What is the most important invention of the past 100 years?
The computer has to come rather high on the list. I suppose it’s a closely run thing between the computer and the aeroplane, but computers have made such a difference to life.

What is the most important scientific discovery of the past 100 years?
Probably quantum theory. The general theory of relativity was, I think, in 1915. But those two together should take pride of place. It introduced the field of probabilities as a fundamental fact of the world, instead of hard, “billiard ball” atoms. We are still trying to absorb the full meaning of that.

And sporting event?
I’m the wrong person to answer that. Andy Murray winning Wimbledon – how about that?

Which book, film, piece of music or work of art has had the greatest impact on you?
I’m not in the habit of growing lists of stuff, but I think as far as books go, almost certainly A Treatise of Human Nature, first published by David Hume in 1739. That’s the most important philosophical book in my life. Most works since can be seen as footnotes to Hume.

It’s quite difficult to separate out one painting. I keep coming back to small portraits. Leonardo’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci has always been very moving. There is also a wonderful Titian of a man called Alessandro [Cardinal] Farnese.

Who is the most influential or significant politician of the past 100 years?
If we are being British, I suppose we would have to say Mrs Thatcher. It’s a pity, but it’s probably true.

And author or playwright?
The playwright I’m not so sure about. Some people might say Harold Pinter but I’m not certain I agree. Perhaps Samuel Beckett. For an author . . . if I’m allowed to include philosophical authors, I would say Ludwig Wittgenstein. He introduced an important voice into the philosophical conversation. He brought pragmatism into the British mainstream, where it had not been before. Pragmatism was thought of as an American aberration.

And artist?
From the past century, one would have to cite Picasso. He changed so many genres of art.

How about someone in business?
I don’t think I know any. Perhaps the guy who invented Google.

And a sportsperson?
Muhammad Ali gave a certain kind of inspiration to a lot of people.

What about a philanthropist?
Are there many left? The funny thing is that some of the great philanthropists were Edwardian robber barons, such as Andrew Carnegie. They spent their lives sucking blood out of the poor, then thought to redeem themselves by giving it all back. In terms of this century, I would name Bill Gates.

What is your favourite speech?
I think the greatest speech of the 20th century is Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream”. The rhetorical power is just amazing.

Do you have a favourite quotation?
Lines I find swimming through my head quite often are:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold . . .

It’s one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a lamentation on old age. I do feel old sometimes when I wake up in the morning.

What do you think will be the most significant change to our lives in the next 100 years?
I’m not really sure I envisage any significant change. I would like to see a period of relative stasis, so that people’s obsession with economic progress starts to become less obsessive.

What is your main concern for the future?
We are going to have to learn to do without all the energy that we have been depleting.

What will be the most dramatic development in your own field?
I think Anglo-American philosophy needs to become more practical and Continental philosophy needs to become more analytical. That would be very good for both sides.

What is the most important priority for the future well-being of people and our planet?
A return to an understanding of co-operative existence, away from the relentlessly competitive and individualistic ideologies that animate so much discussion these days.

The stresses of the modern world are only just beginning to show themselves. They include a few winners and all sorts of losers: the decline of the middle classes and of employment – and therefore hopelessness.

Hopelessness breeds war and all kinds of social ills – terrorism and so on.

Who wouldn’t want to be a goddess? Preeta Shakya can point to some downsides. When she was three years old she was chosen to be a living goddess, or Kumari, in Nepal. According to ancient tradition, a Kumari is worshipped until they hit puberty, and now that Preeta is 16 she has given an interview to Xinhua news agency about her adjustment to life as a mere mortal.

To be chosen as a Kumari, you must be remarkable. Kumari are chosen by committee, and are always drawn from the same clan. As well as having an auspicious horoscope, you need to fulfil the “32 perfections” including – and I quote from an LA Times article here – “thighs like a deer, eyelashes like a cow and a voice as clear as a duck.”

"By the time you're around 6 or 7, you start realizing you're the living goddess and get used to being worshiped," one of Preeta Shakya’s predecessors, now in her thirties, told the LA Times. There are some perks to being a goddess: you are sent to live in a palace, with an entourage of devoted attendants, and are dressed in ornate costumes and lashings of mascara.

According to Preeta Shakya, however, it can be lonely and restrictive, too. She was only allowed to leave the palace thirteen times a year, and her mother could only visit her once a week. When she did visit, it was as a worshipper rather than as a mother (which in itself doesn’t sound too awful, in my view.)

Leaving the palace has been a difficult transition – Preeta told Xinhua it was hard to make friends initially, after years of being worshipped, and it was difficult to adjust to not being waited on. Local superstition dictates that the husbands of a Kumari dies young, so finding a husband could be hard.

All in all, she says she’s “happy nowadays when I think that I can get out of my house anytime I want". In recent years, human rights groups, politicians and Maoists have increasingly said the practice is exploitative and outdated because of the psychological impact it has on chosen girls.

The debate around next week’s Autumn Statement is predictable. George Osborne will declare that the economy is healing and that Labour have nothing of substance to say on the economy because they forecast apocalypse and no apocalypse came. The Chancellor’s message will be couched in appropriate parliamentary language and he will strive to avoid sounding smug, but the essence will be that Ed Balls is –  as we used to say in the playground – badly sussed.

Labour’s response will be that Osborne’s recovery has come along later than it should have done and isn’t helping the right people. Growth that doesn’t fix the cost of living crisis is no cause for celebration.

To that, the Tory riposte is that the surest way to bring relief to hard-pressed households is by delivering growth (which, it will be said, Labour doesn’t know how to achieve) and that the government is implementing a mature long-term plan for prosperity. By contrast, Miliband’s remedies – notably the pledge to freeze energy prices – are desperate gimmicks. I’m told that the Treasury is confident that average wages will start to rise again in line with growth some time around next spring, which would make it harder for Labour to insist that the recovery is felt only by the rich few.

A return of widespread economic optimism would obviously be good for Conservative electoral prospects but it poses an intriguing dilemma. To maximise the advantage, it will be tempting to start doling out goodies. Tory MPs are already nagging the Chancellor for tax cuts. But the current campaign strategy relies on the claim to be focused unerringly on the long-term – finishing the job that was started in 2010, which specifically means repairing the public finances. A significant announcement at this year’s Conservative conference was Osborne’s pledge to turn deficit into surplus by the end of the next parliament (presuming a Tory government is returned).

The logic of this move is simple. In the months after the last election, Labour lost the political blame game over responsibility for Britain’s economic woes and was saddled with a reputation for reckless profligacy. Since then, Balls and Miliband have been forced repeatedly to declare their own commitment to future spending restraint. The shadow chancellor even says he wants the Office for Budget Responsibility to vet Labour’s manifesto. So the Chancellor has moved the goal posts. If the opposition agree that the deficit is a problem, and the economy is back on course, why would they not also want to get the nation back in the black? Gordon Brown failed to mend the roof last time the sun was shining, now the storm has passed and, guess what, Ed Balls is itching to kick off the slates. Etc.

There is no doubt that this is a threat to Labour, but it will be diminished if Osborne gets too generous with his pre-election giveaways. An interesting report appeared in my inbox yesterday from the pro-market think tank Reform, arguing that Westminster and Whitehall are still in denial about the scale of the fiscal challenge ahead. It dwells in particular on demographic trends – the way that an ageing population imposes a growing burden on expenditure and wreaks structural havoc with future revenues. It is worth reading in full, but the short version is that tax cuts now or any time soon should not be on the agenda. (It is worth noting at this point that Osborne has also said he thinks the next stage of deficit reduction should be managed entirely with spending cuts. The Tories know Labour would never match that pledge and they want to fight a campaign warning against a Miliband tax bombshell.)

In reality, tax rises in the next parliament are all but guaranteed, regardless of who wins, but it wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented if British politicians on all sides conspired in failing to mention that until after the election. Still, the Tories will have to decide whether they think their interests are better served by immediate tax relief for voters – ramping up the feel-good factor – or by reinforcing the 2010 dividing line that colours Conservatism as the doctrine of sober frugality and Labour as the drunken wastrels.

Osborne could always try a bit of both, but it’s risky. If he starts promising to “share the proceeds of growth” again, he might signal that the pressure is off and that the fiscal crisis is over. That, as one government advisor puts it, “might give people permission to vote Labour again.”  There are clearly divisions at the very top of the Tory party over this issue, as reported recently by Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.

In Miliband’s office, the expectation is that big headline-grabbing tax cuts are inevitable in the run-up to polling day. Labour strategists speculate that Osborne will not be able to resist a triumphal flourish, accompanied with a message along the lines: “thank you for being patient and putting up with the misery while we repaired the damage. Let me reward you by giving you some of your own money back. Oh, and by the way, don’t forget that Labour will be nicking that cash off you the first chance they get!” It's what one senior Labour figure recently told me he imagines he would do if he found himself in Osborne’s shoes; the obvious attack.

