In an age of greatest hits, best evers and one-and-onlys, classical music has become a lone voice of moderation in a clamour of superlatives. As an industry we’re modest to a fault, ruthlessly chopping down our tall poppies with chastening reviews and damnings with faint praise, subjecting our artists to the kind of demanding scrutiny that only comes from love and just a little bit of obsession. So while the Grammy Awards are a technicolour extravaganza (only outdone by the MTV Awards) and even the edgy Mercury Prize sprawls over front pages and column inches, it’s fitting that the annual Gramophone Awards were announced quietly last night in a Hawksmoor church in North London.

Fitting, but also frustrating. Taking place within weeks of the Classic BRIT Awards – the commercial face of classical music – the Gramophone Awards risk being obliterated by their louder rival. Voted for by critics rather than by the public (as is the case for the BBC Music Magazine Awards) or industry members (the Grammys, Classic BRITs), the Gramophone Awards are easy target for those already inclined to see classical music as a whispered conversation among the ivory-towered elite.

But while democracy in music has given us One Direction, meritocracy has given us Domingo, Monserrat Caballe, Menuhin and Glenn Gould. Classical music doesn’t need to shout, but that’s no reason why it shouldn’t.

A major change this year saw Gramophone’s individual category winners announced in advance, saving only the public-voted Artist of the Year award and the Record of the Year for the ceremony itself. This gave us several weeks to pore over the eleven winners – Jonas Kaufmann at his peak in Wagner, a vividly quirky Trittico from Antonio Pappano and the Royal Opera, the baroque glories of the Gabrieli Consort’s Venetian Coronation, bold, generous performances all – before they were obscured by the big winner. It’s a shift to a savvier, more commercially-minded approach and not before time. Only through exposure, through champions, highlights and yes, even short-cuts, can classical music reach audiences in the current digital babel.

When the Gramophone Awards were launched in the 1970s the recording industry was a simpler and smaller affair. Each week saw a fraction of the new releases we have now, with radio the only real alternative to buying records. Now, with the amount of digital content available online doubling year-on-year, and a bewildering amount of amateur as well as professional music available to us all digitally, is the very notion of expert-driven awards outmoded?

Quite the contrary. Over-exposed as we are, ears dulled by the constant demands of music in shops, restaurants, on the radio and on the internet, this is the time when we are most in need of curated listening, as Gramophone editor James Jolly explains. “It’s wonderful to live in this age of spectacular excess but every so often you just want someone who knows their stuff to choose and play you the best music.” Far from excluding new listeners, awards like these invite them to cut straight to the good stuff, to defer the learning curve until after they’ve seen what lies at the top of it.

Setting the curve in 2013 with a winning Record of the Year was Moldovan violinistPatricia Kopatchinskaja performing concertos by Bartók, Eötvös and Ligeti. It’s a wonderful result, in large part for being so unexpected. Smart money might have been on vocal winner Jonas Kaufmann, nominee Joyce DiDonato or even Gramophone’s most-awarded artist John Eliot Gardiner. A victory for Kopatchinskaja and three 20^th and 21^st-century concertos is a victory for grit over polish, for challenge over comfort. This young artist is not one to mince her musical words. Sacrificing beauty for emotional engagement she risks much, and to reward this daring with a win at such an early stage in her career sends a vital message to an industry of retouchers and studio edits that truth is more valuable than the loveliest of illusions.

Gramophone’s 2013 winners – Kopatchinskaja, Gardiner, trumpeter Alison Balsom, guitarist Julian Bream among them – are serious musicians. Their job is to perform to the best of their ability, to answer eloquently in interviews and choose daringly in their repertoire. Ours is to shout about the results. Classical music itself may still escape the vulgarity of hyperbole and excess that dogs the pop music industy, but if we are to have a hope of keeping it that way then we may have to risk a little vulgarity ourselves in promoting it. I’m holding out for a Gramophone Awards ceremony with elephants, Rhinemaidens and a chorus of thousands – after all, it’s what Verdi, Wagner and Mahler would have wanted.

Britain is being held back by the view that our future is a foregone conclusion. Whether the conversation is about deficit reduction or social change, there is a suffocating pessimism about the next decade. Yet the world that generated the financial crisis is also one in which global poverty has halved in 20 years. The world that produced climate change is also one developing house paint that generates solar power. We must never doubt the capacity of human creativity to solve our problems and secure progress.

It is up to the left to restore faith in Britain’s prospects and its people; to champion how and why – even in hard times – change for the better is both possible and desirable. There is no doubt that some are better equipped than others to navigate the challenges of the 21st century. Our purpose is not to fear or deny those inequalities – in resources, or skills, or confidence – but to understand and overcome them.

This is not a matter of more spending or more government. It requires putting members of the public in charge of their own destiny so we can prevent problems rather than just mitigating them. Such people-led politics is the way in which we save money and secure better outcomes for all. Radical and difficult to implement though it may be, it is the progressive future for which we fight.

The coalition’s failures show how the most expensive strategy of all is limiting your ambition to an accounting exercise, setting your goals by the money you have. Three years of salami-slicing budgets has led to increased costs elsewhere, whether through youth employment, underemployment, homelessness or household debt. This is a damning legacy in itself. Yet the travesty is just how many challenges of our generation remain overlooked: an ageing population, sustainable growth, stubborn inequality. Reform has been driven by a narrow focus on current costs, not concern for the future.

The discussion of the reorganisation of our NHS has been dominated by the working lives of professionals who run it, not the changing health needs of the population. Education policy has been defined by an obsession with who is running schools, when our children need preparation for a digital economy where “jobs for life” no longer exist.

Those on the lowest incomes pay the greatest share of earnings in taxes, and so we have a duty to secure value for money. But our aim is social justice, not just efficient fiscal management. We know an unequal society is also a wasteful one. We all lose out when talent goes unrealised, whether in the child who might have grown up to cure cancer if given the right encouragement, or the invention that could cut carbon emissions, had the investment been there.

If we wait for problems to arise before we act, it is those with the least resources and fewest opportunities who suffer the most. Only 20 per cent of public spending goes on preventive policies, with 40 per cent covering the bill for failing to intervene earlier. We cannot afford to keep working this way – financially or socially. People-led politics means rebuilding our economy to help citizens become more resilient and more open to opportunities. It means reforming public services so that they don’t just tackle problems, but avert them.

With the pace of change in the global economy, no one can take his or her job for granted. British businesses are challenged every day by new players in different countries. The main threat to our living standards hinges on our ability to compete on an international scale. “Robosourcing” – machines doing jobs that were once done by people – accounts for more evolution in employment patterns than immigration. Our future prosperity will depend on our personal and national capacity to create and add value.

In this capitalist maelstrom, the potential for progressive revolution resides in human innovation. As the economist Adam Lent argues, the means of production are increasingly in the hands of workers. Starting a business once required considerable capital outlay. Now broadband and a PayPal account will do. Our youth embrace this. In 1998, just 17 per cent of 18-to-29-year-olds wanted to start a business –now it is 30 per cent.

This ethos hasn’t been created just by the rise of the internet. The new enterprising spirit is no more defined by new hardware than the 1980s were defined by fax machines. This is a grass-roots, pioneering mindset – and it can be harnessed by the left. An economy which nurtures that spirit needs a government that invests in platforms for collaboration. Mentoring young entrepreneurs isn’t just about a fortnight of work experience but about giving businesses the incentive to provide courses, encouragement and funding.

By 2015, there will be more Britons over the age of 65 than under 15. We cannot afford to discard their expertise. Nor can we close our borders to innovation. Forty per cent of the Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants. In the future, concerns about immigration or pensions will be less about sheltering industries or countries from change and more about how to benefit from mobile populations. This requires bringing ideas and individuals of all ages and all nationalities together to inspire new growth.

The public is ahead of politicians on this. One in five has worked or studied in another country, lived with an overseas partner or owns property abroad. One in ten plans to move in the next decade.

Studies showing that on average each of us will have seven careers, two of which are yet to exist, are skewed by younger respondents. They move between occupations with curiosity and trepidation, given the risks and rewards such portfolio careers have. They need social security and trade unions that can adapt to this new way of working, so that people feel socially insured enough to exploit change instead of fearing it.

An economy structured to fulfil that goal also needs redesigned services. Only 15 per cent of a child’s attainment can be accounted for by school. Of course we should give priority to investment in early-years provision, but equality requires action on the 85 per cent, too. Stephen Twigg’s work reflects the need to provide pupils of all ages and communities with more pathways to achieve their potential: prioritising gold-standard skills and further education; engaging with parents; looking at models of mutual ownership for childcare and youth services.

Ten per cent of the total NHS budget is spent on interventions following the failure to tackle diabetes, not the diabetes alone. We shouldn’t accept health care that kicks in only when an illness is diagnosed. We should ask how it can keep us well, too. As my colleague Liz Kendall points out, this will entail an end to the false divide between services that address physical, mental, social care and housing needs. In an era of tight resources, we will do little for those with heart disease, cancer or diabetes by simply fighting for empty hospital beds, when we can be pushing for investment in community services. Addressing quality and reducing costs is not just about structures but about professional cultures. Family and friends with caring roles are crucial to outcomes when treating chronic conditions but too often they are not formally involved in planning treatment.

Such changes can occur only when users are asked to be more than consumers. They must also be partners and pioneers. To rely on either the market or existing state structures alone to provide answers excludes the ingenuity of the public. The left has always understood markets as a tool to facilitate social justice, along with other methods that foster collaboration in pursuit of shared ambitions.

Yet in trying to protect the people from abusive market forces, both the traditional left and New Labour disempowered citizens from shaping their own destiny. Both portrayed communities as requiring assistance to “build capacity” – by setting up countless meetings, bureaucracy or predetermined “choices” to tell people what to do.

People-led politics is not about getting better at organising consultation. It is about building the agency and ambition of all to act for themselves and each other. This entails devolving power and accountability to users and communities alike through personal budgets and mutualisation. Feedback forums and choice are useful tools but to empower citizens fully we need to engage them in conversations about the future, not just the present. Saving money in the long term will entail supporting people to become responsible for reducing their own risks; it will also require co-operation between services so that they are built around the needs of citizens and will strengthen the public’s right to participate in decisions about their own care.

Our fate rests not just on managing problems but on asking how we can realise the potential in each of us for the benefit of all of us. Tim Berners-Lee said of the internet: “This is for everyone.” Our mission is to apply the same principle to Britain’s future. Instead of fearing change, we should build one nation where the rewards that flow from embracing change are shared by all.

