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Tate brightened: How Tate Britain has been restored to glory

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Tate Britain’s director shares her diary of the gallery’s three-year, £45m redesign.

I have got quite used to going into a small Portakabin in my ordinary clothes and coming out on the other side wearing builders’ boots, hard hat, hi-vis vest, gloves and goggles. “Committed to incident and injury free,” the vests say – and even if the English is odd, the Tate Britain site has been blessed with an absence of incident. The project, led by the architectural firm Caruso St John, is pretty much on time and on budget, and we are fortunate. I might almost miss this parallel world that goes on alongside the usual business of the gallery, even if it is a world that is strangely monochrome, covered in plastic, tape and cardboard – and male.

***

It has been fascinating walking around a site in which every group of men is attending to something specific and often unrelated: the cracks between the terrazzo tiles, the plaster finishes, the leather upholstery or the wooden sills. The man who worked alone on the new banister has been carving banisters for 30 years.

***

After two years of regular project boards, client reviews and site tours, and two years of happily asserting that everything was fine, the past few weeks feel like a dose of reality. All those decisions that we made slowly and painstakingly are suddenly happening in front of our eyes: the sign-painter is lettering the letters we agreed, over the doors we specified, and in the nominated typeface. Did we choose the right height? All those negotiations, all those questions of principle, suddenly take shape, in material form, in a very short space of time. It is odd to see the action at the end of the long line of decision-making in the form of a guy with a spirit level and some masking tape.

***

Paul Noble, who is curating a collection of works that symbolise the history of Millbank and the Tate, is waiting to get into the archive gallery, where the paint refuses to dry. Now the marsh, on which we sit, and on which Paul’s project is based, seems uncomfortably present. Richard Wright, who has designed the glass and leading for the foyer, has just been down to see his window, but the upper and lower window frames are 9mm out. The turf has been laid on the much-abused lawns, after months of trampling by dislocated visitors; will it take? We can’t get the plinths and their busts up into the Rotunda because the new lift isn’t working.

***

It is hard to imagine this monochrome world, coloured only by the yellow vests of builders working silently, suddenly made public and animated by families, children and by conversation. We have had tastes of how it might feel. A breakfast for a small group of colleagues enabled them to see the spaces in daylight, which has been a key part of the architects’ thinking. Donors had drinks in the Grand Saloon, restored to its original splendour. Best of all, we had a builders and trades party, in the upper Rotunda. Sidney Smith’s original building turns out to be better than most people realised. This project asserts what was architectural about the 1897 building and also creates architecture in the bits that were previously just spaces.

***

The bespoke furniture has arrived, and I have spent a happy hour arranging it in the members’ room. This has always been a hobby but never before have I helped to research and test the chair on which I sit. Some lucky staff have tried out the new café, eating more than usual in the interests of a soft opening. It is great to have the old building back and to see it made anew.

***

The rationale of buildings comes and goes as they develop over time. The Caruso St John project puts coherence back into the architecture, and we have tried to do the same with the way the collection is hung and how it moves the visitor round the building. I have learnt, in my time working with Adam Caruso, that we share an interest in behaviour that is instinctive, and in underlying patterns of use. I have had the ambulant and the static viewer in my mind in the new layout: the Millbank project brings the visitor in at the right place and helps them to understand how the building functions.

***

The logic of Tate Britain is becoming apparent again. The next few weeks will begin to tell us whether it works for everyone, and across the building as a whole. I’m looking forward to it.


The north is not all Coronation Street and popping the kettle on

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This is a place with a rich cultural life and a jumble of social classes.

Two books about the north, published this year, offered an interesting lack of contrast to the British reader. Paul Morley’s The North (and Almost Everything In It) and Morrissey’s Autobiography present much the same picture of growing up in “the north”; Irish-inflected in the open expression of emotion, a grim townscape alleviated by extravagantly glamorous women in leopard-skin print and “part-beehive”, in Morrissey’s terms. Given their later occupations, both writers unsurprisingly allow pop music to loom large in the sub-national culture – and in an account of the same event, the Sex Pistols’ gig at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1977, each allows the other to make a walk-on part.

Behind the whole thing is a popular stereotype about the difference between life in the north and life in the south; one warm, neighbourly, friendly, emotionally open and hugger-mugger, creating pop musicians and comedians; the other fenced off, cold, withdrawn, detached, creating novelists and string quartets.

It’s fair to say that I don’t recognise any of it, or recognise it only from previous outings in memoirs. And one of the immediately striking things about Morley’s north (and everything in it) is that one quite small part of the north has been allowed to stand for the whole of a large stretch of the country. This is not untypical. Persuaded, perhaps, by the long-running ITV soap opera Coronation Street, much of the national audience regards the manners and culture of a confected innercity Manchester working class as widely characteristic. Actually, a brief reflection will produce some variations in culture across the region. Inner-city Manchester is not much like life in the Yorkshire Dales, nor indeed like Newcastle, Carlisle, the South Yorkshire conurbations, Cumbria, York, Harrogate, rural Lancashire, Bradford and Leeds. Most of them have their own accent, easily distinguishable.

But the most striking thing that the traditional view of “the north” leaves out is any sense of the northern gentry and the middle classes. The distinction between the warm, neighbourly pop-the-kettle-on north and the cold, telephone-first south is not, in fact, a geographical one, but a social one, between proletarian manners and bourgeois manners. You will not get much of a welcome if you pop next door for a quid for the meter in the Tory Valhalla of Harrogate. What! There are Tories in Yorkshire? Well, of course. Some of them have never even seen a whippet under the tea table.

The social classes in the north are difficult for a southerner to interpret because, like in Italy but unlike the south of England, there are regional accents that are also inflected by social class. Just as Naples, for instance, possesses a working-class, a middle-class and an aristocratic Neapolitan accent, so in Yorkshire you can easily distinguish between a working-class Sheffield accent and the one used by the local doctor. The prestige of the south and London makes the same not true there; there is only working-class London and what regards itself as RP, or “correct pronunciation”. On the BBC London TV news, Karl Mercer’s accent is regarded as a working-class accent that a professional person has hung on to. In Yorkshire, the equivalent would be regarded as a middle-class way of talking that was also regional.

The complexities of accent and place repeat themselves when it comes to the culture of the place. One of the things that always gets left out in accounts of “the north” is the vivid life of what might be regarded as high culture. In Morley’s account, for instance, the Free Trade Hall is primarily regarded as the place that staged the Sex Pistols. In reality, you might regard the prime interest of the Free Trade Hall as being, for 139 years after 1858, the home of the Hallé Orchestra – an orchestra set up as a splinter group from the even older Liverpool Philharmonic.

Similarly, readers in the south might think of the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield as uniquely the home of a snooker championship. The snooker was brought in in 1977 to help with funding. For the rest of the year, it is a highly interesting theatre. I remember going to see plays by Racine and Tom Stoppard there in the early 1980s, and hearing string quartets by the dozen in the studio theatre. Popular culture has blocked out, in the public awareness, what is much more characteristic of the north as a place: an engagement with and an investment in high culture.

