact that it gives permission for combat only in self-defence (2:190, 60:8-9). However, all of this is assuming that religion is the primary motivator in the radicalisation of Muslims, a view that is challenged by most think tanks and experts, including the MI5.

Islamofascism indeed poses a serious threat. This is a complex phenomenon that thrives on different forms of grievances, and can only be eradicated at state level through long-term strategies. However, we have an important role to play, too. On an individual level, we must not play into the hands of IS by granting it the religious legitimacy they crave to attract new recruits.

To counter the appeal of Islamofascism, we have to build bridges of love and understanding between each other, regardless of our differences in metaphysical beliefs. We have to show potential Islamofascists that there is, in fact, no clash of civilizations; just a clash of moral values between decent human beings and mass-murdering lunatics.

Ro Waseem is a liberal Muslim. He runs a weekly blog on Patheos, and tweets @Quranalyzeit.

There is an unpleasant stench in the Hovel. I wonder what it can be. It’s a corpse, obviously. But of what? My ambition? My hopes? It is probably nothing more significant than Mousie having eaten a baited morsel of poison from someone else’s hand and crawled off to die beneath our floorboards.

This has happened before. The pong lasts for a couple of weeks and then it goes away, as I recall. The trick is either to mask the smell with smoke, or to go out as much as possible.

This isn’t so bad. For a start, little can put a dent in my mood at the moment, as I managed to get to the end of last month without having to borrow any money. This was largely because I spent most of October cowering in my room, a hostage to obligations unfulfilled and the usual free-floating paranoia. It will be good to get out. I’d also been watching Roman Polanski’s The Tenant on DVD on my laptop and I can tell you for free that this is not a film that you want to watch if you are living a bachelor existence in a major city and are prone to uneasiness.

So off I go. First, to the bank, to arrange something that is none of your beeswax (but is perfectly innocent). The NatWest on the corner has been making itself pleasant to visit lately, or as pleasant as a bank can be – first, by employing as one of its tellers a woman who looks exactly like Gwyneth Paltrow (but who doesn’t seem like such a drip); second, by removing the flat, blank, white MDF board that commonly stands behind all counter staff in order to give the impression of . . . blank indifference, I suppose.

You can tell that they didn’t want to remove this wall. For there is yellow-and-black gaffer tape all over the floor but behind where the wall stood lies the bank’s big secret: a warren of offices and corridors, at least a century old, in ancient, panelled wood, with cheerful little panes of glass in the door frames; all conspiring to make one half expect to see a bowler-hatted Captain Mainwaring, gas mask slung over his shoulder, drop his briefcase on to the table and say, “Morning, Wilson.”

One day, struck by its charm, I commented on this, and I didn’t like the way my comment was greeted. It was as if I had complimented parents on a child they were actually ashamed to death of.

The bank is now closing for refurbishment. Whether it will be demolishing its secret garden, I do not know – but I know where my money would be if I were a betting man.

I walk past a Chinese restaurant I have not noticed before, Bright Courtyard. I am inordinately fond of Chinese cuisine and inspect the menu. Steamed razor clams with vermicelli and garlic is one of the starters. Yum, yum! The price: £8.50. OK, razor clams are a delicacy. But the next word is “each”. As I recall, a razor clam consists of about four inches of white inner tubing that, whether you like it or loathe it, cannot by any stretch of the imagination be said to be a filling repast. One would need about half a dozen to leave any impression that you had eaten anything at all. Here, you would have to spend over £50. As a friend of mine, new to parenthood, once said in a tone of maximal outrage, when he found out how much a wooden Duplo train cost (not the set; just a train carriage): “I could get sucked off for that!”

Once again I have to accept that one of the prices of living in a swish part of town is that you will not find a takeaway that will give you a stomach-bursting portion of ho fun noodles for under a fiver.

So, off I go to the pub, to see my friend Toby-Who-Is-Not-Toby-Young-How-Many-Times-Do-I-Have-To-Repeat-This?, for a catch-up and a chuckle over the latest Viz. This is all very pleasant but, as I make my way back to the Hovel from Edgware Road Station, I am accosted from the other side of the road by Darren, the manager of the Duke, where I used to go a lot when I had funds.

It is now past closing time but he pours me a whisky and tells me the news: the leaseholder plans to shut the place down and replace it with luxury flats – as if there were any other kind here these days. This, despite the Duke making money hand over fist.

And I think of the bank and the poncey restaurant and all the shit buildings that are going up all over the place and all the rest of it – and I know what has crawled under my floorboards and died. It’s London’s ancient heart. 

The arrival of Edna O’Brien’s first novel in ten years, hyped to the hilt by the publisher and proclaimed as her “masterpiece” in a cover quote by Philip Roth, will not disappoint. Her debut novel, The Country Girls, which broke the silence on sexual and social issues in postwar Ireland, was burned and banned when it appeared in 1960. Over half a century later, O’Brien is the grande dame of Irish literature. Nevertheless, The Little Red Chairs comes out at you with the surprise of a jack-in-the-box.

On a dark and stormy night, a cloaked man appears in the Irish village of Cloonoila. “A woman brought me here,” the stranger explains to the bartender. Pale-faced and weeping, this woman, whose name, Aisling, means “dream”, had said to him, “I am of Ireland.” The stranger’s beloved homeland, he reveals, is a place of snow and wolves in which the glacial lakes are known as “the eyes of the mountains”. The Irish and the Balkan Celts, he continues, are “blood brothers”, both having suffered atrocities. The inhabitants of Cloonoila, believing that a prophet has come among them, are instantly bewitched. What follows is a tale in which dream visions blend into what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history.

The stranger calls himself Dr Vladimir Dragan, or Dr Vlad. “Dragan?” asks the local policeman. “Is it related to Dracula?” “No,” Vlad replies, “but that’s an interesting variation.” As a child he was known as Vuk, meaning “wolf”, and throughout the novel he is variously compared to Romulus, Vlad the Impaler, Gilgamesh, Rasputin, the Prince of Darkness, Dr Faustus, a “Red Indian” and Charles Bronson. In the Balkans, where he is wanted for war crimes, Dr Vlad is known as the Beast of Bosnia and O’Brien has modelled him on Radovan Karadzic, who, as a fugitive in Belgrade, reinvented himself as an alternative psychologist called Dr Dragan David Dabic.

A writer of poetry – “macho” and “rigmarole stuff”, his landlady thinks, “about bullets being slender and majestic” – Dr Vlad compares himself to Ovid, another exile, and to Virgil. His mission, he reveals to the local padre, is to do good in Cloonoila and thus he sets himself up as a sex therapist and healer. In his long black smock, with his white hair in a topknot and his beard flowing (the shamanic disguise also adopted by Karadzic), Vlad works his magic hands over the flesh of nuns in wool knickers.

Wandering the woods collecting fauna and flora – hawthorn for the heart, willow for the gall bladder, lime flower for women going through menopause – Vlad also wanders into the dreams of the draper’s middle-aged wife, Fidelma McBride. In one such dream, he delivers the child she longs for. In reality, Vlad and Fidelma begin an affair. On their first date, they share childhood memories: she tells him about “the skeleton of a rotting horse that died on us” and he tells her about the time his father made him taste the blood of a freshly killed wolf.

When Fidelma sneaks back home, impregnated by her lover, her husband is holding the squeezed and oozing remains of a bat, one of two that he found in the washbasin, “clung together like vampires”. Soon, in a particularly horrific episode, there will be a scene involving a stake.

Throughout the story, other stories circulate, all of unremitting misery. When the kitchen staff at the local hotel – “Irish, Burmese, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Slovakian, Polish” – share their hellish experiences, it transpires that the family of one of the workers was murdered by Dr Vlad. Even the dogs in the kennels where she finds work, Fidelma realises, are locked in their past traumas but, with dogs, “One never gets the backstory.”

When Vlad’s true identity is revealed, he is carted off to The Hague to be indicted for genocide, torture and ethnic cleansing. Thrown out of their home by her shamed husband, Fidelma now joins the wretched of the Earth. In its second half, The Little Red Chairs becomes a state-of-the-nation novel. Working as a night cleaner in London, Fidelma hears more stories about “fractured lives” and begins to confront her own, which she can barely put into words. Her new world consists of “nobodies, mere numbers . . . the hunted, the haunted, the raped, the defeated, the mutilated, the banished”. While she is consumed by self-hatred – “When I menstruate I want to wipe my face in it, to add to the defilement” – Vlad, on trial, is a red-eyed, roaring nutter.

This is a powerfully magnetic and mighty strange novel about a powerfully magnetic and mighty strange man. O’Brien has always told the truth about women and sex and here she confronts the seductive appeal of evil. But, for all its tragedy, The Little Red Chairs ends with comedy when Fidelma and her friends in exile put on a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream– the play in which a queen is bewitched by a herb and falls in love with an ass.

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien is published by Faber & Faber, 320pp, £18.99

In February 2016, the Gibraltar branch of the Unite union is helping to organise a conference to explore Gibraltar’s role in the Spanish Civil War. The event comes in the year in which we commemorate the 80^th anniversary of the start of the civil war, but also takes place not long after the 40^th anniversary of the death of Franco. Doubtless under discussion will be the role that the Rock played in providing sanctuary for over 10,000 Spaniards fleeing the early fighting (and savage Francoist repression) in the neighbouring Campo de Gibraltar in the summer of 1936. But also of note is the solidarity and activism of Gibraltar’s Transport and General Workers’ Union (now Unite) in support of Spanish democracy during the civil war. This ranged from fundraising and parliamentary lobbying on behalf of the Spanish Republic to practical and symbolic assistance. Many Gibraltarian workers offered unpaid overtime in the winter of 1938, for example, in a bid to repair the damaged Republican warship the José Luis Diez. The TGWU’s organiser, Agustin Huart, appeared at one point in the civil war in a Republican newspaper, at the front with a revolver in his hand. His (and the union’s) commitment to those republican refugees left in Gibraltar after 1939 remained unwavering well into the 1950s.

Official and elite interaction across the Gibraltar frontier is widely recognised in the period before Franco’s dictatorship. Most famously of all, British and Spanish officers and aristocrats would join local civilian dignitaries by hunting foxes in the Campo. The ‘Royal Calpe Hunt’ boasted as its joint patrons the kings of Britain and Spain. Dozens of Gibraltar’s wealthiest inhabitants owned businesses across the frontier and built summer houses in the Campo, while local Spanish notables were intimately embedded into the social and economic life of Gibraltar. The Larios family, for example, had property on both sides of the border and the head of the family acted as the Master of the Calpe Hunt for decades. The family also insisted on speaking English and serving meals at ‘English’ times.