Stella Creasy is the MP for Walthamstow (Labour and Co-Operative)

If you are not a teenage or pre-teen girl, this is what you probably think about boyband fans: they're just little girls with a liking for unthreatening pretty boys; they dont care about music; all they want it something safe. To which it's worth replying: safe for whom, exactly? Watching One Direction: This is Us (the Morgan Spurlock-directed 1D documentary), it doesnt look like in the middle of a crowd of Directioners is a very cosy place to be.

Actually, it looks terrifying. Small female faces break wide open with uncontainable emotion, their mouths twist and tremble. They cry, not decorous and moderate tears of gratitude, but the shocking, howling sobs of the frantic. And then there's the noise. The noise would beat any normal person back: thousands of lungs emptying themselves in a simultaneous scream, a vast wail of wanting.

Harry, Zayn, Niall, Louis and Liam are accustomed to it, though - to a point. Sometimes, they toy with it like conductors of a dreadful orchestra: in Milan, they duck behind a balcony, listen to the noise subside, then leap up playfully to be met by another predictable rain of shrieks. But in Mexico City, Liam looks genuinely shaken at the noise which meets him when he steps out from behind a stack of amps in a half-empty stadium, hours before the show is due to start.

The noise is for them, but Liam's alarmed face says that he knows there's something in it that the band can't control. In Amsterdam, they go shopping and get mobbed. After they've taken shelter in a Nike store, Liam tells the camera, "One of them had my ear and wouldnt let go. I think she wanted to keep it. I said, you can't have that, its mine." He laughs, but he's holding onto his ear like he's relieved to find it still attached.

The fans want them so badly they would rip them apart. This is a whole crowd with a common purpose: total individual possession of their favourite band member. I asked a friend's teenage daughter if she wanted to come and watch the film. "No, I couldn't," she said firmly, "I'd be too jealous watching all those other girls meeting them."

Most of these girls are too young for them to call this mad wanting lust. They wouldn't recognise sex as the ultimate object of the feelings shaking them, and that's the safety of the boyband crush. Fixating on someone securely unobtainable lets you practice all the wildness of desire without making too many mistakes, embarrassing yourself too badly or hurting anyone too much (Liam's yanked ear is just collateral damage.)

Elated staff pose outside an official One Direction store with merchandise

And though these passions are a way of playing at having adult feelings, they're not disposable. A few weeks ago, I went to an open-air screening of Dirty Dancing. As Patrick Swayze appeared for the first time, approximately 2,000 middle-aged women exhaled Johnny as one, his the image imprinted on the gosling brain of their new-hatched lust some time in the 80s or 90s.

When I was growing up, it was Take That and Boyzone who inspired frenzy: some friends of a friend travelled from Chester to Ireland to camp on Stephen Gately's mum's lawn, because, well, contact with a few feet of distantly related turf was better than no contact at all. And when my mum was growing up, it was the Beatles. One of her most prized anecdotes is the one about the time an alarmed and ragged George Harrison, running away from fans (they probably wanted his ear), ran directly into her.

And before that Elvis, and before that Sinatra. As long as we've had mass media, we've had mass crushes on male stars. So why do still pretend that sex comes over teenage girls like some malignant force from outside? The dread word "sexualisation" is applied almost exclusively applied to girls and never to boys, and it suggests some kind of external process imposing sexuality on women. If girls never underwent "sexualisation", presumably they would remain untainted by desire. Boys, meanwhile, are assumed to just know what they want and what to do, and if any education is needed, it's to warn girls of this masculine menace.

This is transparently a disservice to children of both genders. But for girls, the damaging lesson they're left with is that sex is something done to them, not something they do. If consent even enters into this debate, it's as something girls can refuse: all the agency they're offered is the chance to say no. Yes is taken away from them and replaced with a dull acquiescence to the incontinent urges of boys. Sex stops being a collaborative pleasure and becomes a grim tussle, with men trying to take it, and women charged with keeping it locked up.

But boys and girls have just the same mix of hunger and confusion, the same questions, the same need for answers from grown-ups. And while decorous adults refuse to acknowledge that girls are not just girls, but women in training, there's a seven-decade-old industry predicated on the fact that girls will pursue a boy they like to the end of the universe. The grown-ups keep quiet, and those lungs keep emptying themselves in a howl of unrecognised need.

In 1963 the American author Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. This game-changing book helped to launch the “second wave” of feminism that raged through the next two decades. It showed how women were increasingly well educated but trapped at home being housewives: Friedan called it “the problem that has no name”.

Fifty years on, the problem is only marginally different. It is less about enforced joblessness and housework; more about the pressures of paid work and caring. Nowadays women are expected to go out to work and bring home a wage, but they must do so in ways that interfere as little as possible with, first, caring for children and, later, caring for ailing parents – and often both at once. As a result, many women do so-called “part-time” jobs, which attract lower wages and status because they are not seen as proper (that is, “full-time”) employment. The formal economy could not survive for a moment without the work women do at home. Yet this work is un-valued and largely unnoticed: it is today’s “problem that has no name”. 

Last week’s British Social Attitudes Survey confirmed what many of us suspected - our attitudes to gender roles are changing, but in reality women still bear the brunt of domestic responsibilities. And this has a huge influence over how men and women use and value time, how much power they have, and relations between them. 

Women fought long and hard for the right to enter paid employment on equal terms with men. But this has never been matched with any equivalent movement of men into unpaid caring. So inequalities between women and men remain deeply entrenched.  It is an absurd situation that is ethically indefensible and politically unsustainable. Moreover, it is avoidable. 

In our new book Time on Our Side, we examine the case for a shorter working week – a slow but steady move towards an average of 30 hours, for women and for men. Suppose, as a thought experiment, that it became “normal” to do paid work for the equivalent of four days or 30 hours a week. Every individual – male and female – who now works for five days or around 40 hours would work 30 hours instead. This opens up a range of opportunities for doing things differently. Each man and women would have 50 per cent more time to spend outside the workplace. For a family with two adults who currently work five days a week, this could reduce the number of hours required for paid care by as much as 2 days a week, reducing the care bill by up to 40 per cent.  For households where one adult, usually the female, works short hours while the other works long hours, a new 30-hour “standard” could enable the woman to take on more paid employment, opening up opportunities outside the home and potentially narrowing the pay gap between herself and her partner. And it would give the man more time to spend with his family. 

In effect, with a 30-hour norm, “part-time” would become the new “full-time”. The pressures on women of combining paid work and caring would ease substantially. “Part-timers” would no longer be marginalised once this became the “standard” pattern of paid employment for men as well as women. The corrosive inequalities of income and power between women and men would begin to ebb and change. Men could build their capabilities as parents and carers. Children would get more time with their fathers as well as their mothers and develop less polarised views about male and female identities. 

But moving to a shorter working week will bring a wider range of benefits. In Time on Our Side, the authors show how a slow but steady move towards a shorter paid working week would help to address a range of urgent, interlinked problems: overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life. 

Of course, the call for a shorter working week throws the issue of pay into sharp relief. For many, working shorter hours would mean abject poverty. But the answer to the problem of low pay is not to force people to work long hours just to get by.  It must be tackled on its own ground. This calls for a broad strategy on low pay that goes well beyond defending the National Minimum Wage, to include education, training and pressures on employers to improve pay and conditions. On average, women still earn less than men, so tackling low pay is a gender issue too.

The personal is not just political, it is economic. Who does the dishes or changes the nappies is more than a social choice it’s the effect of an economy that runs on gender divides. Our working week is a relic of another time when women were expected to stay in the home. The next wave of feminism must challenge that.

Anna Coote is Head of Social Policy at the New Economics Foundation

Writing about football tends these days to want to take on the big themes, to paint the big picture. The game itself is pumped up, self-important, at times hard to love, even for those of us who admitted we were hopelessly hooked years ago. So much importance is attached to a game that seems never to avoid the opportunity to shout about how important it is.

And yet, as is so often the case, the real pleasure, the real measure of worth, resides in the small things, the tiny details and quirky corners that come together to create something loved and valued, something with meaning. That’s why Daniel Gray’s book Hatters, Railwaymen and Knitters is such a delight. It’s the kind of book, filled with astute observations of small details, that might just convince the most confirmed football sceptic why football has such a place in our culture.

Gray is a Teessider who, having lived in Scotland for 10 years and realising he is about to turn 30, embarks upon a search for the essence of the England he left behind. He choses to visit provincial football grounds, but the match is merely the hook for an exploration of place and identity. Gray takes the trouble to research the history of the places he visits, all the better to understand what makes his destinations what they are.

In each place he tells the tale of how the club was formed and how the local people embraced it, providing a history of industrial development and later decline as he does so. In Middlesbrough, where he grew up, we learn of the influence of Quakers and steel, and of the rise and fall of the wonderfully named Middlesbrough Ironopolis, early rivals of Middlesbrough FC. In Luton we learn of hatmaking, popular riots and the brief establishment of a workers’ Soviet by disaffected soldiers after the 14-18 war, and of a modern town more comfortable with its mix of people than the demagogues of the EDL and the radical mosques would have us believe. In Ipswich, the boozy paternalism of the posh Cobbold family is writ large, while in Chester the establishment of a supporter-owned club heralds a more modern notion of community, but one rooted all the same in working class traditions of self-help.

It’s Gray’s eye for detail, thoughtful observation and lyrical turn of phrase that make this book more than the stilted stack of clichés it could have been. And so, most importantly, does his ability to recognise things for what they are, rather than to sneer and patronise. In his introduction he says: "I wanted the book to celebrate the provinces and pinpoint why parochialism matters and is not always a bad thing". Later on he observes how easy it is to condemn the Everytown trend instead of looking behind the High Street facades. His historical research is complemented by a social awareness and an ear for dialect, snatched snippets of conversation and a lashing of incisive asides weaved together with vivid description of place to bring to life a middle England far richer and positive than the narrow and depressing place the phrase conjures up.

In Luton, for example, Gray is struck by the segretation between communities, but also at the way people come together: “It is done in subtle ways, in food, in football, in young people boxing together”. In Sheffield, the steel city that cradled the English game, his observations lead him to reflect on how “history and the present are interwoven; how good England was and can be, instead of bemoaning the state of things”. And he says, “this England I have come across resembles the highest ideal I built in my Caledonian exile” – one of a number of asides in which he wonders if the seeming inevitability of a more formal split between England and Scotland will simply show the sum is greater than the parts.