Today, we regard high culture through the prism built for the south of England, as something generated by and created for bourgeois culture. That is only part of the story. High culture was very often implanted in the north not as a means for the bourgeoisie to be entertained, as in a concert hall in Bath, but as a means to bring the urban proletariat to higher things. This was true of art galleries, such as the Manchester Art Gallery, founded in 1824, the Lady Lever in Merseyside and the galleries in Leeds; true of orchestras such as the Hallé in Manchester, the Liverpool Philharmonic and the great Royal Northern Sinfonia in Newcastle, the UK’s oldest permanent chamber orchestra; true of choral societies such as the Leeds Festival Chorus, founded in 1858. It was true, above all, of the great libraries of the region, of which the John Rylands Library and Manchester Central Library represent the highlights. All these aimed at both entertaining a rising middle class and enlightening the aspiring urban poor.

There is a marvellous short story by Arnold Bennett entitled “The Death of Simon Fuge”, describing the visit one night by a southern visitor to a Potteries town. He is taken from house to house, and finds something surprising and distinguished in each. In one, a new piano duet has just arrived and his hosts sit down and investigate this new piece, sight-reading it with great confidence. These amateur players are conquering the Richard Strauss Sinfonia Domestica, a piece that was, in this 1907 short story, only three years old and at the cutting edge of European culture. Only in the north, and only after years of investing the whole of society with access to music, art and literature of the most ambitious sort.

Bennett exaggerates but perhaps by not very much, and he decisively severs any assumption of a necessary connection between wealth and culture. Nor is this necessarily a historic and antique situation. My family moved from London to Sheffield in 1974 and a number of things seemed instantly very different. Some of these were to do with local ways of eating. Many geographical divides focus on foodstuffs – the Germans talk about the Weißwurstäquator, or the “white sausage equator”, the border of Bavaria at which the things start to be eaten. The Swiss talk about the Röstigraben, or rösti-ditch, the point at which German starts to be spoken and rösti becomes a traditional dinner accompaniment.

The usual distinction between north and south in England was the point at which pork butchers specialising in pig products started to appear. This was not an illusion. In 1970, there were 45 pork butchers in Sheffield alone. There were other local delicacies, never before experienced by us, such as haslet, a sort of cold sliced stuffing, or the Staffordshire oatcake, an irresistible crumpet/pancake hybrid, and the term “relish” was used for something very much like, but very much not Worcestershire sauce.

But there were obvious shifts in manners, too, as well as in the social structure. There was the egotistical Yorkshire bore, still very much in evidence. (When the Daily Telegraph recently asked Alan Titchmarsh to say what he liked about his native county, the result came close to breaking all records for the recurrence of the first-person pronouns.) There was, much more attractively, the appearance of the capable woman, running the show and brooking no opposition. There was also, disconcertingly, a style of humour that was so straight-faced in its teasing as to seem like rudeness and not like a joke at all.

None of these was obviously attached to social class and these types probably existed everywhere – I was struck by the identical recurrence of these figures, much later, in my husband’s Bengali culture – but in the north they were universal and conspicuous. They ran the show.

Similarly, the prizing of what elsewhere could be regarded as high culture was, in the north, not obviously or exclusively tied to middle- or upper-class existence. There may have been tendencies, but no obvious barriers. Like the characters in “The Death of Simon Fuge”, I spent my 1970s and 1980s in a Yorkshire whose main interest was in Strauss symphonic poems. I once mentioned this and was promptly called things like snobbish and pompous, though why it’s more pompous to say that you like Sibelius than to stress that you were one of the very first people to notice the sublimity of the Sex Pistols, I really don’t know. Versions of remote cultures, in time and place, have a strong tendency to yield their complexity and range of possibilities to a simple version. Why these simpler versions emerge is a curious question.

The north’s spread of high culture was greater than people outside the region probably suspect. It possessed, too, a startling amount of moneyed and land-owning culture and still does. When we talk about “the north” we think of the urban poor of Manchester. On the whole, we don’t even consider Paul Sykes, the immensely rich owner of a Gothic pile in the shadows of Fountains Abbey, though nobody could be more characteristically “northern”. Nor do we think of Castle Howard or the Harewood estate. There are also the terrifying Yorkshire gentry of Harrogate, Richmond and Ripon.

The point about these people is that they are just as characteristic of what we could call the northern culture as Bet Lynch or Morrissey. They have somehow failed to register as northern and are somehow thought of as interlopers from the south. In fact, like the high cultural institutions of libraries and orchestras long established in the north, their life is complete and characteristic of the region. It’s just that nobody much knows about it.

A few years ago, I wrote a novel called The Northern Clemency, roughly focusing on the culture I grew up in. It was a specifically middle-class, reading, culture. The novel was a success but one of the chief responses from readers was a puzzlement. How could I write about Sheffield in the 1970s and 1980s without writing exclusively about an urban, warm, working-class culture Done Down By Thatcher? How could I possibly let a character go and read a book in a library or enjoy an expensive meal?

Such responses showed a lack of awareness of the richness and variety of the north and a curious willingness to allow a pervasive stereotype to block a range of experience from view. The urban bourgeoisie went through the changes in society as well as the most immediate victims; their manners and their culture changed, too. Strikingly, the ways of living that the very rich and the middling comfortable maintain in most of the north are ways of living that are hardly represented in imaginative fiction, or in drama or film.

When we think of natives of Sheffield, we think of the cast of The Full Monty. We don’t think of A S Byatt, the daughter of a QC, or Michael Palin, the son of a Cambridge-educated engineer, or the Old Etonian actor Dominic West, or the newsreader Emily Maitlis – I used to play in the same orchestra as her sister Sally. They were daughters of a professor at the university and it never occurred to me that the family might not be properly Sheffield in some way.

The truth is that, as time goes on, the richness and variety of culture and life as we know it disappears in favour of the received version. If it is possible that something so near to us as life in the north a decade or two ago can be reduced exclusively to glamorous but poor leopard-skin prints emerging from terraced houses, then we ought to make the case for life as we know it and live it now. The idea that anyone in the 1970s in the north might have chosen to go to hear the Hallé Orchestra at the Free Trade Hall – indeed, that the Free Trade Hall did anything at all in the 1970s other than host the Sex Pistols, playing to an audience consisting of Morrissey and Paul Morley – now starts to seem incredible and ridiculous.

But there is a plea to be made for remembering and noticing the variety of culture in a place. One such element came not from deprivation but from surfeit. It deserves to be remembered and to be assigned to the place where it most vividly happened.

For me, when I think of Sheffield, I am 18, and taking a pile of Nabokovs out of the library. The Hallé is coming to play Penderecki’s St Luke Passion at the City Hall tonight. Only in the north.

 

The A-Z of northern fiction

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From the bonny beck to the kitchen sink and Heathcliff to the angry young men, Frances Wilson explores the personality of writing from the north of England, while Philip Maughan asks how the land lies today.

In Writing Home, Alan Bennett describes having speech difficulties. He grew up to be fluent in two voices. There was “speaking properly”, like in the matinees at the Grand Theatre on a Saturday afternoon, and there was “being yourself”, which was how he was expected to speak at home in Leeds, where his father was a butcher. “Speaking properly” was metropolitan and they did it down south; “being yourself” was provincial, like it was up north. As a fledgling dramatist, what was he to do? Should he write about the middleclass life he knew from books or the life in a dull, northern town in the 1950s that was “largely unwritten about”?