As social history has become more common in Gibraltar and the Campo in recent years, a similar picture has emerged for the local working classes, that is to say the vast majority of the local population. Now rescued from what E.P. Thompson referred to as ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, a vivid picture of extensive and daily interaction between Gibraltarians and Spaniards has emerged. This went well beyond the workplace – at times over 12000 Spaniards were crossing into Gibraltar each day to work alongside Gibraltarians – and extended to thousands of friendships, marriages and children. Sport was another bonding agent for the local population, and while football remained the most popular cross-frontier sporting fixture, bullfighting boasted thousands of fans on the Rock.

As noted above, Unite and its predecessor the TGWU are testimony to this shared history of working-class cooperation across the frontier. Few people realise, however, that the origins of organised labour in Gibraltar are not British, but in fact derive from a very different tradition: that of Spanish anarchism. In a recently published article, we have attempted to chart the origins of labour organisation on the Rock. What is notable is not only the fact that early ‘union’ activity in Gibraltar drew its ideological and organisational inspiration from anarchism, but also just how radical and effective these anarchist activities proved to be.

Anarchism was gaining ground quickly in southern Spain in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. While there is great debate as to the reasons for anarchism’s popularity in the region, it is widely acknowledged that one of the principal attractions of the movement was its roots in the everyday experiences of workers, not only in the workplace itself, but also in response to the harsh living conditions of the population and the repressive nature of the Spanish state. Living and working conditions on the Rock were generally acknowledged to be better than those across the frontier, but it should be remembered that Gibraltar was a heavily garrisoned and strictly regulated fortress community in this period. There was also a perception (not always warranted) that the British officers and colonial administration in the territory favoured the interests of local employers and merchants over those of workers. As anarchist ideas were brought to the colony by those thousands of Spanish labourers each day, it is little surprise that Gibraltarian workers found much to commend in the ideas and practices espoused by anarchists.

Continued next week, in which our correspondents explore the effect on business, property and the unions. 

Publisher Bauer Media announced today that it will "suspend publication" of FHM and Zoo magazines by the end of the year. 

In a statement, Bauer explained that mens' reading habits have increasingly moved online and on to mobile, which may explain the decline in sales for the two magazines: 

Over time young men’s media habits have continually moved towards mobile and social and today FHM and ZOO have a combined digital audience of over 5 million.

Despite the size of their online audiences, it looks like Bauer intends to shut down both the print and digital arms of the two magazines. 

FHM (which stands for "For Him Magazine") was launched in 1985, and at its peak was published in 27 countries. It was perhaps best known for its annual "100 Sexiest Women In The World" list, topped this year by Michelle Keegan. Zoo was launched in 2004. 

Nuts and Loaded magazines also ceased publication in the past twelve months, and the four closures may signal an end to the era of lads' mags. The male-targeted magazines dominated the market through the 1990s, but it seems like the rise of the internet (and, perhaps, of online porn) has rendered them obsolete. Looks like we'll be left to figure out 2016's sexiest women ourselves. 

This week in PR news events: Oxford Dictionaries, the brains behind the Oxford English Dictionary, have announced their “word of the year”. True to form, this year's candidate has made a splash online, because it’s not actually a word at all – it’s an emoji.

The chosen picture is what the Unicode Consortium (the wardens of online text and picture characters) calls the “face with tears of joy emoji”. Here are a few versions of it, as designed by different technology companies:

According to the Oxford Dictionaries (OD) website, the symbol was chosen because it “best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015”. According to some academics, emoji is the fastest growing language in the UK. OD partnered with SwiftKey, a mobile tech company, to find the most-used emoji of all, and the rest is history. 

OD’s word of the year tends to resonate with the internet generation in particular. Last year's winner was “vape”; 2013's was “selfie”. It's clear that OD are using a marketing stunt to remind us that its products are still a relevant reference point in the internet age. In fact, this year's winner makes clear that they still want a piece of the pie, even if words are replaced by grinning yellow pictures altogether. 

Accompanying the press release on OD's website is a poll, where you can vote for your choice of word out of this year's shortlist. Other contenders included “Dark Web”, “on fleek”, “refugee” and “ad blocker”. Interestingly, at time of writing, the emoji is running in second place, with 20 per cent of the vote. In first is “they”, when used as a gender-neutral pronoun, with 23 per cent of the vote. 

Perhaps it’s the mood after Friday’s Paris attacks, but the emoji choice felt a little trite, especially when a different, more socially engaged choice has already proved more popular with the public. The announcement usually includes a history of the word in question and its usage, which could have raised awareness around trans language in a positive, celebratory way.

“Word of the year” may be a PR stunt, but it still holds symbolic weight: it sends the message that language change is a good thing, and something we should all take part in, which, after all, is the message we send by using “they” or other non-traditional pronouns. Ah, well. Maybe next year. 

There’s a mutant cow on the roof of my house and I don’t know how to get it down. I don’t even know how to start getting it down. I built a ladder but it just doesn’t seem interested. Sometimes its feet vanish into the roof and it judders about like it’s in a mid-90s music video but most of the time it stands there and moos. For some reason though, it doesn’t bother me. Welcome to Fallout 4, the greatest game yet to feature roof cows.

Fallout 4 is a continuation not just of the Fallout series, but of a series of Bethesda open-world roleplaying games that goes back more than a decade. Fallout 4 could easily have been called Bethesda Open World RPG 5. Like an Assassin’s Creed or Call of Duty game Fallout 4 is a remake of the game that came before. Unlike other developers, however, Bethesda does this right.

The line of games leading to Fallout 4 started with Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. This might seem like an incredibly strange thing to say, given that there were two Fallout games before Morrowind even existed, but while the lore and the setting might be from Fallout, the modern Fallout games are no more sequels to the originals than FIFA is a sequel to Football Manager.

Morrowind was an open world adventure set in a dark volcanic land populated by weird monsters and creepy elves. It was unique, not just because of the scale of the game and the freedom that it offered the players, but because the setting was so incredibly alien, even by fantasy standards. It offered a world of blimp-like floating monsters, giant mushrooms and a mysterious crab who fenced stolen goods. While it was not the first Elder Scrolls game it was Morrowind that established them in their current format, a format that the Fallout series would also adopt.

As good as Morrowind was in its day and as tempting as it is to view it through a nostalgic lens, it was not a game without significant problems. The world building that went into the game is some of Bethesda’s best work and the ambition of the game is awe inspiring given the hardware it was built for, but on a mechanical level it was vital that the series evolved.

At heart Morrowind was very much a number crunching roleplaying game first and an action game second. For instance you could run up to a monster and attack it, but if your character lacked the necessary skills your attack would probably miss regardless of where the blow seemed to fall. This reliance on more traditional RPG mechanics served to paper over the fact that the combat in the games was well below par for an action game. Later games have progressively lightened these systems, trading them piece by piece for a more action based approach.

Some thirteen years and three games later Fallout 4 actually boasts remarkably good combat. Controls are sharp and movement is mostly on par with what you’d expect in an action game. Your character doesn’t start out slow and have to level up their athletics skill as they did in earlier games and weaponry does what it is supposed to do without needing you to have designed a character around being able to use it.

This success is timely because as the statistics and dice based roleplaying elements of the games were discarded over the years the series had settled into a sort of design Purgatory. Skyrim, for example, which Fallout 4 is more closely related to mechanically than Fallout 3, tried for an action oriented combat system but ended up creating something perfunctory and rather joyless. There are still shades of that failure in Fallout 4 of course, some enemies are bullet sponges and plenty of fights can be won by simply wolfing down food or using medical syringes at a faster rate than your enemy can inflict damage, but the progress is clear.

This streamlining has happened throughout the game as whole. Fallout 3 for example had skills, stats, perks, but Fallout 4 has done away with most of these. Everything is now rolled up together into a new system which uses perks to establish what your character is good at, but which still allows the player to point a gun and hit at target as well as they are able. Gone are the strength and skill limitations of Fallout 3 that required players to reach a given level before being able to use certain weapons properly. The character building systems in Fallout 4 go without a level cap, ensuring that for the first time in the series a single character can eventually do everything.

One slightly disturbing trend of this evolution is that Fallout 4 seems so proud of its shiny new combat that it wheels it out a lot. I wouldn’t say that this diminishes the game, but it does change the tone from its predecessors. In Fallout 3 you could complete the game without ever killing anything beyond a couple of roaches in a tutorial, but in Fallout 4 you’re often called upon to act as a one man army. Many of the classic Bethesda McGuffin retrieval subplots have been replaced with assignments to kill everything in a given location. If the next Bethesda game proceeds further down this avenue we might see something more like Golden Axe than Skyrim.

The main diversion from the fighting and snooping around the radioactive ruins of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is building farmsteads and outposts and looking after the settlers who move into them. This element of the game feels like a progression from the systems of home ownership and later home building that have been growing in the background of the series for years. The AI for townsfolk that in the old games saw them tending to their job during the day, going to the pub in the evening and then going home to sleep at night is now solid enough that it can adopt these behaviours in a town of the players own making, rooftop livestock notwithstanding.

It is clear that the extra time between Bethesda games helps immensely. Over the last thirteen years we’ve seen five games, an engine overhaul and a transformation from slightly stodgy niche RPGs to huge multiplatform hits. By contrast if we look at a series like Assassin’s Creed for example, boasting nine major games in eight years, we’re lucky if we get maybe one or two significant changes between them. Assassin’s Creed 4 added naval combat, Unity added multiplayer, Syndicate added a second protagonist, but each game was dogged by bugs, performance issues and an overriding sense that the developers would be too busy working on the next title to fix the one they’d just released. The same could be said about Call of Duty or FIFA. Taking a few years to put some substantial work into the nuts and bolts of these games can yield spectacular results but instead we get treated to overhyped Matryoshka dolls, popping open each year to show us more of the same with a different coat of paint.

It is easy to take a game like Fallout 4 for granted. It is not a game that will often shock those who are familiar with the series. It is not a game that will blow the socks off many people. Yet in spite of that overwhelming sense of the familiar it remains a great game, a victory for idea that practice makes perfect whether you’re juggling chainsaws or building a multimillion dollar RPG. I wanted Bethesda Open World RPG 5, I got it and I’ll probably be playing it until the next one comes out.

The coming referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union is haunted by three referendums: the 1975 referendum on British membership of the European Common Market, the 2011 referendum on the Alternative Vote, and the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

Take 1975 first: the contest of which this one would, in an ideal world – if you are a pro-European or David Cameron – be a straight replay of. A Prime Minister, regarded, despite his election-winning heroics as a vapid show pony by many observers, calls a referendum on the European question not out of a great point of principle, but in order to manage his fractious activists. He secures a handful of token concessions from his European partners, declares a glorious victory – and retires in glory, his chosen successor in Downing Street and his enemies frustrated.