It is also worth pondering the position of the Lib Dems in all of this. Clegg’s decision to bind his party to Osborne’s original austerity programme in 2010 helped discredit Balls. The most prominent argument of the first two years of the current parliament became a two-against-one battle to define what was imperative in the national interest. Labour lost. Now the Lib Dems want their share of the credit. But they also want tax cuts – specifically Clegg wants the personal income tax threshold to rise again before 2015. This is the signature Lib Dem policy that is meant to signal generosity to people on low incomes, although how well it achieves that is open to dispute. Meanwhile, Clegg reminds anyone who’ll listen that Cameron once rejected it as unaffordable. The Lib-Dem centre-hugging strategy requires being fiscally disciplined but not obsessive. So the junior coalition party is unlikely to match Osborne’s ambitions to eliminate the deficit entirely, partly so they can leave open the possibility of coalition with Labour but also because they think the promise of perpetual austerity may be a dividing line too far. One Clegg advisor recently told me he thinks the Chancellor’s determination to keep punching the bruise of public fear over debts and deficits might be overdone. There is a possibility that by 2015, voters will be suffering from austerity-fatigue and will turn away from the Tories if they start to look bloodthirsty in their addiction to cuts. Cameron himself once identified the hazard of Conservatives coming across as “hatchet-faced accountants.”

Ultimately, of course, all of these calculations are hypothetical. The performance of the economy over the next 18 months will force certain choices on all three parties. But one thing that can be said with some certainty is that the big fiscal arguments – how much to cut, how much to spend; when and for whom – haven’t stopped being the defining issue of current British politics. Labour’s cost of living crusade has been effective at changing the subject. Next week, Osborne will do everything in his power to change it back.

The BBC reports today that the government is planning to cut annual costs of the Energy Company Obligation (Eco) in half as part of a package to reduce energy bills by £50. The Eco is more of a social policy than a carbon policy and is intended to tackle fuel poverty. Energy efficiency is the best long-term route to addressing rising bills since it permanently reduces energy demand. But the Prime Minister regards it as "green crap" so it is in the firing line in George Osborne's Autumn Statement.

By stretching the deadline from 2015 to 2017, and therefore halving ambition, the move means that around 40,000 homes who were entitled to free energy efficiency improvements will miss out this year and next. Equally worryingly, the Green Business Council estimates that 10,000 jobs will be lost as a result of the government's announcement. Until now, the policy had been a major driver of job creation all around the country.

The move also lets the worst performing companies off the hook. British Gas have only delivered up to 9% of the measures they were expected to carry out by March 2015 year while the best performer, E.ON, have done up to 74%. The former are being rewarded for coming bottom of the class.

This is not to say that there aren't problems with the scheme. At present, the policy is poorly targeted with only 20 per cent of measures going to those in fuel poverty. The remainder are received by low income households with relatively lower energy bills. In a major new report, IPPR proposes a new 'Help to Heat' scheme to tackle energy bills without lowering ambition on fuel poverty.

We propose a new 'house by house' approach of free assessments to determine whether households are in fuel poverty or not. Those that are would be entitled to free measures ensuring that 197,000 fuel poor homes were treated every year - up from 80,000 at present, or just 40,000 if the scheme is halved. Those that are not would receive an energy efficiency assessment - worth £120 - for free.

These households could use this information to take out a Green Deal loan and have energy efficiency measures installed. But as Newsnight highlighted last night, the government has achieved only 1 per cent of its target suggesting that, with interest rates of 8 per cent, the policy is failing. IPPR suggests using some of the Eco money to subsidise the cost of Green Deal loans turning it from a good deal to a great deal. It would cost the government just £16.7m to provide zero per cent loans for 200,000 households. These families and individuals would save £136 per year on their bills.

But all this looks like wishful thinking as the government have caved to the demands of the energy companies. Instead of improving its own policy, the government is riding to the rescue of the Big Six on the back of the fuel poor.

1. China has thrown down a gauntlet (Financial Times)

Beijing has turned control of the air space around the Senkaku Islands into a test of the US, writes Philip Stephens. 

2. Misery looms for the 'have-it-all' generation (Daily Telegraph)

As the baby boomers approach retirement, many face a retirement crisis, thanks to QE, writes Jeremy Warner.

3. Energy's big six: the more we learn, the worse they look (Guardian)

Cutting the 'green crap' from energy bills is a damaging electoral sweetener – the signs are voters will not be fooled, says Polly Toynbee.

4. The case for the Union is still strong – so why does the government not make it? (Daily Telegraph)

Alex Salmond and the SNP are being given a free hand to blame London for their own mistakes, says Fraser Nelson. 

5. Tories and the cult of home ownership (Financial Times)

Promoting house-buying is a form of stimulus that does not overtly add to the fiscal deficit, writes Samuel Brittan. 

6. There is no link between porn and sex crime (Times)

Rape and violence are about power and the male nature, writes Philip Collins. Moral panic about legal images is pointless.

7. The U-turning Tories are making their lack of conviction obvious (Daily Telegraph)

Not knowing what they believe makes for messy messaging for the Tories, says Isabel Hardman. 

8. Leveson: Britain's press needs to learn humility – I should know (Guardian)

As a former Sun editor, I know newspapers are dictatorships, says David Yelland. Their hysterical reaction to Leveson proves it.

9. If I were young and Scottish, I would vote yes to independence (Independent)

The country is certainly strong enough to stand on its own, writes Mary Dejevsky. 

10. Why the assault on cigarette packets? They already look like props in a horror movie (Guardian)

I hate smoking, writes Simon Jenkins. But I also hate being told by the government how to look after my body. Cameron should leave smokers.

When Ed Miliband announced his pledge to freeze energy prices if elected, the Tories insisted they wouldn't enter a bidding war with Labour over the cost of living. 'Don't play on Miliband's turf' was the message from George Osborne to Conservative MPs. As the Chancellor told the Daily Telegraphlast month: "I do not feel under pressure to match gimmick for gimmick. If anything, we are winning this argument with the British public precisely because we have been consistent, we have continued to put a grown-up argument to a grown-up country." Rather than reinforcing Labour's frame, the Tories would seek to shift the debate back to their preferred terrain of the deficit and GDP.

That strategy now lies in ruins. After the government repeatedly branded Miliband's plan to freeze prices a "gimmick" and a "con", energy company sources have now told the BBC that it is pleading with them to do just that (a transparent attempt to head off the move). The proposed freeze would last for at least 18 months until the middle of 2015 (after the general election in other words). Far from denouncing Labour's offer, the Tories, spooked by the opposition's stubborn poll lead, are now trying to match it. 

I expect ministers will respond by pointing out that the move is contingent on there being no major increase in wholesale prices and on the transfer of some green levies from consumer bills to general taxation, but much of this detail will be lost. Having spent months telling voters that a price freeze is unworkable, the government is now sending the reverse message. It leaves Ed Miliband with a political open goal: "David Cameron is 'asking' the energy companies to freeze prices; I'll force them too." 

As shadow energy secretary Caroline Flint said last night: "David Cameron is making himself look weaker and weaker with every passing day. For months he has been saying Labour's energy price freeze is a con. Now he is begging the energy companies to do the very same thing. But the truth is that only by legislating for a freeze can we guarantee that it will happen. David Cameron won't do that because he's not prepared to stand up to the big energy companies. All this shows is why we need a Labour government implementing Labour policy to freeze prices until 2017 and reset the energy market so that it works for the long term." Job done. 

At the end of a week that began with George Osborne U-turning on payday loan charges (and appropriating Miliband's rhetoric on setting "the rules" of the market) and continued with the government doing so on plain cigarette packaging, it creates the impression of a party in a strategic tailspin. After seeking, with some success, to project an image of competence, "omnishambles" is back

The government's wild lurching is reminsicent of that of Gordon Brown following George Osborne's 2007 conference pledge to cut inheritance tax. Rather than dismissing the Chancellor's gambit (which ultimately did his party more harm than good), Brown forced Alistair Darling to try and match it in his pre-Budget report, with predictably disastrous consequences. Far from wrongfooting the Tories, it created the impression of a government that was at the mercy of the opposition, in office but not in power. The irony is that, as Raf wrote recently, Osborne himself has cited this affair as evidence of why his party should not enter a political auction with Miliband. But under the pressure of events, that insight has now been cast aside. 

The Tories' plan for victory in 2015 is supposedly to present themselves as a "grown-up" party with a "long-term" plan. But rarely have they looked more childlike or short-termist than this week. 

Chris Huhne has ventured in Juncture magazine that any Labour/Lib Dem coalition after the next election is likely to be based upon common agreement in the policy areas of tax, the environment and housing. Which would be grand if he’s right, as Lib Dem members seem to think that these three areas (plus jobs) should form the four key pillars of the 2015 manifesto.

And indeed the received wisdom is that Nick has moved left (much to the chagrin of certain high profile MPs) - remember the long list of things we’ve stopped the Tories doing in government announced at conference, the free school meals announcement, the agreement to look again at secret courts post 2015, the apparent acceptance that the bedroom tax might not be the best idea since sliced bread...

