At the height of his cocaine habit in the 1980s, Elton John looked out of his hotel room window and called his manager: it was too windy – could he possibly change the weather?

Elton’s long commitment to the powder was, he says, one of the things that ought to have killed him, along with Aids, which he still can’t believe he didn’t get. Like many ex-addicts, he has a therapeutic need for transparency. This has alienated some of his best-known friends – George Michael and Billy Joel, both of whom he publicly declared were in need of rehab – while others to whom he gave the same advice (Rufus Wainwright and Eminem among them) pretty much credit him with saving their lives. Elton is a unique figure in British celebrity: our national mother hen.

Tonight, the upper decks of the Roundhouse in Camden are heaving with famous names – Rupert Everett, Stephen Fry, Harry Styles from One Direction. People come to see Elton the way they used to turn out for the royal family. Many in the audience are in their early twenties and unlikely to have much of his music on their phone, but in a sense there is no need; it is part of the public consciousness, coming to us on late-night radio or via the wedding disco.

At the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, the famous “dancing fountains” perform to “Your Song”, handling Bernie Taupin’s stuttering phrases – “Anyway, the thing is, what I really mean” – in a series of smaller spouts. At the Roundhouse, his story of a fictional 1970s band, “Bennie and the Jets”, raises the roof after one solitary strike of its strange opening chord. Frank Ocean sampled that chord on his debut album, Channel Orange, last year, the latest young person to make tasteful work of Elton’s early material. Everyone understands that he is a great songwriter but fewer realise that he still does 200 shows a year, orders new albums every Monday from the HMV website and has a record collection so vast it is stored on rollers, like how the British Library stores books. In short, he is still very much a “working musician” –which is what they seem to be trying to address with The Diving Board, his 30th studio album.

“Written in two days!” it says on this press release.“Elton reunited with Bernie Taupin!” The pair were put together by the Liberty Records A&R man Ray Williams in 1967 after they answered an ad for songwriters in the New Musical Express. Taupin’s lyrics would be delivered to Elton (then still Reg Dwight) on sheets of paper and he would set them to music quickly at the piano; sometimes songs would be written in half an hour.

In the 1980s the lyrics would arrive by fax machine. Elton still works the way he used to – rents a studio from 11 till six and turns up not knowing what he’s going to write. As we continue to excavate the rich ground of 20th-century pop, any musician who rose from a Tin Pan Alley background to lead a stadium career of his own seems particularly fascinating. He wrote songs for Lulu and Roger Cook; he once referred to his song “Sacrifice” as “my Percy Sledge number” . . .

T-Bone Burnett produced The Diving Board and he also worked on The Reunion, Elton’s 2010 collaboration album with his hero Leon Russell, another project that reminded people of his roots. While his early 1970s Americana records expressed their authenticity through sepia-tinged artwork, the new one shows a figure, shaped like Elton, stripped to jeans, socks and a T-shirt, standing at the end of a vast sea; kind of dark and so very different from the giant specs, jumpsuits and Regency wigs that are branded on the memory. Different, indeed, from the sparkly red ringmaster’s coat he’s wearing at the Roundhouse tonight.

He begins with “The Bitch Is Back”, dwarfed by footage of a blonde pole-dancer beamed on to the screens behind him. Over the course of the night the screens also show naked men playing with kittens and, for a new song called “Home Again”, a video in which a handsome, middle-aged chap walks thoughtfully over a moor. (Elton, like Woody Allen, chooses not to appear in his own films much any more, preferring to be represented by Robert Downey, Jr or Justin Timberlake.)

Having spent a lifetime contending with one of rock’s more cumbersome instruments, he stands up from the piano every few minutes and punches the air, then reseats himself with legs akimbo, like Little Richard. There are many high-wire displays of technique tonight. “Watch me go!” he says, before motoring away on the high notes.

As a child, he attended the Royal Academy of Music every Saturday for lessons. He was famous for his Red Piano show at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas and is still the closest thing we have to Liberace. His voice has dropped considerably in the past 20 years, naturally, and this is particularly noticeable on “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” when, instead of going for that great, arcing chorus, he opts for something a few storeys below the verse instead, which is funny.

Sometimes you feel he could do with subtitles, like for foreign opera, because his diction has become rather slurred and these words are so fascinating. For instance, it is great to hear “Levon” tonight, which was written at the height of Elton and Bernie’s love affair with America and represents Taupin at his obscure best. Named after the Band’s Levon Helm, it is an otherwise fictional account of a young man born on Christmas Day, with a father called Alvin Tostig who owns a family business blowing up balloons.

There were many other strangenesses in the 1970s: “Grey Seal”, about looking into the wise eyes of a grey seal, and “Rocket Man”, based on a short story by Ray Bradbury, about a lonely astronaut-drone working in space. Whether through books, or drugs, or just the imagination of youth, Taupin aimed cosmic in the early days.

As the mid-career point approached, and real life intruded and marriages collapsed, those imaginative first-person fantasies and American vistas retreated somewhat. So it’s strange to hear them coming back now, on The Diving Board, which seems to me to be packed with a young man’s visions – accounts of bohemian life in “My Quicksand”, the story of a dissipated poet, or the cowboyish romp “Oscar Wilde Gets Out” (which tonight is dedicated “to Rupert and Stephen” – yuck!) and tells the tale of Wilde’s days in Paris after Reading Gaol: “And looking back on the great indifference . . ./Thinking how beauty deceived you . . .” There’s Huck Finn-style Americana in “A Town Called Jubilee” and “The Ballad of Blind Tom” (“from Harlan County all the way to Tuscaloo”), and the old homesickness that Elton and Taupin did so well in old “touring songs” such as “Rotten Peaches” and “Holiday Inn” has come full circle in “Home Again”.

“The New Fever Waltz” is set in a kind of Anna Karenina world of ballroom dancing, white flags and ice skates. It’s probably complete nonsense but it is quite beautiful. I’m sure this album is not, as some people are saying, the best thing Elton John has ever done, but it has huge energy and more piano than you can shake a stick at, and “Mexican Vacation” is the best gospel he’s written since “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”.

Strange how we expect the imagination to wane as people get older. When they lived together in Elton’s parents’ house in Pinner, Middlesex, he and Taupin would lie on the floor listening to American 45s with two sets of headphones plugged into the same machine. When he worked at One Stop Records on South Molton Street, alongside Danny Baker, even the paper sleeves of the American imports felt magical to him. Until recently a return to the style of his 1970s songwriting would have looked extremely self-conscious but now it seems appropriate: at this stage in a 50-year career, everyone wants the long view.

Still, the thoughtful interior lives of the new songs sound funny in a show full of celebrity shout-outs. The latest troubled starlet to be caught in Elton’s searchlight of concern is Lindsay Lohan, who, he told the Sun, inspired The Diving Board’s title track (he is rather too late, as she has already been to rehab).

And I can’t be the only person to feel a stab of jealousy when he dedicates “Tiny Dancer” to Tom Odell, the 22-year-old Brit Awardwinner whose career he has supported, who is also in attendance tonight. I mean, everyone in this room has a relationship with that song, even if, like me, they’d never heard it until Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous and that brilliant scene on the tour bus where the fictional bandmates start singing along to the radio. Elton can dedicate his songs to Marilyn, or Diana, or Oscar Wilde, or made-up people for that matter – but not Tom Odell! Hands off, Tom. Good songs, given long enough, start to feel like public property.

“The Diving Board” (Mercury) is released on 24 September

The historian and journalist Paul Johnson made his name writing for and then editing (1965-70) the New Statesman, but gave up on socialism in the 1970s and became a Thatcherite. Here, in a piece first published in the NS of 26 September 1975, he derides a Labour Party in hock to the “fascist” anti-intellectualism of trade unionists. After Margaret Thatcher’s landslide victory in 1979, he became a leading adviser on union policy and a powerful pro-Tory polemicist.