For Harold Wilson in 1975, read David Cameron in 2017 (or whenever the referendum ends up being held). But then, the overwhelming majority of the press backed the status quo – now much of the press will be hostile. As one senior staffer in the In campaign observes, “even those papers who will come down in favour will give Leave a fair hearing – we won’t get the same [in reverse]”.

In 1975, too, Wilson had a helping hand from the headstrong leader of the Opposition, regarded by many as a certain loser, one Margaret Thatcher. Although in retirement Thatcher discovered a rich vein of anti-Europeanism, she was, at that time, a vocal supporter of Britain’s membership of the Common Market.

Jeremy Corbyn may also be headstrong and regarded as a surefire loser by his opponents, but he remains – quietly – opposed to Britain’s membership of the European Union. He does not, in the words of one close ally “have religion” on it in the way that he does on, say, the nuclear deterrent.  But he will not be a loud champion of a “Remain” vote and the prospect of a Corbyn intervention for “Leave” is among the nightmare scenarios for the In campaign.

Also standing in the way of a re-run of 1975 is the quality of the Leave campaign. The election keeping pro-Europeans awake at night happened just four years ago, in 2011. The Alternative Vote started with a  big lead over the status quo in 2011, only to go down to a thumping defeat, being rejected by two-thirds of voters, with just Hackney, Cambridge, Oxford, Islington, Haringey, Edinburgh Central, Southwark, Glasgow Kelvin and Lambeth voting for change.

The campaign against the Alternative Vote, even senior figures admit, was cynical, disingenous, and underhanded. But it was also a textbook case of how to campaign and win – and Matthew Elliot, of Vote Leave was the architect of that campaign.

Before the election, one pro-European Labour frontbencher observed that  “we already know how they’ll play it [a vote to leave the EU]. A few useful idiots from our side, plenty of money from the Tory side and a few seemingly apolitical figures while we run around talking about fishing rights”.

That is, in essence, how Vote Leave hopes to fight and win the In-Out referendum.  But they may not get the chance. They are vying with Leave.EU for the “official” nod from the Electoral Commission to lead the Out campaign. Most Inners would rather face Leave.EU rather than Vote Leave. A Leave.EU campaign is likely to be far more narrow, far more focussed on Ukipesque themes, and would find it “much, much harder” in the words of one Outer, to get the 51 per cent of the vote necessary to leave the European Union.  

The choice for the Electoral Commission is trickier than it looks. Both campaigns have a strong case for receiving the official designation. Vote Leave has the wider political reach – as well as Ukip’s increasingly detached MP Douglas Carswell, it has signed up the Green’s sole peer, Jenny Jones, the Labour MP Kate Hoey and a bumper crop of Conservatives – but Leave.EU’s goes deeper. They have many more activists and social media supporters.

In any case, to the delight of the In campaign, as much as cooler heads would wish it were otherwise, Nigel Farage will play a big role in the referendum – with all the potential that has to put Brexit on the wrong side of a growing culture clash. “The BBC will still book Nigel Farage, whoever is in charge [of the Out campaign],” says one Inner.

That said, a narrow Out campaign, focussed on identity, immigration and Ukip’s other greatest hits, while in many ways the best case scenario for pro-Europeans, will have Labour strategists nervous. That third referendum – the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence – still has Labour MPs nervous. They fear that the In-Out referendum will allow Ukip to do to them in the North what the SNP has done in Scotland. They warn that a Ukip-dominated Out campaign that flops in the South and Midlands but recalibrates politics in the North might be  victory for pro-Europeans; but for Britain’s biggest pro-European party, it could be a victory with a heavy price.

When visiting patients at home, I generally ask for any dogs to be shut in another part of the house. Unlike with cats, which usually ignore strangers, the arrival of an unfamiliar man is of supreme interest to any canine. The more protective and territorial breeds go straight to DEFCON 1. Many are the consultations I have had to conduct above the snarling of an incensed hound, bashing itself against a perilously thin panelled door in a determined effort to get its teeth into the intruder.

Smaller breeds are usually more friendly – although most Labradors are also fairly genial – but this poses its own problems. Dogs are intensely olfactory animals and a new human being brings an enticing smorgasbord of aromas to investigate. It is difficult to maintain a professional interest in Mrs Smith’s breathing difficulties while having repeatedly to remove Fido’s snout from one’s crotch.

An exception to my no-dogs rule was Hector, a white miniature poodle belonging to Gordon and Irene Ives. Gordon spent several years housebound with end-stage heart failure and he was frequently on the list for a home visit. Hector became accustomed to doctors and district nurses calling and would greet each arrival with his tail wagging nineteen to the dozen. Once the initial thrill subsided, he would settle himself on the sofa next to you, contentedly being stroked as you discussed Gordon’s symptoms and charted his slow but inexorable decline.

There were two occasions on which Gordon actually died, with Irene’s frantic 999 calls bringing the paramedics in time to restart his heart successfully. Irene told me that Hector seemed to recognise the difference in these situations and kept out of the way of the resuscitation efforts.

Gordon spent many months living on borrowed time before the third episode of arrhythmia, from which he could not be brought back. We feared for Irene’s emotional health. For years, her existence had centred around caring for Gordon and now, suddenly, he was gone. She had always been somewhat anxious, periodically depending on mild tranquillisers for her “nerves”. Following her bereavement, she developed agoraphobia, which made it impossible for her to attend surgery.

My home visits continued, now focused on helping her through this difficult period. Hector remained as ebullient as ever and there was a difficult disconnect between his playful bouncing on and off the furniture and Irene in her grief and dislocation.

Eventually, though, things improved and I began to see less of Irene. When she did require attention, she would make an appointment. I always enquired after Hector and her expression and the way she talked so fondly about him spoke of the comfort he gave. His need for walks had gradually restored her confidence in going out and he was an irrepressibly sunny companion in the otherwise empty house.

Irene came to see me just after I got back from holiday this summer. I was sad to learn that Hector had died while I was away. It was something we had discussed among the team: what would happen to Irene if she lost her dog, too. However, she told me that, far from a resurgence of grief, her overwhelming feeling was of relief. Now in her early eighties, she had become increasingly worried by the thought of what would happen to Hector were she to die before him.

She confessed to having become preoccupied by disturbing visions of him alone in the house, perplexed, nudging and worrying at her lifeless body. As it was, he had lived out his days in his inimitable style and had been put peacefully to sleep once the vet had diagnosed cancer.

Irene misses him but there has been no recurrence of her anxiety or agoraphobia – something we had thought would likely happen. She seems to have drawn strength from no longer having to worry about his future. At some point, though, I am bound to pay another visit to her home, and it will be strange not to see Hector there.

“If you had asked most mainstream development experts in the year 2000 to name those factors they thought would most imperil their efforts to reduce poverty globally in the new millennium, it is highly unlikely they would have mentioned a sudden radical spike in the price of the principal agricultural commodities, and the staple foods made from them, on which the poor of the world literally depended for their survival.” By 2006, as David Rieff goes on to show, prices of wheat, rice, corn and soybeans began to rise steeply on world markets. In Egypt, the price of bread doubled in a matter of months, and by some measures the food bill of the world’s poor rose by roughly 40 per cent. The result, in 30 of the world’s worst-affected countries, from Ethiopia to Uzbekistan, was a rash of bread riots. Food prices peaked in 2008, but rose again, almost as sharply, in 2010 and 2011, and the rising cost of bread was among the triggers of the Arab spring.

Why were the experts so unprepared? One reason is that most of them believed that a formula for ridding the world of poverty had been found. All that was needed was the will to apply it, and this determination already existed in the many transnational institutions and NGOs dedicated to eliminating hunger. As Rieff writes, “The consensus in the development world is that the early 21st century really marks the ‘end-time’ for extreme poverty and hunger.” The Reproach of Hunger challenges this consensus, showing it for what it is – an ideology that simplifies the causes of extreme poverty and systematically underestimates the difficulties of eradicating it.

Rieff’s insight that the development consensus is ideological in nature is crucial for understanding the flaws in current thinking about hunger. The movement against global poverty imagines that it transcends political divisions yet it demands deep changes in the prevailing world order. Some in the movement want to insulate food from global markets; others favour “philanthrocapitalism” – a benignly transformed utopian variation on the existing economic system. But what all versions of the ruling consensus on hunger have in common is that they promote a radical political programme yet refuse to think politically about the limits of what can be achieved.

Chronic malnutrition and famine cannot be understood, let alone prevented, if they are detached from the realities of power. Consider the role of war. As Rieff writes, “While there have been famines in times of peace, there have been few major wars without famine.” Somewhere between 50 and 72 million people died on account of the Second World War. Roughly 20 million deaths were caused by hunger, about half of them in the Soviet Union. The famine in Greece in 1941-42, when some 300,000 people perished out of a population of less than 7.5 million, was mainly a result of plunder by German occupying forces and a British naval blockade. Exacerbated by a harsh winter, the last European famine of the Second World War occurred in those regions of the Netherlands still under German occupation in 1944-45.

Going further back, the Great Irish Famine of 1845-50 and the Great Bengal Famine of 1943-44 were both artefacts of imperial rule. The Soviet famine under Lenin in 1920-22 occurred during a civil war, but the famine in Ukraine in 1932-33 was a direct result of Stalin’s policies of collectivisation. The Chinese famine of 1958-62, which Rieff describes as “probably the most lethal single event in history”, was caused largely by Mao’s disastrous rush to industrialisation. Summing up, Rieff writes: “To the extent that one can view the last part of the 19th century as the age of imperialist famines, it is equally appropriate to view much of the 20th century as the age of socialist ones.”

All these famines were a result of the exercise of power. None of them came about because of the gap between food production and a rising population postulated in the theories of Thomas Malthus. Yet the clergyman-economist, whose forebodings are dismissed nowadays by citing the enormous increases in agricultural productivity achieved over the past decades, may yet have a point with regard to the future. “The stark fact is that to avoid famine recurring throughout a world that now has seven billion people and will almost certainly add two billion more by 2050, and possibly another billion in the two decades after that, agricultural production will have to increase unceasingly,” Rieff writes.

Maybe this increase will occur. GM crops may enhance agricultural productivity in the 21st century as the Green Revolution did in the 20th, while the dire effects of climate change – in many countries a grave threat to food production – may somehow be neutralised. Yet even if so, it does not follow that hunger can be eradicated any time soon. Those who look to technology for a quick fix to hunger assume that the global food crisis is fundamentally a problem of supply: in fact, it is largely a matter of distribution. The crucial preventative of chronic hunger and famine is not technology but access to food, which can only be secured by having decent and effective governance.