The differentiation strategy is in full swing and it looks like Nick has heeded the advice of Tim Farron when he said of left-leaning Lib Dem voters from 2010: "The people who are most likely to vote for you next time are the people who voted for you last time...You don’t write people off, they’re there to be persuaded to come back, or rather stay with us". 

So, it’s all guns blazing on the swing to the left. Or is it? I wonder if there isn’t another thought in the minds of Great George Street folk.

We’ve already tacitly accepted that 2015 is going to be tough for the Lib Dems and we’re in defensive mode. The second place party in the majority of our seats is the Tories, not Labour (38 vs. 19). Of our top 50 target seats, the majority are Tory. Of the 13 seats we lost in 2010 – in theory, the easiest for us to win back – no less than 10 fell to Tories.

Which is why I suspect what’s going on is less a lurch to the left but a small veer, designed to appeal to One Nation Tories alienated by the UKIP tendency in the Conservatives that seems to be in the ascendency. The sort of person who cares about the environment, who bought into "vote blue, go green" and now feels a little let down. The sort of voter who benefits most from the rise in the income tax threshold. The sort of voter who cares quite a lot about house prices and home ownership. The sort of voter Nick Boles had in mind when he suggested it might be time for a revival of the National Liberal Party– before it was pointed out that there already is one…

The environment. Tax. Housing. It’s what we’ll be fighting the next election on. But I wonder if it’s an agenda that should give David Cameron more sleepless nights that Ed Miliband?

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

It's a pretty trite observation that the news and video games don't really mix too well; and that traditional media weirdly shoehorns a multi-billion dollar mass-market industry into a cultural no-man's-land somewhere between This New Hashtag Thing and Internet Porn. It took several years for TV presenters to say the phrase 'double-u double-u double-u dot' without smirking, and a weekend with a cattle-prod in a locked dressing room to coax Dimbleby into uttering the term 'hashtag', but you're more likely to see people take drugs on prime-time television than you are to see any serious discussion of a video game.

When Arthur C Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey was published, the author and futurologist predicted that it would be far easier for 20th century folk to understand the 30th century than it would be for those who lived in the Middle Ages to grasp today's world. Clarke's argument was comprehensively destroyed last night by Charlie Brooker on Channel 4 News, when, in a new nadir for gaming on the telly, he tried to introduce Jon Snow - a man who has never even played Pong - to the new PS4.

What followed was the most comprehensive failure of cross-cultural communication since the time Kanye West stumbled across 'modesty' in a dictionary. "What does [Twitter] have in common with the new PS4?" Snow asked as the pair played Call of Duty, leaving Brooker temporarily speechless. The incisive social commentary continued with the veteran broadcaster speculating that players wouldn't marry very often because there "probably aren't any women," while Brooker tried to avoid eating his own hand.

"This is for kids", Brooker explained as they switched to a friendlier game, LEGO MARVEL Super Heroes. "What is a kid?" Snow demanded in the manner of Paxman presenting a weather forecast. "I like practical LEGO, the real thing, I don't want to see it on video I want to play with it." A Lego version of the Helicarrier fromthe Avengers appeared on screen. "Do you think the Department of Defence get ideas on how to run their aircraft carriers from this?"

Inevitably, a LEGO man met his Danish maker. "I've seen somebody blown to pieces!" wailed a traumatized Snow. "What?! Where?!" "I did! In outer space!" "These are pieces of lego!" And so a grown man was forced to explain to another grown man the difference between fiction and reality; and that manipulating pixels on a screen wasn't 'going through the psychological experience of killing people'.

It continued in similar fashion for about 15 minutes, which you can watch here:

To be fair, Jon Snow was clearly on a bit of a mission to troll Brooker, but the fact that they could even have this kind of 'wacky' segment on a prime time news show speaks volumes; not just about gaming but the huge cultural disconnect that's growing between the virtual world of traditional media and the real life Britain it claims to represent.

At 42 years old, Charlie Brooker is settling into his middle age, but in the world of current affairs, where few male presenters under 50 occupy top jobs, he's basically a small angry child. At 66, Jon Snow is far closer to the likes of John Humphrys (70) and James Naughtie (62) at the Today programme, Jeremy Paxman (63) at Newsnight, Andrew Neil (64) at This Week and the Sunday Politics, or Question Time's 75-year old David Dimbleby. The few female presenters on these shows are allowed - compelled even - to be under 50, but current affairs output remains dominated by 50- to 70-something white men. This even extends to the pundits - a very small proportion of panelists on Question Time are under 40, and those under 30 are treated virtually as cultural curiosities to be gawked at or patronised. Owen Jones's TV career seems - through no fault of his own - to be predicated on the idea that by giving him a say, broadcasters have somehow ticked the 'under 30' box, as if one guy can somehow be the 'voice of a generation'.

The same trend is reflected in print journalism. Newspapers may not be dying, but many of their readers are only a sharp winter or two short of their final edition. Research in the US by Pew shows that the bulk of newspaper readers are in that same over-50s bracket. The average age of a Daily Mail print edition reader is creeping toward 60.

The effects of this massive bias in mainstream public discourse can be seen in items like Jon Snow's absurd introduction to gaming - regardless whether or not Snow was hamming it up, can you really imagine a book critic being asked to explain to a bewildered anchorman that a novel is a 'structured sequence of text read in a linear fashion'? Hardly. They reach far beyond topics like gaming though, affecting some of the key issues facing our country today.

We live in a society where asking people over 65 to wait a couple of years to receive their free money from the state is a major political issue, but a party can casually talk about stripping welfare from under 25s as though they're somehow children - after all, you'd never see one on Question Time. Housing policy, including measures supposedly aimed at first time buyers, is almost entirely geared towards preserving or increasing the price of homes, pricing first time buyers out of the market and forcing them to pay exorbitant rents, effectively buying rich people's houses for them.

Young people are regularly portrayed in the media as lazy, useless, selfish, unmotivated, unhealthy and degenerate, even as a recession caused by their parents' generation means a million remain unable to find work. And if they dare to complain about unemployment they're told by those in power that they should work for free and be grateful for the damned opportunity, as if more education or an internship is going to put food on the table.

Ultimately, technology may provide the answer. The pseudo-democratization of punditry and writing online isn't as free or fair as many of us would like, but it has at least led an explosion of diversity. Writers from communities who would have been denied a voice ten years ago can now reach wide audiences, and some of that impact is trickling back into traditional media too - the internet played a huge part in enabling Paris Lees to appear on Question Time, for example. Eventually - hopefully - as the internet becomes the dominant source of news, the tide will turn.

But for the time being the ancient kings still rule. The old make the news for the old, and politicians watch and obsess as if the images flickering across their screens are somehow relevant to the hopes, dreams and fears of the population they so dismally fail to represent. With any luck they'll dance together into the grave, and we can finally start to talk about the things that matter.

Investors sometimes forget that the converse side of lucrative returns for investing in overseas territories is that host governments sometimes seize their assets. Expropriation, confiscation and nationalisation of assets, often referred to as resource nationalism, is one of the most significant challenges confronting companies operating in developing markets.

Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) have for many years acted as a safeguard for investors.  These agreements between states are designed to provide investors with protection in the event of government action or inaction that makes investments unviable. The United Nations estimates BITs cover approximately two-thirds of global FDI and one-fifth of possible bilateral investment relationships.

Today there are over 2,800 BITs in existence. At the heyday of such agreements in 1995, four new agreements were signed every week. By 2012 this figure had declined to a rate of one per week. As it is theoretically possible for over 40,000 BITs to be in existence when one considers that there are around 200 countries in the world, the reason for the decline is more to do with the efficacy of BITs in the presence investment environment, rather than an exhausting of the possibilities.

The appeal of signing BITs has decreased amongst sovereign governments because the stability they bring to the investment environment is perceived to thwart their room for independent action. For foreign investors the appeal of BITs is that they generally offer arbitration under the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes Between States and Nationals of Other States, better known as the ICSID, the dispute resolution arm of the World Bank. ICSID arbitration has become an increasingly popular and effective forum for dispute resolution, with victorious investors being able, for example, to reclaim assets seized by a host nation overseas. The number of arbitrations against host countries has grown enormously in recent years. In 1997 the number of known Investor v. State disputes in arbitration was seven. By 2012 this number had reached fifty-eight.

South American countries, assisted by the outstanding efforts of Venezuela, which nationalised over a thousand companies during Hugo Chavez’s tenure as president, account for 30 percent of cases registered with ICSID. As one might expect, the developing world accounts for the majority of cases lodged with ICSID, as governments in Russia, Uzbekistan, Bolivia and Uganda have resorted to the outright expropriation of assets to seize a greater share of returns from the exploitation of their natural resources. In contrast, although just six percent of cases concern North America and western European countries, these governments have proved themselves as adept as their counterparts in the developing world at taking the money of foreign investors. In 2012 Canada was sued by a petroleum company for USD250 million, challenging a moratorium on fracking enacted by the government of Quebec.