The children in the stories Bennett read as a boy all “spoke properly”. They called their parents Mummy and Daddy and lived in a “down south” equipped with thatched cottages, millstreams, picnics on red-and-white chequered tablecloths, owls in hollow trees and sticklebacks in buckets. Leeds could provide none of these things, not even hollow trees, so his only option if he wanted life to be more like literature was to try replacing “Mam” with “Mummy”. This was discouraged by his father as a sign of social pretension and of not “being himself”.

My experience of childhood reading was the opposite of Bennett’s. My compass always faced north. As someone of no fixed abode whose family perched during my most impressionable years in the West Midlands, I didn’t have a book in my bedroom that didn’t take me up the M1. The north had personality – it almost seemed to be a person – whereas the south, slumbering beneath me, was only a place. The south was literature’s finishing school but the north undid etiquette; it was where people stopped talking properly and became themselves. It was in the north that the spoiled Mary Lennox found her secret garden in the tangled grounds of Misselthwaite Manor and turned from nasty to nice; the north was where E Nesbit’s “railway children” – Bobbie, Phyllis and Peter – sent their love to their father on the 9.15 train to London and where John, Susan, Titty and Roger camped on their Lake District isle in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. Dracula landed in Whitby, Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White was set in Cumberland and West Riding provided Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey and Catherine Earnshaw.

I would have loved then to have known the Newcastle of David Almond’s Skellig, where Michael befriends a Blakean angel in the garage. To me, the north was a place of courage and transformation while the south was about storing what you already had (sticklebacks in buckets).

Northern tales often contained two voices. In Wuthering Heights, some characters spoke “properly” while others, such as the servant Joseph, were so brazenly themselves that they seemed not to mind whether we understood them or not. Joseph’s vernacular was his badge of belonging: “T’ maister’s down i’ t’ fowld,” he would scowl. “Go round by th’ end o’ t’ laith, if ye went to spake to him.” Like the poet and playwright Tony Harrison, Joseph subjected everything, as Alan Bennett put it, “to one defiant Leeds voice”. When Mary Lennox speaks, in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, her words fall dead on the page but the language of her servant Martha soars into flight. The moor, Martha explains, is “none bare. It’s covered wi’ growin’ things as smells sweet.”

I identify the north of my childhood reading with the heritage north catered for by the refurbished Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth and the dinky reconstruction of Wordsworth’s cottage in Grasmere. There was, I later learned, a less Laura Ashley experience of northern writing. A new school of writers emerged in the social transformation of postwar Britain and the kitchen sink replaced the bonny beck. Bennett’s “largely unwritten-about” world became the subject of the northern “lad lit” of John Braine, raised in an Irish-Catholic enclave of lower middle-class Bradford; Stan Barstow, a coal miner’s son from the outskirts of Wakefield; and the Leeds-born Keith Waterhouse.

“We had the temerity to think we could write,” said Barstow, “but [with] no teachers and no models.” Heathcliff and Rochester had morphed into the daydreaming William Fisher in Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1959), the upwardly mobile Joe Lampton in Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), Vic Brown in Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960) and the angry young Frank Machin, who leaves the pit to play league rugby in David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960).

The other England: (from top left) Thomas De Quincey,
John Braine, Charlotte Brontë and Alan Bennett
Photos: Bridgeman, Rex, Getty

 

The West Riding of Waterhouse, Braine and Barstow is isolated and landlocked, caught, as David Storey puts it, between “two deep and narrow valleys on the eastern slope of the Pennines”. Its “obsessively puritan” inhabitants operate on a “very simple morality: that work is good and that indolence is not so much deplorable or unfortunate as evil”. In Storey’s Wakefield mining community, the maxim is further simplified: physical work is good and mental work is evil.

In the opening pages of Room at the Top, Braine’s first novel, we read: “I came to Warley on a wet September morning with the sky the grey of Guiseley sandstone.” Warley is the name Braine gives to Bradford; Guiseley is a small town in the suburbs of north-west Leeds. We note the weather; the writing is spare. In an interview with J B Priestley – another Bradford man – Braine described his home town as dominated “more than any other in England . . . by a success ethos”, an ethos that is at the heart of his fiction. Joe Lampton comes to Warley from Dufton with the aim of earning £1,000 a year. He secures a desk job, joins the amateur dramatic society and gets the girls.

“It is hard now to convey,” Stan Barstow once said, “the importance of Room at the Top for a generation of writers from the north of England.” Braine’s novel allowed Barstow, Storey and Waterhouse “to hoe their own row”, to write about the world they knew “from the inside”.

In Billy Liar, William Fisher, working for the local undertaker and living with his parents in a small Yorkshire town, fantasises about life as a comedy writer in London. In Barstow’s A Kind of Loving, Vic Brown’s dreams end when he gets his girlfriend pregnant and, because there is a housing shortage, the couple move in with her mother.

What readers responded to in these novels (and in the films that they all became) was the primitive sexuality of the men. D H Lawrence, the last provincial writer to have risen to the top, had cleared the path in this respect. Working-class men, especially those with northern accents, were represented as more masculine than their middle-class counterparts who “spoke properly”. Working- class characters in books had, in the past, been described solely in terms of social economy, while middle-class characters were endowed with psychological depth. William Fisher and Vic Brown were given complex moral interiors; Billy constructed his own reality, while for all his banter about sex, it is love that Vic is looking for.

The 1960s was the decade of angry young men, lecherous young men, chancers, Jack the Lad figures and blokes. Gone were the effete, over-educated southerners such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, who had dominated the pre-war literary scene. So macho was the atmosphere that women such as Winifred Holtby, who had helped to shape the landscape, might be forgotten. Snootily described by Virginia Woolf as a Yorkshire farmer’s daughter who learned to read while feeding the pigs, Holtby was a socialist feminist who lectured for the League of Nations.

Her novel South Riding, later adapted for television by Stan Barstow (South Riding is a fictionalisation of Holtby’s native East Riding), was published in 1936, a year after her early death. A state-of-the-nation romance, the plot might be described as Jane Eyre uncovers local government corruption. Sarah Burton, an idealistic young headmistress, takes over a school in Kiplington (an amalgam of Hornsey and Withernsea) and gets involved in council politics; her nemesis, the conservative Robert Carne, proprietor of the dessicated Maythorpe Hall, eventually wins her heart.

Holtby was well aware that the accessibility of her writing was out of sync with the ethos of the Bloomsbury set. In her critical study of Virginia Woolf (which was published in 1932) – the first such book on Woolf to appear – Holtby weighed up the benefits of modernist and traditional fiction and found herself preferring literary democracy over elitism, the values of the north over those of the south.

If we follow a female line, Holtby is succeeded by Margaret Drabble, Beryl Bainbridge and Jeanette Winterson, who are rooted, respectively, in Yorkshire, Liverpool and Lancashire. She is preceded by the Knutsfordraised Elizabeth Gaskell, whose North and South (1855) appeared at around the same period as Dickens’s Hard Times. Both Gaskell and Dickens set their stories in Manchester, which Dickens called Coketown and Gaskell called Milton. While Dickens wrote from the position of a Londoner, Mrs Gaskell, who now lived in the great Cottonopolis, understood, as Charlotte Brontë said, “the genius of the north”.