This is the message of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, whose work has had such a formative effect on thinking about development. Sen has declared that “famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties, and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort”. He cites as evidence for this view India, which has not suffered famine since the end of British rule. Yet if democracy is what is needed, famine will not be easy to prevent. Sen published his declaration in 1999, a time suffused by democratic triumphalism. The picture looks rather different today. Is there anyone – aside from incorrigibly delusional liberal interventionists – who believes that functioning democracy is possible in Syria or Libya in the near or medium-term future? Equally, is it true that only democracy can reliably prevent famine? One need not be an uncritical admirer of the post-Mao regime in China to accept that it has presided over the biggest and fastest decline in extreme poverty in history. The largest obstacle to preventing hunger in recent years has been failed states, not a lack of democracy.

The conquest of hunger is as much a matter of politics as it is one of food production, if not more so; and the politics of hunger is not at all simple. As long as there are wars, civil conflicts and collapsed states there will be hunger, sometimes chronic and extreme. But no public official will admit this fact. To the ruling culture in development agencies, well captured by Rieff, realistic thinking is a type of sacrilege against humanity:

There has come to be something almost impious in denying that all societies and all human problems this side of mortality can be radically made over and suffering brought to an end. And by definition, in a progress narrative, the good eventually triumphs and the bad is defeated. In this universe, perhaps more emotional (not to say narcissistic) than it is moral in the proper sense, it is almost an assertion of one’s membership in the party of the good not to treat sceptically the claims that the world is on the cusp of being made anew that are routinely made by development and aid officials from major Western governments.

Between 1992 and 2004 Rieff worked as a correspondent in some of the world’s most dangerously conflicted regions – the Balkans, Rwanda, Congo, Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. It was during these years that he became interested in the “humanitarian” dimension of conflict, spending time in refugee camps and with UN agencies charged with relieving suffering. Today he is convinced that “the age of humanitarian war is largely over” and in this he is surely right. The idea of humanitarian warfare has been compromised by murky policies of regime change, and the most savage conflicts are being waged in regions where the UN and other transnational agencies have little leverage, such as Syria and Iraq. The question is whether the ambitious goals of the development movement – such as “ending hunger” within a decade – may not prove similarly ephemeral.

Rieff does not presume to answer the question definitively, but his unflinching analysis is an invaluable corrective to the happy-clappy unreality of much of our current thinking on hunger. A forceful critique of the ideology that has captured many transnational institutions in recent decades, The Reproach of Hunger is a substantial work of political thought.

Rieff cites the work of Cormac Ó Gráda on the history of famine as being “enormously important”, and Eating People Is Wrong . . . shows why this is so. Dealing with some of the most horrendous aspects of famine, the five essays collected here are meticulously scholarly and at the same time arrestingly vivid. The first of them discusses “famine’s darkest secret, a taboo topic”: cannibalism. “The horrors of famine include child abandonment, voluntary enslavement, including resort to prostitution, and the rupture of communal and neighbourly loyalties. But perhaps the greatest horror of all is being the victim (or even worse, the perpetrator) of cannibalism.” Ó Gráda is referring not to “customary cannibalism” – the ceremonial or ritual consumption of human flesh in non-emergency situations – but to the practice of cannibalism during life-threatening food shortages. It’s not only “survivor cannibalism” – survivors consuming the bodies of those who have already died – that occurs during famines. There is also what he calls “murder cannibalism”, or killing people in order to eat their flesh. In Russian, he tells us, there are different words to describe killing human beings for food and the consumption of human corpses. In Sichuan in China in 1936, according to a historian
whose work Ó Gráda cites, human flesh was sold at varying prices depending on whether it came from a corpse or someone freshly killed, the latter being more expensive.

Although famine cannibalism has never accounted for more than a minuscule fraction of famine deaths, it remains a continuing object of horror and fascination for what it shows of the fragility of human bonds in extreme situations. Yet by no means all famines have led to cannibalism. Ó Gráda cites a study suggesting that in the Soviet famine of 1920-22 the practice was linked with an atmosphere of despair and cruelty that was absent from the Biafran famine of the late 1960s and the Sahel drought of 1972-73. There is no evidence of cannibalism in the Great Bengal Famine, which is considered in illuminating detail in the longest essay in the book. Aside from dismissing cultural (and racist) explanations that invoke the idea of savagery, he does not attempt to account for some famines producing cannibalism and others not. Rightly, he believes there may be no simple explanation.

In the book’s penultimate essay, “Great Leap into Great Famine”, Ó Gráda considers the largest recorded famine in human history, which occurred in China as a result of the Great Leap Forward, “a reckless and misconceived campaign aimed at greatly accelerating economic development”. He describes the ensuing catastrophe, which led to widespread cannibalism in a country touted by its rulers as “the ultimate paradise in history”, as being “in a league of its own”. He is critical of recent work on the famine, notably Frank Dikötter’s pioneering study Mao’s Great Famine (2010), describing it as “highly politicised”. But as Ó Gráda acknowledges, this was a disaster whose scale was “both ‘hidden’ and ignored for several decades”. When a lack of food has been caused by politics, and then covered up for political reasons, a political judgement cannot be avoided. In these circumstances a stance of detached academic neutrality is impossible – and, to my mind, not desirable.

At the end of Eating People Is Wrong . . . the author declares:

Eliminating hunger is not at all as straightforward as the marketing agencies and street canvassers employed by some NGOs imply. In the past some development agencies had a tendency, understandable and well intentioned, to exaggerate the risks and dimensions of famine; today they risk a similar mistake by exaggerating the benefits of foreign aid and making conquering hunger seem “easy”. The NGOs have the major advantage of being for the most part corruption-free, and they have a lot of experience. But their efforts are constrained by vested interests, by power politics, by geography, by poverty, by ignorance, by cynicism, and by false analysis.

One might go further. Leaving out politics has been the besetting weakness of the dominant consensus on hunger. The underlying assumption is that conquering hunger is a goal everyone can agree upon. But governments and those over whom they rule have other priorities, and these come from political decisions. Such choices cannot be made by aid agencies, however well funded or strongly committed.

Formulaic solutions for ending hunger – more aid, better development programmes – are like the grandiose theories of human rights to which everyone defers these days; pleasant-sounding ideologies that conceal and deny the realities of human conflict. We can’t know when the next famine will occur, but it will be a by-product of war and politics. Whenever it does happen, it’s a safe bet that development experts will be as surprised as they were by the outbreak of bread riots just a few years ago.

The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice and Money in the 21st Century by David Rieff is published by Verso, 432pp, £20. Eating People Is Wrong and Other Essays: on Famine, Its Past and Its Future by Cormac Ó Gráda is published by Princeton University Press, 248pp, £24.95

Three is apparently the magic number when it comes to predicting another global financial apocalypse. Fears of an impending collapse have been ignited by an IMF stability report that cited a “triad” of risks – instability and recession in emerging economies, growing burdens of debt and discord in the eurozone, and fragility in global markets – that combine to offer a telling insight into when the world economy might tank once more. The Bank of England’s chief policymaker, Andy Haldane, has also argued that the emerging-market crisis of 2015 can best be understood as “Credit Crunch: Part Three” (part two being the eurozone wobble of 2014).

Crunchtime

Having spent recent weeks on the road promoting my book Crunch Lit, which examines the impact of the 2008 crash on culture, I think these claims can seem nothing if not a bit predictable. Indeed, given the lack of change since 2007-2008, it’s remarkable that talk of a third-wave financial crisis has taken this long to emerge. We are suffering from a global debt hangover, and no number of credit-bought bacon sandwiches can make it all better. Booms and busts are a cyclical, symptomatic feature of the failure of contemporary capitalism. Many of the toxic practices and cultures that characterised the 2008 crisis not only remain but have been compounded by an over-reliance on anticipated growth in markets (such as China) that has veiled broader economic weaknesses. Although sequels are notoriously ropy, present signals suggest that Credit Crunch III could be every bit as edge-of-the-seat scary as parts one and two.

No Womancession

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 was widely dubbed the “Mancession” as a reflection of the male-dominated composition of the banking sector. Since the crunch, many female financial leaders have united in calling for reform and review. The lethal testosterone of the pre-2007 banking sector even led some to speculate that if women had occupied more top positions in economics and politics, the credit crunch might never have happened. This is why I’m so encouraged by the creation of the Virago/New Statesman Women’s Prize for Politics and Economics, which will be awarded to a new female writer on economics or politics who shows originality and rigorous thinking. Although the irony of a publication called the New Statesman offering this intervention will not be lost on some, the prize nevertheless intends to identify, encourage and promote women writing in male-dominated fields, and will have a judging panel comprising three women and one man. Writings on economics and politics are a reflection of the worlds they capture, worlds in which women remain relatively invisible.

Red Kensington

As a recent returnee to northern climes (I’m originally from Newcastle), I was encouraged to hear that Labour has decided to relocate its HQ outside Westminster. Currently based in Brewer’s Green – a five-minute walk from parliament – the party is being forced to move because of the commercial redevelopment of its rented premises. Yet in a move that would astound even Kirstie Allsopp, it has decided to pick up sticks and move to the Conservative stronghold of Kensington. The average house price in Kensington is £1.4m, and (with an awkward serendipity) the republican Labour leader will now have the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as his neighbours.

As the move is only temporary, I’d like to use this article to issue an open invitation for the party to head north. The IPPR think tank claims the north is suffering from “devo-disarray”, and who can blame it? In recent months, 38 different cities and regions have submitted bids for more powers but without any sense of what these might be or how it might happen. Giving parliament and parliamentary parties a physical base and presence beyond the capital would be an important step towards figuring it out.

Party up north

Thanks to the post-crash property bubble, northern cities are littered with unoccupied and competitively priced office space. As a self-confessed fan of trains, Jeremy Corbyn will know that Leeds and Manchester are little more than two hours from the capital. So, is it time for Labour to move north? In an
era of austerity and devolution, such a move would address not only cost issues, but also an ongoing tension between the experience of the 99 per cent of the UK and the 1 per cent of Westminster. Dan Jarvis, the Labour MP for Barnsley Central, has called for the creation of a “Northern Powerhouse” in which “the daughter of a cleaner from Kingstone in my constituency will have the same opportunities as the son of a barrister from Kingston-upon-Thames”. But this new “SuperNorth” rhetoric will become a reality only when one of the two main parties takes action to prove that you don’t have to live and work within the M25 to direct debates about the future of the whole country.