The biggest change that has overcome the British socialist movement in my time has been the disintegration of Labour’s intellectual Left. The outstanding personalities who epitomised, galvanised and led it are dead and have never been replaced. I am thinking, for instance, of G D H Cole, whose activities covered the whole spectrum of working-class activism and whose voluminous writings constituted a summa theologica of left-wing theory and practice; of R H Tawney, who placed the modern Left firmly in a long historical context and who endowed its philosophising with enormous intellectual and literary distinction; of R H S Crossman, who brought the bracing austerities of reason into the grossest skulduggeries of practical politics; and, above all, of Aneurin Bevan. The majesty of Bevan’s contribution lay in the fact that he transcended classes and categories – a working man with the instincts and capacities of a philosopherking, a man of action with a passion for reflection, a romantic devoted to the pursuit of pure reason, and an egalitarian obsessed by excellence.

Around these, and other, great planets swam many scores of satellites, collectively constituting a huge left-wing galaxy of talent and intelligence.

And where do we find the left wing of the party today? Without a struggle, with complacency, almost with eagerness, it has delivered itself, body, mind and soul, into the arms of the trade union movement. There is a savage irony in this unprecedented betrayal, this unthinking trahison des clercs. For Labour’s intellectual Left had always, and with justice, feared the arrogant bosses of the TUC, with their faith in the big battalions and the zombie-weight of collective numbers, their contempt for the individual conscience, their invincible materialism, their blind and exclusive class-consciousness, their rejection of theory for pragmatism, their intolerance and their envious loathing of outstanding intellects. The whole of Cole’s life was devoted to demonstrating, among other propositions, that trade union organisation was not enough, that there was a salient place for the middle-class intelligentsia in the socialist movement, and an essential role for didacticism. What Labour lacked, argued Tawney, was what he termed “the hegemonic way of thinking”: it concentrated on the base trade union aim of sectional gains for its own members instead of trying to create a new moral world.

Bevan, though a trade unionist, never regarded trade unionism as a substitute for socialism – in some ways he thought it an enemy, indeed a part of the capitalist system. He fought bitterly against the attempts by the TUC to determine Labour policy in conference and to usurp the political role in government. He believed passionately that Parliament was the instrument of strategic change, and its control the political object of social democracy – he would have resisted at all costs the brutal threat of a syndicalist takeover. Crossman put the anti-union case a little more crudely: what invalidated the TUC claim to control Labour was its sheer lack of brains and talent. Hence his notorious article pointing out that only five trade union MPs were fit to participate in a Labour ministry. For this heinous heresy he was dragged before the inquisition and, just as Galileo was forced to recant his heliocentric theory, Dick was made to pay public homage to the dazzling genius of his trade union “friends”. Afterwards, he said to me: “There was only one thing wrong with my article – I should have written three, not five.”

In those days, it was a dismally common event to see a left-winger stretched on the rack of trade union power. Intellectuals from Stafford Cripps to Bertrand Russell were the victims of drumhead courts-martial conducted by the union satraps. Yet today the leaders of what is hilariously termed the Left look to the unions as the fountainhead of all wisdom and socialist virtue. Mr Michael Foot, a Minister of the Crown, will not stir an inch unless he has the previous approval of the TUC General Council. Mr Eric Heffer, Foot’s doppelgänger and cheerleader on the back benches, regards any criticism of British trade unionism as a compound of high treason and the Sin Against the Holy Syndicalist Ghost. Did this gigantic U-turn come about because the trade union bosses have undergone a cataclysmic change of heart and transformed their whole philosophy of life and politics? Not a bit of it. It is true that the general secretaries of the biggest unions no longer, as in [Arthur] Deakin’s day, pull the strings from behind a curtain, but prefer to strut upon the stage of power themselves. It is true, also, that they inspire more genuine fear than they did 20 years ago, as their crazy juggernaut lurches over the crushed bodies of political opponents. In other respects, however, their metaphysic has not altered: it is still a relentless drive to power by the use of force and threats.

The union leaders still regard money as the sole criterion of success and social progress. They are prime victims of what Tawney, in Equality, called “the reverence for riches, the lues Anglicana, the hereditary disease of the English nation”. Blind to the long-term, to the complexities of the economic process, to the well-being and rights of other human beings – blind, in fact, to what Tawney called “fellowship”, to him the very core of the socialist ethic – they see the whole of the political struggle in immediate cash terms. The other day one of them said he would not hesitate to bring the entire publicly owned steel industry to a halt, and throw perhaps hundreds of thousands of his “comrades” out of work, unless he was offered “more money on the table”, as he put it. Asked if he would heed the activities of the government conciliation service, he said he was not going to take advice from those he contemptuously referred to as “college boys”.

Indeed, one of the startling characteristics of modern British trade union activists is their systematic dislike for intellectual and cultural eminence and their hostility towards higher education. Here a great and deplorable shift in attitudes has taken place since the 19th century. To me, the saddest newspaper report of recent years was a survey of the miners’ clubs of South Wales, which revealed that their large, and often rare and valuable, libraries of political books and pamphlets had been sold off to dealers in order to clear space for juke-boxes, pintables and strip-shows. Part of the price the left wing of the Labour Party has paid for its alliance with the trade union bosses has been the enforced adoption of a resolutely anti-intellectual stance. If miners prefer strip-shows to self-education, the argument runs, then so be it: that the collective working masses express such a preference in itself invests the choice with moral worth. Anyone who argues the contrary is “an elitist”.

“Elitist”, in fact, has become the prime term of abuse on the syndicalist Left; it heads the list of convenient clichés brought on parade whenever the Eric Heffers put pen to paper, or give tongue. It is a useful bit of verbiage to be hurled at those who, by any stretch of the imagination, can be accused of criticising wage-inflation, strikes, aggressive picketing, the Shrewsbury jailbirds, the divinity of Hugh Scanlon, “free collective bargaining”, differentials, overmanning and other central articles of syndicalist theology. And equally, anyone who pays attention to quality, who insists on the paramountcy of reason, who does not believe the masses are always right or that the lowest common denominator is the best, and who considers there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the philosophy of a Mick McGahey or an Arthur Scargill – well, he or she can be dismissed as an elitist, too. Crossman, Tawney, Cole, above all Bevan, would have been given short shrift today – elitists, the lot of them.

It says a great deal for the power of the syndicalist Left in the councils of the Government, and even in the immediate entourage of Harold Wilson (who, secretly, is one of the outstanding elitists of our time), that anti-elitism has, to some extent, become official government policy, at any rate in the sphere of higher education. Our universities used to be autonomous, and for all practical purposes exempt from state control or guidance – a very elitist and reprehensible state of affairs! But all this is now being changed as the financial cuts begin to bite and the University Grants Committee progressively takes up its role as the Government’s instrument of supervision. Earlier this year, Reg Prentice, one of Harold’s innumerable Education Ministers, sneeringly told the universities to “live off their fat” and, if necessary, “sell their art treasures”. Direction of the anti-elitist policy has now devolved on the Prime Minister’s personal academic henchman, Lord Crowther-Hunt. In an earlier incarnation he was Dr Norman Hunt, an assiduous gatherer of Westminster anecdotage with a fashionable prole accent, who made himself useful to Harold Wilson and other Labour magnificos. His reward has been a peerage and ministerial charge of higher education.

The new anti-elitist spirit in the realms of higher education both complements and echoes the alliance between the trade unions and Labour’s know-nothing Left. Away with the ivory towers! To hell with expensive research which ordinary people can’t understand, and will probably come to nothing anyway. The job of a university is to turn out field-grey regiments of “socially relevant” people, with the right egalitarian ideas, the capacity to learn by heart the latest fashionable slogans, and to march, shout, scream, howl and picket as and when required. Degradation of the universities, of course, would fit in neatly with the syndicalisation of the Labour Party, since the ideal student – according to the anti-elitists – is one who conforms as closely as possible, mentally, emotionally and culturally, to a union militant. The operation is part of an uncoordinated but nevertheless impressive effort to proletarianise the educated classes, and to smash to bits what are venomously referred to as “middle-class values” (such as honesty, truthfulness, respect for reason, dislike of lawbreaking, hatred of violence, and so forth).