The football clubs in Sheffield and Luton and Chester and Crewe and Hinckley and all the towns Gray visits are as much a part of the place as steel or hatmaking or locomotive assembly ever were. Noticeably, Gray does not visit any of the clubs in the grandiously-titled Premiership. For one thing, the price and sheer trouble of getting a ticket does not make it easy for the casual visitor, for another, Gray seems to conclude, football at the top level is already a place apart, while “away from the jaded cynicism of its highest reaches it remains a social movement”. It is an observation that goes to the heart of the modern game, raising the prospect of a detached top tier that may eventually be undone by its remoteness from those very ideas of place and identity that made football what it is.

As Gray concludes: “In an England of flux, where no job is certain, families break up or live far apart, community or church is loose or weak, football is more important than ever. It breeds belonging in an uncertain world.” Gray manages to be both realistic, eschewing the rose-tints, while retaining an optimism often missing from modern social histories. The result is a book to savour and to make you think.

Hatters, Railwaymen and Knitters by Daniel Gray is published by Bloomsbury.

Just in time for its conference, Labour has announced the appointment of the Sunday Telegraph's political editor Patrick Hennessy as its deputy director of communications.

The latest addition to Team Miliband, will work alongside director of communications Bob Roberts, the former political editor of the Daily Mirror.

The party said: "In his new role, Patrick will direct, shape and lead the daily media output of the Labour Party. He will sharpen Labour’s attack stories, improve message discipline and ensure the party delivers a 24-hour news cycle."

Ed Miliband said: "I am delighted to welcome Paddy to the Labour Party as our new Deputy Director of Communications. His experience working at a range of national newspapers will add significant expertise to the Labour Party’s communications team. I’m looking forward to working with him."

Hennessy said: "I am sad to be leaving the Sunday Telegraph after nine great years but this is an exciting new challenge. After nearly 30 years working in newspapers, it's a big move but a simple task: to help Labour win the general election. I’m delighted to be joining."

Time is running out for politicians who want to give their team that extra edge only an Old Etonian can provide.

Ed Miliband has just become the latest to snap one up, in the form of Patrick Hennessy, who is leaving his post as the Sunday Telegraph's Political Editor to become Ed's Deputy Director of Communications.

Has Ed decided he needs one of Cameron's own schoolfellows on Team Labour if he's to come out on top at PMQs? Or will we suddenly see a drop-off in the number of "toff" jokes now that Ed has one of his very own?

But don't worry, politicians, the lobby hasn't yet been depleted of all potential Old Etonian staffers. As far as this Mole is aware, the BBC's James Landale and the Sun's Tom Newton-Dunn are still open to offers.

This piece first appeared on newrepublic.com.

Our daughter Rebekah, who is in second grade, takes three after-school classes every week. On Monday there is violin; on Wednesday, Hebrew; and on Thursday, ballet. One of these classes connects her to a religious tradition going back three thousand years. Two of them are pretty well pointless.

I don’t mean that as a bad thing. Pointlessness rules, as far as I am concerned. Lots of great activities have little or no point, at least beyond the fact that somebody likes to do them. My annual viewing of Dazed and Confused is pointless (it’s not as if I didn’t get all the nuance by the fifteenth time around). Candy corn is pointless. Watching local Pentecostal preachers on public-access cable is pointless. Hobbies are all the better for having no point beyond the fun they provide. Rebekah enjoys her violin and ballet classes, both after-school at New Haven’s terrific Neighborhood Music School. She loves her teachers, and she is proud when she makes progress. That’s good enough for me.

But that’s not good enough for some parents, who make claims for the utility of music and dance lessons that are, I think, unfounded and overblown. Lessons are fine, and I think it’s especially important that all public schools offer music and other arts in their curricula—both for their educational value, and so arts instruction does not become the province only of Americans who can afford to pay for after-school classes. But Americans’ emphasis on certain kinds of lessons—like ballet and classical instruments—are just accidents of history, entirely contingent. And if we look closely at why we encourage our children to study music and dance, and what the real benefits are, we will see that our children are taking the wrong lessons, and for the wrong reasons.

So why are so many children taking ballet, violin, piano? Lately, I have been asking my fellow middle-class urbanite parents that question. About dance, they say things like, “Ballet teaches them poise,” or, “Ballet helps them be graceful.” And about violin or piano they say, “It will give them a lifelong skill,” or, “They’ll always enjoy listening to music more.”

It does not take a rocket scientist, or a Juilliard-trained cellist, to see the flaws in these assertions. First, as to ballet, I propose a test. Imagine we took ten girls (or boys) who had studied ballet from the ages of five to twelve, and then quit, and mixed them in with ten girls (or boys) who had never taken dance. Let’s say that we watched these twenty tweens move around their schools for a day: around the cafeteria, the library, the gym, passing notes, sneaking out behind the middle school for a smoke, all the stuff tweens do. Does anyone really believe we could spot the ones who had spent seven years in weekly or biweekly ballet class?

I do not doubt that a ballet teacher or dance aficionado might spot some tell-tale moves—a slip into first position here or there, a certain elegance in a jump during a game of ultimate frisbee. And probably one or two of the ballet students, the best of them, really would appear more graceful than the others. But for the general mass of kids, the dance classes will not have had much impact on how they move. If you don’t believe me, then please visit a middle school in a wealthy town, watch children in the lunch line, and try to pick out which ones had studied ballet.

As for the enduring value of music lessons, I propose an even simpler test. Go on Facebook and ask your friends to chime in if, when they were children, they took five years or more of a classical instrument. Then ask all the respondents when they last played their instrument. I tried a version of this at a dinner party recently. There were about ten adults present; I was the only one who had not played an instrument for many years as a child. All of them confessed that they never played their instrument. Whatever it was—violin, piano, saxophone—they had abandoned it. The instrument sat lonely in a closet somewhere, or in the attic of their childhood home. Or their parents off-loaded it in a tag sale years ago.

And the music that these friends listen to as adults—klezmer, Indigo Girls, classic rock—is in each case quite far from what their parents paid for them to study. Their studies of cello had not made them into fans of Bach. And unless I am mistaken, Shinichi Suzuki didn’t include Rush in his violin books.

Now it is clearly the case that if nobody studied ballet or violin, we would have no professional orchestras or ballet companies. That would be a great loss. But for such art forms to persist, it is only necessary that the most eager and gifted students persist in their studies. I’m all for lots of children trying classical music or dance, but we no more need millions of fourth-year violin students than we need millions of fourth-year origami students. We all love paper cranes, I think, but we aren’t rushing to give our children to the cause.

***

Before the twentieth century, there was a good reason for anyone to study music: If you couldn’t make the music yourself, then you would rarely hear it. Before the radio and the phonograph, any music in the house was produced by the family itself. So it made sense to play fiddle, piano, jug, whatever. And before urbanization and the automobile, most people did not have easy, regular access to concerts. Of course, small-town people could come together for occasional concerts, to play together or to hear local troupes or traveling bands. Growing up in the sticks, you still might see Shakespeare performed, and a touring opera company could bring you Mozart. But very infrequently. If music was to be a part of your daily life, it had to be homemade.

But there were other, more complicated reasons that people took up instruments, or forced their children to. As the historian Susie Steinbach writes in Understanding the Victorians, in the mid-nineteenth-century the piano, which had always been handmade and tended to reside in upper-class parlors, became an accessible, middle-class status symbol, as fit for a tradesman’s house as for Emma Woodhouse’s. “By the 1850s and 1860s many pianos were manufactured in Germany and in the United States as well as in Britain,” Steinbach writes, “and were made by machine; both changes made pianos less expensive.”

Changes in financing helped, too: The advent of the installment plan brought pianos to people who did not have vast capital. As the price of instruments dropped, music lessons became the burden of the well-bred girl, or of the girl whose parents hoped to massage some breeding into her.

By the 1880s, when the United States began filling up with unwashed immigrants, a whole class of do-gooder, piano-taught ladies believed that one way to acculturate the new immigrants was to offer them, especially the children, musical instruction. The institutions of the settlement-house movement, as it became known, offered much more than music classes; they provided instruction in English, the trades, home economics, and many arts. But music was everywhere seen as one important key to the cabinet of proper, middle-class ways.

That belief helped animate the founders of  the Educational Alliance, Henry Street Settlement, and Third Street Music School Settlement, all founded in downtown New York City between 1889 and 1894; Settlement Music School in Philadelphia (1908); the settlement houses that became Community Music Center of Boston (1910); Neighborhood House, which became New Haven’s Neighborhood Music School (1911); and the Cleveland Music School Settlement (1912). Not all of those schools were founded specifically to teach music, but even those that were not, and many like them across the country, quickly included music classes in their offerings.

The schools have stayed, even as the nationality of the immigrants has changed. At the Educational Alliance, where my wife took piano lessons as a child, the clientele used to be mainly Jewish; more recently, it’s Chinese, Latino, and much else besides. But the music classes go on, the product of a couple centuries of parents’ aspirations for their own children and others’. The schools have long grown beyond their initial mission of acculturating immigrants, and are now educating the middle-class children and grandchildren of the first waves of students.

The classes are not a bad thing. Studying music or dance over a long time teaches perseverance and can build self-confidence. But then again, studying anything over a long time teaches perseverance and can build self-confidence. There is no special virtue in knowing how to play the violin, unless you have a special gift for the violin. Otherwise, you’re learning the same valuable lessons that you’d get from karate class, or from badminton. Or from endless hours of foosball.

I am not saying that children should stop learning stuff outside of school (although some days, when I see how overscheduled some children are, that’s precisely what I want to say). We just need to sign them up for classes that make more sense, given that it’s 2013, not 1860, and that I don’t need a violin-playing daughter to cement my class status. Look, I love the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, but one could make the argument that Rebekah would be better off learning to play the Lumineers’ “Ho Hey” on guitar. That skill would certainly be more of an asset at summer camp.

We can probably all agree that it’s worthwhile for children (as well as their parents) to try new activities, and that there is virtue in mastering difficult disciplines. So what challenges should we be tackling, if not ballet and classical music? How about auto repair? At least one Oppenheimer should be able to change the oil, and it isn’t me. It may as well be one of my daughters. Sewing would be good. And if it has to be an instrument, I’d say bass or guitar. The adults I know who can play guitar can actually be seen playing their guitars. And as any rock guitarist will tell you, there is a shortage of bassists.

But I do not believe that all artistic pursuits, or all disciplines that one studies, should be judged for their usefulness. The sublimity of art is tied, after all, to its uselessness (cf. Dazed and Confused). More than anything, I want children to find pursuits, whether useful or not, that they can take with them into adulthood. For a while, a number of children in my neighborhood were taking ukulele lessons. I don’t much like the ukulele, and I think I successfully kept my daughters from knowing what their playmates were up to. But I was heartened by the whimsy of it all, and I kind of wish that the little gang of kids had stuck with it. Before too long, they might have gotten pretty good. At the very least, it might have kept them away from ballet.