The ICSID has become a victim of its own success. Aggrieved investors, who have received recompense through the system, believe it performs well. Host nations who have been instructed to honour claims have been less pleased.  There is a widely held view among governments that BITs are too investor friendly, and place too much restriction on a government’s ability to make changes to the legal or regulatory changes that might be in the broader public interest. Governments are citing this apparent bias and lack of freedom as their reasoning not to renew individual treaties. In 2009 the South African government announced that it would not be renewing a treaty with the Belgo-Luxembourg Economic Union when it expired in 2013, and would be allowing all other BITs with European Union states to lapse as well.  

As fewer new BITs are signed and some of those already in existence are permitted to lapse, we will see a broad deterioration in the investment landscape. Future agreements are likely to offer host governments more flexibility to make legal and regulatory changes, which will of course be to the detriment of investors. We are also likely to see less recourse, in treaties which are new or renewed, to robust and independent arbitration forums such as ICSID.

Careful due diligence and the adoption of effective risk management strategies will become even more crucial as protection offered by BITs declines. For those risks that cannot be managed can often be insured. The credit & political risk insurance market continues to evolve and for well structured transactions can offers a final safety net that neutralises many of the more pernicious aspects of country risk.

Dr Elizabeth Stephens is JLT Head of Credit & Political Risk Advisory

Winter in Britain has traditionally been a major public health challenge, with temperatures dropping and a spike in the number of people falling ill, having accidents, going to A&E, or even succumbing to the cold. But two chilling statistics out this week show us all too clearly that Britain can do better than this.

First it was revealed that episodes of hypothermia have jumped by 40% over the three years since the 2010 election. Doctors treated more than 28,000 cases in NHS hospitals in England last year alone. Then on Tuesday, we learnt that there was a 29% surge in the number of people who died unnecessarily last winter.

The technical term for the figures published by the Office for National Statistics is 'excess winter deaths' – this is the number of additional deaths that occur during winter months compared to the rest of the year. In total, 31,100 more people died between December and last March. That’s 31,100 deaths that by their very definition were entirely preventable.

This isn’t just a one-off that can be explained away by a single cold winter. It’s reflective of the huge pressures being felt across our NHS because people are struggling to keep themselves warm. For every person who tragically loses their life over the winter months, eight more have to be admitted to hospital. That works out at just under a quarter of a million extra patients at a time when David Cameron has put our A&E services into crisis.

Our NHS spends a staggering £850m each year treating winter-related diseases brought on by cold housing. And that’s the key point. According to the World Health Organisation, as many as 30% of excess winter deaths are directly caused by people living in homes that aren’t warm enough.

There are three things the government should be doing right now to address this very serious problem. First, we can’t combat fuel poverty without addressing the fact that our energy market is broken and too many people are being charged sky high prices for their gas and electricity. Energy bills have gone up by £300 since the last election and a typical household now pays an eye-watering £1,400 a year. But while wholesale energy prices have risen just 1.6% since 2011, the Big Six energy giants have hiked prices by an average 10.4% a year over the same period.

That’s why Labour has pledged to freeze gas and electricity prices, break up the Big Six and reset the market to deliver fairer prices in the future. We would also move all pensioners aged over 75 onto the cheapest energy tariff. When over 80% of the people who lose their lives in winter are 75 or older, it makes sense to do this for the age group most vulnerable to cold weather and least likely to be able to access the cheapest energy deals online.

Second, we need to tackle the cost of living crisis. It’s no surprise many people feel nervous about turning their thermostat up when households are £1,600 worse off since 2010 and prices have risen faster than wages in 40 of the last 41 months. That’s why we need to put money in people’s pockets by incentivising firms to pay a living wage, extending childcare and building an economy that works for working people.

Third, much more needs to be done to improve the thermal efficiency of our homes. It’s no coincidence that the region I represent, the North West, has both the highest rate of excess winter deaths and one of the deepest levels of fuel poverty in the country. Ultimately, the best way to help people who can’t afford to properly heat their homes is by reducing the amount of gas and electricity they need to use in the first place.

But as a country we have some of the most energy inefficient domestic properties in Europe. Conversely, countries like Germany, the Netherlands and across Scandinavia have far lower levels of winter mortality than the UK despite many of them having a much harsher winter climate. Take Sweden for instance. The weather there is 7 degrees colder on average, but a home in Dudley uses 4 to 5 times more energy than a typical house in Malmo.

Yet progress in insulating our homes under this government has been utterly lamentable. More than 10,000 people were supposed to sign up to the Green Deal this year, but only 219 have had measures installed so far under the flagship energy efficiency scheme. Its twin ECO scheme is poorly targeted and estimated to lift just 250,000 households out of fuel poverty over the next 10 years. That’s 50,000 fewer than fell into fuel poverty last winter alone.

It’s time David Cameron took some real action to help people most threatened by the cold this winter. Too many pensioners will be freezing tonight - the Prime Minister would do far better to freeze energy bills instead. 

It used to be that when politicians wanted to bury bad news they’d orchestrate its release to time with a distracting event. Seeing Iain Duncan Smith publicly criticized for wasting at least £140 million of public money over Universal Credit at the start of this month, it struck me how we’ve slowly reached another level. “Unmitigated disaster”? “Alarmingly weak”? These words were used to describe Universal Credit but could easily have been levelled at a number of largely unreported changes to the benefit system. Nowadays, bad news is buried by even worse news. The sheer volume of inefficient and unethical changes to social security this Government has enacted means some of it doesn’t even get noticed. Which, for a set of politicians hacking at vulnerable people’s support systems, is worryingly convenient.

So, here’s five benefit changes the government doesn’t want you to know about.

1. Disabled people denied a key benefit have had their right to appeal reduced 

On 28 October the Department of Work and Pensions introduced a major change to the appeal process to the main disability benefit for people who are too ill to work, Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). If a claimant wishes to appeal against a decision that they are not entitled to ESA, they must now ask the DWP to reconsider the decision before lodging an official appeal – and receive no money in the meantime.

Dubbed the ‘mandatory reconsideration’ stage, not only will the claimant not receive ESA income during this period, there will be no time limit on how long it will take. People with disabilities and illness are being left with no income for an indefinite period of time. This would be bad enough for a system that works. It’s particularly alarming for a system where 40 per cent of appeals overturn the original decision. 

The DWP response is the claimant can claim Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) during this appeal stage. Campaigners tell me, however, many disabled people say they won’t apply for JSA due to the fear that doing so will be interpreted by the DWP as evidence they are indeed fit for work.

There’s also concern that the disabled and long-term sick having to enter a system not designed to cope with claimants with poor health will leave them vulnerable to sanctions. As Sharon Brennan points out on her blog ‘Diary of a NHS buff’, statistics of sanctions against JSA claimants show that every month 12% of job seekers are referred for sanction. These are sanctions given if Job Centre Plus feels claimants “are not making themselves available for work” – an accusation easily targeted at people who find it a physical struggle to make appointments, let alone look for work. Which brings us to number two.

2. Long-term sick people are having their benefits sanctioned ... for being sick

The increase in sanctions placed on claimants of jobseeker’s allowance has been widely publicised, with most headlines on the issue last month dedicated to statistics revealing that nearly 600,000 have had adverse benefit sanctions taken against them.

Less publicized is the fact 45,000 sanction decisions have been made against sick and disabled people. This means the number is set to have doubled from the year before. 

11, 000 sick and disabled people had their ESA penalized in just seven months – either for not participating in work related activity or missing a meeting with the Job Centre. 120 disabled people receiving JSA have had their benefits stopped for three years.

I reported in October the Work Programme’s failure to help disabled people gain employment; things as basic as making an effort to find them suitable work or understand that, when you’re dealing with claimants with health conditions, some days an appointment will be missed as they will be too ill to get up. Put this together with an increase in sanctions, and the system’s failings are now seeing sick and disabled people losing parts of their benefits.

Sarah Davidson*, 43, was threatened with a sanction for being physically unable to do her assigned work activity. Sarah has ME and was awarded ESA on the basis of limited mobility and her inability to sit for more than an hour.

Despite having a meeting with a personal advisor at Seetec, her Work Programme provider, where her inability to sit and concentrate for long periods were noted, Sarah’s now received a summons to an ‘employability programme’ that requires her to have four weeks of twice weekly work related activity lasting over three hours.

“My support worker called and explained I could not do this programme because of my disability,” she tells me. “They were very rude apparently, refused to take my health condition into consideration, and said they would be reporting me to DWP for failing to participate.”

In fact, when the programme was due to start two weeks ago Sarah had a flare up of her condition and was physically unable to leave her home all week. Job Centre Plus is currently considering whether to sanction her for non-attendance.

Sarah tells me she’s tried to discuss this with both JCB and Seetec but neither has responded.