A tale of two Englands, North and South describes the transformation of Margaret Hale from stuck-up southerner to informed observer of the Industrial Revolution. Her family moves from the tranquil Helstone, a place of thatched cottages and owls in hollow trees, to the smog-ridden Milton, a place of dust and tuberculosis. Their arrival coincides with a series of strikes at the local mill. Sympathising with the impoverished workers, Margaret clashes with the factory owner, the wrong but romantic John Thornton. By the close of the novel, she has learned to love not only the cotton mills but Thornton, too.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), written as a homage to her friend after her death, fuelled the myth of the elemental northern writer. The book begins in wailing wind, with a description of the Leeds and Bradford railway running through “a deep valley of the Aire”; Gaskell arrives in Haworth on a “dull, drizzly, Indian-inky day”.

The Brontë family is described as carved out of the landscape – as Ted Hughes, raised on the Pennine moorland would also seem – and Charlotte’s story is told as though she were a character from one of her novels. Yet the Brontës had already constructed their own mythology.

In a letter to Wordsworth, Branwell Brontë had said that he, like the poet, lived in “wild seclusion”, with only rocks and stones and trees for company. Haworth Parsonage was on the edge of the moor but it was not secluded; there was a village attached. Four miles away was Keighley, which, as Gaskell points out, with its “great worsted factories” and “rows of workmen’s houses”, could “hardly be called ‘country’”.

Simone Signoret and Laurence Harvey in the
1959 adaptation of "Room at the Top"
Photo: Rex/Courtesy of Everett Collection

The Brontës’ model of the Romantic life came from the biographical sketches of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy by Thomas De Quincey, a Mancunian – a scandalous series of articles written for Blackwood’s Magazine in 1837. Today, Wordsworth is largely presented as the asexual spokesman of leech-gatherers and idiot boys but De Quincey described the poet, who was bourgeois to his marrow, as barely civilised and semi-incestuous. With his teeth bared and his eyes flashing, Wordsworth was fuelled by “animal appetites”. Dorothy, who her brother would kiss on the mouth, was also “beyond any person I have known in this world . . . the creature of impulse”.

Emily Brontë, who read Blackwood’s Magazine, surely based her tale of barely civilised and semi-incestuous siblings on this account of the Wordsworths. When I read Wuthering Heights, I am reminded of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journals, in which she describes the two and half years that she lived alone with her brother in Dove Cottage, before he married and was transformed from a wild, Heathcliff- like figure to a gentleman resembling the priggish Edgar Linton. The nature of Dorothy’s love for William, which is hard for us to understand, is replicated in Cathy’s well-known des cription of her love for Heathcliff. Less a pleasure than a necessity, it is like “the eternal rocks beneath”.

“We are all, at heart, Wordsworthians,” writes J B Priestley of his fellow northerners in English Journey (1934). He has reached the point of his tour at which he is heading home. The hills have become “solidly black, their edges very sharp against the last faint silver of the day”; they are beginning to take on “that Wordsworthian quality which belongs to the north”.

Native northerners, Priestley writes, “have to make an effort to appreciate a poet like Shelley, with his rather gassy enthusiasm and his bright Italian colouring; but we have Wordsworth in our very legs”. (Wordsworth’s legs, according to De Quincey, were not his best feature; short and stocky, they were suited only for contemplating nature. It was a pity that he did not have a spare pair for “evening dress parties”.)

It is one of the peculiarities of the Lake District that, apart from its effect on Wordsworth, the sublimity of the landscape stems the flow of creativity. Wordsworth’s aim in the Lyrical Ballads was to write in “the very language of men” (he rhymed “water” with “matter”) but the writers who followed him to Grasmere found themselves tongue-tied.

Wordsworth country quickly became, as Michael Neve has put it, a country called Wordsworth: he is the only poet able to grow in its soil. The poet in Coleridge died when he moved from the coombs of the Quantocks to the crags of the lakes. De Quincey, Wordsworth’s first fan, lived in Dove Cottage for over 20 years but – like Ted Hughes – did his best writing down south.

De Quincey set his store by poetry but produced not a line of his own verse; his autobiography Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, mentions the country called Wordsworth – now his own turf – only from a safe distance.

The young De Quincey, who has run away from Manchester Grammar School, finds himself homeless and hungry on Oxford Street in London, a copy of Lyrical Ballads in his pocket. It is Wordsworth he wants to meet and Words worth’s rural idyll that he wants to inhabit. Like Branwell Brontë, he has written to the poet to prove his Romantic credentials. It is a cold night and he looks “up every avenue in succession which pierces through the heart of Marylebone to the fields and the woods; for that, said I, travelling with my eyes up the long vistas which lay part in light and part in shade, ‘That is the road to the north, and therefore to [Wordsworth], and if I had the wings of a dove, that way I would fly for comfort.’”

This was Thomas De Quincey’s version of writing home.

***

Martin Amis v The Provinces

By Philip Maughan

The Arctic Monkeys knew what they were doing when they chose the title for their debut album. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, a line from Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, perfectly captures the brooding, self-defeating energies that power northern fiction.

Billy Fisher, the protagonist in Keith Waterhouse’s 1959 novel Billy Liar, dreams of a life as a writer in London. But when the opportunity to begin a new life in the south presents itself, he opts not to get on the train. Likewise, Sillitoe’s lonely long-distance runner Colin Smith is a highly cognisant thief, who, at the point when he is about to win a competition and delight his borstal masters, stops running. The barrier to “success” is not his incapacity, or want of personal volition. It is the realisation that he is competing in someone else’s race.

In 1957, John Braine, the author of Room at the Top, wrote an affectionate yet satirical essay entitled “Portrait of a Provincial Intellectual” for the NS. The narrator mocks his own pretensions (freshly ground coffee, no more tea) and the local scene (“the Little Theatre and the Arts Group”) and ends with a familiar refrain: “The next time the London job was offered, he wouldn’t say no.”

Eighteen years later, Martin Amis scorned Braine’s sole literary triumph: “One wonders what sort of shape the late-1950s imagination must have been in to get itself captured by such a modest and unsophisticated book,” he wrote. All sympathy for the thwarted outsider had drained away, partly due to Braine’s shift to the political right and partly due to Amis’s snotty metropolitanism. He recently told an audience at the RSA: “England is a one-city nation. I get the horrors when I go to provincial England. The sort of trundling, pottering English – I can’t be doing with that.”

The genius of the angry young men was to build vivid fictions from the soiled matter of everyday life. They expanded the boundaries of British fiction. Today’s northern writers – Sarah Hall, David Peace, Jon McGregor, Sunjeev Sahota – concern themselves with epic themes: nature, violence, landscape, multiculturalism. They are among the most inventive stylists in contemporary fiction and draw no end of blood from trundling, pottering life.

Why is Rugby League still patronised as a mud-splattered, parochial throwback?

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Rugby league is the product of a very English revolution. It still has an egalitarian, anti-establishment, strictly northern way of viewing the world. That it has failed to make the world listen, or watch, only confirms its outlaw – and so grittily romantic – status.