As it happens, a trend like what I am advocating may be under way. My friend Noah Bloom, a trumpeter who works at Neighborhood Music School and used to be at Church Street School for Music and Art, in Lower Manhattan, told me that at Church Street there were “as many electric guitarists and young singers wanting to be Green Day or some hot pop artist as there were kids wanting to be classical pianists.” He also told me about School of Rock, a chain with dozens of franchised schools and camps, here and abroad, offering lessons geared specifically to aspiring kiddie-rockers. The School of Rock only teaches guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals, and drums. “They’re our competition,” Bloom said.

Rebekah, for her part, will continue with ballet. And violin. Periodically, we ask her if she’d like to quit, and she always says no. That’s good enough for us. If she finds a lifelong pursuit, that’s great. But if one evening, at her usual practice hour, she decides enough is enough, maybe I’ll suggest the guitar. Or maybe I’ll just ask if she wants to sit with me on the couch and watch Dazed and Confused.

This piece first appeared on newrepublic.com.

The BBC journalist meant to pick up his iPad, but ended up with a stack of paper instead. Here he is, styling it out.

Australia’s new prime minister, Tony Abbott, has appointed himself women’s minister (as well as the minister in charge of indigenous affairs, deregulation, national security and relations with state governments – he isn’t limiting himself.) Here are five reasons why he’s not up to the job.

1. He has appointed just 1 female minister in his 19-strong cabinet

When Abbott was once asked about the under-representation of women in Australian politics, he answered“there’s an assumption that this is a bad thing.” Of course he’s right, how ridiculous it is to assume that women could bring anything to political discussions in the country! And how glad Australian women should be that Abbott will now be speaking for them.

I should mention that as prime minister, he’s softened his position somewhat, saying “I am disappointed that there are not at least two women in the Cabinet.” Because with Abbott on your side, two women cabinet ministers would definitely be enough…right?

2. He has said that equality between the sexes is “folly” because women are wired differently to men

Abbott once said“I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.”

When challenged on this in 2010 he said that he didn’t want to “repudiate what was said, but I don't want people to think that what I thought as a 21 year old is necessarily what I think as a 52 year old.” It’s hardly the strongest rejection of views that appear to have come straight from the 1870s rather than the 1970s. Presumably employment equality won’t be especially high on Abbott’s political agenda, but perhaps knitting-circles and cupcake bake-offs will be.

3. Whether he’s talking about his opponents or his supporters, he just can’t help being sexist

Whether by challenging former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard to make an “honest women of herself” or standing next to placards describing her as a "man’s bitch”, Abbott seems incapable of avoiding sexist attacks on his female opponents. Nor is he interested in clamping down on sexism within his own party. When a party fundraising dinner for Liberal candidate Mal Brough featured a menu including "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail - Small Breasts, Huge Thighs and a Big Red Box”, he described the menu as “tacky” but refused to withdraw support from Brough.

His dealings with women in his own party have been equally dubious. Asked earlier this year to compare two female Liberal candidates he said they both had a “bit of sex appeal”, sounding more like a pervy uncle (or to use his words a “daggy dad”) than a party leader. He could have described their intelligence, their dedication to their party and their electorate, or their political insight, but he didn’t seem capable of judging them on anything other than their looks.

4. His views on sexism and abortion are deeply worrying

Abbott has said that he won’t change Australia’s abortion laws, but he’s previously held an anti-abortion stance, once describing abortion as the “easy way out.” His views on sex should be concerning to women too, as he's been quoted as saying that “the right of women to withhold sex ... needs to be moderated"

5. Australian women deserve better

The pay gap between men and women has increased 2 per cent in the past decade to 26 per cent. 38 per cent of employees in Australia have said they prefer employing men to women. 1 in 4 Australian children in single parent families (predominantly headed by women) live in poverty. Australian women deserve someone better than Abbott to reverse these injustices.

With a year to go until the referendum, it’s safe to say most Scots remain disengaged from the debate about their constitutional future. And who could blame them? Neither the nationalists nor the unionists have produced a campaign capable of capturing the public’s attention.

The SNP, given the opportunity to permanently alter the terms and conditions of Scottish politics, has chosen instead to try and triangulate its way to victory. Its manoeuvres on NATO, the currency, the monarchy, the regulation of financial services and corporation tax reveal a party (or rather a party leadership) lacking in ideological ambition. How much of the UK’s dysfunctional political model do Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon want to impose on an independent Scotland?

When it launched last summer, Yes Scotland had the chance to build a grassroots movement based on the idea that far-reaching constitutional change was a necessary first step towards far-reaching social change. So far, however, it has simply followed the SNP’s lead. At its most radical, Yes Scotland sells independence as a way of mitigating the worst effects of the Westminster consensus, not of actually breaking with it.

The task of building an alternative vision of independence has fallen to smaller, left-leaning organisations such as the Jimmy Reid Foundation – with its hugely successful Common Weal initiative – the Radical Independence Convention and National Collective. Without these groups, the Yes campaign would lack vitality. Their contributions will be pivotal over the coming months.

Better Together, meanwhile, has done exactly what it set out to do - and with great efficiency. Furiously exaggerating the economic pitfalls of independence, undermining trust in the Scottish government, flooding the debate with distracting and trivial arguments – the No camp has adopted a scorched earth approach to the referendum, laying waste to everything in its path, including its own intellectual credibility.

Three scare stories in particular stand out. The first is the late Lord Carmyllie’s suggestion, back in March 2012, that England would be forced to bomb the airports of an independent Scotland if it ever came under attack. The second is the claim that an independent Scotland wouldn’t be guaranteed a triple-A credit rating– something Britain itself was stripped of in January. And the third (a hands-down winner) is the MoD’s warning that Faslane nuclear base might remain “sovereign UK territory” after independence.  

During the early stages of the campaign, the relentless questioning of the SNP by Alistair Darling and others worked to expose the weakness of the nationalists’ case. Now it serves only to remind people of how empty the unionist one is. Better Together’s rampant, unsophisticated unionism needs to be balanced by a compelling account of how Scotland will benefit, socially and economically, from continued membership of the UK. It remains to be seen whether any such account exists.

The polls have been pretty consistent. According to the latest survey, the Yes campaign is trailing by 17 points and support for independence is struggling to edge above the 35 per cent mark. However, nationalists can take comfort from the fact that a large number of voters – as much as 45 per cent of the electorate, in fact – remain undecided. What’s more, the desire for a more powerful Scottish Parliament could translate into support for secession if the unionists fail to produce a coherent blueprint for the next phase of devolution.

We should, at any rate, expect the polls to narrow as the referendum approaches. The SNP is a formidable, well-resourced campaigning machine, while the energy and enthusiasm of the activists on the Yes side far outstrips that of their unionist counterparts. Moreover, it has happened before. Contrary to Nate Silver’s recent assertion, it was the Canadian federalists, not the Quebecois separatists, who squandered a double-digit advantage during the closing weeks of the 1995 referendum on Quebec’s independence from Canada. It’s not hard to imagine a similar scenario emerging in Scotland next year.

On the other hand, things could go badly wrong for the SNP if its White Paper, due out in November, doesn’t live up to the hype. Salmond has said he wants it to “resonate down through the ages”, so the pressure is on. Better Together is gearing up for a massive assault on the document, which it hopes will fatally undermine the nationalist campaign as it heads into 2014. The media’s response will be important. If journalists feel the White Paper has succeeded in answering some of the more problematic questions surrounding independence, people will think it has passed the test. If not, the SNP will find it difficult to recover.

The last 12 months have not been very edifying. The SNP and Yes Scotland have pursued their continuity narrative promising that a future independent Scotland will replicate the current unionist one in almost every way. Better Together and the pro-UK parties have pursued their wrecking ball strategy aimed at demolishing the idea that independence will be seamless and pain free. This time next year we’ll know which of the two campaigns Scots disliked the least.

Next-gen millionaires are more bullish investors than their older generation counterparts, with almost four in ten buying into high-risk asset classes such as venture capital and derivatives.

That’s according to new research by US-based financial services firm Fidelity Investments, which surveyed over 540 individuals with investable assets of at least $1 million.

It found that eighty-one per cent of Generation X and Y millionaires – those up to 48 years old – said they preferred to pursue aggressive investment strategies, compared to 27 per cent of the baby boomers.

Wealthy next-gens also had a more diversified investment portfolio than the older generation. 51 per cent of Gen X and Y millionaires, for example, owned foreign currency; 43 per cent invested in international individual securities; 39 per cent bought into venture capital; and 38 per cent chose derivatives. The baby boomers’ figures (respectively) were 6, 27, 12 and 10 per cent.

In the short term, the next-gens surveyed planned on making changes to their portfolio, while 39 per cent of the baby boomers were more conservative and didn’t plan on adding anything until the end of the year.

But the younger HNWs weren’t just more bullish about investing, they were also more confident about their own abilities, with 71 per cent considering themselves knowledgeable about investing, compared to 44 per cent of their old-generation counterparts.

Asking for advice

Perhaps surprisingly, then, the report found that next-gens millionaires were also more likely than the older generation to turn to financial advisers for investment recommendations, with 92 per cent using a financial adviser, compared to 68 per cent of the baby boomers.

According to the study, the financial crisis was the main reason why the young HNWs sought financial advice, with 69 per cent of those surveyed admitting doing so because of more volatile market conditions. This compared to only 17 per cent of the baby boomers.

However, next-gens remained very much involved in their investment decisions, with those working with an adviser saying they independently managed almost half of their own assets. In comparison, baby boomers HNWs who have financial advisers said they managed only a third of their wealth by themselves.

61 per cent of the Gen X and Y millionaires also said they made their own investment decisions but used advisers as sources of information and to get a second opinion. Only six per cent admitted to delegate their decisions entirely to an adviser, compared to one in five of the baby-boom generation.

According to the report, next-gen millionaires tended to use other people as their sounding board when making investment decisions. Apart from their advisers, they were more likely to turn to family and friends, with 23 per cent of those surveyed doing so, compared to only thirteen per cent of the older generation.

Work hard, play hard

But younger millionaires aren’t just focused on how to maximise their money, the research found. In fact, they were more likely to indulge in comforts than the older generation. Eighty-seven per cent of Gen X and Y HNWs, for example, spent their holidays abroad every year, compared to only 56 per cent of the baby boomers. Similarly, 63 per cent of the next-gens millionaire owned a second home and nearly four in ten flew first class, compared to 21 and 5 per cent respectively for the older generation.