“My support worker called JCP and was passed to at least 3 different people ... it turns out my adviser has left. We were given the name of a new adviser, who wasn't available to speak to us. We asked if she could give us a call to explain the situation but I’m not hopeful” she says. “Seetec has rarely if ever returned my support worker’s call or emails.”

She adds she’s normally able to use the phone herself but due to the stress of sanctions and inappropriate work activity, she now needs her support worker to make contact for her.

“I developed an anxiety disorder because of the treatment I've received at JCP and Seetec,” she says. “I'm not able to call them or deal with them without experiencing symptoms of panic.”

That Sarah is now physically unable to even get to her work programme provider’s offices due to Seetac moving to an area that’s inaccessible to her by public transport is only adding to that stress. She knows she could well be penalized for this as well.

“They’re 0.7 miles from a station, and it involves a combination of trains and buses with between 17 and 25 minutes walking involved. I can't walk more than 200m. My Work Capability Assessment report states this,” she says. “I've asked if they would pay cab fares but I’ve had no reply.”

3. 50,000 disabled people are being cut out of work

The cocktail of cuts being made to benefits mean the DWP are managing to simultaneously penalize disabled people for not working and stopping them from having a job. 

50,000 disabled people could lose their jobs due to the Government removing Disability Living Allowance (DLA), the Disability Benefits Consortium (DBC), an organisation of over fifty leading charities, has found. 

One in five disabled people who receive the now scrapped DLA are in work and use the benefit to cover the additional costs that come with that – be it help showering in the morning or a motability vehicle to get to the office. 

But as DLA is phased out and replaced by Personal Independence Payments (PIP) – and half a million people lose their support – it’s been projected 50,000 disabled people will no longer be able to hold onto their jobs. (If a tenth of this number of people were due to lose their jobs at a company, this would be headline news. Tens of thousands of disabled people scattered around the country trapped in their house and unable to get to work receives a strange silence.)

Reflective of the general incompetence of new social security policies, the switch from DLA to PIP doesn’t even make sense financially. At best, it’s hoped to save the Government £145 million. Disabled people no longer being able to get to work, however, will lose the Government £278 million in lost National Insurance and Income tax, as well as £178 million in unemployment benefits it will have to pay out. 

Still, they can probably make some savings by cutting other vulnerable people’s safety net elsewhere.   

4. There’s now a one-year limit on hundreds of thousands of people’s sickness benefit

In fact, the government is way ahead of us. They have now ‘time limited’ Employment and Support Allowance – meaning many people who have been found too ill to find work without support can only get the benefit for a year.

700,000 people with long-term sickness or disability have had their benefit taken as a result. The means test is only £7,500 for this change, leaving someone earning barely £8,000 per year having to support themselves and their ill partner.

Gayle Lewis, 47, has fibromyalgia, endometriosis, and depression but had her ESA stopped last month. In addition to severe pain, Gayle’s conditions leaves her with muscle weakness, fatigue, and a lack of co-ordination that leads her to fall over her feet. She has memory problems that mean she forgets the words she’s looking for when talking and is sometimes unable to speak. Like hundreds of thousands of others, she has had her benefit stopped despite her health meaning she has little hope of finding long-term work.

“My illnesses have not got any better,” Gayle says to me. “In fact, my conditions have [gotten worse]… I’m in terrific pain and I’m on the waiting list to go back for yet another laparoscopy.”

Gayle’s lost £400 per month after having her ESA stopped. Due to the fact her husband earns more than the allowed £7500 a year, the two of them are left to get by on his wage alone.

As Sue Marsh, disability campaigner with We Are Spartacus, points out, “Families already overwhelmingly living in poverty will lose £4661 per year [due to ESA ‘time limiting’]. This is three times as much as higher rate taxpayers ... lose in child benefit.”

Gayle tells me she’s found some part-time writing work she can do from home but would have to write six articles a day to make up the money she’s lost from ESA. “I worry that there will be days when I am completely unable to work, even from home,” she says. 

The effective large-scale withdrawal of ESA comes with an extra layer of distress for those relying on the payments due to the fact the removal is done retrospectively.

As Sue Marsh says to me, “The government ... backdated [the change] retrospectively ... to the previous April, so April 2011 sending letters out to warn people even before the bill passed. So effectively, once it did pass, some people lost their entitlement immediately, just like that.”  

The damage of backdating the withdrawal of support is worsened when poor testing sees claimants having to embark on lengthy benefit decision appeals. Gayle was incorrectly found ‘fit for work’ last year and it took her six months to even be placed in the group receiving a benefit with the ‘365 day limit’. She then had the time limit on her benefit backdated to the date of her request for an appeal.

In the system the DWP have created, sudden, arbitrary, unplanned removal of support for ill and disabled people seems almost common. 

Gayle tells me she’s in a “vicious circle” as the removal of her sickness benefit makes her more ill. “That fact that our income [has quickly dropped] substantially does nothing to help the depression or the anxiety and both of these have a direct effect on the levels of pain, which are made worse by stress,” she says.

“I fear that, like many others, I will simply slip down the cracks now and disappear,” she tells me. “Which is what the DWP seems to be aiming for with this time limit.”

5. Eviction letters are now including veiled threats to remove people’s children

Depressingly, even the cuts that do gain media attention seem to have certain aspects that remain hidden. It’s well highlighted that policies like the bedroom tax are leaving people unable to pay the rent. Less well publicized is the scale of rent arrears social tenants are finding themselves in – or the tacit threats being used to get monetary blood from the stones.

Nearly three quarters of housing association staff say their tenants are falling behind on rent this year, according to a recent Unison survey. Over a third report the main cause is the bedroom tax.

Half of the housing association staff surveyed had seen an increase in tenants being evicted or forced to move out due to financial pressures, Inside Housing reported.

Stuart Hughes was one of the first to receive an eviction notice after being unable to pay the extra rent the bedroom tax had left his family with. I spoke to him back in June and looked at the eviction letters that had been repeatedly sent to his home; bold, black words of ‘possession’ and ‘legal proceedings’. It’s now emerged some housing associations are sending out letters that include the threat eviction proceedings may lead to the tenant’s children being taken into care.

“If you have children in your household we may also inform Social Services,” reads one such letter.

Or the mildly more subtle: “...we must make you aware that if there are children at your property, a referral has now been made to Children’s Social Care (Social Services) as the children at your home are now at risk of becoming homeless.”

As housing solicitor Giles Peaker says on the blog ‘Nearly legal’, these are threats that are “unsustainable and unjustified in both law and practice.” “Most, if not all, people evicted solely on bedroom tax derived arrears would most certainly have an argument that they were not intentionally homeless. The Council would therefore owe a household with children the full homeless duty as being homeless, in priority need and not intentionally homeless,” he says. “Even if Children Services were to accept a s17/s.20 Children Act duty (or Children (Scotland) Act 1995 equivalent) to the children of the household, there is a very strong Article 8 human rights case for the family being kept together, so the proper response would be provision or securing of accommodation for the family…”

Empty threats concerning people’s children may be a new low. Then again, against the recent actions of this Government – be it imposing sanctions on the disabled or removing the benefits of the sick – ‘a new low’ seems to come weekly.

* Sarah Davidson's name has been changed

To celebrate the release of Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom in cinemas 3 January 2014, the New Statesman is offering two lucky readers the chance to win a pair of tickets to the Royal Premiere taking place on 5 December 2013.

The Cinema and Television Benevolent Fund and Pathé are delighted to announce that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will attend the Royal and UK Premiere of the highly anticipated Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

Stars of the film, Golden Globe winner Idris Elba (Nelson Mandela) and Naomie Harris (Winnie Mandela), as well as BAFTA-winning director Justin Chadwick and Nelson Mandela’s daughter Zindzi Mandela, will meet the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the evening.

The film celebrates Nelson Mandela’s extraordinary journey from his childhood in a rural village through to his election as president of South Africa. It explores the Mandela unknown to most of the world – the lover of fast cars and women, the boxing enthusiast and playboy, the skilful lawyer and the gun-toting freedom fighter – an intimate portrait of the making of a modern icon.

Terms and Conditions:

• Competition open to UK residents only.
• No cash alternative is available.
• Royal Premiere ticket winners must be able to attend the premiere on December 5th 2013.
• Travel and accommodation is not provided for the winners of the premiere tickets.
• Please email ChloeGoody@feref.com to enter this competition.

The National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) appears on the verge of splitting away from the African National Congress. As the largest affiliate of the main trade union movement – Cosatu – this would be a heavy blow for the party, which will rely heavily on the unions during next year’s general election. The metalworkers represent some 291,000 workers out of the Cosatu’s 2.2 million strong Cosatu membership.

The issue is to be debated at a Numsa special congress, scheduled for 13 - 16 of December. The ANC is clearly deeply worried by the prospect. The unions have been linked to the party since 1986, and form a bedrock of the ANC’s relationship with the organised working class. In a remarkably frank statement the party’s General Secretary, Gwede Mantashe made plain his concerns.