Momentum in time

It’s been nearly six months since Corbyn was thrust into the spotlight as a late game-changer in the Labour leadership election. Chairing his Northern Futures campaign policy launch in Leeds back in June, I witnessed the effect his new approach to politics has on young people: very rarely have I had to admonish students for trying to break into a political rally.

Now Jeremy’s urgent challenge is to maintain momentum, not just in the shape of the newly formed Labour organisation of the same name but also in offering workable alternatives. Immigration, the economy and security will define the teenage years of this century, and now is the time to see original interventions from a leader who, this summer, inspired all those of us in search of something different.

Katy Shaw is principal lecturer in contemporary literature at Leeds Beckett University. Her book “Crunch Lit” is published by Bloomsbury

A classy start to the former London mayor and world's most divisive newt enthusiast Ken Livingstone's new role in the Labour party. Having just been appointed to lead a review into Labour's defence policies, Livingstone hit out in a deeply insensitive outburst at one of his critics in the party.

Kevan Jones MP questioned Jeremy Corbyn's decision to put a famously anti-nuclear politician in charge of reviewing Labour's stance on replacing Trident, which triggered Livingstone's offensive outburst to the Mirror:

“I think he might need some psychiatric help. He's obviously very depressed and disturbed.

“He should pop off and see his GP before he makes these offensive comments.”

Three years ago, Jones spoke about his mental health problems in parliament, explaining how he had been suffering from deep depression. He calls Livingstone's comments "gravely offensive not just personally but also to the many thousands who suffer from mental illness", adding that "offensive statements like this just reinforce the stigma about mental illness".

Livingstone denies that he was aware of Jones' history of depression, claiming he hadn't heard of the MP before now, and has refused to apologise.

Ken Livingstone tells me he was not aware that Kevan Jones suffered from depression - but refuses to retract his remarks.

— Pippa Crerar (@PippaCrerar) November 18, 2015

Livingstone refuses to apologise FOUR times on LBC re Kevan Jones comments. "He was rude about me, I was rude back..he needs to get over it"

— Craig Woodhouse (@craigawoodhouse) November 18, 2015

A spokesperson for Corbyn urges Livingstone to apologise:

"Jeremy is incredibly concerned that people with mental health problems shouldn't be stigmatised. He has worked with Kevan in the past on this issue and is impressed by his bravery in speaking out on his own mental health issues. Ken should apologise to him straight away."

And Labour's shadow mental health minister Luciana Berger has also condemned Livingstone's comments:

My response to @ken4london's mental health related comments pic.twitter.com/YyRMzpaQm0

— Luciana Berger (@lucianaberger) November 18, 2015

But there is one person defending poor old Ken! And that person is George Galloway. Yep.

the witch-hunt turns on Ken Livingstone. Tooth by tooth claw by claw they are trying to defang JC. I defend Ken. pic.twitter.com/4xeTxC7gxc

— George Galloway (@georgegalloway) November 18, 2015

After several days of struggle within Labour over foreign and security policy, the news that Ken Livingstone will co-convene the party's defence review has provoked further unrest. To the surprise of some, the Trident opponent and former London mayor revealed the appointment at a Left Book Club event last night. 

The fear among pro-nuclear MPs is that Livingstone's involvement will increase the chance of the review endorsing unilateral disarmament. But an aide to Maria Eagle, the shadow defence secretary and a Trident supporter, emphasised to me that she would "still be leading" the work. It is standard practice for each commission to be co-convened by a National Executive Committee member (as Livingstone is). 

When I recently interviewed Eagle, she told me that the review would examine Trident "with a completely open mind" on "the basis of facts and figures", adding that she was "not ruling out" backing unilateral disarmament. But the shadow defence secretary, who rebuked Jeremy Corbyn for saying that he would never press the nuclear button, also conceded that it was "unlikely" she would change her view. Before the review concludes, Labour will be forced to take a stance on Trident in the Commons, with most shadow cabinet members expecting Corbyn to offer a free vote. After the recent annual conference voted not to the debate the issue, the party's official policy remains to support full renewal. 

Since Corbyn's election, Livingstone has been one of his most prominent and loyal allies. Two of his former City Hall aides, Simon Fletcher and Neale Coleman, serve as the Labour leader's chief of staff and director of policy. Following the recent suspension of Corbyn aide Andrew Fisher from Labour, for allegedly supporting rival candidates, Livingstone told me: "All the MPs pushing the campaign against Fisher are people who want to get rid of Jeremy. It’s no good all this lot saying we can never win with Jeremy when they’re doing everything to undermine any chance of winning the next election by being divisive." He added that disciplinary action should be taken against Simon Danczuk, for revealing details of a private meeting with Corbyn in the Mail on Sunday, and Frank Field, for urging Labour MPs to trigger by-elections and run as independent candidates if deselected by left-wing activists. 

20-26 November Issue
The Age of Terror

A special issue: How Isis threatens the world

Shiraz Maher: Isis is determined to draw western nations into a war of conquest.

John Bew: It's decision time for Britain - will we join the fight against Islamic State or sit on the sidelines?

Letter from Paris: Andrew Hussey on a sleepless, grieving and edgy city.

Laurie Penny: Isis wants a holy war. The West must not play along.

Barbara Speed: Why the "Snooper's Charter" won't help - those who plot terror are always one step ahead.

Helen Lewis: How jihadi magazines are helping Isis win the propaganda war.

George Eaton: Why Labour MPs fear Jeremy Corbyn's response to the Paris attacks makes the party look soft on national security.

The NS Profile: Colin Robinson on Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old socialist shaking up the US presidential race.

Books of the Year:Michael GoveKazuo Ishiguro Chris Patten Hilary Mantel John Bercow Margaret Atwood Alan Johnson William Boyd Rowan Williams Clive James Rachel Cooke Alexander McCall Smith Leo Robson Andrew Marr A S Byatt Mark Damazer Vince Cable Mark Lawson Lionel Shriver

Letter from Oxford: John Simpson on the Cecil Rhodes statue that's causing jitters among the university's grandees.

A new Clive James poem: "The Wren and the Coconut".

***

Cover Story: Shiraz Maher

In the wake of the Paris attacks, Shiraz Maher argues that at some point IS will turn its attention to the West. Although the group is preoccupied for now with tightening its grip on the Middle East, he warns that "there is no eventuality in which we could expect to escape its sabre-rattling indefinitely".

For all its nihilistic sadism, IS is a rational actor. The group controls a large landmass, enjoys autonomy and makes claims to a revived caliphate. That is a project it wants to continue expanding and consolidating by being left alone to overrun the Middle East, a process that involves massacring minorities, including the Shias, Christians, Yazidis and Kurds. If the West intervenes in this it must be prepared to face the prospect of mass-casualty terrorism at home.

Some will invariably argue that this is precisely what we should do. Leave them to it: Islamic State may be distasteful, but the cost of acting against it is too high. Besides, we cannot police the world, and what concern is it of ours if Arab societies implode in this way?

This view overlooks a broader (and inevitable) strategic imperative that can never be divorced from Islamic State. The group's millenarianism and commitment to eschatological beliefs are such that it wants to be left alone - for now.

IS ultimately believes it must confront and then defeat the West in a comprehensive battle between haqq and batil: truth and falsehood.

Maher believes that after the attacks on Russian and French civilians in the past fortnight, "the wider world is finally realising that Islamic State is a threat it cannot afford to ignore".

John Bew: Syria, Islamic State and why Britain now stands at a crossroads

In a bullish essay on British foreign policy, John Bew, NS contributing writer and author of Realpolitik: a History, argues that it is decision time on Isis and Britain can no longer justify sitting on the fence.

On Sunday night, two days after the Paris attacks, the French - with US support - launched a series of bombing raids against Islamic State targets in Raqqa. With much more to come the choice facing this country may not be easier but it is certainly clearer. Britain must determine whether it wants to be a viable and genuine partner in the fight against Islamic State, and in the long-term efforts to bring an end to the assorted evils of the Syrian civil war; or whether we are content to sit on the sidelines and cheer on former team-mates without getting our knees dirty

We can join our two most important allies - France and the United States, at the head of a coalition involving a number of Arab and other European states - in confronting a threat that potentially is as grave to us as it is to France, and certainly more dangerous than it is to the US. Alternatively, we can gamble that others will do the work for us, keep our borders tighter than ever, double down on surveillance (because that will certainly be one of the prices to pay) and hope that the Channel and the security services keep us comparatively safe. There is no fantasy middle ground, where we can shirk our share of the burden on the security front while leading the rest of the world in some sort of diplomatic breakthrough in Syria; or win a reprieve from the jihadists for staying out of Syria (yet hit them in Iraq), through our benevolence in opening the door to tens of thousands of refugees, or by distancing ourselves from the ills of Western foreign policy.

Bew addresses the five "flimsy" objections to military intervention in a recent Commons foreign affairs select committee report:

The most flimsy [. . .] was that it will somehow diminish the UK's leverage as an impartial arbiter and potential peacemaker. This is based on an absurd overestimation of the UK as some sort of soft-power saviour, valued by all parties for its impartiality in Middle Eastern affairs. Britain cannot hope to have any influence on policy if it is always last to sign up while others put their lives on the line. As so often in the past, what masquerades as tough-minded "realpolitik" is nothing of the sort. It is just another post-facto rationale for inaction.

Bew insists that "if we have a declared national interest in curtailing Islamic State and stabilising Syria [. . .] it is neither honourable nor viable to let others take care of it on our behalf".

Letter from Paris: Andrew Hussey on a sleepless, grieving and edgy city

Andrew Hussey, the author of The French Intifada: the Long War Between France and Its Arabs, describes the eerily sinister atmosphere in the French capital after last Friday's attacks. By Sunday, Hussey, like others in the city, was drawn out on to the streets in the "abnormally good weather":

It was as if, after a grim Saturday when the city was all but deserted, we needed to reassert our presence, to take up again the everyday pleasures of living in Paris. I went with my wife for lunch at one of the classic brasseries - the Zeyer - in the 14th arrondissement, where I live. For some reason I had an instinct to live well and do something Parisian. I was not alone. The place was packed with diners.

The Zeyer is quintessentially Parisian - a big, bustling eating machine, serving up a menu that has hardly changed in a century (it has been here since 1913). The waiters were funny and charming; the choucroute and wine were delicious. But, after the horrors of Friday night, as you sat in full view of the street, it was all too easy to imagine a gunman blasting a hole through the plate glass and to see the scene as a slaughterhouse. It took real effort not to be scared. And although the restaurant was alive with chatter, people had only one topic of conversation: are we now at war? And what does it mean?