A much-admired Observer cartoon of the 1980s, drawn by the incomparable Trog, contrasted a pair of Home Counties champagne swillers, basking in the sun, with a gloomy middle-aged couple from the north. The latter, sheltering from the rain, observed: “They’ve got their prime minister, why can’t we have ours?” Had they been from Yorkshire, Lancashire or Cumbria, they might have been tempted to add, on a more defiant note: “They’ve got their rugby, we’ve got ours.”

In spite – or maybe because – of Margaret Thatcher’s divisiveness and the return of the geographical fault lines that marked that low, dishonest decade, the umbilical cord between the 13-a-side oval ball game and its northern heartlands remains intact. Whatever side of the north-south divide you happen to fall on, there should be a deep appreciation that a small corner of northern England – between junctions seven and 38 of the M62 – will be forever rugby league.

In late November, fans and players from Leeds Rhinos came to see my dark comedy about Eddie Waring, Playing the Joker, at West Yorkshire Playhouse. As the Q and A afterwards illustrated, in an age of sporting globalisation and postmodern homogenisation – and after three decades of manufacturing decline – the self-styled people’s game has not only survived but flourishes as the apotheosis of northern defiance. According to Professor Tony Collins, author of Rugby’s Great Split, being a fan has become “almost a daily act of defiance. People are choosing to follow a sport that is ignored, in the main, by the establishment. It’s seen as outside the mainstream. People are making a decision to do something that is aberrant. In today’s Britain, we should all be going to watch the Premier League, then catching up with the Six Nations and then looking forward to Andy Murray at Wimbledon. So to say, ‘No, I’m going to watch the rugby league’ – it’s a political act, albeit with a small ‘p’.”

We northerners are well-balanced people: we have chips on both our shoulders. One of our long-standing gripes is that Their Rugby – union – is treated as a national sport while Our Rugby – league – is patronised as a parochial throwback to a mud-splattered, black-and-white, trouble-at-the-mill world of slag heaps, Tetley’s ale, black pudding, whippets, brass bands and bizarrely accented, trilby-hatted buffoons droning on about “up and unders” and “early baths”.

The final of a World Cup contested by 14 nations takes place at Old Trafford on Saturday 30 November; proof enough, one would have thought, of rugby league’s global reach. Most pundits agree that the competition has been hugely entertaining. Big crowds have watched exciting games at a variety of venues in England, Wales, Ireland and France. But, as John Prescott put it with typical bluntness: “You’ve probably heard very little about this because the London-dominated media prefer the posher rugby union to its rougher working-class northern cousin.” As a broadsheet columnist remarked after watching this season’s Challenge Cup final, “The game remains a prisoner of geography.”

It’s as if, as another icon of northern defiance once put it, the world won’t listen. Or, more to the point, watch. (I’m not sure Morrissey’s a fan; I can’t recall Waring joining Pat Phoenix, Viv Nicholson and Shelagh Delaney in the pantheon of Smiths cover stars.) “Why hasn’t the World Cup got a headline sponsor?” asks Phil Caplan, editor of the magazine Forty-20. “Because too many companies perceive the sport as being northern. If you’re content to be seen and talked about as a northern sport, that is exactly what it will be. There are more schools and juniors playing the sport in London than in Leeds and Wigan. Rugby union has heartlands, as does rugby league . . . but one is seen as a worldwide, global sport; the other as a northern, parochial one.”

Northern Union, as it was called on its formation in 1895, was the product of a very English revolution: a rebellion against the southern gentleman-amateur toffs who objected to working-class players being financially compensated for missing their Saturday morning shifts. Thirty years later, this breakaway northern league adopted open professionalism – while union remained an amateur sport until 1995.

Although both codes are now professional, they remain different entities. League is a more fluid, open game, having reduced teams from 15 to 13, dropped line-outs and phased out rucks and mauls and, to a large extent, scrums – and introduced “play the ball”, in which the tackled player heels the ball back to a teammate. From the interwar years, when a Bradford crowd sang “On Ilkley Moor Baht ’At” rather than “God Save the Queen” before a match between Britain and Australia, to the coal strike of 1984-85, when players who were blacklegs were jeered by their own supporters, it provided, according to the screenwriter Colin Welland, the north’s “cultural adrenalin”.

Welland was in the vanguard of a working class new wave that stormed the London barricades in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of his fellow writers, such as David Storey, Alan Sillitoe and Barry Hines, saw sport as an embodiment of local, collective identity. In This Sporting Life, for example, Storey – who had played professionally for Leeds – has his antihero Arthur Machin declaring: “There are no stars in this game. Just men like me.” The author unsentimentally depicted a game rooted in its environment; its graft, combativeness and occasional violence the product of the hard Pennine rock of the rugged hills. It had been built on the mines, docks and textile factories of the Industrial Revolution, which had bred, he argued, a “camaraderie that came from a united struggle, whether against nature or the class system”.

The problem is that, 50 years after Storey’s novel was adapted for the big screen, Rugby League Land has been completely transformed. The heavy industry that was its staple has gone. Take the tiny Yorkshire mining town of Featherstone. The two things that have any significance in its history are coal mining and rugby league. Residents used to hang their washing lines on the club’s post office ground. Before a game, perhaps apocryphally, if “Fev” needed a prop forward, an official would go to the top of the nearest mine shaft and whistle.

In 1995, thousands of people took to the streets to protest against a proposed merger with neighbouring clubs; unlike the campaign to keep their pits open a decade earlier, this action succeeded – but those traditional, fixed, stable, working-class communities, commemorated by Richard Hoggart in his book The Uses of Literacy, have mostly disappeared.

“The industries that formed the physique of the players either at semi-professional or amateur level are no more,” says Caplan. “Our raw material is in increasingly short supply.” It is one of the oldest clichés to say that sport mirrors life. Yet the demise of northern manufacturing, particularly in the mining communities of Featherstone, Castleford and Wakefield, the heavy woollen areas of Dewsbury and Batley and the railway engineering hub of Hoggart’s beloved Hunslet, has severely depleted the gene pool of many smalltown clubs.

In Books Do Furnish a Room, Anthony Powell wrote: “It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.” Everyone, Powell elaborated, has a personal myth. He was writing about fictional characters but the axiom can be applied equally to sport. Tennis, despite Andy Murray’s best efforts, remains wedded to the middle-class suburbs of the Home Counties. Rugby league’s personal myth is that it is the sporting expression of an overlooked, downtrodden, “true” England: a physical manifestation of collective solidarity, honest endeavour and commitment to fair play. This runs counter to the modern, marketed version of a dynamic, 21st-century summer sport, reinvented by Rupert Murdoch’s all-singing, all-dancing Super League.

There is a part of me that still buys into this myth. Like swaths of 20th-century variety hall comedy and pop music, from the Beatles to the Smiths, rugby league still has an egalitarian, anti-establishment, strictly northern way of viewing the world. That it has failed to make the world listen, or watch, only confirms its outlaw – and so grittily romantic – status.