It is by no means confined to students. At a recent conference of local authority education officials, a former headmaster and university vice-chancellor had the temerity to attempt a half-hearted defence of elitism and was promptly denounced, by a yobbo from Glamorgan, as “an educational fascist”. But students are the prime targets of the anti-elitists because they can be so easily organised into Rentamobs by Labour’s syndicalists and their allies (and future masters) even further to the Left. As all totalitarian rulers have discovered, once you have hacked away the logical and rational foundations on which the edifice of civilisation rests, it is comparatively easy to invert the process of ratiocination, dress up the results in verbiage, and sell them to thousands of apparently well-educated people.

A typical example of anti-elitist Newspeak is a dissenting minority report of a Yale Committee on Freedom of Expression, appointed after left-wing students smashed up a meeting addressed by William Shockley in 1974. The overwhelming majority of the Yale academics concluded that disruption of a speech should be regarded as an offence against the university, and one which could lead to expulsion. The dissentient, speaking for the Left, argued that free speech was both undesirable and impossible until there had been “liberation from, and increased self-consciousness of, the social and irrational factors that condition knowledge and pre-form the means and structures of language”. Hidden in this ugly gobbet of verbiage is the thoroughly totalitarian idea that the meanings not merely of words but of moral concepts must be recast to conform to political expediency – the very essence of Newspeak. The example is American; but there are plenty of parallels over here, not always expressed quite so naively as by the Essex student leaders who refused even to discuss an “independent report” on their activities, for which they had clamoured, on the grounds that “reason is an ideological weapon with which bourgeois academics are especially well armed”!

When reason ceases to be the objective means by which civilised men settle their differences and becomes a mere class “weapon”, then clearly the anti-elitists are making considerable progress. How long will it be before the books are burning again, and the triumph of the “Common Man”, that figment of violent and irrational imaginations, is celebrated by another Kristallnacht? Already, at the extreme fringe of the syndicalist Left, the aggrosocialists are taking over public meetings, with their ideological flick knives and their doctrinaire coshes. Not long ago, hearing and seeing a group of students and trade unionists giving the Nazi salute, and shouting “Sieg heil!” at some very stolid-looking policemen, I shut my eyes for a few seconds, and tried to detect the redeeming note of irony in their chanting. For the life of me, I could not find it. What differentiated these mindless and violent youths from Hitler’s well-drilled thugs? Merely, I fear, the chance of time and place, a turn of the fickle wheel of fortune.

Unreason and thuggery are always the enemies, whatever labels they carry; for labels are so easily removed and changed. I remember Adlai Stevenson – an elitist if ever there was one – saying wearily: “Eggheads of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your yokes.” Perhaps it is time for the elitists to stand up for themselves – there may not be so few of us, either – and start the long business of rescuing the Labour Left from the know-nothings and the half-wits.

On 2 August 1999, under the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, Talk magazine held its launch party. It was “impossibly glamorous”, according to the New York Times, with a guest list that had Henry Kissinger rubbing shoulders with Queen Latifah, Madonna and Salman Rushdie. At the centre of it all was Tina Brown, the founder of Talk and serially victorious media darling.

Brown had every reason to believe that Talk would be a success: she had been editorin- chief of Tatler at the age of 25, of Vanity Fair at 31 and of the New Yorker at 39, overhauling editorial boards and boosting circulation beyond expectations each time. In the end, Talk folded after the advertising slump that followed the 9/11 attacks, but not before it had published a series of scandalous interviews, including one with Hillary Clinton in which she blamed her husband’s philandering on childhood abuse.

In 2008, after a brief spell as a talk-show host for CNBC, Brown founded the news website the Daily Beast, which was supposed to be her proof that she could win on the web as she had in print. This decision had little to do with money – the advance for her biography of Diana the previous year was, she said, “not unadjacent” to $2m – and everything to do with ambition.

However, something clearly got lost in translation from print to online. Since the Beast’s disastrous merger with the moribund Newsweek in 2010, which was repeatedly criticised in public by her business partner, Barry Diller, Brown’s illustrious career has floundered.

And, on 12 September, it seems to have come to a sudden stop with the announcement that Brown will not have her contract renewed at the Beast. She is now devoting her time to ensuring as dignified a departure as possible.

What made Brown so irritating to a horde of jealous and grudging admirers was her ability to navigate a respectable media career and at the same time intersperse it with unashamed gaudiness. The launch of Talk magazine at the foot of the Statue of Liberty was tacky and her book The Diana Chronicles was deemed not “literary enough” to befit a former editor of the  , yet she endured.

One of Brown’s most engaging talents is her absolute commitment to that antijournalistic device, the ad hominem attack. In an article she wrote for the New Statesman in 1974 about her Oxford finals, she referred to a fellow student as a “tiny self-possessed figure with wall-to-wall halitosis”.

More recently, she described the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, on Twitter as “a creepy, lisping, giraffe-necked liar”. Because sometimes a political attack just won’t do.

Happily for those of us who enjoy personal takedowns of malodorous students and the president of Syria, Brown won’t be retiring into obscurity. With characteristic initiative, she has established Tina Brown Live Media, an events business specialising in conferencing. Such a venture did risk leaving her with a tiny amount of leisure time – a risk that she has negated by agreeing to write a memoir, reportedly titled Media Beast.

So, we needn’t feel bad for Tina Brown, who has conquered and rebuilt so many worlds and remains as rich, well connected and happily married (to the former Sunday Times editor Harold Evans) as any lifetime media mogul could hope to be.

It is not surprising that she would leap straight from the industry that has fallen out of love with her and into another. But did she jump or was she pushed?

You wouldn’t expect an industrial park in the East End of London to have much to do with London Fashion Week, but one warehouse in Canning Town is home to a surprising beneficiary of Britain’s high-fashion credentials. Lawrence M Barry & Co (LMB) is one of just two London companies that still hand-sorts second-hand clothes – mostly from council recycling bins or the rejects from charity shops – for resale in Africa and eastern Europe.

In the five years to 2012, the price of one tonne of second-hand clothes almost tripled, from £220 to roughly £650, according to the trade publication letsrecycle.com, and each year the UK sells about 378,000 tonnes of used clothes abroad. At market stalls in Mombasa or in shops in Warsaw, customers are willing to pay a premium of as much as 30 per cent for British garments.

While the fashion press studies the catwalks in central London to divine next season’s trends, LMB has its own in-house fashion rules and seasonal fads. The most valued trousers across Africa have a pleat down the middle and turned-up bottoms, which is a problem, because “no one wears turn-ups these days”, says LMB’s business development manager, Ross Barry.

Zambians love corduroy trousers, which are also hard to find. In the past few years, Barry has started exporting ladies’ high heels, “because Africa’s changing – before, women just worried about their heels getting stuck in the mud”. And there has been an unlikely increase in demand for ski jackets, after some countries made it illegal to drive a motorbike without a jacket. Barry walks me around LMB’s factory floor, where “sorters” in high-visibility jackets rifle through piles of clothing, throwing some items down yellow chutes and others into big metal cages labelled “Children’s Winter” or “Silk Blouses”. The highest-quality 5 per cent of clothes will go to eastern Europe, 45 per cent will go to Africa and the lowest-grade 50 per cent will be recycled or turned into industrial rags.

A kilo of clothes destined for eastern Europe can be sold for £2 to £3, while a kilo of clothes heading for Africa will sell for half as much. The sorters are paid the minimum wage, plus a bonus depending on their performance, and the fastest sorters can sort through two tonnes of clothes – about a lorry-full – in one shift.

In some ways, LMB is just the kind of old-fashioned British firm that policymakers romanticise and that is slowly being undercut by nimbler multinationals. It is a family business, as are most other companies in the rag trade. “My dad always says it’s because no one grows up thinking, ‘I want to be a rag man,’” jokes Barry, who has a law degree and worked in the oil industry before joining his father in the business. Sorting clothes may be tough, menial work, but staff turnover is low. The average employee has worked here for nine years and LMB runs a project to employ ex-prisoners.