Hussey points out that the area of Paris where the attacks took place was chosen very carefully: "this is the home of the anti-establishment Parisian left, people who read Libération and Les Inrockuptibles" as well as a "pleasure centre" of the city, which was "an obvious affront to angry puritans of radical Islam". Rumours that concerts at the Bataclan were used to fund causes in Israel may have made that venue a target, Hussey suggests. He argues that the images of the attacks beamed around the world are now critical to the Isis war strategy:

It is now nine years since Martin Amis used the term "horrorism" to describe the spectacular forms of violence that define contemporary terrorism. He was writing about the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC, trying to understand what had happened at the beginning of the century, "what was revealed to us" in the "vehement and desperate nostalgia" that led to mass murder: "maximum malevolence", in Amis's words.

For Amis, 9/11 was not just an atrocity but the spectacle of an atrocity. This was what made it so terrifying. It is as if, following Guy Debord, what terrifies us most in the society of the spectacle is not just the experience of death but the image of death, transmitted globally. That is the terrible game of war that the radical Islamists are playing.

At the local level, there is now the feeling that we are on a front line and that bad things can happen to any of us at any time in France. That is why Paris remains so sleepless and edgy.

Laurie Penny: Isis wants a holy war - but the West must not play along

In a column for this week's issue, Laurie Penny argues that to close our borders and surrender to bigotry after the recent terror attacks would be to hand Isis an immediate victory:

The morning after the murders, the people of Paris queued up to open their veins. In the days after terrorists from the apocalyptic cult calling itself Islamic State had slaughtered 129 people in Paris and 43 people in Beirut, ordinary Parisians queued for hours to give blood, even though the number of donors outstripped the number of wounded.

Of all the illogical responses to great violence, the impulse to give blood is perhaps the most sweetly symbolic. Terrified human animals come forward to offer, quite literally, the contents of their hearts, because they have no idea how else to help.

[. . .]

The unity that terrorists fear is not unity of opinion or outlook. It is unity in principle. It is commitment to the principle that every human life is of value, that pleasure and diversity and liberty are not to be thrown away the instant some psychopath opens fire in a restaurant. We cannot say for certain that opening Europe's borders would not allow a few terrorists to cross over into our cities along with hundreds of thousands of needy innocents. What we can say for certain is that closing those borders would allow the terrorists into our hearts.

Kindness, diversity and decency are weapons that can only be brought to one battlefield, and it happens to be the one territory that Isis cannot afford to lose. It is the territory of the collective human imagination, and it has no borders at all. We are allowed to be shocked. We are allowed to grieve. But if we allow ourselves to be provoked into bigotry, cruelty and intolerance, then the terrorists will have won. It's the only way they ever get to win.

George Eaton: As the threat from Isis grows, Labour's internal warfare will only get worse

In this week's Politics column, George Eaton considers widespread consternation in the Labour Party occasioned by Jeremy Corbyn's response to the 13 November terror attacks in Paris. Labour MPs fear his remarks will leave the party open to accusations of being soft on defence:

When Jeremy Corbyn remarked two days after the Paris attacks that he was "not happy" with a "shoot-to-kill" policy against terrorists, it was the 1980s that MPs recalled. Shadow cabinet ministers suggested that it was the killing of three unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar in 1988, rather than the present threat of Islamic State, that shaped his thinking.

The former cabinet minister Ben Bradshaw told me: "The first responsibility of any government is the protection of its citizens and the defence of the realm. Trust in Labour on these issues was hard-won in the Eighties and Nineties and any equivocation on such vital matters is unhelpful."

Corbyn's riposte is that, far from preserving national security, the policies pursued by the Conservative government and its predecessors have undermined it. In a speech that was postponed after the Paris attacks, he was expected to say that "a succession of disastrous wars" had "increased, not diminished the threats" to the UK. Even some MPs who share this view fear that he will not win a hearing for such arguments after his recent statements. Outraged emails from voters and Labour Party members followed his comments on shoot-to-kill, they say. In their constituencies, MPs are asked how a leader who has declared that he would never use the nuclear button can defend the nation.

PLUS: Trident opponent Ken Livingstone to co-convene Labour defence review

The news that Ken Livingstone, an opponent of the Trident nuclear defence system, is to co-chair Labour's defence review with Maria Eagle was broken by the NS political editor, George Eaton, yesterday on Twitter. Read Eaton's analysis of the appointment here.

The NS Profile: How Bernie Sanders, the only socialist in the Senate, is shaking up the presidential race

Colin Robinson considers the rise of Bernie Sanders, the junior senator from Vermont. Until recently, Sanders was regarded as a political outlier - but is he now America's answer to Jeremy Corbyn?

One thing is immediately striking: as he addresses primary rallies across America, arms flailing like a giant bird coming in to land, snow-white hair fizzing skywards like Doc Brown's in Back to the Future, eyes startled behind the thick spectacles he has worn since childhood, Bernie Sanders looks quite unlike any other presidential candidate.

Perhaps the surprise in those eyes is sparked by the size of the crowds Sanders has been attracting. They are enormous, rivalling the numbers who turned out for Barack Obama back in 2008, and unprecedented for a candidate who is not shy of describing himself as a socialist: 28,000 in Portland and LA, 25,000 in Boston and 15,000 in Seattle. Even in Dallas, not a renowned centre of radicalism, 8,000 turned out to "feel the Bern".

In these days when slick suits and pricey haircuts are increasingly a turn-off for a public weary of smooth politicians who deliver for only the wealthy, Sanders's persona, like that of Jeremy Corbyn, his equally unkempt British counterpart, has proved popular. But it is his message - an angry chronicling of the depredations facing so many Americans and a robust social-democratic programme for putting things right - that is really pulling in the crowds. Sanders, who is 74, and the main challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, doesn't just look different. With his confident calls for a "revolution" to break up the banks and impose higher taxes on the rich, he doesn't sound like any other recent presidential contender, either.

Books of the Year

This week, we asked friends and contributors to choose their favourite reads of 2015.

The Justice Secretary Michael Gove's recommendations have a distinctly Gallic flavour: Michel Houellebecq's Submission (William Heinemann) and Ken Kalfus's novella Coup de Foudre (Bloomsbury USA) are both fictionalised accounts of French presidential elections. Gove applauds Kalfus's story, based on the fall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as "psychologically brilliant". John Bercow meanwhile, as a devoted fan of Sarah Waters, rushed out to buy The Paying Guests (Virago), "an upmarket, literary version of Columbo with passionate, although sadly secret, lesbians". Douglas Alexander's more sober selection is Anne-Marie Slaughter's Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family (Oneworld), which "sheds fiercely honest light on the choices women face in today's homes and workplaces".

Top of the list for both Rowan Williams and Lucy Hughes-Hallett is Death and Mr Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis (Jonathan Cape), a novel that Williams describes as "a wonderful re-creation of the imaginative world in which Dickens and his collaborators discovered Pickwick and his companions". Chris Patten's somewhat darker choice is The Cartel (William Heinemann) by Don Winslow, a thriller about the Mexican drugs wars which, Patten warns, is "not for the squeamish".

Both William Boyd and Craig Raine choose David Hare's memoir The Blue Touch Paper (Faber & Faber) which, Raine writes, "includes a droll account of Hare's time as a vacuum cleaner salesman in New York. A customer points out to him that 'Hoover', the term he favours in his spiel, is the name of a rival brand. He is representing Electrolux. Death of a salesman." James Shapiro's 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber & Faber) similarly gets a double endorsement. Both the NS editor, Jason Cowley, and Mark Lawson delight in this sequel to 1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. In one chapter, Shapiro turns his "X-ray brain" to the single Shakespearean word "equivocation" over 30 insightful pages.

Alan Johnson favours Kate Atkinson's A God in Ruins (Doubleday) for its profound exploration of "humanity and its frailties". Clive James, whose new poem "The Wren and the Coconut" is published elsewhere in the issue, has the highest praise for Alexandra Harris's work of cultural criticism Weatherland (Thames & Hudson): "her book is so beautifully written that it transcends even its wealth of information. She is a poet scholar."

Alexander McCall Smith's patriotic choice is Scotland: a History from Earliest Times (Birlinn) by Alistair Moffat. "Scottish history is full of tears and triumphs, moments of glory and deep despair," he writes. "If you want to understand Scotland, start with Moffat." His countryman Andrew Marr recommends The Illuminations (Faber & Faber) by Andrew O'Hagan, "a cracking novel" about being a British soldier in Afghanistan: "O'Hagan is as unsentimental a writer as I can think of and there isn't a maudlin sentence in the book."

John Simpson: Letter from Oxford

In a despatch from the city of dreaming spires, John Simpson reports on a row that has broken out over the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College:

You've got to look quite hard to spot it: a statue four feet high, rather attractive and informal, way above street level, on the façade of Oriel College on the High Street in Oxford. The only way you would know that it was Cecil John Rhodes, apart from the Latin inscription beneath the figure, is that he is wearing a three-piece suit and holding his familiar slouch hat in his right hand. Around this manikin a row of surprising proportions has arisen.

It is a by-blow of the much greater and far more serious dispute in South Africa, in the course of which Rhodes's statue at the university he helped found in Cape Town has been hustled out of sight after being smeared with paint and excrement and surrounded time and again by angry, chanting students. Now the slogan "Rhodes must fall" has been picked up in the quieter atmosphere of Oxford. Oriel, which Rhodes briefly attended, is the centre of the fuss because it commemorates him with the statue in question. All this has given rise to an air of nervousness among some elements of the university hierarchy. But is it justified?

Simpson observes that although Rhodes, "outspokenly racist and imperialist", was not "a nice man, even by the standards of the time", he was an "extraordinary" figure who also created "one of the most effective in the modern world - the Rhodes scholarships". For Simpson, "the past is the past" and bringing down an imperialist's statue will neither change it nor help us progress:

The desire to cleanse history of its unattractive sides isn't restricted to Southern Africa. But the past is the past; it can't be changed. Charles Conn, Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford, who oversees the Rhodes scholarships, says: "We should interrogate history, of course, and learn its lessons. Nearly all historical figures held views at odds with our perspectives today. Rhodes, Jowett, Jefferson, even Gandhi, had beliefs that we find out of touch and even abhorrent. But we don't serve the pursuit of knowledge if we agree to airbrush or bulldoze history."

Cambridge Literary Festival - 28-29 November

The winter edition of the Cambridge Literary Festival, supported by the New Statesman, will see the editor, Jason Cowley, in conversation with Vince Cable, deputy editor Helen Lewis chair a debate on "the personality of power" with Dan Hodges, Anthony Seldon and Owen Bennett, and the NS culture editor, Tom Gatti, in conversation with Kevin Barry, the author of Beatlebone and winner of this year's Goldsmiths Prize.