According to Tony Collins, the tropes that define British sport have not changed in a century. “As in 1914, football is still the national sport. Rugby union is still strong in south Wales; in England, it’s still strong in the public schools, professions and universities, with a working-class fringe down in the south-west. And rugby league is strong in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. Rugby league doesn’t have the financial strength of football or the institutional strength of rugby union.” Pundits have been predicting the death of rugby league since its formation but, as Collins notes, “This World Cup shows it’s very much alive and kicking.”

Since the great northern uprising of 1895, there have been periodic attempts to expand and rebrand: moving the Challenge Cup final to Wembley in 1929, offering up Waring as the nation’s unofficial court jester in the 1960s, setting up a London team, Fulham, in 1980, accepting the Murdoch shilling (£87m) in 1995. All of these moves have broadened the game’s base. At heart, however, it remains rooted in – perhaps locked into – its dissenting, regionally distinctive history. Rejoice.

Anthony Clavane’s “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here? The Story of English Football’s Forgotten Tribe” is published by Quercus (£17.99)

If the Tories are to win a majority, they must reverse their northern decline

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The party currently holds just 43 of the 158 parliamentary seats in the three northern English regions. What does this mean for the electoral map in the future?

When the Conservatives met in Manchester for their conference this year, one activist fondly recalled that 40 years ago the party held a majority on the city council. Today, it has no representation at all. The same is true in Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield. In these northern cities, as in Scotland, voting Tory has acquired a status similar to an eccentric pastime.

The party currently holds just 43 of the 158 parliamentary seats in the three northern English regions (see map below), fewer than the number it won in the Labour landslides of 1945 (44 seats) and 1966 (45 seats). At the 2010 general election, only 31 per cent of northerners voted Conservative, compared with 43 per cent of voters in the rest of England and 47 per cent in the south. Unless the Tories improve on this, they cannot hope to win the parliamentary majority that has eluded them for the past four elections. As things stand, 39 per cent of northerners say that they would “never vote” for the party.

This chart, adjusted for population density, shows the parliamentary constituencies of the United Kingdom

Although the Tories’ “toxicity” is easy to identify, it is harder to explain. Contrary to popular belief, the party’s northern difficulty is not primarily because of differences in class and employment status. As polling by YouGov has shown, professionals and managers in the north are less likely to vote Conservative than unskilled workers in the south (33 per cent to 34 per cent). Some Tories attribute their weakness to the existence of Labour’s “client state” in the form of the north’s disproportionately large share of public-sector employment. (Government employees account for 20.3 per cent of all jobs in the north compared to 17 per cent elsewhere in England.) Yet public-sector workers in the south are more likely to vote Conservative than their private-sector counterparts in the north (33 per cent to 32 per cent).

There is greater evidence for the importance of ideology. Northern voters are more supportive of higher taxes and higher state spending than their southern counterparts and less supportive of private-sector involvement in public services. But the differences are too marginal to account for the chasm in voting intentions. Rather, it is the Tories themselves who are the problem. If the Conservative brand is toxic in much of the United Kingdom, it is radioactive in the north. Nearly three-quarters of northerners (73 per cent) believe that the party cares “more about the rich and affluent than ordinary people”, compared with 62 per cent of southerners, and 42 per cent believe that David Cameron is “out of touch”, compared to 32 per cent in the south. Less damaging than the decision to cut the top rate of income tax was the perception that the Tories did so on behalf of their well-heeled friends in the south-east.

If northerners believe that the Tories regard the region as a foreign land and its people as oddities, it is often not hard to see why. In July, the Conservative peer Lord Howell touted the “desolate” north-east as an optimal location for fracking. On 20 November, in response to the finding that 39 per cent of northerners would “never vote” for the party, Margaret Thatcher’s former press secretary Bernard Ingham, a Yorkshireman no less, cursed their “bovine stupidity”.

There are Tories who have begun to think more imaginatively about how to revive their party’s fortunes. The campaign group Renewal, led by the northern Conservative activist David Skelton, has called for policies such as a higher minimum wage, a mass housebuilding programme and free party membership for trade unionists. Others have proposed the introduction of proportional representation for council elections to allow the party to regain a base in local government. Yet too many Tories still give the impression of wanting to dissolve the people and elect another. As long as they continue to regard northerners with a mixture of indifference and contempt, they should not be surprised when they respond in kind.

Will a small northern town's football club ever get in the Premier League again?

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The thing about the north is that, of course, there is no such place. It’s full of different places, just like London or Paris, some parts being looked down on, ignored, feeling chippy, feeling slighted.

My first job in life, back in 1958, was on the Manchester Evening Chronicle as a graduate trainee journalist, which was a joke, as there was no real training. Until then, I hadn’t been south of Penrith, apart from a day trip to London for the interview at Kemsley Newspapers (later Thomson Newspapers) in Gray’s Inn Road. My home town was Carlisle and for four years I had been at Durham, which, oh God, I can’t face getting a map out, isn’t south of Penrith, is it?

The Chron, which was then in deadly rivalry with the Manchester Evening News, had a million readers each night, so it boasted on the masthead, and was housed in Withy Grove, the biggest newspaper building in Europe.

There were frequent headlines in the Chron and the News about the north-west – “Pools Winner from the North-West”, “North-West Couple in Road Drama”.

I would rush to read the stories, thinking: it’s probably about Carlisle people, or at least Cumbrians, so I might know them. But it was always about folk from Salford or Wigan, or Chester, and even Buxton. To me, they were in the Deep South, practically the Mediterranean.

Look at any map of England and you will see that the northwest, no question, is definitely that bulge at the top left that today is called Cumbria. Yet Manchester and its hinterlands were convinced they were the real north-west. When I came to London the following year, then joined the Sunday Times– with an accent no one could place, but must be northern – it really did seem like the Med, thanks to the smells, the sun, the clothes, the food, the outdoor pavement life. The distinctive aroma of London, like that of Paris, has disappeared. All big cities now smell the same.

The thing about the north is that, of course, there is no such place. It’s full of different places, just like London or Paris, some parts being looked down on, ignored, feeling chippy, feeling slighted.

Carlisle feels even more ignored than it was when I left, cut off from Manchester and the rest of England. Get cancer in Carlisle and you have to trail all the way over to Newcastle or Lancaster for treatment. Look at a map and you realise what a drag that must be, especially when screaming in agony, as one of my young relations recently was.

Pity Carlisle United, then, stuck out on its own, the only League club in the whole county when once there were three – along with Workington and Barrow. Yet back in 1974 not only were CUFC in the top English division but on 14 August 1974 they were top of the League. Only three games had been played, but they’d beaten Chelsea, Middlesbrough and Spurs. Alas, they got demoted that same season. They are now lingering in League One, which, despite its name, is the third English tier. Will it ever happen again that a faraway small northern town in an empty rural area will get into the Premier League? No chance. Those days are gone. And days to come will get worse.

One of the reasons Lancashire and the London area can still support so many league clubs who are not in the Prem is the Prem. When you’re not quite making the first team at Man United, or far less at Spurs, you don’t want to move to Carlisle, even if they guarantee that you’ll play. You want to stay local, so you move to Preston or Charlton, keep your gated mansion and Baby Bentley ticking over, till the call comes again. If you’ve not even made the bench and are still very young, they might send you out on loan, which is a godsend for small, struggling clubs, but not many players want to go to Carlisle. It’s all sheep, innit?