A lot has changed since Barry’s father, Lawrence, moved into the clothes trade in the mid-1980s, initially handing out flyers at Heathrow Airport to find potential buyers and shippers. The market has expanded, but that has made it tougher, too. Councils are charging more for second-hand clothes and rising labour costs have forced many to outsource their sorting to eastern Europe. Barry says six UK rag firms went out of business last year and eight have folded this year.

Whatever your parents told you, it’s not about the birds and the bees. Ultimately, reproduction seems to be about a protein molecule called kisspeptin. The name has nothing to do with foreplay, however. Kisspeptin was discovered in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and its name comes from the town’s other great research success: Hershey’s Kisses chocolates.

At some point, most people’s brain starts to secrete kisspeptin; when it does, the hypothalamus begins to produce a chemical called gonadotropin-releasing hormone, or GnRH. Written down, it looks like a teenage grunt and that’s what it leads to. GnRH release is a crucial moment at the beginning of puberty. It brings about the secretion of hormones that start egg or sperm production and create the characteristic signs of sexual maturity.

On 12 September, the King’s College London professor Kevin O’Byrne discussed the “enigma” of GnRH at a conference at the University of Bristol. The central enigma is the unanswered question of what kicks off puberty – we still don’t know what activates kisspeptin to release GnRH.

It seems to have something to do with the brain’s monitoring of stress and nutrition. Without good fat reserves and a relaxed demeanour, the chemical sages won’t let you enter the trials of reproduction. That’s why girls suffering from anorexia can experience disrupted menstruation.

Kisspeptin’s role in puberty was discovered by accident when researchers were looking at its anti-cancer properties. Controlling the teenage brain is not the only thing it can do. GnRH is now used as a part of some cancer treatment routines because it stops the production of oestrogen, a hormone that seems to play a role in stimulating tumour growth.

Here’s another clue: some of the ugliest rodents on the planet, known as “naked mole rats”, are awash with kisspeptin – and they don’t get cancer.

Most animals have levels of kisspeptin neurons that vary according to sex as well as reproductive state. New research shows that naked mole rats have high kisspeptin and GnRH levels no matter what their readiness for reproduction.

That is particularly odd because, despite these high levels of kisspeptin, most naked mole rats don’t develop the ability to breed. Like some species of bee, naked mole rats live in colonies in which only a queen and a few consorts develop the ability to reproduce. The rest are workers that remain sterile all their lives. And those are long lives.

Their extraordinary resistance to developing cancers makes naked mole rats the longestliving rodents. Mice and rats typically live for two or three years; naked mole rats often live for two decades or more. Understanding what kisspeptin does for the naked mole rat could assist our fight against the ravages of ageing.

However, our slowly increasing grasp of kisspeptin and GnRH is causing a dilemma. The age at which human beings hit puberty is falling – on average, it has fallen by five years since 1920. It’s less of a problem for boys than for girls, for whom “precocious puberty” is linked with an increased risk of breast cancer, mental disorders and, in later life, polycystic ovary syndrome.

That raises the question of whether we should intervene. There’s still a lot we don’t know but research has shown that an injection of kisspeptin kicks off puberty artificially. More usefully, drugs that block kisspeptin prevent puberty from starting and doctors are starting to intervene in the most extreme cases of precocious puberty. Some see this as a risky thing to do when we have no long-term data on the outcome.

This new branch of science might not yet have hit puberty but it is already starting to give us trouble.

French author Marcel Proust, whose work Gilmour says he has read twice.
Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

There are many good reasons to be upset about the things the novelist and broadcaster David Gilmour said in a recent interview on the Hazlitt Magazine blog. Both he and I work at the University of Toronto, so my instant reaction was institutional defensiveness: unlike Mr Gilmour, who teaches the odd college course, I am a professor of English literature here, and it stung to see his bizarre, reactionary views on literature and teaching associated in the media with my institution, and in particular with its literary scholars.

That’s why I think it’s important to say that David Gilmour is not a colleague of mine (though I speak in this, and in the rest of this essay, only for myself). As far as I can tell from his published comments, he’s not much of a literature professor either. He seems to be fond of authors, and he says he loves their work — provided they are male, white, and very much like him. If they check those boxes, there are few limits to how far Mr Gilmour is willing to go in his passion. Take Proust, whom he loves so much, he's read him twice. A true worker in the vineyard of the literary gods, David Gilmour.

The biggest hits on his shelf, he says, are Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Proust. His love for these men is reflected in his teaching, which focusses on "serious heterosexual guys. F Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth." But not, it seems, on the twice-read Proust. The massively guy-guy Proust, notorious philanderer, heavy drinker, gregarious man-about-town Proust. (Not the Proust you know? Someone might want to drop David Gilmour a note. Or send him Proust’s biography.)

Women authors, however, Gilmour won't teach, because he just doesn't love them enough. Except for Virginia Woolf, whom he loves too much. Woolf he can't teach because his students, even in third year, aren't sufficiently smart to catch up with her “sophistication.”

I don't know if this inane interview bears any resemblance to what Gilmour is telling his students. I rather hope it doesn’t, but he said what he said, and he hasn’t taken anything back in his subsequent interviews. And what he did say, besides the generally offensive stuff, barely reached the level of the average Wikipedia entry. It certainly didn’t have much to do with literature. I get why David Gilmour might want to do shots with Chekhov, but I have no idea why he would want to read his works. Authors sound a lot like George W. Bush when Gilmour praises them: great guys to have a beer with. Never mind about the writing, or the government bit.

All of which makes me think that it’s probably a good thing David Gilmour isn't teaching Virginia Woolf. I'm a bit sorry he's teaching Chekhov, and Tolstoy, and Fitzgerald. I don't really care about Philip Roth or Henry Miller: he can do with them what he likes. And I’m sure there must be other white, middle-aged, male authors who would benefit from having the kind of pseudo-biographical rubbish draped all over them that Gilmour heaps on poor Chekhov, who apparently was "the coolest guy in literature." (Christopher Marlowe just called to complain. What makes Chekhov so cool? Whom did Chekhov ever kill? Did Chekhov ever catch a knife in the eye? Or get done for coining? Fuck that milquetoast Chekhov!) Chekhov, Gilmour informs us, also laughed loudly. And he made everyone around him a better person. Man, that Chekhov. What a guy. What a guy-guy. Oh yeah, and a writer, too.

Obviously, that's all a curdled mess of intellectual mediocrity. And really not worth bothering with. What is more troubling to me than the initial interview, though, is Gilmour's follow-up conversation with the Globe and Mail newspaper, in which he explains what he really meant to say:

People are calling you a sexist for refusing to teach books by women. Were your statements in Hazlitt misrepresented in any way? They were totally, totally misinterpreted. I said, look, I’m a middle-aged writer and I am interested in middle-aged writers. I’m very keen on people’s lives who resemble mine because I understand those lives and I can feel passionately about them – and I teach best when I teach subjects that I’m passionate about.

So in order to teach, you have to relate?

I believe that if you want to teach the way I want to teach, you have to be able to feel this stuff in your bones. Other teachers don’t, but I don’t think other teachers necessarily teach with the same degree of commitment and passion that I do – I don’t know.

It is obviously Gilmour's prerogative, as a middle-aged writer, to be interested exclusively in other middle-aged writers. It may make him sounds staggeringly narrow-minded and parochial, but so what: it takes all sorts. But what this attitude of I-relate-only-to-myself has to do with teaching is entirely beyond me.

Is passion about our subject matter important in the classroom? Absolutely. Is the passion required in teaching typically stirred because the teacher identifies with the author or the text she teaches? I seriously hope not. I can only speak for myself, but I can categorically say that I have never identified with Shakespeare or Ben Jonson. Marlowe, well that’s a different story. (For the record: I’m nothing like Marlowe, and I don't want to be Marlowe. I like my eye-sockets too much.) And yet, I don't believe I have a reputation for lacking passion for my subject. But what do I know: most likely, I’m one of those uncommitted, indifferent “other teachers” Gilmour has in mind. If feeling the stuff you teach “in your bones” is a requirement for teaching it well, I suspect Gilmour is right about his singularity. From what I can observe in my colleagues, I don't think many of them teach only authors in whose works they see mirror-images of themselves. English Departments would otherwise be rife with psychopaths, morbidly jealous types, pretend kings and queens, and wealthy socialites. And people who ride around on donkeys. I’m sad to say they're not. And I don't even want to think about how dangerous a work environment history departments would be: who would ever want to be next door to the colleague who’s teaching Nazi Germany?