Plus

Kevin Maguire's Commons Confidential: Comrade Corbyn's edict to shadow cabinet Castros, Robert Halfon's East India Club trysts with "Tory totty", and why Alan Yentob is in the firing line for the collapse of Kid's Company.

Caroline Crampton on the landmark trial of Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi for acts of "cultural terrorism".

Yo Zushi on the final volume of Simon Callow's life of Orson Welles.

Mark Damazer reviews two vast histories - The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley and Human Race by Ian Mortimer.

Will Self finds himself chowing down at the Cereal Killer Café on Brick Lane, the epicentre of London's hipsterville.

Film: Ryan Gilbey explores the difference between art and pornography as explored in Gaspar Noé's Love.

Daisy Dunn relishes the ancient Roman machinations in Robert Harris's Dictator.

India Bourke meets the mental health campaigner Rachel Kelly.

On newstatesman.com: Glen O'Hara on Jeremy Corbyn, a Labour leader without historical precedent.

Wadia, a village in north Gujarat, close to the Rajasthan border, is famous for prostitution. Aside from a few exceptions, most of the boys are raised to be pimps, and the majority of girls, some as young as 12 years old, earn a living selling sex. 

Men come to the village from as far afield as Ahmedabad, Pakistan, Rajasthan, and Mumbai to buy sex, with rates beginning at 500 rupees (£5).

The 600 inhabitants of Wadia are descendants of the nomadic Saraniya community. Saraniya men once worked for the army, which ruled over the region prior to India’s independence from Britain in 1947.

Ever since, realising how much money could be made from the sex trade, the majority of men in Wadia have continued soliciting buyers for their sisters, daughters, aunts, and even mothers.

I head out to Wadia from Gujarat’s main city, Ahmedabad, accompanied by a driver and translator, during Diwali. After almost four hours on the road we reach a hilly terrain and are directed onto a narrow road. Off this are several hamlets consisting of a few huts made from wood and plastic sheets.

I was told that it is unsafe for anyone to travel alone near Wadia. As my driver asks passersby for directions to the village he is warned by several that it is “bandit country”.

“It is very dangerous in Wadia,” says one elderly man walking his small herd of goats. “You will be robbed and maybe even worse.”

As we approach the village, the car is surrounded by a group of young men, all with sharp haircuts, designer jeans, diamond earrings, and good jewellery. They ask the driver why we are heading to Wadia, and whether we are carrying any weapons.

Arriving in Wadia I am met by Amr (not his real name), one of the main pimps in Wadia. Amr, who is in his 20s, speaks good English. He has whitened teeth and is wearing a large diamond earring. Amr immediately calls the man he refers to as the chief of the village, who quickly appears, dressed all in white and with his face hidden behind a large white scarf.

I am led to the porch of the village shop where at least 40 boys and men are gathered. I am given sweet, milky chai in a saucer and one of the two plastic chairs to sit on. The chief takes the other.

I ask Amr if the police try to impose the rule of law on the village. “They are corrupt,” he tells me. “Many are customers.”

No women or girls are visible as we arrive, and when I ask if I could meet some of the women, I am told, emphatically “no” by the chief. I ask why. “Because they will be scared of you,” he says. “They will think you are a police officer.”

There have been occasional attempts from outsiders to prevent the sexual exploitation that has become the fabric of Wadia society.

Vicharti Samudaya Samarpan Manch (VSSM), an NGO working to improve the education and welfare of nomadic tribes in the region, decided that the only way to break the cycle of prostitution was to marry off as many girls as possible. In March 2012, a mass wedding ceremony was organised at which eight young women were married and twelve girls, aged between 12 and 17, engaged. Some of the bridegrooms were regular sex buyers at the village. Most of the women, once married, would still be required to sell sex, with their husbands living off their earnings.

Daughters of prostituted women in Wadia are considered unmarriageable, so they too are forced into prostitution as the only way to survive.

During my tour of the village, on which I was accompanied by a reluctant Amr, I saw several women and girls, dressed in pink or red saris, scurrying into their huts when they spotted me. One woman was going into a half-erected brick building with a man I assumed to be a sex buyer.

My translator tells me that each of the newly-built houses are brothels, and the old huts are the family homes. “Ninety nine per cent are prostitutes,” he says. “The man with the white handkerchief, big broker [pimp]. His wife, mother, sister, daughter – all prostitutes.”

I ask Amr what age the girls start selling sex, and was told, “not before 18”, but according to VSSM it can be as young as 12. I was told by Amr that the women all like their work; the customers are never violent; there are no STIs; and that at most, only one-fifth of the women in Wadia are in prostitution.

Despite the obvious poverty in the village, there are also pockets of wealth. Many of the older men had expensive iPhones, and three of those I met were attending colleague in Ahmedabad.

“The women are in [prostitution] for life”, Amr tells me, as I say goodbye, “They are illiterate, it is all there is for them.” Clearly pimping is more lucrative for the men than prostitution is for the women.

On asking my colleagues involved in the sex trade abolitionist movement in India if they had heard of Wadia, I soon discovered that this tiny village had almost the same notoriety and potency as Nevada, the only state that allows legal brothels in the US.

Wadia is far away from the legalised sex industries of Nevada, Germany and the Netherlands, but it has something fundamentally in common with those prosperous nations.

Where prostitution is seen as part of the economy and a job like any other, and men are given free reign to treat women’s bodies as a commodity, gender equality will remain a distant dream.

Julie Bindel is a journalist and author. Her book about the international sex trade will be published by Palgrave McMillan in 2016

It was at the close of the exchange between David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn that the defining moment of today's PMQs came. Having so far avoided attacking Corbyn over his remarks on "shoot-to-kill" (I'm not happy"), Cameron finally fired. "Hasn’t it come to something when the leader of the opposition thinks that the police, when confronted by a Kalashnikov-waving terrorist, isn’t sure what the reaction should be?" he cried. By saving his barb till the end, Cameron left Corbyn with no chance to reply. "Of course I support the use of whatever proportionate and strictly necessary force is required to save life in response to attacks of the kind we saw in Paris," the Labour leader clarified the day after his remarks. But as his MPs feared, it was the original quote that damned him and which the Tories will repeatedly recall.

The session had begun in an appropriately sombre manner, with Corbyn asking a series of non-contentious questions on support for British nationals affected by the Paris attacks, the risk of a rise in Islamophobia and the need to cut off Islamic State's funding. The exchange turned more political when Corbyn raised next week's Spending Review. Cameron refused to say where the extra funding for the security services would come from and highlighted Andy Burnham's support for 10 per cent "efficiency" cuts when challenged over falling police numbers. When Corbyn used his final question to press him on whether neighbourhood policing wouldl be protected, Cameron shot to kill. 

It was an apt demonstration of precisely what Labour MPs fear: that Corbyn's contentious statements will undermine his wider message at every turn. Their leader, they fear, will never win a hearing on police cuts and security funding if voters do not trust him with the basic duty of national defence. It was left to shadow rail minster Jonathan Reynolds to rouse his colleagues' spirits, referring to Cameron as "the new leader of the anti-austerity movement in Oxfordshire" in reference to the PM's recent letter. As laughter reverberated around the chamber, a blushing Cameron explained: "What I said to my local council is what I say to every council, which is you’ve got to get more for less, not less for more ... If his council would like to come in and get the same advice, I’d gladly oblige." 

Teenagers in Wales believe it is important that Welsh remains a living language, but fewer than half believe they will go on to speak it as adults. This is what we found when we surveyed over 800 young people from across Wales about their attitudes to the language.

Our initial results show that despite the Welsh government’s efforts to create an “infrastructure” for the language so that Welsh speakers can use it on a daily basis, there is still a lot of work to be done. The narrow vote in favour of Welsh devolution in 1997 was seen as a defining moment in the history of the Welsh language. The Welsh Assembly was heralded as the ultimate tool to safeguard the language, which had consistently been declining throughout the 20th century.

Initially, things looked very promising. The 2001 census results seemed to mark a historic turnaround in fortunes for the language, showing a 13 per cent increase in the number of Welsh speakers since 1991.

Yet this proved to be a false dawn. In 2011, the numbers of Welsh speakers had again declined, with 19 per cent of the population “able to speak Welsh” compared with 20.8 per cent in 2001. Disappointingly, this decline also included the younger age groups, aged between five and 15, which had shown slight increases in ability in previous years.

To address this decline, in 2011 the Welsh government published the policy document Living language: a language for living. Its aim was to ensure that Welsh remains a living language used in everyday life – as opposed to a language merely associated with school or “high culture”.

Over the past few years my colleagues and I at WISERD Education have been visiting schools (both primary and secondary, Welsh and English medium) across Wales surveying different groups of children as they pass through key phases in their education. In one survey done between April and July 2013, we asked 849 students, drawn from Years 8 and 10 (aged 12-13 and 14-15), their views on the Welsh language.

Attitudes v practice

The students were generally positive towards the language, with 75 per cent feeling that it is important that Welsh “remains a living language”. Of those we surveyed, 65 per cent of students claimed it was important for them to learn Welsh – a positive sign for the Welsh government’s strategy – although only 59 per cent stated it was important to “actually speak Welsh”. This also raises the spectre of a disjuncture between attitudes and practice.

Welsh became a compulsory subject up to GCSE level in English medium schools in Wales in 1999. This is still a controversial issue and our findings provide some food for thought. When asked how much they liked Welsh as a “subject”, only 28 per cent of children said “a lot”, while a significant minority – 32.5 per cent – said they did not like it at all.

An interesting link also emerged between attitudes towards the language “in general” and attitudes towards Welsh as a subject. Students who disliked Welsh as a subject were also more likely to think that it is not important to speak Welsh.

Unsurprisingly, when we broke these figures down further, children in bilingual or Welsh medium schools had a more positive attitude towards Welsh as a subject. Where children live was also key: students from the Welsh-speaking heartlands were far more likely to enjoy Welsh as a subject. This may well be down to how relevant the language seems to children in their daily life, and how frequently they hear it spoken in their community.

The significant amount of negative attitudes towards Welsh as a “subject” should be of interest to the Welsh Government, in particular when it comes to sustaining the widespread goodwill towards the language.

Use of Welsh in everyday life

We also collected data about language use outside the school gate. When asked “how likely is it that you will speak Welsh as an adult?”, only 45 per cent of fluent Welsh speaking students stated “definitely”.

When even fluent speakers feel that they will not use Welsh in everyday life, this suggests that the language infrastructure remains weak, and that Welsh remains far from a “living language”.