Organisationally, the alliance remains the home of the progressive forces in South Africa. Both the right wing and the ultra-left are on the ascendency and attack our movement relentlessly. The re-emergence of the old debate about forming a workers' party in Cosatu, led by Numsa as it was the case in the 1980s, demonstrates the shift in the balance of forces in the federation. The congress movement is under siege in the federation more intensely than in the country in general. Those who want to collapse the alliance have nothing to lose, hence the determination we see we trying in to split Cosatu.

Ominously, Mantashe went on to accuse those who contemplated these measures of acting in the interests of unnamed “international forces opposed to our movement".

At the heart of this complex relationship is the Tripartite Alliance, which includes the small and once influential South African Communist Party. Although the ANC leads the Alliance, it is meant to consult its partners before implementing major policy changes.

This relationship has become increasingly sour. The union movement criticised the ANC at its 2012 Congress for moving to the right and accused it of only turning to its Alliance partners at moments of crisis: “The Alliance lurches between good coordination and unity, to dysfunctionality; and only sees the need to meet when there is a crisis.” 

The unions kept up a barrage of criticism of government policy and of the corruption that is now endemic within the ANC administration. With general elections due to take place next year, President Jacob Zuma decided to act. The general secretary of Cosatu, Zwelinzima Vavi found himself suspended from his post, despite his considerable popularity within the labour movement.

Vavi had left himself vulnerable by having a dalliance with a member of Cosatu staff and for allegedly taking some dubious financial decisions. But few – including Vavi himself - believed he would have been suspended. Since losing his job, Vavi has kept up a barrage of criticism of the ANC-led alliance, accusing sections of the leadership of acting on behalf of “neo-liberalist South African capitalism.”

In these remarks Vavi was echoing a warning by the union movement from as long ago as 1982. The unions attempted to learn from the mistakes of the 1950s when the ANC was perceived to have used its then union partners as a battering ram in its fight with the government. The unions fell apart, and as they were painfully rebuilt in the 1970s the movement was determined not to make the mistakes of the past. 

In a carefully phrased warning, Joe Foster, the then union leader, declared that while it was important to work with the ANC, the movement had to preserve its independence:

It is, therefore, essential that workers must strive to build their own powerful and effective organisation even whilst they are part of the wider popular struggle. This organisation is necessary to protect and further worker interests and to ensure that the popular movement is not hijacked by elements who will in the end have no option but to turn against their worker supporters.

In the 1980s, as the fight against apartheid intensified, the unions abandoned their caution, and forged closer links with the ANC. But neither the unions nor the party ever forgot these concerns; hence Mantashe’s reference to the 1980s.

Much now depends on what the metalworkers decide when they meet in December. It seems likely that Numsa will take things slowly. Forming a new party does not happen overnight, especially since the union will attempt to bring about a “coalition of the Left” including some of South Africa’s vibrant civic organisations. The union may decide to remain neutral at the next election,  leaving its members to decide on whom to vote for.

Certainly they will have no end of options. South Africa has some 200 political parties. Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters are attempting to win votes on the left, in competition with the tiny Workers and Socialist Party.  But both are likely to gain relatively small followings. A genuinely popular left wing party, led by a popular figure like Zwelinzima Vavi, would change the political landscape. As one leading commentator put it: “there's always an element of fear about what storms, uncertainty and chaos the uncharted territory could bring. Fasten your seatbelts, South Africa.”
 

Boris Johnson has exerted much energy recently defending "the 1%" and their contribution to society in the form of tax. He said in his Margaret Thatcher lecture on Wednesday night: 

Last week I tried to calm people down, by pointing out that the rich paid a much greater share of income tax than they used to.

When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 they faced a top marginal tax rate of 98 per cent, and the top one per cent of earners contributed 11 per cent of the government’s total revenues from income tax. Today, when taxes have been cut substantially, the top one per cent contributes almost 30 per cent of income tax; and indeed the top 0.1 per cent – just 29,000 people – contribute fully 14 per cent of all taxation.

That is an awful lot of schools and roads and hospitals that are being paid for by the super-rich. So why, I asked innocently, are they so despicable in the eyes of all decent British people? Surely they should be hailed like the Stakhanovites of Stalin’s Russia, who half-killed themselves, in the name of the people, by mining record tonnages of coal?

Boris's ideological stridency is often contrasted favourably by conservatives with David Cameron's timidity, so it's striking to see the PM make the same argument in a Q&A with i readers today. In response to a question on why the government cut the top rate of tax while simultaneously reducing benefits for the poorest through measures such as the bedroom tax, he said: 

You mention the cut in the top rate of tax. The fact is that if you carry on with a relatively high top-rate, that makes this country a less attractive place for wealth creators and entrepreneurs to be. If they decide to go elsewhere, that means fewer jobs created, less money for the Treasury, and less money to spend on schools, hospitals and growing our economy. These are all the things we took into account when cutting the top rate. Beyond that particular case, the fact is this: the top 1 per cent of income-taxpayers contribute nearly 30 per cent of all income tax – and those with the highest incomes will contribute more to income tax this year than under any year of the previous government.

Cameron isn't wrong; the top 1% do pay 30% of all income tax and currently pay a higher marginal rate than in any year of New Labour (the 50p rate wasn't introduced until April 2010). But what he doesn't mention is that the 30% stat tells us less about what has happened to the tax system than it does about what has happened to the income system. Over the period in question, the earnings of the rich have risen to previously unimaginable levels. As a recent OECD study showed, the share of income taken by the top 1% of UK earners increased from 7.1% in 1970 to 14.3% in 2005, while the top 0.1% took 5%. Quite simply, the rich are paying more because they're earning more. Is this really cause for us to thank them? If 11 million low and middle earners receive the pay rise they have been denied since 2003, they'll pay more tax too. 

Like Boris, Cameron also doesn't mention the inconvenient truth that the poorest continue to pay more tax than the richest. As the ONS recently found, owing to VAT and other regressive levies, the least well-off households pay 36.6% of their income in tax, while the wealthiest pay 35.5%. 

But even were this not the case, Cameron's argument is still an odd one for him to make. Had it not been for the Lib Dems, the top rate of income tax would almost certainly have been cut to 40% (Boris, meanwhile, has suggested that George Osborne should "brood" on cutting it to 30%), so it's more than a little opportunistic for Cameron to boast that the rich are paying more tax than under Labour. Rhetoric aside, his commitment to a progressive system is wafer thin.

Albert Camus was born one hundred years ago. To celebrate this centenary, Penguin has repackaged a range of his best-selling works. The centrepiece is, of course, The Outsider, the brief and perplexing novel that raised its author from respected reviewer to literary and philosophical star. Its cover image has traditionally been a solitary individual against a blank or hostile background. The new edition is fronted by a photo of the sun, at once familiar and foreboding, bright and warm but potentially oppressively so. Can we expect this image shift to have an impact on the book's reception?

Thirty-five years ago, the same strange tale launched the career of what is now one of the longest running and most successful rock bands in the world, The Cure. A sharp and fast presentation of the central scene, "Killing an Arab" became the band's signature piece. But it soon presented them with a difficult dilemma, for the title had attracted National Front skinheads to their gigs. The band now faced the moral problem of inadvertently encouraging a subculture of racism.

Yet the song held a special place in their work. It was not merely a debut. It was almost a manifesto. It set the dark, bass-heavy, dissonant sound that dominated their first five years and that they never entirely left behind. It introduced their recurring theme of the tension between the importance we find in our interactions and the apparent unimportance of our lives overall. And it embodied the lyrical style of much of their subsequent work, which uses short staccato sentences to portray moments through their minutiae, just as the novel does.

The Outsider was thus the inspiration for the distinctive storytelling style and the air of alienated ambivalence that characterised much of the extensive work that established The Cure as one of the central forces shaping post-punk music. For this reason, it became traditional to close their gigs with "Killing an Arab", the ominous opening bars taking on the feel of heralding not merely the rest of the song, but the rest of the band's career. For this reason too, their first singles collection was named after the song's opening line, Standing On A Beach, with the different CD and video versions named after the third line, "staring at the sea". Perhaps the old man on their cover is the novel's character Pérez.

But this continual contextualisation of the song did not eliminate the misunderstanding. When the first President Bush began the first war against Iraq, the band felt the need for their singles collection to carry a sticker on the cover explicitly opposing the racist interpretation of the song. An updated singles collection soon followed under a different title and omitting the debut single. The song was dropped from the live sets. It was only after the second President Bush had begun the second war against Iraq that it resurfaced in the band's repertoire.

The solution now seems obvious, as good ideas often do in retrospect. The song was renamed "Killing Another". Because this has the same syllable count as the original phrase, the rest of the song could remain intact. What is more, the new version more clearly isolates the aspect of the novel that it presents. What matters to their version of the story is not the victim's ethnicity, but his humanity and individuality. That word 'another' neatly encapsulates both the sameness that unifies and the difference that separates the murderer and the victim. By removing a detail, the song has become more precise. Their most recent live album, the epic Bestival 2011, closes with a triumphant performance of this new version of the song.