Gilmour’s right, though, that passion, even love, are necessary ingredients in pedagogy. What he’s got completely wrong is the who and the what of that love. Great teaching requires empathy — the effort to understand things, ideas, and people totally unlike you. Some of those people are your students. Some of those things are of the past. Some of those ideas are the ideas of authors from different cultures than yours, and yes, shockingly, even of a different gender. Engaging with those people, things, and ideas is what teaching is all about. And not coincidentally, it’s also what research is all about, and why research and teaching go well together. Most crucially, engagement with the other is what reading is.

Gilmour's account of his teaching, by contrast, is strikingly devoid of empathy. Chinese authors? Nothing like me, can't love them. Queer authors? Nothing like me, can't love them. (But Marcel....) Female authors? Nothing like me, can't love them. White men who are like me or the man I want to be? Love those. Sympathy is what this view of things is all about: one big group hug among white guys across the twentieth century, all guys like Gilmour. What's grimly hilarious, rather than merely depressing, is the predictable casual homophobia that goes hand in hand with this chest-thumpy, circle-jerky, narcissistic literary bromance: Gilmour loves Chekhov so much, he'd marry him tomorrow if only they weren't both so amazingly straight. The "literary" bit seems almost incidental. None of what makes Chekhov a cool guy, after all, has anything to do with the plays or short stories he wrote. It's all about his "personality." His grace. His generosity. His "bellicose laugh." And the right set of genitals.

What David Gilmour professes isn’t literary scholarship or criticism. Never mind that he says offensive things (a big thing not to mind, I know). I’m sure we all say offensive things from time to time. Far more troubling, to me, is his basic failure to grasp why anyone should read literature at all, his stunningly self-righteous elevation of narcissism into the most powerful source of aesthetic appreciation — the infantile pleasure of self-recognition, and ultimately of self-affirmation as the highest, even the only end of reading.

We can argue about whether Hamlet is right or not when he claims that art holds a mirror up to nature. But let's just say he is. Here's what Hamlet doesn't say: that art is a mirror you choose to pick up to see yourself. Art doesn’t give you that choice. If you’re playing along at all, it forces you to look in a mirror; and what you see there isn't supposed to be your pre-conceived self-image. It's something strange, or alien, or scary, or ridiculous, or dull; beautiful or hideous; unsettling or vaguely comforting. But whatever it is, it demands engagement, an engagement that can’t ever be entirely on your terms. And sometimes, the mirror reveals something that you realise isn’t strange at all, but is in fact you — but that shouldn’t be a happy realisation. It’s supposed to come at a price. It’s meant to matter. And it’s not meant to be as easy to come by as self-love. Because if the thing you see when you look into a book looks exactly like what you think you look like, you're doing it wrong. David Gilmour is most certainly doing it wrong.

A version of this article first appeared on Holger Syme's blog, and is crossposted here with his permission

Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank has been ordered to compensate mortgage customers it treated unfairly as well as pay a fine. We answer five questions on the fine.

Who has ordered Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank to compensate customers?

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has fined the bank £8.9m. The authority said customers were not made aware of their rights after errors in 42,500 accounts in 2009.

It added that Clydesdale was concerned with its own commercial interests rather than its customers.

Around 22,000 customers will now receive payouts averaging £970.

What happened exactly?

There was a calculation error on customers’ mortgage repayments demands over a four year period to 2009. Due to the error, 22,000 customers had underpaid their mortgages and were subsequently expected to increase their monthly repayment to make up for the short fall.

The FCA said this was unfair and the bank should have taken on the cost rather than shifting it to the customer.

How big were the shortfalls?

The underpayments ranged from £20 to over £18,000. They will now be paid back in compensation. Those with outstanding mortgages will see their debt reduced while others will receive a cheque.

A further 20,500 who paid too much of their mortgage may be able to claim compensation as well.

Overall the bank has said the cost of the fine and compensation would total £42m.

What has the FCAsaid?

"For most people mortgage payments are their biggest monthly outgoing and we all budget on the assumption that the information our mortgage lender gives us about what we need to pay is correct," said Tracey McDermott, of the FCA.

"Here Clydesdale failed in that basic duty and, when it discovered the problem, sought to pass all of the consequences on to its customers - expecting them to find the money to remedy mistakes which were entirely of Clydesdale's making.

"Clydesdale is today paying the price for its decision to put its bottom line ahead of the need to ensure its customers were treated fairly."

What has Clydesdale said?

"I am very sorry that this was not handled as it should have been. We should have made it clear at the time that this was entirely our fault and that some customers may be entitled to compensation," said David Thorburn, chief executive of Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank, which is owned by National Australia Bank.

"Our priority is to fix this for customers as quickly as possible and they will each receive a letter explaining how we will make this right for them."

Gender-based violence is a deeply embedded problem in many societies and cultures. Despite this, efforts to challenge it are rarely seen at a primary school level. There is a perception that children aged 11 and 12 are too young to “know” about violence, or to offer opinions on it. But this is something that has to change if we are ever going to combat the attitudes and behaviour that can lead to this type of violence.

Recently, I have been conducting research in this area with children in five primary schools across Glasgow. I wanted to look into how young children viewed and defined violence, and thereby confront what I discovered was an everyday acceptance of, in particular, male violence against women.

I found that young people understood and made sense of violence in a way that was always framed by gender. They tended to naturalise violence as an integral part of male identity. They justified male violence using expectations of inequality in gender roles. Violence that occurred amongst peers and siblings was normalised, and therefore not labelled as violence.

My research indicated that actions were only defined as “violent” under some fairly stringent conditions. They understood a “violent” situation to involve an adult male fight taking place outside the home, which would be followed by injury and official sanctions. This kind of violence is replicated by the media in films and in newspapers. When hypothetical examples followed this linear route the children were more likely to judge them as violent.

Incidents that were experienced by the young people themselves were therefore less likely to be labelled as violence. This was compounded by the way in which the girls often found that their own experiences of violent peers, particularly when boys, were invalidated by the lack of adult recognition.

Authority figures such as teachers are more likely to turn a blind eye to boys being violent towards girls. When the girls told teachers that a boy had hit or pushed them teachers normalised the behaviour by saying that it was the boys way of trying to get attention, or “that’s just what boys do.” If the violent actions of men towards women are normalised, girls may grow up to minimise abuse as part of their everyday gendered interactions with men rather than be encouraged to challenge it as behaviour that is wrong.

Stereotypical gender roles are evidently pertinent in young people’s understandings of men’s violence against women.

This is seen in the way that young people access a discourse of difference when talking about men and women. Most children judged adult gender difference as symbolised by heterosexual relationships where they expected men and women to have different roles. They also used age as a signifier in their constructions of gender, judging that the more adult somebody was, the more fixed and restricted their gender identity became.

This can be best illustrated with girls' future ambition. Girls in particular see their futures as limited, and their ambitions restricted because of their understanding of anticipated gender roles. Whilst viewing their identities as evolving and fluid at a younger age, girls saw these identities as more rigid, and less plural, as they got older. For example, currently the girls had a wide range of ambitions, doctor, astronaut, scientist, dancer. However they saw these ambitions and opportunities as being curtailed by marriage and children. Boys' ambitions, and their belief in achieving them, did not change.

This gendered invalidation of their own experiences of violence and their understanding of identity demonstrate that the promotion of gender equality and the reduction of gender divisions is a necessity for dealing with this social problem.

Violence against women is rooted in the structural inequalities between men and women. It is both a cause and consequence of gender inequality. When gender divisions and stereotypes are perpetuated, young people are less likely to challenge men’s violence against women.