In a follow-up “snapshot” survey of 366 of the same Year 8 pupils, only a small minority reported using Welsh “infrastructure” in everyday life: only 5 per cent visited Welsh websites, only 9 per cent read Welsh books or magazines, and only 17 per cent watched Welsh television or listened to Welsh language radio.

So positive attitudes towards the language are widespread, but ultimately, goodwill is not enough to sustain a language. For Welsh to remain a “living” language, infrastructure is central. This means that Welsh speakers should have easy access to Welsh language services – transport, customer services, paying bills – so that they can use the language in everyday life.

The Welsh government recognises that this infrastructure needs to be creative and modern, with a vibrant media landscape (including social media) being of critical importance. But there is clearly a lot of work to be done to establish this, as English remains the language of the internet and media, and ultimately of everyday life, with children very rarely using the Welsh language outside school.

Daniel Evans is a researcher at WISERD, Cardiff University

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

“Hi Enda,” one tweet began chirpily. “My ovulation day was a week ago today. 11 more days of freedom. And then it’ll be a bloody nightmare.” Another message, directed at Ireland’s Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, was less flippant: “1st period since my stillborn baby. I carried her for 6 weeks after her diagnosis, losing my mind with grief.”

Over the past weeks, Irish women have been tweeting details of their menstrual cycles at Kenny, using the hashtag #repealthe8th – a reference to the Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution, which puts the foetus’s life on an equal footing with that of the pregnant woman. The campaign was started by a stand-up comedian called Gráinne Maguire, who decided that if the state was going to take an interest in the contents of her uterus, it would only be fair to offer regular updates.

Here in England, we are used to thinking of the abortion debate as settled – frequent raids by MPs such as Nadine Dorries and Fiona Bruce notwithstanding. Across the Irish Sea, the situation is very different: an estimated ten women a day travel outside Ireland to have an abortion because the procedure could get them jailed for 14 years at home. The referendum on gay marriage – which was won by LGBT campaigners in the summer – was supposed to mark the birth of a new, more liberal, less religious Ireland. But feminist campaigners complain that it is impossible to get the country’s politicians to engage with the abortion debate at all. (Kenny has stonewalled those chasing a response to the period tweets.)

In Northern Ireland, access to abortion is also severely restricted because the Abortion Act 1967 was not implemented there. Women on both sides of the border are seeking their own solutions: going abroad or ordering drugs online.

In June, 215 Northern Irish women wrote an open letter admitting that they had used such drugs – and daring the government to arrest them. (It did not.) That gesture became a cause célèbre on social media, as did the period tweets, suggesting that there is an international appetite for revisiting the issue. This has prompted feminist activists to ask themselves: is it better to fight by drawing attention to the big, global picture, or by staying local?

Their opponents have made their choice. In the US, for example, “pro-life” activists have long tried to chip away at the Roe v Wade judgment at a state level after getting nowhere with the Supreme Court. And that is what Labour’s Yvette Cooper fears will happen as abortion law is devolved to Scotland under the post-referendum settlement. “It would be naive to think that anti-abortion campaigners won’t try to change the law or to test the commitment of the Scottish Parliament over its new jurisdiction,” she wrote in the Guardian. “Surely we are stronger if we stand together?”

Some campaigners disagree. One told me that devolution was a chance to make the law more liberal in Scotland and then to try to make England and Wales catch up – and that Labour risks looking parochial in questioning a done deal.

Whatever happens, both the jokey tweets and the serious questions show that abortion is back on the political agenda. 

The Lib Dems have stepped back from the brink. Until Tuesday, and while the rest of the world’s attention was focused on Paris, it appeared the party, not content with being half-buried by the electorate in May, was intent on finishing the job off itself. "When you're in a hole, stop digging" is the usual advice; instead, Lib Dems have been busily arming themselves with spades.

What was the cause of this internal strife? Nothing to do with policy: no rows over Trident or the economy or anti-terror legislation. Instead, it was the slow-burn fall-out from the Lord Rennard saga. 

Last week, the self-governing group of Lib Dem peers voted by a 2:1 majority to offer its seat on the party's ruling Federal Executive (FE) to its former chief executive and campaigning guru.

It was Rennard who was at the centre of allegations of sexual impropriety that exploded into the headlines almost three years ago, following the decision of four long-standing female Lib Dems – including a former special adviser to Nick Clegg – to go public with their complaints against him on Channel 4 News. The party found itself engulfed in crisis, paralysed by its own due process.

A QC’s investigation concluded that, "the evidence of behaviour which violated the personal space and autonomy of the complainants was broadly credible". However, as the party’s rules at the time required that disciplinary charges could only be brought against a member if allegations could be proven beyond reasonable doubt – a high threshold he felt could not be met – it was recommended no further action be taken.

With the peer still protesting his innocence, an independent report by businesswoman Helena Morrissey acknowledged this unsatisfactory "not proven" limbo satisfied no one, but that "there is no justification for [the party] remaining ambivalent towards Lord Rennard – he should be just as welcome a participant or guest at party events as any other".

Except, of course, he isn't. At least not to those many friends and sympathisers of the women, all of whom stand by their accusations and have since resigned from the party. And although Tim Farron had publicly stated when running for the leadership "I have no intention of appointing him to any role", he was unable to stop Lib Dem peers, who fiercely protect their independence, from restoring Rennard to a position of power. 

It was a deeply provocative choice, highlighting not just their lack of accountability (to the party, let alone the public) but also their political naivety. Ill-judged public interventions by Rennard’s colleagues – Lord (Tony) Greaves hand-waved the allegations away as “relatively minor” – further inflamed matters. 

A group of Lib Dem activists set up to ensure harassment has no place in the party – whose name "Rock the Boat" is a declaration of intent to ensure members don't feel guilt-tripped into silence to spare the party's blushes – successfully gathered the required number of signatures over the weekend to trigger a special conference. This – only the second in the party's history (the first rubber-stamped the coalition) – would have voted on whether to abolish the Lord's representation on the FE.

And so the party seemed set on a path of mutually assured destruction. Farron and party president Sal Brinton (one of Rennard’s colleagues in the Lords) had been trying desperately behind the scenes to defuse the situation. In the end, the Lib Dem leader issued Rennard with an ultimatum: stand down or I’ll publicly call on you to resign. When an extended Sunday night deadline passed, Farron made good on his threat.

Rennard blinked: within an hour, he’d announced his decision to resign from the FE, noting that a special conference would "make the party look absurd, cost a great deal of money that is needed for campaigning, and do nothing to heal the divisions".

A crisis averted, then, with Farron’s leadership strengthened (albeit at the cost of further damaging his already strained relations with many of the party’s peers), as well as a sharp reminder that the Lib Dem grassroots don’t care to be trampled on.

Yet few expect this to be the end of the affair. The Rennardites feel a man who’s never been found guilty of any wrongdoing has been shabbily treated by the party that’s been his life. The Rock the Boaters feel that Rennard is symbolic of an entitled bullying culture in politics that for too long has gone unchecked. Both sides are resolute – which means resolution is a distant hope.

I don’t remember the first time I used the word “kike” in a game of Scrabble on my phone. Understandable, I suppose, seeing as I play a lot of Scrabble and none of it is memorable. But I do remember – how do I explain this without sounding like a dick? – the vibe that, err, engulfed the time in my life I started using a racial slur against my own people to win at Scrabble. It was an, “I’m not sure I like this, but I’m gonna do it anyway” vibe.

Kike is a nasty word. It’s also a useful one, Scrabble-wise. Or (and feel free to call this confirmation bias) at least it has been for me, since I discovered it was playable. It’s become a recurring theme in my Scrabble games, as if Heinrich Himmler is trying to contact me from beyond the grave, via my phone. Maybe, I reason, this is my way of reappropriating such an offensive word. There must be at least one neo-Nazi out there who’d be horrified to think that an actual kike is using the word “kike” to dominate Scrabble, while already dominating the media and international banking. On her own. From her bed. Surrounded by empty crisp packets. Well, I need something to keep me entertained while I guard my massive pile of gold.

There are lots of rules to offensive language. Being, for example, both a dyke and a kike, I have the right to sprinkle my prose with those words like politically incorrect hundreds and thousands. I just did it, in fact. And I’d do it again. And, on the off chance that you’re a) neither of those things yourself and b) reading this aloud, perhaps to someone who is, maybe you feel a bit uncomfortable. And you should feel uncomfortable, because that’s how this whole – not altogether that convoluted - thing works. It’s why I’d never use words that don’t belong to me, like “tranny” or “nigger”. Except I just did and, believe me, I feel weird about it. Both of those words, by the way, are allowable in Scrabble. Although, according to Collins, the official Scrabble dictionary, “tranny” is an abbreviation of “transistor radio”. Because that’s definitely what people mean when they shout it at everybody from drag queens to folks who don’t look exactly like those symbols off of toilet doors.

But, according to recent YouGov research, released by Stonewall, one in five British people surveyed admitted to making offensive comments about LGBT people in the past year. A lot of these remarks, of course contain words like “dyke” and “poof”, which – honest to god – I thought were dying out. I’ve been called a “dyke”, non-ironically, a grand total of once. And who, apart from actual queers with either a good sense of humour or some kind of reappropriation agenda, is still using the word “poof”? Are they old? Do they know it’s not the Seventies? Should someone tell them about 9/11 and Jimmy Savile?

The evolution of homophobic language is interesting. The most up-to-date slur for “lesbian”, for example, appears to be “lesbian”. That’s to say, the few occasions on which I’ve had a word yelled at me while, say, holding hands with a woman in public, that word has been “LESBIANS”. Which, if I were being generous, I’d say is more tactlessly observational than offensive. A bit like seeing Iain Duncan Smith and yelling, “IAIN DUNCAN SMITH”.

So, while I’m not surprised that a lot of people are still using homophobic slurs (hey, have you met people? They’re idiots) I am surprised that me and my faggy (I can say that, right?) brothers and sisters are still known, by anyone other than each other, as “poofs” and “dykes”.

What’s more though, according to that same YouGov survey, no one’s really doing anything about this spate of retro bigotry. Sixty per cent of people admitted to not intervening when they hear others being loud and proud with their homophobia. Which, again, I’m going to file under “sad but not surprising”. I put it down to that very British thing of “either get extremely involved, or don’t get involved at all”. I.e. drop bombs on entire countries, but don’t say, “poor form, old chap”, when you hear someone in the office use “gay” as a pejorative. After all, they might object to your objection. It could get slightly uncomfortable. Slightly uncomfortable. Another option, of course, would be to avoid embarrassment by launching a cruise missile directly at their face.  

Bomb the homophobes? Your thoughts, Mr Corbyn?