Where the change in song title alters the presentation of the murder victim, the new cover art on the novel alters the presentation of the murder itself. Camus leaves it quite ambiguous how much the murder was the free choice of the murderer and how much it was the product of the blinding and scorching midday summer Algerian sun. Camus accords nature a very significant role in human existence, but this side of his work has been less influential than his ruminations on the relation between individual and society. Perhaps this apparently simple reframing will provide the novel with a whole new lease of life in the English-speaking world, bringing into sharper focus an essential aspect of the tale.

But this will depend on the reception of the other change that the publishers have made. For the new edition is a new translation, the first for thirty years, which is intended to capture the novel better in today's English. Whether or not it succeeds in that aim, it does seem to have lost some of its poetic quality. "The sea heaved a heavy, scorching sigh," it reads, at the moment the murder occurs, where the previous translation had "the sea swept ashore a great breath of fire". The scene now ends with the protagonist saying of the shots that "it was as if I had rapped sharply, four times, on the fatal door of destiny" in place of the more lyrical (and more accurate) "it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness".

Perhaps more importantly, the new translation presents the murder itself in a rather different light. Immediately before the shots are fired, the protagonist describes the victim brandishing a knife. Then, in the new translation, he describes "the knife, a burning sword hovering above me. Its red-hot blade tore through my eyelashes to pierce my aching eyes". Camus, however, is clear that it is not the knife itself but rather "the burning spear still leaping off the knife in front of me", as the previous translation had it, that "was like a red-hot blade gnawing at my eyelashes and gouging out my stinging eyes". While the new cover draws attention to the role of the sun in the story, the new translation obscures that role at the story's pivotal moment.

How will these changes in translation affect the book's cultural influence over the next few decades? That depends entirely on the readers. Perhaps their reception of the book will not rest at all on these details. Or perhaps, despite the translator's intentions, the less lyrical prose and the suggestion that the murder victim had attacked first will frame the whole narrative in ways that cannot easily be predicted. We can only wait and see.

"Does this stuff just bore you?", asks an agitated Oxford don after an hour of forced discussion about the political economy of World War Two. "Is this why we now have George 'unremarkable 2:1' Osborne as Chancellor?", he goes on, disheartened by the lack of interest his undergraduates have shown in Beveridge, Keynes and Hayek. Young people, it would appear to him, even Oxford history students, have no interest in political ideas.

Yet the arguments in our defence are compelling. We explain that we have lived our whole lives in a neo-liberal, post-Thatcherite ideological vacuum. Thehyperbolic clashes of the twentieth century’s intellectual heavyweights are a world away from the monotonous, and frequently broken, promises of the career politicians that have dominated the discourse of our lifetime.

The Russell Brand episode and the enormous response it received soon becomes our tutorial’s topic of conversation. We explain how 'Brandism' is emblematic of how disengaged our generation has become. The comedian is certainly no Keynes. However, what he said was something we have never yet heard – that it doesn’t have to be like this. That there should be an alternative. Although Brand may not know what that alternative is, even the suggestion that a new idea could take root excites a generation that has only ever known a gap where the Big Ideas should be. The very fact I just felt the need to give Brand an 'ism' only goes to show our yearning for an ideology. We are bored stiff by the status quo.

Yet as the Oxford University Student Union elections demonstrated last week, this paralysing lethargy is not confined to third year history students. With a turnout of only 21%, LJ Trup, the joke candidate promising to build a monorail through Oxford and turn the Bodleian Library into a night club, was elected.

Trup’s victory was in part down to a shrewd election campaign. He eschewed the usual door knocking and leafleting. He preferred to upload a video of himself belting out that speech from Braveheart, accompanied by bagpipes and hoards of screaming students. Unconventional, yes, but it certainly caught the imagination.

He owes his new 20k salary to his main opponent, however. The outstanding favourite for most of the race, Jane Cahill was cast as the stereotypical student politician. Her painfully unoriginal 'Jane4Change' slogan, her awkward, insistent use of hand gestures while talking and her frightfully organised campaigning clique of loyal followerswere alternatively mocked andloathed by students. Trup’s rallying cry '#LJTrup4ousu4chang'’ poked fun at his well-polished rival. In the final week of the campaign, Cahill even felt the need to write an article defending the notion of a 'student politician'.  We were clearly not convinced. Cahill, rightly or wrongly, came to symbolise everything we now resent in politics.

Like Brand, Trup isn’t a genius. Unlike every other political figure, however, he isn’t mind-numbingly boring. But our fetishisation of his charisma only demonstrates the dearth of remotely interesting people elsewhere.

This election result is just another symptom of disengagement with the political class, even if this time it’s only the student political class we are rebelling against. One thousand six hundred and eight five students were willing to vote for a man who wrote his manifesto in crayon. We are that desperate for an alternative. 

It was a bored evening when I was prodded by my Twitter feed to try Gogglebox, a programme with a daft premise I’d been sneering at for weeks. Real people sat on their sofas reacting to TV programmes? Oh please, I’ve got Twitter for that. We’re watching them on TV watching things on TV? Beyond being neat, it seemed there wouldn’t be much in that to engage a jaded cynic with half an eye on funnier, cleverer commentators. It’s vox pop, I thought, and I hate vox pop, they add absolutely no dimension, pointless questions asked of the kind of people who would ring a quiz line just to say ‘don’t know’. What did you see of the incident, random passer by? ‘Nothing, but I hear it was dreadful.’ What do you think of child-murderers, insightless stranger with no relevance? “They should put them in prison and throw away the key’. Thanks, now it’s back to Kay in the studio.

Then I watched it, and now I can confidently state with all the experience of someone who has loathed a lot of comedy over the years, that Gogglebox is the funniest thing currently on TV. There’s very little on that makes me proper laugh out loud, since the halcyon days of TV Burp at its finest. It does a similar thing, I suppose, with Harry Hill replaced by a variety of ordinary people – couples, families, friends – except no writers, no punchlines. People don’t need them; they are funny, man. One couple - I think it was Stephen and Chris - made me really cackle as they discussed a documentary. ‘Hitler was born with all this teeth’ said one. ‘The dirty evil bastard’ said the other, deadpan. It doesn’t look anything, written cold like that, things rarely do. You have to be there.

If I came for funny, I stayed for something else. Of course there’s more. There’s family dynamics, annoying teens, debate; there’s drinking, body language and dreadful art - I can’t focus on what one couple say because of the terrible breast painting hovering behind them, a tit on each shoulder. There’s the nation’s obsessions reflected. I’m thinking of one young man, trying to hush his mum at the start of The Day of the Doctor. ‘Don’t say one word’ he warned. ‘But what’s the …’ she started. ‘NOoooooo’ he howled, and we all understood. We’ve all been there, on both sides of that sofa.

Then there’s Leon and June. If one couple sum up the joy of Gogglebox for me, it’s Leon and June. A Liverpudlian couple in their 70s, they were watching "Countdown", doing what all right minded people do, trying to get a better word than the contestants. Leon got piss, and June got passion. Piss! said Leon, repeatedly, pleased with himself. Passion, said June, with quiet confidence, not rising to it. Piss and passion. In just that, everything. The stuff that drama aspires to: revealing, comedic, familiar, unpretentious. It was glorious. And June got the (imaginary) points.

As well as reminding me of TV Burp, it takes me back to the first two series of Big Brother. It has the same sociological feel, that almost-buzz when something interesting about who we are and where we’re at, is being revealed. We can all find someone in the ‘cast’ to reflect ourselves, to favour, to sometimes laugh at - but not cruelly. It has the affection of ‘Kids Say the Funniest Things’, this sofa-bound slice of life. And these references remind me that while it feels new, it’s really not, because nothing is.

It reminds me too that TV executives can get things right, which is bloody annoying. It’s much easier to deride them and my god they’ve practically forced the ammunition into our hands. Nobody sets out to make bad programmes, but as a quick for instance, the manipulative cynicism that pervades X Factor when people with mental health issues are carefully selected to go on screen goes some way to explain our distrust. This time, I’m asking ‘who commissioned this?’ in a very different tone, with respect. Like the editors who turned down J K Rowling, I suspect I may have looked at this on paper and failed to see the spark.

The one clanging note is the voiceover. It’s obvious what they were aiming for – ‘let’s have something quirky that can provide another layer.’ But Craig Cash is no Daves Lamb or Quantick. His mock-sincere drawl is the only off-note in the show and it’s banal to the point of grating.

Producers will soon doubtless be angling to get their programmes ‘reviewed’ on Gogglebox, which I hope it will resist. And it will certainly create ‘stars’ – it’s how TV operates, eating itself. I shan’t blame Leon and June for bringing out a range of jigsaws, I may even buy one. And in a couple of years, when Steph and Dom are holding hands across their hammocks on I’m a Celeb, I’ll only have myself to blame.