As adults we need to examine our role in this. We can teach them that all violence is wrong but we also need to scrutinise how we may be limiting what children can be or become. Boys and girls are continuously told that they are “different” from each other, or this is implied by lining them up in different lines at school, having gender specific sports, toys or activities, by speaking to them in different ways or by expecting different things from them.

The promotion of gender equality would mean violence against women was no longer normalised or endorsed by gendered stereotypes. As such, gender segregation and division needs to stop, and all members of society need to challenge all forms of violence against women. Until they do so, women will never achieve an equal status.

Nancy Lombard does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

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

The widely anticipated handshake between Barack Obama and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani at the United Nations General Assembly never happened, but today US secretary of state John Kerry and Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif will meet, the highest-level meeting between the two countries since 1979. So what are the main factors affecting negotiations?

Rouhani's personality

Rouhani has been widely labelled a ‘moderate’.  Not everyone agrees with this label, but his diplomatic style is certainly a stark departure from that of his confrontational predecessor Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, and he’s launched what the Economist describes as an ‘unprecedented charm offensive’. This includes releasing some political prisoners, condemning the Holocaust and switching control of nuclear policy from the national security council to the more moderate foreign ministry. Sceptics, however, warn against pinning too much hope on Rouhani, suggesting that he’s too close to Iran’s hardliners and is simply using a different strategy to achieve the same old, unfriendly Iranian goals.

Iran’s economy

Years of sanctions are taking their toll on the Iranian economy, and present an urgent problem for Iran’s new president. Youth unemployment is almost at 30%, the value of the rial has halved, and inflation is soaring – official figures place it around 39% a year, but some estimates by independent economists are as high as 60 to 100 per cent. This means Rouhani will be seeking a lifting of US sanctions as soon as possible. It may also mean that if the US waits too long to ease sanctions, Rouhani will struggle to convince hardliners in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards that his diplomatic strategy is worth it.

Hardliners in Iran

Rouhani will need to keep the more conservative Revolutionary Guards on side, and will need to maintain the approval of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. For the moment, Khamenei’s slightly opaque remarks about the importance of “heroic flexibility” suggest he’s happy to support Rouhani’s efforts, but Khamenei may yet change tack. If Rouhani is able to win concessions from the US quickly and this is reflected in an improved economic outlook in Iran, this will strengthen his position against more conservative forces.

The US and its allies

Obama is keen to avoid confrontation with Iran, particularly given the ongoing Syrian conflict, but he needs to ensure that he isn’t seen to concede ground too easily to Iran. Not only will this reduce the US’s future bargaining position, but it will inflame those in government who are sceptical of Iran’s intentions. Obama will also be aware that if he gives too much ground to Iran, this will worry and anger Israel, who already believe that Obama’s failure to use military force against Syria sets a dangerous precedent.
 

In his last speech to Labour Party conference in 2006 Tony Blair said this:

"10 years ago, I would have described re-linking the basic state pension with earnings as old Labour. By 2012, we aim to do it. 10 years ago, if you'd have asked me to put environmental restrictions on business, I would be horrified. Today, I'm calling for it. I would have baulked at restrictions to advertise junk food to children. Today I say that unless a voluntary code works, we will legislate for it."

He was right then and we are right now. Market failure in tough times should not simply be shrugged off. What’s needed is a hard-headed dose of common sense, not ideology that lets the British people suffer. I’ve not seen many British commentators describing Angela Merkel’s interventions in the economy as 1980s socialism.

The great, late Philip Gould would tell us that the modernisation project is a constantly evolving beast. If we are to 'own the future', we must adapt to the changing concerns and aspirations of the British people. As well as leading opinion and reaching consent, governing is also about listening and taking on the concerns of voters. That is exactly what this week has been about.

'Hard-pressed families' is not just a sound bite - it’s a reality for so many of my constituents in Liverpool West Derby. Prices are outstripping wages, energy prices continue to rise and childcare costs mean that some parents are paying to go to work. David Cameron’s cost of living crisis has come about, as Ed said, because of a race to the bottom. Time and again, David Cameron has shown that he is strong at taking a stand against the weak but is weak when confronted by the powerful vested interests- whether the banks, the energy companies or the Murdoch press.

But under Ed Miliband, Labour has shown this week that we are on the side of hard working families and, crucially, that we will not duck the tough choices to make a better Britain.

Freezing energy prices, lowering tax rates for small businesses, extending universal childcare for three and four-year-olds to 25-hours a week. All diligently costed policies. But we are not surprised at the response from those quarters better off with Cameron’s status quo. That must not detract us.

So while Conservatives peddle the myth that Labour is lurching to the left or going backwards, we should take comfort in the knowledge that this is far from the truth. That it is in fact the case that our political opponents’ scaremongering is a sign of our strength. This week’s conference in Brighton delivered a raft of policies showing how a future Labour government will support hard-pressed families. I know from my conversations with members of the public I met in Brighton and on my way home that people are awake to Labour’s offer. It is now the job of all of us in the Labour Party to take this message out on the doorstep and in our communities.

The number and wealth of HNWs in Asia Pacific has grown at more than double the rate of the rest of world in the past five years and is expected to become the world’s biggest by 2015, a new study has found.

According to the Capgemini/RBC Wealth Management Asia Pacific Wealth Report 2013, the region’s HNW population and wealth increased by 31 per cent and 27 per cent respectively in the five-year period, dwarfing the rest of the world, where the number of millionaires grew by only 14 per cent and their wealth by 9 per cent. As a result, 45.4 per cent of the world’s HNW wealth growth came from Asia Pacific.

The region’s HNW population – defined as those with investable assets of at least $1m – grew by 9.4 per cent to 3.68 million in 2012, and their wealth increased by 12.2 per cent to $12trn during the same year. North America had the largest HNW population in 2012, with 3.73 million millionaires. However, according to the study, it will be overtaken by Asia Pacific in the near future, where HNW wealth is expected to grow at 9.8 per cent a year to reach $15.9trn by 2015.

Asia Pacific also outpaced the rest of the world when it came to the UHNWs – those with investable assets of at least $30 million. The region’s UHNW population and wealth grew by 15.4 and 17.8 per cent respectively compared to 9.7 and 9.4 per cent in the rest of the world.

Thanks to economic growth

Jean Lassignardie, Capgemini Global Financial Services’ chief sales and marketing officer, said he expected the region’s fast-growing economies to boost the HNW market through 2014.

‘GDP growth of 5.5 per cent, which is more than double the global average, combined with strong equity market performance across the region and strong real estate market performance in some markets, drove robust growth in Asia Pacific’s HNW population and wealth in 2012. This GDP growth rate is projected to drive Asia Pacific’s growth in HNW population and wealth through 2014.’

All countries in Asia Pacific have seen growth in their wealth in 2012, the report also found. But Hong Kong and India have seen the biggest increases, with their HNW population rising by 35.7 per cent and by 22.2 per cent respectively and their wealth jumping by 37.2 per cent and 23.4 per cent respectively.

Japan and Taiwan were the only two markets to report single-digit increases in HNW population, at 4.4 per cent and 7 per cent respectively.

Perhaps thanks to their wealth’s recent growth, the Global HNW Insights Survey – which is a global qualitative survey Capgemini/RBC conducted together with Scorpio Partnership – found that 80 per cent of HNWs in Asia Pacific excluding Japan said they ‘highly’ trusted their wealth managers and firms, compared to about two-thirds of HNWs in the rest of the world.

The survey also found that Asia-Pacific’s HNWs had different wealth management needs than the rest of the world.

For example, 40.1 per cent of HNWs in Asia Pacific preferred to work with multiple wealth managers from one firm, compared to only 21.7 per cent in other regions. Almost 40 per cent also said it preferred digital rather direct communication with their wealth managers, compared to 21.5 percent in the rest of the world, and 42.3 percent was willing to pay more for tailored services, compared to less than 26 per cent in other regions.