Carlisle have currently got Ben Amos, a young goalie from Man United, but for only a month. Carlisle depend on a good Cup run – which they did have for a few years, getting to Wembley for the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy final, don’t mock – or on discovering talent that can be sold on quickly at a large profit.

Doesn’t look like happening this season. The gates are down to 3,500. Last season they lost £600,000. It’s hard, up in the real north . . .

I like to think I'm tougher than I look, but Rembrandt takes my breath away

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The painting that gives me an unmistakable case of Stendhal syndrome is Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles.

At the time of writing, I do not know whether the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special will be any good but it had better be, because I’ve just had to lash out £174 incl VAT on a new aerial – the last one got nicked – to be able to watch it. The children have understandably wearied of sitting in front of a computer monitor to watch the show, especially when the internet connection is ropy, giving us plenty of time to contemplate the plot holes while watching the little red circle go round and round. Now it can just wash over us, as Steven Moffat intended.

One aspect of the 50th anniversary upsets me and that is the word “50th”. It is, I suppose, a privilege to have been born in a year that people are finally beginning to recognise as one of the most auspicious in the west’s history but I can’t help noticing that it’s all a bit . . . 50-ish. That’s half a century.

Footage from the 1960s looks as though it was filmed underwater on a zoetrope, whatever that is. It was a time of full employment. I can still add up in old money. I made the bad mistake of alluding to the old money to the Beloved, who was born ten years after decimalisation, and I won’t be doing that again in a hurry. Incidentally, while checking on the date at the Royal Mint website, my heart sank even further at its opening sentence: “For those of us under 50 . . . ” Shouldn’t that be “you”?

I was sitting on the Tube the other day and listening to a young, camp gay man talking about a recent night out to a couple of female friends. He was talking so loudly that it was impossible not to overhear and, besides, I’d forgotten to bring a book, so I thought I might learn something about the human condition. Every day is a school day.

He described, in some detail, an evening that ended in the not-so-small hours with him watching a man singing in a band. “It was hilarious. He was, like, so old– he must have been, like, 50 – and I had tears streaming down my face, I was laughing so much.” He made little waterfalls past his eyes with fluttering fingers to demonstrate.

The rest of the journey was rather spoiled for me and even though it was only three stops to King’s Cross, it felt like – ha! – 50. I contemplated winking at him and saying softly, “Fifty isn’t that old, you naughty boy,” as I left, but thought better of it and carried on to Hampstead, where I was going to spend the afternoon being shown round the newly restored Kenwood House. There, at least, I’d be seeing things that were older than I was, although this thought was undermined when I was introduced to the curator in charge of the restoration, a rather attractive woman, who noticed the label of my jumper sticking out and tucked it back in.

Hell’s bells, I think to myself, now I need curating. (Not that this good woman caused offence: I quite like it when that happens and, as my jumpers tend towards unruliness, it happens quite a lot.)

So I gawp at Gainsborough’s portrait – all eight feet of it – of Mary, Countess Howe, and marvel that there is some beauty that is so powerful that it can transmit its signal undiminished through the centuries. (A spot of mental arithmetic informs me that she is the same age in the portrait as the Beloved is now.) But the painting that really holds my attention, the one that gives me an unmistakable case of Stendhal syndrome, to the point where I feel my legs might give way, is Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles. I knew it was in the collection and was looking forward to seeing it; I like to think that I’m tougher than I look but this still takes my breath from me. That incredible expression of indomitability. The confidence and power of execution.

I then recall that at the time of composition, Rembrandt was broke and had to sell the plot of land his sister was buried in to keep himself in paint and canvas. Rembrandt’s poverty bothers me even more than Mozart’s at times. To think you can be one of the greatest talents the world has ever seen, one of about 20 people out of multiple billions who have changed the way we experience the world, and die in poverty . . .

Eventually, after the most extraordinary visit – upstairs in the Suffolk Collection are 400-year-old portraits so preserved that they look like they were painted last week – I cheer myself up by having a pint with my old friend John Moore in the Holly Bush. He asks if it is true that the Beloved is off to Sweden. Yes, I say.

“Ha!” he laughs. “You’ll never get laid again!”

Squeezed Middle: Staying totally cool with the whole situation

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If my son wants to wear lipstick and dresses, that is just fine. We are not the kind of parents who are going to have a problem with that.

‘‘Mummy.”

“Yes?”

“Why do I always have to have boy things?”

During his waking hours, Larry, who is three, asks me a question roughly every one and a half minutes, by my estimate. As he’s usually awake for a 12-hour stretch, that tots up to 480 questions each day. I defy anyone to provide decent answers if subjected to such relentless interrogation. Sometimes I can barely bring myself to grunt in response.

Once in a while, though, he asks me a question that I can’t help but stop and consider seriously. This is one of them. He is right. Larry’s room is full of cars, train sets, Lego, diggers, builders’ hats ... I haven’t done it on purpose, really I haven’t. But there’s no getting round the fact that, in our choice of toys, we have unthinkingly conformed to every gender stereotype in the book.

“I want some girl things!”

“Well . . . sure, of course, darling. Which girl things do you want?”

Larry gets a faraway look in his eye. “I want a princess magazine ... one with a free lipstick.”

Great. I want Larry to feel at ease with his feminine side. He needs to know that if he wants to wear lipstick and dresses, that is just fine. Curly and I are not the kind of parents who are going to have a problem with that.

“In that case, darling,” I say, with resolve, “we will get you one.”

On our way back from the park that afternoon we stop at the newsagent. Larry spends several minutes poring over the section of shelf filled with bright pink, sparkly magazines. I am totally cool with the whole situation.

“How about this one?” I hold up a copy of Barbie. “It comes with free plastic kittens and a carry basket.”

“No,” says Larry firmly. “I want lipstick.”

“Or what about our usual, CBeebies? It’s got stickers!”

“That’s not for girls!”

After much deliberation he plumps for My Little Pony, which comes not only with a pale pink “lipshine” but also a dewy-eyed plastic pony and hairbrush. I am taken aback to find that I am gritting my teeth, but it’s too late to backtrack. I take the magazine to the counter and pay, flashing the newsagent a slightly apologetic smile (why?). We’re about to leave when the door swings open and a rather good-looking man comes in with his son, who is cutely kitted out in mini-chinos and a little flat cap. He glances down at Larry, who has unwrapped the pony and is brushing its mane lovingly with the little pink brush.

“Ha haha!” I say. “Ha. Ha.” Then I put my head down and charge out of the shop, dragging Larry behind me.

I ponder my reaction as we amble back down the road. It was not cool at all. Perhaps, deep down, I’m way more of a square than I thought. When we get home I flick to the first page of the magazine. It’s a spot-the-difference picture of two pink ponies with hearts in their hair. On the next page is a colouring-in picture of a pony, also surrounded by hearts.

As I flick through I realise, with some relief, that even if I had a daughter I would not want to buy her this magazine. The problem is not that it’s girly; the problem is it’s trash.


The Azerbaijan that you are allowed to see

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As the Black City district is being redeveloped and renamed White City, contrasts between past and present in this oil–rich country could hardly be clearer.