And if they liked to spend more, Gen X and Y millionaires also liked to give more, as they averaged $54,000 in annual philanthropic donations, compared to $12,000 for their older counterparts. They also volunteered more of their time to charitable causes, with 82 per cent volunteering or serving on charity boards, compared to less than 50 per cent for the baby boomers. 

This piece first appeared on Spear's Magazine

Read more by Giulia Cambieri

I’m not going to do the thing of listing all the other names under which Tommy Robinson is known. He has precisely as many AKAs as you would expect from a leader of a group in balaclavas and a former member of the BNP with a long history of arrests. I find his pseudonyms neither surprising nor amusing.

The facts are these: Mr Robinson and a friend were refused service at a Selfridges store. He protested and filmed the encounter. Selfridges have issued a statement expressing their disappointment at the incident. They said they pride themselves on making everyone welcome. The member of staff involved has been suspended. Tommy Robinson and his friend were treated to a complimentary three-course meal by Selfridges.

Was this an act of bravery by someone standing up to a dangerous bully or an act of arrogant unprofessionalism by someone not in a position to pass judgement on a paying customer? “It is not for staff to determine the policies of the organisations they work in through individual petulance”, suggests Mic Wright in the Telegraph. I may agree with the statement in the abstract, but find that it suffers fatally when applied to the actual circumstances.

The member of staff neither determined organisational policy, nor is there any evidence that acted through petulance. He simply refused to interact with a customer. Everyone would recognise that a member of staff has the right to refuse to interact with a customer under particular circumstances. People work for their employers; they do not belong to them. Security staff in bars and clubs routinely eject and ban patrons who are obnoxious, inappropriate or threatening.

Is such treatment reserved only for circumstances when they do so, right there and then? I suggest not. Consider the circumstance of an abusive former boyfriend entering an establishment where the recipient of his violent threats works as a waitress. Would anyone seriously suggest that she is obliged to recite today’s specials with a smile? Of course not.

The only question is, at what point does the behaviour become sufficiently personal? It is important to note that the members of staff filmed by Mr Robinson appeared to be of ethnic minority origin. Mr Robinson is the head of an organisation which goes around in balaclavas, threatening violence. He is the head of an organisation which speaks to “every single Muslim” and warns them that they will feel “the full force of the EDL”. He is the head of an organisation which advocates“all Muslims rounded up and deported back to the hell Holes [sic] they came from.” He was arrested a mere ten days ago for incitement. He was only released on bail ten days before that after his previous arrest. He had only been released on bail with an electronic tag at the beginning of the year for his last conviction.

If he had walked into Selfridges and gone up to this member of staff and said: “You will soon feel the full force of the EDL. I’m going to deport you back to the hellhole from which you came. Down with Sharia law” there would be absolutely no question as to whether the member of staff was within his rights to refuse him service. Well, this is absolutely what he has done. To suggest that threatening and inciting violence, as leader of a movement, indiscriminately against an entire group somehow absolves him from personal responsibility to individual members of that group is ridiculous.

The implication that someone can go around sowing hatred on a daily basis and then reap nothing but good will and professional service is not only inane in the extreme, but also unrealistic. I applaud the member of staff who was brave enough to say “not on this counter, not on my shift”. If Selfridges decide that it is now store policy to force their members of staff to interact with known dangerous fascists and criminals, I am certain the publicity backlash will be commensurate.

Mr Robinson was thrown out of a casino that same evening. I am sure that, in a past littered with criminal activity, he has been thrown out of many places. If he chooses a future of advocating violence and intolerance against entire groups, he can expect to be thrown out of many more. He can look upon this not as a one-off incident where he was refused service at a store, but as an ever-increasing pattern of decent people refusing to engage with him in any civilised context. He dreams of a society where people like me don’t exist. I dream of a society where thugs like him haven’t a single rock under which to crawl. This is not a negotiable position nor one for which there is room for pleasantries.

The malice Mr Robinson’s views encourage and the damage they cause are neither petulant nor imagined. The other day a young lad slammed into me with his bicycle while I was coming out of a local shop. He said “watch it”. I said “the pavement is for pedestrians”. He replied “you’re fucking foreign, innit?” before adding “this country is going to the dogs”. He spoke emboldened and amplified by Robinson’s voice. If either of them walked into a shop where I worked, I would not serve them. Either you get that as being totally within my rights or you don’t.

Three years ago – nearly three and a half – I walked into the Cabinet Office for my first day as Deputy Prime Minister.

Picture it: history in the making as a Liberal Democrat leader entered, finally, into the corridors of power, preparing to unshackle Britain after years of Labour and Conservative rule. Only to arrive and find an empty room and one shell-shocked civil servant promising me we’d get on with things shortly – but first he had to get us some desks.

You saw the calm bit in the rose garden. What you didn’t see was the utter chaos indoors. To say the Coalition caught Whitehall off guard is a massive understatement. The Government machine had no idea how it was going to handle power sharing – and not just the furniture, this was going to need a complete overhaul of how decisions would be taken and departments would be run. And – while no one really wanted to admit it at the time – the truth is, no one was quite sure how it was all going to work.

Here we were, this anti-establishment liberal party – which hadn’t been in power for 70 years – smack bang in the middle of Her Majesty’s Government: a Government machine built to serve one party, with only one party leader at the centre, now suddenly having to answer to two parties and two party leaders. Alongside us were these Tories, who we had been at war with for the past month – well, actually, more like the last hundred years.

The country was deep in economic crisis, in desperate need of stable Government. And the whole thing was set to a soundtrack of pessimism and naysaying: the Liberal Democrats had signed their own death warrant. The Coalition would fall in a matter of months. Britain would be the next Greece.

So let’s just stop and think about where we are now: The country’s economy growing stronger by the day. Stable, successful coalition – something that seemed impossible now accepted as the norm. And the Liberal Democrats proving that we can be trusted with the biggest responsibility of all – fixing the economy.

I know how hard it has been getting here – facing down all the vitriol from our opponents. Trust me, there were days I thanked my lucky stars that my children were too young to understand some of the things that were written and said. But every insult we have had to endure since we entered Government, every snipe, every bad headline, every blow to our support: That was all worth it – because we are turning Britain around.

We haven’t won over every critic; we’ll be tested a million more times. But the big question mark that has always hung over the Liberal Democrats – could we handle Government, and handle it when the going got tough? – that question mark is now gone. This recovery wouldn’t be happening without us.

We have made sure the deficit is being cut at the right pace. We were the ones who said you don’t just get growth by cutting red tape – Government also needs to invest in things: infrastructure, apprenticeships, regional growth.

So I want you to feel proud today. Feel proud that the country’s fortunes are turning. Feel proud that, when we were under pressure to buckle and change course, we held our nerve. Feel proud that we are right here, in the centre of Government and the centre of British politics, standing up for the millions of people in the middle.

I have talked to you before about our journey from the comforts of opposition to the realities of Government – but not anymore. Liberal Democrats – we are a party of Government now. And just think of what we have achieved in three short years.

For the first time ever, our schools get given money – our Pupil Premium – to stop children from the poorest families from falling behind – the first time ever. More than a million men and women have started training as apprentices – record numbers. Businesses across every region are being given billions to help them grow.

We’ve made the biggest investment in our railways since the Victorian times. We’ve created a bank devoted to clean, green industry – a world first. Elderly people will no longer have to sell their homes to pay for social care because we’ve capped the crippling costs. Mothers will no longer be worse off in retirement because our new simpler, fairer state pension recognises the value of raising a family.

Fathers will have the choice of staying at home once their children are born because we’re transforming parental leave.

All parents will get free, extra childcare, paid for by the state, when their children turn three or two for the families who need it most. We stopped ID cards. We’ve taken innocent people off the DNA database. We’ve ended child detention in the immigration system. 0.7% of national wealth spent on aid for the world’s poorest – our party’s policy for years. Not to mention getting the banks in order and helping create over a million new jobs.

And, one last one: at a time when millions of people are feeling the squeeze, when every penny counts, we’ve cut income tax bills by £700 and taken almost three million people on low pay out of paying any income tax altogether.

The Tories like to claim credit for that one now, don’t they? But do you remember the TV debates? David Cameron turned to me, in front of the whole country, and said:  ‘I would love to take everyone out of their first £10,000 of income tax Nick, but we cannot afford it’. Well, we can afford it. And we did it. A stronger economy and a fairer society too.

Actually, just one more, and my new favourite: just a few months ago, our Government – our Government – passed a law that will make Britain a place where we finally celebrate love and commitment equally between couples whether they are gay or straight: Equal Marriage. Three years. Three years. We’re not even done yet.

Can you imagine what we could do with five more? You should be able to –we’ve spent the last five days talking about it. This whole week has been about looking forward and one thing is very clear: the Liberal Democrats don’t want to go back to the opposition benches, because we aren’t done yet.

Because here’s what’s at stake at the next election: The country is finally emerging from the biggest economic crisis in living memory. The absolute worst thing to do would be to give the keys to Number 10 to a single party Government – Labour or the Conservatives.

All of the sacrifices made by the British people – the pay freezes, the spending cuts, the lost jobs, the daily grind of austerity – all of that would be for nothing. Labour would wreck the recovery. The Conservatives would give us the wrong kind of recovery. Only the Liberal Democrats can finish the job and finish it in a way that is fair.

In 2015 the clapped out politics of red, blue, blue red threatens everything we have achieved. But, back in Government – and next time that will mean back in coalition Government – the Liberal Democrats can keep the country on the right path.

Imagine the next round of leaders’ debates everyone watching to see who agrees with whom this time. David Cameron will say to Ed Miliband: you’re irresponsible, you are going to drive the economy to ruin. Ed Miliband will say to David Cameron: you can’t be trusted to help everyone, your party only cares about the rich. For once, I will agree with them both. Because they’re both right: left to their own devices, they’ll both get it wrong.

But, Liberal Democrats, we have learned a lot since getting into Government, and one of the main things I have learnt is this: If we’re asking people to put us back in the room next time round, if we want them to know why it’s better to have us round the table when the big decisions are made, they need to be able to make a judgement about what we’ll do there. And that’s as much about values, character, background as anything else.

They need to know who we are. Who I am. Why I’m a Liberal Democrat and why I’m standing here today. So, let me start with this: I was part of a generation raised – in the 70s and 80s – on a constant diet of aggressive, us-and-them politics.