Giulia Cambieri writes for Spear's

This piece first appeared on Spear's Magazine

What do you see when you look in the mirror? According to the What I See project, a lot more than a bleary-eyed 25 year old with unbrushed hair and a reindeer onesie. The self-styled global ‘online platform for women’s voices’ has spent the last few months asking the question of women across the world, who have come up with a vast array of answers on placards and in video format. These span from the fairly straightforward (‘I see me’) to the heartrending (‘I see flaws that need covering up’; ‘An ordinary girl putting on a clever facade’), to the encouraging (‘I see all the inspirational women in my life and how they’ve shaped who I am’; ‘Someone who has overcome difficulties in her life and embraced happiness and positivity’), to the wide-ranging and culturally critical (‘I see a society obsessed with appearance.’)

As a project that highlights the depressing way in which women view themselves, What I See is hardly unique. Many aspects of it call to mind the Dove‘Real Beauty Sketches’, which famously asked women to describe themselves to a forensic artist and then showed them the resultant sketch. Unsurprisingly, the sketches were usually much uglier than the women sitting in front of the person with a pencil – which is a relief for Dove, really, considering how incredibly awkward it would have been if they were better looking.

Even The Daily Mail has waded in on this issue in the past, most recently with a ‘silhouette test’ designed to assess how happy – or unhappy, as the case may be - a woman is with her figure. Four brave souls willing to be profiled on the infernal catalogue of hate that is the Mail Online were given representations of various body types, and asked to choose which one most accurately matched their own. Spoiler alert: they all did the expected thing and chose larger figures. Comments from the Mail readership subsequently tore them apart for crimes as varied as supporting feminism (‘if women have such bad judgment, why should we let them become board directors?’) and existing in the first place.

One of the reasons that such studies are solid advertising ploys – or the Daily Mail equivalent, clickbait – is because we always know how they’ll turn out. Stick a woman in front of a few silhouettes, and she’ll pick one larger than herself. Ask her to describe herself, and she’ll downplay her attractive characteristics and self-deprecatingly focus on the bump in her nose or the weak chin or the fat on her thighs. One of the reasons that female participants do this is because they have, from a young age, been aggressively taught about the perceived inadequacies of their faces and bodies, and the products they need to allay these, by people with a vested interest. Another is that, when asked in a media situation what they look like, they know the consequences of being too positive.

To be passive and modest are traditionally feminine attributes. Do a Samantha Brick and declare your own beauty, and prepare for a predictable torrent of abuse. In the wake of Brick-gate, Eva Wiseman pointed out that the rare women who do call themselves pretty manage to make such a journalistic splash because of their relative rarity. ‘We are expected to hate ourselves,’ she said. ‘We are encouraged to improve ourselves... we are prohibited from getting comfortable.’ Undoubtedly, Dove and The Mail knew what their participants were going to say before they said it.

How does the What I See project differentiate itself from the campaigns before it? First of all, it’s a not-for-profit venture, which immediately makes its intentions far nobler than those of Dove, their anti-cellulite cream and their overpriced moisturising shower gel. But it does benefit from the business acumen of entrepreneur Edwina Dunn, who pioneered a slew of successful worldwide loyalty programmes such as Tesco’s Clubcard in the past. The fact that she has lent herself to such an altruistic platform is heartening. Like Arianna Huffington’s conferences on women in business and ‘the Third Metric’, Dunn seems to be reaching a hand down from above the glass ceiling and using it to haul others up.

It’s important for women at the top to join and found and share these projects because we’ve been fed for too long the dangerous idea that only ‘women who aren’t like women’ – or ‘women who don’t like women’ – succeed. When Edwina Dunn and some of her prestigious ambassadors - Eileen Cooper, the first female keeper of the Royal Academy of the Arts, Professor Dame Athene Donald, professor of experimental Physics at The University of Cambridge, Baronesses from the House of Lords and journalist and feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, to name a few - pour their money and expertise into uniting women worldwide on a global platform, they make a powerful point about how each is just as much a ‘typical woman’ as any other. There is nothing in 'being a woman' that precludes success, they suggest - it's just the social conditions surrounding womanliness that might. So let's do something about that.

Hopefully, once we watch the videos of demonstrably normal women admitting that they can’t stand what they see in the mirror, we’ll start to realise that we’re not so hideous ourselves. But we’ve been down this road before and we know that it only goes so far before the deluge of insecurity marketing sweeps it away. The only way to definitively change society is to hold advertisers and the magazines and newspapers that carry their commercials to account at the same time as supporting worthwhile ventures like What I See. It’s an arduous job, but it’s well worth doing.

Undoubtedly, the What I See project is a step in the right direction, even with its obvious focus on appearance. One of our favourite images from their compilation is the woman holding up a sign on the project’s Twitter page stating that what she sees when she looks in the mirror is ‘only me, no comparisons.’ Rather than needing to declare our own beauty to a camera crew sponsored by Dove, wouldn’t it be amazing to just be able to deaden the media noise which asks every teenage girl to compare herself unfavourably to Megan Fox? Wouldn't it be brilliant if every woman could see herself in the mirror, mentally unobstructed by a million and one comparisons which make her ugly?

We don’t need a miracle to make that happen – we just need to continue talking about it.

Earlier this week, Global Witness, the organisation behind restrictions on blood diamonds, called for an EU law to restrict the use of conflict minerals. This would match a US law, called the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires companies to trace the origin of certain metals through their supply chain to ensure they don’t come from known conflict zones.

To be clear, conflict minerals are both horrible and, unfortunately, in most of our electronics. Few would defend them, but the call for a new law was immediately met by criticism. "There are times when the actions of do-gooders makes [sic] me want to kneel down and weep bitter tears of pain," exclaimed Tim Worstall in Forbes, who wrote a riposte to the call for the new law. This isn’t because Worstall supports conflict minerals – he doesn’t – but because he thinks that we can prevent conflict minerals from being used for 300-400 times less money. Fundamentally, this is a debate about how best to create supply chain transparency, an essential component of resource resilience.

In essence, Worstall’s solution is to regulate smelters rather than manufacturers. Because the mineral ores used to create metals have a unique "fingerprint", they can be tested prior to smelting to ensure the fingerprint doesn’t match that of mines from known conflict areas. As there are only around 500 smelters capable of processing the majority of conflict metals, it would only cost around $10m to set up a certification scheme. In contrast, supply chain transparency is expensive: the Dodd-Frank Act is expected to cost $3-4bn.

It’s a neat idea, and the economics certainly stack up. But the politics and policy don’t. Here’s why:

First, public concern matters. As "do-gooders" know, regulation creates the risk of buck-passing. At worst, it invites unethical consumer companies to accept tick box certification and look the other way when this proves meaningless. This disadvantages ethical companies and doesn’t chime with public opinion about the responsibility companies should bear for their supply chains: when the issue of suicides at Foxconn or sweatshop labour arose, the response wasn’t to call for regulation of manufacturing facilities in China or elsewhere, but to put pressure on Apple and western clothing brands. A regulator’s job is infinitely easier when they know that a company breaching regulations will face consumer backlash. The activities of smelters are effectively invisible to the public.

Second, the location of the smelters matters. As Worstall admits, the vast majority are outside the EU and, therefore, outside the jurisdiction of European regulators. Because it’s economically advantageous to smelt conflict minerals, there’s a strong incentive for fraud. We have a readymade example of what this might look like: in Shetland, a fish processor fraudulently avoided EU fishing quotas by using a "secret specially-built underground pipeline which allowed illegally-landed fish to be pumped into the factory from fishing boats, undetected by regulators." If we have difficulty policing illegal fish processing in the UK, it’s hard to believe that EU protestations will affect non-EU smelters. In contrast, business relationships span regulatory boundaries. It makes sense to regulate at the consumption end.

Tim Worstall suggests that we should adopt "the vastly cheaper way that the industry is already addressing the problem." What he doesn’t say is that this programme doesn’t "require members or their supply chains to purchase from the compliant smelter list." This isn’t a conspiracy to promote conflict minerals. Instead, it stems from the fact that smelters are invisible and without public pressure, it’s easier and cheaper to not have to reconfigure sourcing and supply chain relationships. The inability of voluntary regimes to deliver sustainable outcomes across a whole host of globalised supply chains is feeding a wider change in consumer preferences. As one of the company members of the Circular Economy Task Force said, "Five years ago, our customers where asking for recycled content in packaging. Today, they’re asking about the origin of the materials in our products."