Until then, make the most of its strange power. They watched Children in Need one week, something I had studiously avoided (it’s a good way to get a quick overview of what’s on, incidentally) for reasons. The cast were crying, as a particularly moving section of film moved to its finale. And I felt a tear roll down my face. I was crying watching a TV show of people crying watching a TV show I hate. They’ve got to be doing something right.

Jenny Landreth is on Twitter @jennylandreth

Scots, it is frequently stated, are progressive or radical, even left-wing. This, on some readings, gives independence a radical potential. Posed slightly differently, independence is deemed necessary to preserve a welfare state that is cared about here in Scotland but, by implication, not elsewhere. "We’re different up here" is the assertion. But who are we different from? And how different are we?

Given much of current debate around independence is predicated around the idea that there is a gulf in attitude north and south of the border, this is no small matter. Many will assert that we are seeking a progressive future through independence to escape the politics of a UK simultaneously proclaimed to be moving to the right and incapable of change. (In such narratives the oft stated enthusiasm of the SNP to keep levels of corporation tax below those set at Westminster and their intention to grow the financial sector as a share of the Scottish economy seldom get much of a hearing.)

If the comparison is between Scotland (population: five million) and England (53 million), it’s no real surprise to find some diversity of views. Yet even here, a Nuffield Foundation report in 2011 concluded that in terms of being "more social democratic in outlook than England, the differences are modest at best". In what, perhaps, should serve as a warning for those who would conflate constitutional and social change they also note that "like England, Scotland has become less – not more – social democratic since the start of devolution."

But what if a less disproportionate comparison is used? A Study for the Red Paper Collective of British Social Attitudes Surveys going back to the mid-1980s examined not the difference between Scotland and England but rather between Scotland and our 15 million closest neighbours, the three northern regions of England.

Looking at a range of measures that might indicate some level of progressive opinion (e.g. role of government in tackling unemployment, support for taxation to fund services, attitude to benefit claimants etc), Scots are no different at all. It can, of course, be argued that during much of this timeframe Scotland operated largely within the same political and economic environment as the three regions sampled, so a degree of congruity is to be expected. This would be to miss the point. It is not simply that Scottish opinion was and is the same as these places – it is that Scots reacted in the same way to the same issues.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, our problems of unemployment, industrial decline and exploitation are much the same. Yet many are increasingly content to define Scottish difficulties as being a national question while issues in the English north are an economic question.

Such an analysis ignores the realities of the political and economic power wielded by business and capital. Much of the Scottish economy is owned and controlled at a UK level. But for the north of England as much as Scotland, 'the UK' in this context is really a synonym for the City of London. (See Richard Leonard in The Red Paper on Scotland 2014 .)

In this context, insisting that progress for people in Scotland depends on independence is saying that those with similar problems and outlook to our own must be written off as partners in building something better. Despite problems on Clydeside and Merseyside having similar causes and people feeling the same about them, the response, put bluntly, is a statement that "Connection with you is holding us back".

Those who advocate such a course seldom show any signs of having considered how Scotland’s retreating from tackling issues on a UK basis, in pursuit of a (quite possibly illusory) sectional advantage, will impact on those they wish to leave behind.

Some of course are explicit in advocating a lifeboat scenario, saying in effect, "It’s all terribly sad for the Scousers, but it’s nothing to do with us". This attitude suffices for nationalists, who, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, don’t really care about anyone’s country but their own. But for those who would claim to espouse any sort of politics of the left - this is an inadequate response.

The question of whether or not Scotland leaving the UK would be a progressive move depends of course on a range of factors far wider than the convergence of opinion between Scotland and the north of England. But that congruence of attitude is not trivial either.

Their issues of lack of accountability and economic democracy, the consequences of financialisation and external ownership are our issues too. They feel the same way about these things as we do. In such circumstances, surely the burden of proof lies with those who would argue for putting a political divide between us. They should show, rather than simply assert, how independence would improve, or at least do no harm, to our capacity to jointly confront our common problems.

Stephen Low is a member of the Red Paper Collective

Are women hard-wired to be bitches? Could it be that, when you whisper to your colleague how that girl's outfit is way fugly or speculate about how that your female colleague is a pathological liar, it's not because you've been conditioned to do so by a society which sets women up in competition with one another, but because your brain has developed that way? If so, it allows you to blame any Regina George-like tendencies on your bitchicampus, say, or your pre-frontal whoretex, rather than having to face up to the possibility that you might just be a massive asshole. Talk about a get-out-of-jail-free card. Thanks, evolutionary psychologists.

Whether or not women are natural bitches is the question the Times saw fit to ask itself week, and, after taking an extremely balanced look at one whole side of the argument, decided to write it all up in its special burn book, sorry, newspaper, under the not-at-all-sensationalist headline 'The science of being a bitch', with the accompanying standfirst 'Mean girl behaviour is hard-wired in the female brain'. In the article, said 'mean girl behaviour' is tenuously linked to the phenomenon of 'slut-shaming', thus conveniently allowing the Times to illustrate it with a picture of a scantily clad woman who journalist Barbara McMahon recommends you scrutinise thus:

'Look at this photograph. If you are a woman, look particularly carefully and monitor your response. Look at those boobs. That miniskirt is ridiculous. She's probably a complete cow.'

That's some quality journalism, right there. (We should add that, despite Barbara's leading question, we did not assume that the lady in the picture was a 'complete cow', though we were somewhat surprised that nineties polyester peddlers Bay Trading were still making clothes).

According to Canadian psychologist Tracey Vaillancourt, women such as ourselves make bitchy comments - such as the one we made just now - do so because we perceive our female opponents as sexual rivals because like, evolution. The article goes on: 'This indirect aggression - what we call bitchiness or latterly slut-shaming - goes back to the caveman era when women had to learn ways to compete with other females to find suitable males with whom to reproduce.'

Though no hard evidence is put forward for how so-called female bitchiness is down to nature and not nurture, we are of course totally ready to take at face value the basic claim that, despite thousands of years of social and technological progress, all of which has taken place against a backdrop of patriarchy reliant on women's subservience, we're all just monkeypeople wearing dresses (and bitching about those dresses afterwards). Furthermore, all our bitchiness is apparently to do with trying to get men, something that came as a surprise to us considering the fact that modern female bitching is rarely ever about men, but hey ho.

Vaillancourt and her colleagues readily admit that their theory is unpopular. Indeed, apparently people tell Vaillancourt she's a bitch rather a lot, something that she regards as deeply ironic. Fair enough. Equally, you could say that leading a study that sets out to prove just how massively bitchy women are and then giving lots of interviews where you hammer home that point about just how massively bitchy women are might look to some like the height of bitchiness. Indeed, it could be seen as meta-bitchery. But it would be very bitchy of us to say so. Though totally not our fault, come to think of it, because we were BORN THIS WAY.

Sidestepping the risk that we'll tie ourselves up in circles trying to work out who's a bitch and who isn't, let's instead deal with the claim that women hate this study because they feel Vaillancourt is 'denigrating the sisterhood.' Perhaps we could all try and think of a single woman that any of us have met who has confessed to a persistent belief in this thing called 'sisterhood' or indeed has indicated membership thereof. We might be here a while, because as far as our experience goes, most people seem to believe society consists of a range of individuals of different genders who are either friends with one another or not, and that the likelihood of them being nice or, indeed, nasty to one another has very little to do with their respective genitals and much more to do with whether or not you behave like a twat at drinks parties. If you do behave badly at drinks parties, expect to get bitched about by both men and women alike. It's happened to the best of us.

Relationships between people are complex and that goes too for relationships between women. To reduce those relationships to evolutionary impulses not only limits our transactions with other women to merely sexually competitive ones, but also disregards the number of things a human being can do to thoroughly piss another off.

This is the problem with claims of 'hard-wiring.' Though the Times article acknowledges the existence of the social norms that make female aggression more taboo than male, it seems to find the fact that female chimpanzees don't beat the shit out of each other much more compelling a narrative, regardless of how convincing it is. 'The science of being a bitch' is going to sell copies, granted, but it would be useful to see some proper, balanced reporting on this issue rather than the usual dumbed down media-friendly studies, cherry-picked to maintain the status quo. People want to believe this stuff because it offers a ready and simple explanation for why the world is the way it is, through the eyes of a very select number of people.

Evolutionary psychology so often seems to underpin existing gender biases that until we see some solid, hard, biological evidence to contradict us, you'll have to forgive us for siding with the late, great Simone on this one in proclaiming that one is not born a bitch, one becomes one. And to anyone who disagrees, we say simply: boo, you whore.

Tim Yeo has been deselected by his local constituency party, the BBC has reported. 

The former environment minister, 68, has been the Conservative MP for South Suffolk since 1983. He was recently cleared by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards of breaking lobbying rules, although he stood down from the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee while the investigation was ongoing.

Yeo was ousted in a secret ballot held in his constituency on Friday night. He had previously expressed his desire to stand again in the 2015 General Election, and it is possible he will appeal the decision.

South Suffolk is a safe Tory seat, returning Yeo with a majority of 8,689 at the last election, with the Lib Dems coming in second.