I have so many memories of my brothers, my sister and I watching television and asking our parents why everyone seemed so upset. Angry, shouty Labour politicians. Union leaders gesticulating furiously, next to pictures of rubbish piling up on the streets. And later: stand offs between crowds of miners and rows of riot police.

At school I was being taught all about the Cold War – the backdrop to all of this; I even remember a history teacher telling me and my petrified classmates that we probably wouldn’t make it until Christmas because there was bound to be a Soviet strike. So the world I grew up in was all about stark, polarised choices. Us vs them; East vs West; Left vs Right.

An incompetent Labour Government had been replaced by a heartless Conservative Government. All anyone seemed to care about was whose side you were on. So I steered clear of party politics.

Then, one day, when I was 22 and studying in America, the phone rang and it was my mum. She had just heard on the News that the Berlin Wall was coming down. So my flatmate and I tuned in our radio, and we sat and listened for hours to reports of people coming out of their homes in the middle of the night and literally hammering away at this symbol of division and hate.

And I can remember so clearly the sense of optimism and hope. Anyone here who’s my age will understand: it really felt as though the dark, drab days of angry politics and conflict could now give way to something better. But, in the weeks and months that followed, when I looked to the Government of my country, the British Government, to see if they were raising their sights to help shape this brave new world.

All I could see was a bunch of Tories too busy tearing strips off each other – embroiled, surprise surprise, in rows about European Treaties and widget directives. It was so totally dispiriting: everything I’d come to abhor about the politics with which I’d grown up: insular, petty, polarised.

And if that had been the end of the story, I doubt I would have entered politics at all. But it wasn’t. Enter Paddy Ashdown. I met Paddy, for the first time, when he came into a dingy, grey, bureaucratic office I was working in in Strasbourg. It was the middle of a major trade dispute between America and Europe.

He marched in, everyone instinctively stood to attention, and in what seemed like the blink of an eye: he ordered a cup of coffee, instructed the room on how to solve the world’s trade wars, issued a series of action points that should have been delivered yesterday, reassured us all it would be alright, and then swept out.

This was the first time I’d seen a British politician talking with passion and conviction and without defensiveness or fear about the challenges in the world and the leadership Britain needed to show. The Liberal Democrats seemed so outward looking and forward looking, compared to the tired, old, introverted politics of Labour and the Conservatives. For me, that was it. That’s how I found our party.

So I know what it is like to look at the old parties and want more – to want a party that speaks for big, enduring values. And what the Liberal Democrats gave me 20 years ago. Showing me there was something better than the tired choice between Labour and the Conservatives is something I want us to give to people across Britain today.

What do you think Britain would look like today if the Tories had been alone in Whitehall for the last three years? What would have happened without Liberal Democrats in this Government? I haven’t said enough about it.

It’s a bit old fashioned, but I always thought it was better, in politics, to tell people about the things you’ve achieved not just the things you’ve stopped. But people do need to know how coalition operates and what we do day in day out inside Government.

Ultimately it’s up to the Prime Minister and me to make this work; where there are disagreements, we try and seek compromise, and by doing that we’ve cracked problems that single party Governments have struggled with for decades: social care, pension reform, reducing reoffending, and so on.

But sometimes compromise and agreement isn’t possible and you just have to say “no”. Inheritance tax cuts for millionaires - no. Bringing back O’ levels and a two-tier education system - no. Profit-making in schools – no. New childcare ratios – no. Firing workers at will, without any reasons given – no, absolutely not.

Regional pay penalising public sector workers in the north - no. Scrapping housing benefit for young people – no. No to ditching the Human Rights Act. No to weakening the protections in the Equalities Act. No to closing down the debate on Trident. Had they asked us, no to those ‘go home’ poster vans.

No to the boundary changes if you cannot deliver your side of the bargain on House of Lords reform. And if there’s one area where we’ve had to put our foot down more than any other, have a guess. Yep, the environment.

It’s an endless battle; we’ve had to fight tooth and nail; it was the same just this week with the decision to introduce a small levy to help Britain radically cut down on plastic bags.

They wanted to scrap Natural England, hold back green energy. They even wanted geography teachers to stop teaching children about how we can tackle climate change. No, no and no – the Liberal Democrats will keep this Government green.

I don’t pretend it’s always easy to say no.  Sometimes I’ve had to wrestle with some genuinely difficult dilemmas – not just Tory party dogma.

With the Snoopers’ Charter, I took months listening to Home Office officials, the IT experts, the security services and the police because, as much as I am in Government to protect civil liberties, I also have to go to sleep at night knowing I did my bit to keep people safe.

Government ministers, loud voices in the Labour party, the securocrats and Whitehall were all adamant I should say yes. But, when push came to shove, it became clear that the surveillance powers being proposed were disproportionate: they would have massively undermined people’s privacy, but the security gain was neither proven nor clear. It was right for the establishment, but wrong for the people. So I said no.

Obviously, we haven’t been in coalition with Labour. I could give you a hypothetical list of bad ideas the Liberal Democrats would have to stop – but that would involve Labour producing some actual policies. Who here knows Labours plan for our schools? Or welfare? What would they do for the NHS? For industry? To cut crime?

Well, Labour may not have an economic strategy, but fortunately we do. A bold plan for growth agreed by conference two days ago, built on sound public finances, with house-building, infrastructure and lending to business at its heart – Liberal Democrats turning Britain around.

The truth is, Labour haven’t set out any kind of vision for Britain because they didn’t think they needed to. They have spent the last three years lazily assuming austerity would drive voters into their laps. For them, 2015 is all about the coalition parties losing rather than Labour having to actually try and win. And that tells you everything about why they act the way they do: their deliberate decision to put tactical victories ahead of long-term reform.

Remember the AV referendum? Not a happy memory for the Liberal Democrats, I accept. But do you remember that AV was in fact in Labour’s manifesto? Yet it was Labour figures who were most staunch in the defence of the status quo – just to score points against us. Lords reform – something they historically believe in. Yet when they had the chance to vote for it they found excuses not to – just to score points against us.

Even when we hear good news about the economy, they’re miserable – they’d rather it be bad, just to score points against us. So I have a message for Labour today: you can’t just duck responsibility for the past – refuse to spell out what you’d do in the future – and expect people to give you a blank cheque.

You can sit and wait for the British people to come back to you, but don’t hold your breath. And if there is one area all of the parties need to put politics aside, it’s Europe, and Britain’s place in it. The Conservatives have this bizarre view that we can turn our back on Europe and still lead in the world.

As if we’ll be taken seriously by the Americans, the Chinese, the Indians, all the big superpowers when we’re isolated and irrelevant in our own backyard. But the truth is we stand tall in Washington, Beijing, Delhi when we stand tall in Brussels, Paris and Berlin.

I know it because I worked there; I have seen with my own eyes what can be achieved for Britain by engaging with our neighbours and building the world’s largest borderless single market upon which millions of jobs in our country now depend.

Of course the European Union needs reform – no one is saying it doesn’t. But we cannot allow the contorted confusion of the right, the outright isolationism of UKIP, to jeopardise millions of British jobs and diminish Britain’s standing in the world.

Liberal Democrats, it falls to us to stand up for the national interest: we will be the party of In. I am an internationalist – pure and simple; first by birth, then by marriage, but above all by conviction. We may be an island nation, but there’s no such thing as an economic island in an age of globalisation.

And Britain is always at its strongest and proudest when we are open to the world – generous-spirited and warm-hearted, working with our neighbours and a leader on the world stage. That’s the message I will take to New York next week, when I represent the UK at the United Nations General Assembly.

There are some in the world who seek to present us as pulling up the drawbridge, following Parliament’s decision not to consider a military intervention in Syria – but they will hear from me that they are wrong.

My views on Syria are well known: I believe the use of chemical weapons – a war crime under international, humanitarian law – should be stopped wherever possible.

But I understand why some people are wary of another entanglement in the Middle East – Iraq casts a long shadow – and we now have the opportunity to work with the UN, the Russians, the Americans, the French and others to put these heinous weapons beyond the reach of Assad’s regime.

What matters now is that we are clear that this nation is not heading into retreat. It would be a double tragedy if the legacy of Iraq was a Britain turned away from the world.

Others look to our values and traditions for inspiration. Democracy, peaceful protest, equality before the law. That, in itself, confers a leadership role on us. Not as some military superpower. Not out of some nostalgic impulse after the loss of empire.

But because we believe in the virtues of law, peaceful dissent, political stability and human rights as enduring liberal values.
These are values that my own family – affected by the wars and conflicts of the past like so many other families – never took for granted.

And Miriam and I try to teach our sons that they shouldn’t take these values for granted either. After Spain moved to democracy in the 1970s, Miriam’s father was the first democratically elected Mayor in a small agricultural town in the middle of the countryside.

He single handedly brought better schools, more jobs and better housing to his community. He was hugely proud of being the first Mayor to serve his community through the ballot box. He sadly died some years ago, and there’s a small statue of him today outside the church in Miriam’s village.

Our small boys see that statue every holiday and Miriam tells them of the wonderful things he did. And they always ask about why he was elected and no one before him. We teach them that democracy and freedom are a fragile and recent thing in many parts of the world.

We teach them – just as my parents taught me – that rights and values should never be taken for granted, and if you believe in them, you should stand up for them.

And that is the United Kingdom that I want my children – all children – to grow up in: a United Kingdom that defends and promotes its values – our liberal values – at home and abroad.

It is now a year to the day until the Scottish people decide whether or not to leave the UK. The independence referendum. I unambiguously, unequivocally want Scotland to remain in the United Kingdom. The nationalists don’t have a monopoly on passion in this debate. I love the way the UK is made up of different peoples, different traditions, different histories.

I’ve sat in rugby grounds shouting my head off for England while the Scottish fans have shouted back just as loud – and it is a very special thing when good natured rivalry can flourish side by side with a feeling of affinity and closeness that comes from being a family of nations. And on every single level we are stronger together than we are apart.

We live in uncertain times, in an uncertain world - these are not days to build walls. They are days to bring them down. The decision in a year’s time does not need to be between breaking the bond or keeping the status quo – that’s a false choice. 
‘No’ does not mean no change.

A Scottish decision to remain within the UK family can and must give way to a new settlement for this nation. The Liberal Democrats have always fought for more powers for Scotland – and Wales and Northern Ireland too. In Coalition we have overseen the biggest transfer of financial freedoms in 300 years. And, from Gladstone to Grimond to today, we continue to believe in home rule.