Supply chain traceability may not be cheap, but it’s increasingly a condition for good business. Global Witness could bolster its campaign by pointing to the upside of traceability: businesses that understand their supply chains can foresee resource constraints. There’s already evidence that mining companies which report their water use across their supply chains outperform those which don’t. Indeed, much of the economic opportunity in the circular economy lies in better connections across supply chains. Rather than trying just to minimise costs, we should be designing regulation with an eye to the opportunities of more visible supply chains.

While he hasn't gone as far as his old comrade-in-arms Peter Mandelson, who warned that Ed Miliband's energy price freeze risked taking Labour "backwards", Tony Blair has signalled his unease with Ed Miliband's policy agenda. He told Sky News:

I’m not really going to comment on Ed’s conference speech. It seemed to go down very well with people and was excellently delivered, I think. But I’m not going to comment on the policy.

He added:

He’s got the job of being leader of the opposition. I did that job for three years, I know how tough it is, I’m not going to get in his way.

Blair's explicit refusal to comment is strong evidence of his opposition to the policy. When he supports Miliband, as in the case of trade union reform, he says so. 

But with the exception of Blair, it is striking that not one Labour figure has echoed Mandelson's concerns, with many rebutting him (see Stephen Twigg's piece on The Staggers). Alastair Campbell, for instance, tweeted: "Peter M wrong re energy policy being shift to left. It is putting consumer first v anti competitive force. More New Deal than old Labour".

Elsewhere, Andrew Adonis has smartly noted that energy companies similarly threatened to withdraw investment when New Labour announced its windfall tax on them. He tweeted: "Labour's windfall tax 'will undermine our ability to invest, affect jobs and increase prices.' Yorkshire Electricity 1996 on Tony Blair" and "We may have to cut our investment programme if we face a windfall tax.' London Electricity 1996". 

And as the FT's economics editor Chris Giles points out, "Even though the Labour party cannot know how much utility bills would go up without the freeze, it is nevertheless saying that households would see a £120 benefit. If true, that is the equivalent of a £3bn tax on energy companies – which is smaller than the £5.2bn windfall tax the Blair government imposed on the utilities in 1997."

I have spent over forty years in science and, I hope, have made a significant contribution to our understanding of the relationship between our genes and disease, particularly in relation to Duchenne muscular dystrophy. But it very nearly wasn't so.

Upon graduating from Oxford University with a vocation for science, I initially decided to fulfil it through teaching. This, I had been advised, was the only scientific career I could reasonably combine with my husband's: he was a scientist who would move from institution to institution, and I would be expected to follow him.  Fortunately, the education professor who interviewed me thought otherwise. Teaching, he said, would be a waste of my talent. He urged me to do a PhD instead.

My interviewer was right. Research was my true passion, and I embarked on a successful career in science.

A career in science is never an easy choice, however, and particularly not for a woman in the 1970s. When I was interviewed for a lectureship at Oxford, where my husband worked, I was advised that a junior position would be more appropriate as it would enable me to go home and cook dinner. When I had a child, I could no longer work the long hours that were often expected. Without a supportive partner - and, crucially, a sympathetic employer - my career would have been short-lived.

The challenges I faced were not unique to me and nor are they entirely a thing of the past. The environment has improved, but as a report published by the Wellcome Trust shows, there is still some way to go: more women than men still drop out of research, and earlier in their careers. The reasons they cite chime with my own experiences.

Like many professions, science requires hard work. By its nature, it also requires robust challenge from your peers. Too often, though, this can translate into a culture where long hours are felt to equate to productivity, and where macho and adversarial behaviour is rewarded. This can be difficult for good researchers of both sexes, but the report finds that men and women feel it disadvantages women more.

Science needs a working environment that better recognises that individuals' personal circumstances and approaches to research differ, in ways still compatible with excellence. Collaboration is the lifeblood of science, but this need not always mean early-morning meetings or after-work drinks that don't suit the nursery run. When I was the mother of a small child, commuting from Oxford to London, I proved that it is quite possible to deliver first class research without working late into the night. It is too often assumed, wrongly, that it can't be done.

Women in science also need positive role models and, critically, mentoring and career support. I try to give advice where I can. Be aware of your limitations, I tell them, but above all be confident and give it a try - it nearly always works out. Those of us who have shown what can be done need to share our experience more widely. The young researcher struggling to balance research against family often needs only to see what is possible, and to be encouraged not to give up. Her enthusiasm and drive will do the rest.

Science is an exciting and fascinating field to work in. It needs diversity of talent to provide diversity of thinking. I have been fortunate enough to have lived and worked in a supportive and encouraging environment. I want this to be the same for today's scientists.

Dame Kay Davies is Deputy Chair of the Wellcome Trust and Professor of Anatomy at the University of Oxford

Apparently we in the Lib Dems are meant to have had a fit of the vapours over the re-emergence of Red Ed. James Forsyth tells us that "there’s genuine concern in Clegg’s circle about the contents and policy implications of Miliband’s speech. After yesterday, it is even harder to see how a Clegg Miliband coalition would work."

And I’m sure he’s not making that up. I suspect Nick does go a little weak at the knees at the thought of being the filling in an Ed Miliband and Linda Jack sandwich.

But actually Nick will probably be rather pleased about the way things have panned out in Brighton. Sure, the inner circle may be a little horrified at the prospect of coalition negotiations with a Labour leader reviving the 1983 manifesto, but at least Labour have now clearly tacked left. They may not have meant to – 'One Nation' is still being kicked about - but in the context of Labour’s new strategic approach, it’s a dead duck. They have nailed their colours firmly to the socialist mast.

Meanwhile, far from being tempted to chase after them, the Tories seem destined to tack in the other direction as they look to take the ground back from UKIP. How else to explain George Osborne's decision to march off to Brussels to defend capitalist predators just as Miliband is taking them on. 'Ed’s trying to fix the market, George is trying to free it' will be their cry around the shires.

And where does that leave Nick? Well, firstly, in the centre ground that he has promised to fight for since the last election. And what’s more, he finds the Lib Dems now have it all to themselves.

Secondly, Labour knows full well that to retain 2010 Lib Dem voters, it needs Lib Dem-friendly policies – like a mansion tax, a living wage, free childcare, decarbonisation targets. Why, Lib Dem activists even voted to condemn the Bedroom Tax last week. Plenty of common ground there for any coalition negotiations.

And thirdly, if either Labour or the Tories genuinely want to deliver on any of their more radical and eye-catching policies, they’re going to have to come up with some significant quid pro quos for the Lib Dems – like Lords reform. Otherwise they may find they can’t deliver on some high profile pledges, which, from experience, doesn’t play well with the average voter.

So it’s all fallen into place rather nicely. Almost like it was planned that way. It’s probably why they call him Mystic Clegg.

Richard Morris blogs at A View From Ham Common, which was named Best New Blog at the 2011 Lib Dem Conference

This interview has been edited and condensed. Linda Kinstler is a reporter researcher at The New Republic. Follow her on Twitter @lindakinstler.

This piece was originally published on newrepublic.com

The Staggers, the New Statesman's rolling politics blog, has been shortlisted for the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards 2013. The blog is edited by NS staffer George Eaton, and we're delighted to see it getting the recognition it deserves.

The novelist and journalist Will Self, who writes a weekly column for the magazine, has been shortlisted in the Cultural Commentator category, while the NS has dominated two out of the three spots available in the Mainstream Media Blogger category, for pop culture writer Bim Adewunmi and legal blogger David Allen Green. Martin Robbins was also nominated for Foreign Commentor.

A special congratulations also to goes Glosswitch, who was shortlisted in the Independent Blogger for her website Glosswatch.

The winners in each category will be announced at a ceremony on Tuesday, 26 November 2013, hosted by Peter York. For more information visit the Comment Awards website.