Ming Campbell has recently produced a superb report setting out how we think home rule will work in the future. Our vision is of a proud and strong Scotland, within the United Kingdom, in charge of its own fate but part of a family of nations too. This is a vision shared by many Scots and, increasingly, the other major political parties.

That is why – once the issue of Scotland’s continued participation in the United Kingdom is hopefully settled next year – I want to see a new cross party approach to the next advance in Scottish devolution.

Willie Rennie has signalled his willingness to work with the Scottish Labour and Conservative leaders ahead of next year’s vote – and I support him.

Delivering Home Rule is a tantalising prospect that is now closer than it has been for a generation.

So let’s get out there to win the referendum in favour of keeping our nations together – and then work with others to deliver the future Scotland wants.

I had the pleasure of meeting one of Scotland’s finest this summer - Andy Murray. It was at a reception in the Downing Street garden the day after his stunning Wimbledon victory. David Cameron, Ed Miliband and I were all kind of fluttering around him, trying to ask clever questions about the Djokovic match, when Andy Murray suddenly interrupted with: ‘you all seem to get along now, why can’t you always be like this?’

A good question that was met with an awkward silence and the three of us shuffling our feet. He was right, it’s true: we can get on. We’re never going to be mates, but I’ve got nothing against them personally – politically, yes, personally, no.

That’s why the constant, breathless speculation about how different party leaders get on kind of misses the point. I’m endlessly asked who I feel more ‘comfortable’ with – David Cameron or Ed Miliband? Wouldn’t our party be more comfortable with Labour? Aren’t we more comfortable with our present coalition partners? But I don’t look at Ed Miliband and David Cameron and ask myself who I’d be most comfortable with, as if I was buying a new sofa.

In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to work with either of them because I’d be Prime Minister on my own thank you very much – and I’d like to think I’d do a better job too. So the best thing would be to put all of the predictions and personalities to one side. Whether or not we have another coalition is determined by the British people – not me, not you, the people.

And if that happens, only their votes can tell us what combination of parties carries the greatest legitimacy. Our job is plain and simple: to get more Lib Dem MPs elected.

A liberal commitment to genuine pluralism – genuine democratic choice – starts and finishes with the wishes of the public, not the preferences of the political classes.

That’s one of the reasons why I’ve never shared the view that the aim of our party should be to realign British politics by joining up with one of the other parties.

Roy Jenkins – someone I admired very much – believed that if we aligned with a modernising Labour party we could heal the divisions of the centre left. But, for me, joining forces for good with another party simply reduces democratic choice. The Liberal Democrats are not just some subset of the Labour or Tory parties – we’re no one’s little brother. We have our own values, our own liberal beliefs.

We’re not trying to get back into Government to fold into one of the other parties – we want to be there to anchor them to the liberal centre ground, right in the centre, bang in the middle. We’re not here to prop up the two party system: we’re here to bring it down.

My upbringing was privileged: home counties; private school; Cambridge University. I had a lot of opportunities. But I also had two parents who were determined that my brothers, my sister and I knew how lucky we were. On both sides, their families had experienced huge upheavals.

My Dutch mother had spent much of her childhood in a prisoner of war camp. My dad’s Russian mother had come to England after her family lost everything in the Russian Revolution. So our home was full of different languages, relatives with different backgrounds, people with different views, music and books from different places.

And my mother and father always told us that people’s fortunes can turn quickly – that good fortune should never be assumed and misfortune can occur suddenly, without warning.

I think because of the traumas their parents had been through, while they wanted to give us everything, it was so important to them that we didn’t take things for granted.

My brothers and sister and I were always taught to treat everyone the same, not to judge people by their background. We were raised to believe that everyone deserves a chance because everyone’s fortunes can change, often through no fault of their own.

And now, as a father with three children at school, I have come to understand even more clearly than before that if we want to live in a society where everyone has a fair chance to live the life they want - and to bounce back from misfortune too - then education is the key.

The gifts we give our children – self-confidence, an enthusiasm to learn, an ability to empathise with others, a joy in forging new friendships – these are instilled at an extraordinarily young age.

That’s why I made social mobility the social policy objective of this Government – and I will want it to be the same for any Government I’m in. It’s why so much of my efforts over the last three years, and so much of the money available to us, has been invested in those crucial formative years:

The £2.5bn Pupil Premium that I first wrote about 10 years ago. The 15 hours of free pre-school help for all three and four year olds, and now two year olds from the homes who need it most. Shared parental leave; new rights to flexible working; tax free childcare. These are the measures I’ve spent more time on than anything else in this Coalition.

If you want to know what I really believe in you will find it in these policies. Using the muscle of the state to create a level playing field when it counts most – when boys and girls are still forming their views, their characters, their hopes and their fears.

That’s why I’m delighted to tell you that we are now also going to provide free school meals for all children of infant school age.

From next September we’ll give every child in Reception, and Years 1 and 2 a healthy lunch every day – saving families more than £400 per year, per child.

And, for the Liberal Democrats, this is a first step: my ambition is to provide free school meals for all primary school children. Another reason we want to get into Government again next time round.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, have made it clear that their priority is to help some families over others, with a tax break for married couples. A tax break for some, funded through the taxes of everybody else - that tells you everything you need to know about their values.

We, however, will help all families in these tough times, not just the kind we like best, by helping their young children get the best possible start in life – and that tells you everything about our values. Providing this kind of help, Liberal Democrats, is now, the most important thing we can do.

Aside from anything else, that is how we restore people’s faith in our politics: by delivering for them in ways that are relevant and real. By talking to people about the things they care about, not what the political classes are talking about.

It’s so easy to lose sight of those things when you’re stuck in the Westminster bubble. And I want to be honest with you: keeping a balance between politics and normal life isn’t straightforward.

Politics these days is a roller-coaster ride of 24 hour news, breathless headlines, lurid tweets, endless polls, constant gossip about who’s up and who’s down. And you have to be really disciplined with yourself about keeping one foot in the real world to keep things in balance.

Miriam and I chose not to live behind the Government battlements in Whitehall, so we live in the same home we’ve been in for some years. We try very hard to keep our family life normal and private – we keep our children away from the cameras. We don’t pretend we’re a model family – we are who we are. We try to make sure that Westminster doesn’t take over our lives.

I know I won’t be in politics forever. What I will be is a father, a husband, a son, an uncle to all those I love in my family for good – just like anyone else. So, the longer I spend in this job, the more and more I cherish the human, direct and unstuffy way we Liberal Democrats do politics.

Our zeal for knocking on doors, making ourselves available, speaking like human beings – we must never lose that. And, as much as I’m always telling you all to embrace Government, I’m forever looking for ways to try and get out of Whitehall myself.

Taking answers on the radio; fielding questions in village halls; trying to help my constituents out when they come to see me in my Sheffield surgery; going out on regional tours; or, when I can’t get away, answering your questions online.

Doing things differently must always be part of our identity. I want us to stay in Government – but I also want us to show that it is possible to be a party of Government without behaving like an establishment party.

There was this wonderful moment on the day of the last vote on Equal Marriage. Some of us put pink carnations in our button holes and Alistair Carmichael and I were invited to go outside to meet some of the campaigners. Little did we know that they had set up an impromptu wedding ceremony – cake and dancing ‘n’ all – outside the Palace of Westminster.

And we found ourselves standing side by side – if not quite hand in hand – in front of the exuberant London Gay Men’s Chorus, singing Abba’s Dancing Queen for us at the top of their voices.

Meanwhile, inside the House of Lords, dinosaur opponents of the Bill were having a final go at killing it – declaring that gay marriage would be the end of civilisation as we know it. And, awkward though I think Alistair and I must have appeared as we lamely clapped along to Abba, at that moment we were exactly where we belonged: on the outside, welcoming in reform.

Liberal Democrats, three years ago I told you that we had an opportunity our predecessors would have given anything for. To govern. To turn our liberal principles into practice. Today I tell you that an even bigger opportunity awaits. The cycle of red, blue, blue, red has been interrupted.

Our place in this Government has prevented the pendulum swinging back from left to right. We are now where we always should have been: in power; in the liberal centre; in tune with the British people. And every day we are showing that we can govern and govern well. That pluralism works. And if we can do this again – in Government again in 2015 – we are a step closer to breaking the two party mould for good.

In the past, there were people who would only support us when the future of the country was not at stake. Now there are people who will support us precisely because the future of the country will be at stake.

In the past the Liberal Democrats would eke out an existence on the margins of British politics. Now we hold the liberal centre while our opponents head left and right. I have spent my entire life watching the other two mess it up.

We cannot stand idly by and let them do it all over again. We are the only party that can finish the job of economic recovery, but finish it fairly.
The only party able to build a stronger economy and a fairer society too.

Liberal Democrats take that message out to the country. Our mission is anchoring Britain to the centre ground. Our place is in Government again.

Prepare to be wrong about Sky.

When BSkyB shares dipped recently there was more than a little cheer among certain parts of the UK's chattering classes. For many, especially those on the liberal, intelligent left Sky's Murdoch links, anti-intellectual approach and opposition to the BBC makes them feel that their subscription, bought on the basis that football is, after all, the stuff of life, smacks of hypocrisy. And hell hath no fury as a middle-class liberal made aware of their own hypocrisy.

Sky's dominance as a sport broadcaster, its presence in pubs and bars (even the rough ones) and its almost sacrilegious pokes at the BBC do not win it many friends.

But strip away the schadenfreude and the share price movement was entirely predictable. The initial drop in share price after the results were released was obviously just a reflection of profit taking rather than an indication of weaknesses in the business. The results themselves highlight the strengths of BSB, not least a solid strategy in the face of a confused and complex media scene.

Sky's great strength is that is has a good share of a market that is comfortable with a monthly subscription and eager for cross-platform services and content. It already has 35 per cent of its customers buying into the cross-platform offer.

Younger consumers don't understand annual licences and have no more interest in maintaining the BBC, or any other traditional broadcast operator or news provider come to that, than they have in buying newspapers.

The BSkyB investment strategy does not have to take into account legacy services of the sort that will, for many of its rivals, become an ever greater burden.

BT's foray into sport broadcasting is much lauded and gets positive media attention - mostly for all the wrong reasons. However, it does show that BT is serious about becoming a media player. It is determined to offer content as well as technology and infrastructure. That said, Ian Livingstone has departed and BSkyB is not going to wait around while rivals try to catch up.

Few political debates are as persistently vexed and fractious as that over immigration. Successive governments have deployed tough rhetoric claiming to have a grip on the system, softened with Danny Boyle-esque nods to migrant contributions through centuries of British history. To no avail.

The British public remain stubbornly sceptical about immigration, much more so than their European neighbours. According to Transatlantic Trends, the German Marshall Fund's annual survey, published today, 64 per cent of British people consider it to be more of a problem than an opportunity. We remain much more concerned than other countries with similar or higher levels of immigration, such as France, Sweden and Italy. And when asked to estimate how many migrants live in the country, the British are especially prone to inflate the numbers. The average guess in the UK was 31 per cent. The real figure is closer to 12 per cent.

Immigration is a contentious issue in the US and in most of the European countries included in the survey. Countries such as Spain and Italy have been more severely affected by the economic crisis than the UK. And they have only recently become a destination for large numbers of migrants. Yet the British are more worried about immigration than residents of these countries in the Schengen zone, within which border and passport controls have been abolished.

However, Transatlantic Trends also shows that in the UK attitudes have remained fairly stable. The recession, rising unemployment and ongoing welfare cuts have not led to the dramatic hardening of public opinion that might be expected. Other countries have shown changes since 2008. German attitudes, for example, have become more positive, in contrast to the increasingly pessimistic French.

But are the British really as unwaveringly anti-immigrant as these findings suggest?

One reason underlying British scepticism is likely to be persistent distrust in the management of the immigration system. The current Government, like its predecessor, has been keen to demonstrate its competence in this area. Rafts of measures have been introduced to reinforce the message that our borders are well-managed and tightly controlled: from scrapping the UK Border Agency to this summer's controversial 'Go Home' van. But there has been little change in perceptions and an overwhelming majority of British people - 72 per cent - still think that the Government has been doing a poor job at managing migration.

On closer examination, it's also clear that public opinion on this issue is much more nuanced than it initially appears. A majority of British people agree that immigrants take jobs from British workers but also that they create jobs through setting up new businesses and help fill jobs where there are shortages. As for the cultural impact of immigration - an important part of the story - views are also seemingly paradoxical. While we are fairly evenly split on whether immigrants pose a threat to our national culture, a healthy majority - 63 per cent - consider that they enrich British culture.

Perhaps one key to understanding British public opinion is to consider the immigration and integration debates separately. The former focuses on numbers, borders and rights and entitlements, or the lack or abuse thereof. A recent report by the Migration Observatory at Oxford University examined broadsheet and tabloid coverage of immigration during the past three years. It found that the most common word used to describe immigrants was 'illegal.'

Integration, on the other hand, is a much slipperier concept. In the public conversation it tends to manifest itself almost subliminally, in the form of personal stories and experiences. The prize-winning heart-surgeon or Olympic medal winner who just happens to have been born in a different country. This may explain why Transatlantic Trends shows that the British public are more positive on questions of integration. A majority consider that the children of immigrants are integrating well.

It may also be that the British debate about national identity is not as closely linked to immigration as on the continent. Leaving aside whether multiculturalism failed as a state policy, as Angela Merkel memorably claimed, there is no denying that attitudes to diversity and race have transformed in recent decades in the UK. As a report by British Future last year notes, concern about mixed race relationships has fallen from 50% in the 1980s to just 15% in 2012.

During the last World Cup there was much discussion about the unprecedented diversity of the German national team, with Merkel commenting that they provided a role model "for those who are of German origin just as much as for those who want to integrate." It's hard to imagine an analogous debate in the UK. Racism remains a problem in football, but it's unlikely that Jermain Defoe and his non-white team-mates would be described as role models for integration. Few would consider them to be anything other than British.

The fact that integration debates in Britain have become more subtle in recent years is to be welcomed. But it's important to approach our seemingly overwhelming negativity towards immigration with some caution. As these poll findings suggest, the British public have complex and multi-layered views on the benefits and challenges immigration brings. And it's that debate we should be having, not one about how we can become tougher and less welcoming to migrants.

Ayesha Saran is Migration Programme Manager for the Barrow Cadbury Trust

The much talked about patent box legislation came into effect for relevant profits arising on or after 1 April 2013. There have been many articles looking at how patent box works but in this blog I want to look at some of the less talked about, but just as important, aspects of the relief.

When does the relief start?

The new legislation has effect for accounting periods starting on or after 1 April 2013. The important point, however, is that sub clauses (2) and (3) apply where a company has an accounting period straddling 1 April 2013. Such a period is treated, for these purposes, as two separate accounting periods, one ending on 31 March and one starting on 1 April. The relevant profits of that second period will be eligible for consideration for the patent box.

I’ve got losses, should I elect into the patent box?

If your s 357C (or 357DA, if appropriate) CTA 2010 computation currently produces relevant IP losses, then it is almost certainly better to stay out of the patent box at this stage. Patent box losses must be set off against patent box profits. If the company is a member of a group, the losses must be set off against patent box profits of other group members before the relief is computed in those companies. If there aren’t any group companies with patent box profits, the losses must be carried forward and set off against future patent box profits of the claimant company.

A word of caution, the offset of available patent box losses in a group is mandatory. The definition of ‘group’ for patent box purposes is quite broad so make sure you know whether you are in such a group and, if so, whether other companies have patent box losses that you may need to offset.

There are scenarios, however, where you might still want to elect into the patent box regime even with losses. The legislation recognises that the patent application process can be quite long and in some cases profits may arise after the patent has been applied for, but prior to its actual grant. The legislation provides a mechanism for including such profits for up to 6 years prior to the grant of the patent. Following an election (s 357CQ CTA 2010), these amounts are added to the relevant IP profits of the period in which the patent is granted.

In order to make the election, the company must have been within the patent box (i.e. have made an election under s 357A CTA 2010) in the period in which the profits actually arose. Therefore, if you currently anticipate patent box losses but there is significant profit from a “patent pending” invention, it might still be worth electing into the patent box now. Ultimately, a little bit of financial forecasting will be required to enable a decision to be made.

Should I opt for streaming rather than the formulaic approach?

S 357C CTA 2010 provides a formulaic approach to identifying the relevant patent box profits; it is possible to elect for an alternative approach, known as streaming. The streaming approach is set out in s 357DA CTA 2010. Broadly, this involves a more direct splitting of income and expenditure between IP and non-IP related sources.

Streaming may be worth considering if you have a significant amount of non-IP income that is less profitable than the relevant IP income.

Note that streaming is mandatory if certain conditions are met.

We use a patented production process, can we benefit from patent box?

Companies sometimes use patents in industrial processes. Whilst it will not be possible to directly include income from products produced using such patented processes, companies will be able to compute a notional royalty income from such patents. In this way a proportion of the profits will be able to be included in the patent box. Essentially, the notional royalty is the proportion of the income (which is not otherwise relevant IP income) arising directly from the use of the patent which the company would have to pay to a third party for use of the patented process (assuming it didn’t already have the right to use that process).

Should I start applying for patents?

The availability of the patent box relief is one factor to consider in the company’s IP protection policy. However, its availability may just mean that seeking patent protection makes more sense. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there has been an increase in patent applications. The process of obtaining a UK patent, however, is quite long and earlier this year the IPO launched a consultation process looking at the possibility of introducing an accelerated process. The results of that consultation seem to have been generally negative and the Government has decided not to proceed with it at present.

This article first appeared on economia

This was the speech that many thought Nick Clegg would never deliver. Back in 2010, when millions of Lib Dem voters defected en masse to Labour, Westminster sages predicted that by 2013 he would be in retreat from British politics, preparing for a return to Brussels as the UK's new EU commissioner. But today Clegg stood before his party as a politician reborn, buoyed by the Eastleigh by-election, the economic recovery and the prospect of another hung parliament.

Of the six conference speeches Clegg has given as leader, this was by some distance the best. It was by turns witty, moving and self-deprecating. In a clarion call to Labour supporters in Tory-Lib Dem marginals to come home to his party, Clegg reminded us just how much worse a majority Conservative government would have been: "Inheritance tax cuts for millionaires - no. Bringing back O’ levels and a two-tier education system - no. Profit-making in schools – no. New childcare ratios – no. Firing workers at will, without any reasons given – no, absolutely not. Regional pay penalising public sector workers in the north - no. Scrapping housing benefit for young people – no. No to ditching the Human Rights Act. No to weakening the protections in the Equalities Act. No to closing down the debate on Trident." He pointed out that it was David Cameron who told him during the 2010 leaders' debate that the country couldn't afford a personal tax allowance of £10,000 and smartly took ownership of equal marriage, the coalition's greatest achievement and one that would have been impossible without Lib Dem support. And he reaffirmed his party's status as the surest defenders of civil liberties, the greatest champions of Europe and the most committed environmentalists.

The announcement of free school meals for all infant pupils was a masterstroke, drawing some of the sting from Labour's "cost of living" attack and cheering his party's universalist wing. How foolish of the Tories to press ahead with their discriminatory tax breaks for marriage, giving the lie to their claim that they wish to support all and any "hardworking families".

But there were two problems with Clegg's speech that he evaded, rather than confronted. The first, if we are entering a new era of hung politics, is the question of whether the Lib Dems view Labour or the Tories as their natural coalition partner. Clegg sought to present himself as agnostic between the two but the polls repeatedly show that it is the former that his party's activists and voters are drawn towards. In the case of Clegg, the reverse is the case. Today, he declared that "I don’t look at Ed Miliband and David Cameron and ask myself who I’d be most comfortable with, as if I was buying a new sofa." But his staff routinely brief that they crave a renewal of vows with Cameron. If the next election results in another hung parliament but both Labour and the Tories win enough seats to form a majority government with Lib Dem support his party risks a damaging schism. Jeremy Browne and David Laws will look towards Cameron, Vince Cable and Tim Farron to Miliband.

The second problem is that Clegg's positioning of the Lib Dems as a "party of government" is premised on the belief that another hung parliament is likely in 2015. It certainly appears more probable than it did last year, but recall that while even a seven-point lead wasn't enough for the Tories to secure a majority, a lead of just one-point will be enough for Labour. Clegg confidently ended: "Our place is in Government again." But if Miliband leads Labour into government after 2015, he will be left as the head of a marginalised party, bereft of members and seats (even now, the Lib Dems will struggle to hold onto more than 30), and discredited for a generation by collusion with the party that was for so long its greatest foe.

The Lib Dems' new raison d'être is to serve as a centrist party that takes office in order to ameliorate the extremes of Labour and the Tories. To this end, Clegg has been prepared to trade principle for power. For every one of the Tory policies that he prevented, one can name others that he enabled: the immigration cap, NHS privatisation, £9,000 tuition fees, the VAT rise, the abolition of the 50p tax rate, the benefit cap and the bedroom tax. In the trade-off between principle and power, the danger is that Lib Dems will lose both.