30 miles off the coast of Azerbaijan lies Oil Rocks, an entire city built on stilts above the Caspian Sea.

Oil Rocks, Neft Daşları, was the world’s first offshore oil platform. Built by the Soviets in 1949 and still in use today, it was built as a Stalinist utopia where 5,000 oil workers would live and work for weeks at a time. There are bunkrooms, bakeries, laundry rooms, vegetable gardens and even a park created from soil shipped out from the mainland.

Archive footage from shortly after shows happy Soviet workers, whipped by the sea breeze, living self-sufficiently in their ocean home as waves crash upon the metal struts below. Lorries speed along 200 miles of roadways, on bridges and platforms built upon a foundation of sunken oil tankers.

Even before its construction, Azerbaijan was already producing three quarters of the USSR’s total oil output. But in 1946, Stalin ordered for oil production to be tripled over the next 15 years – and the success of Oil Rocks was to be crucial to this plan’s success. Since then, it has produced more than 170 million tons of oil, and 15 billion cubic metres of natural gas.

Today, however, those Soviet dreams rust and crumble into the waves. Two thirds of the roadways have fallen into the Caspian Sea and many of the remaining roads lead off into nowhere. Neglected, it struggles on; it will cost more to decommission and deconstruct that it does to keep it working. But, while it continues to function as an oil well, staff levels have more than halved and it now produces only around two per cent of the country’s oil.

I flew to Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital city, drawn by a rare invitation to visit Oil Rocks. I had leapt at the chance: foreigners – especially foreign journalists – need special permission from the state oil company Socar, which can take years to negotiate. Even once permission has been granted, access is only via helicopter or a six–hour boat trip.

But by the time I arrived, it appeared that the invitation had been withdrawn. “I think it will not be possible,” my smiling press contact told me on arrival, so cheerily that at first I believed I must have misheard her. “It is not possible,” confirmed a less congenial man employed by my hosts, a company owned (like so much of Azeri big business) by Kamaladdin Heydarov, the Minister for Emergency Situations.

Further pushing on my part was simply stonewalled. There would be no trip, they said, as if it had never been an option. Foreigners may not visit “for security reasons”.

Oil Rocks is no longer what the Azeris want us to be looking at. Once a source of national pride, this crumbling industrial relic is now something of an embarrassment. It does not fit in with Azerbaijan’s new image as a hip, monied oligarch’s playground.

Since gaining independence in 1991, the country has undergone an immense reinvention. So much was steamrollered by the Communists – mosques demolished, mansions stripped of their finery, utilitarian factories and housing built in their place – but with their newfound wealth, they are buying back an identity. Medieval ruins are painstakingly rebuilt, relics returned from Hermitage archives, celebrity architects given carte blanche and big budgets.

Stanley Escudero, a former US ambassador to Azerbaijan, told me: “In immediate post-Soviet times Baku was characterized by a combination of the instant rubble created by the Soviet Union alongside the decaying charm of European-style buildings [built] after the First World War. The streets were narrow and utilities routinely failed. There was no economy worthy of the name.

“With the advent of stability and oil-fueled prosperity all of that began to change. The skyline is completely different now, streets are well-lit and new highways and bridges have been constructed all over the country ... Thousands of shops have opened, many selling luxury goods to the growing wealthy upper and middle classes – far too expensive for most foreigners. Grand homes have been constructed all over the city and in outlying regions.”

The country’s rebrand is all pervasive. In Baku, whole districts have been bulldozed to make way for shining glass skyscrapers. In others, Soviet-style apartment blocks have been simply concealed under glossy veneers, like bad teeth.

The Black City district, an industrial port where cranes litter the waterfront and the smell of petroleum hangs heavy in the air, is being ripped out and redeveloped by a British partnership that includes the architects Foster + Partners. The 221 hectare site will include a grand square and boulevard, and 50,000 homes. It’s new name? White City.

In some ways the tactic is working. The city centre is clean and feels safe. Luxury brands line the main drag: Tiffany, Dior, Gucci, Armani. Seven five-star hotels have opened in two years. The world is beginning to take notice.

“We have seen a very rapid increase in visitors to the country,” said Aydyn Ismiyev, head of tourism at the Azeri Ministry of Culture. “In 2001, we had 420,000 tourists. By 2007, that figure was 1m, and last year 1.95m.” So there is sharp growth, albeit from a small base. By comparison, England’s Lake District alone receives around 10m visitors a year.

But there are serious doubts as to whether this transformation reflects a deeper change within the country. Nominally a democracy, Azerbaijan’s elections are plagued by claims of malpractice. The current president Ilham Aliyev inherited his title from his father, a former KGB general who led the country under the Soviets. Inequality is growing and corruption is rife.

Jamil Hasanli, the leader of the opposition, told me: “There is no serious change and development here. Increased wealth is only creating higher levels of corruption – currently Azerbaijan is being managed under the old rules. We need serious reform: political, economic and administrative. The benefits of the oil have to be shared with the people too.”

And there is something perverse about the grand efforts being made to disguise the trappings of heavy industry in a country where it still is so ubiquitous. The shopping district may have been scrubbed within an inch of its life, but oil still shimmers on the surface of the water in the bay across the road. Only a few miles from the centre the first oil wells begin to sprout. At first they are screened from view by a series of gleaming 10ft limestone walls, then by neat hedges, finally nothing at all. Soon a forest of rusting oil derricks and bobbing pumpjacks stretches out in all directions.

So much oil and gas is concealed under the earth that it periodically bursts through the surface. At Yanar Dag, half an hour from the capital, a fire has been burning on a rocky hillside for more than 50 years, where natural gas seeps out through vents in the sandstone. Thanks to these riches, Azerbaijan now produces around 50 million tons of oil a year and now seeks to challenge Russia’s dominance of the European market via a new pipeline that snakes from the Caspian through Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean.

The source of Azerbaijan’s newfound wealth is obvious to all, to anyone with eyes. But even on dry land, the authorities are not keen for visitors to get a close look.

I travelled inland with two French photographers who were keen to get images of the oil industry in action. So when our minibus pulled over we jumped out to inspect a nearby well. Our Azeri guide, Balash, was up in arms. “Here is absolutely prohibited,” he said, pacing the ground. “Why you not listen?” But the photographers had already gone. I followed, murmuring apologetically.

The pumpjack nodded to itself, eerily keeping time. The belt was whirring, the gears sliding. Each stroke pumps around 40 litres of oil out of the ground. I clambered up a dune towards it, then stopped dead to stop myself slipping down into a wide dark pool. Crude oil, like treacle, had leaked from the well and was leeching slowly into the sand. Empty bottles and tyres were drowning in the thick, black, tarry mess.

As we returned to the bus two cars veered off the road and pulled up, one in front and one behind our bus. “You will get me arrested,” said Balash, darkly, as men in Surakhani Oil coveralls converged on the photographers. “Delete them,” came the order, as soon as they saw the pictures. “It is for reasons of security.”

2,500 miles from home, frustrated by the constraints and the dissolving prospect of an Oil Rocks visit, I staked out a press conference where Socar’s CEO Rovnag Abdullayev was due to attend. He, I was told, is the genie of the oil lamp who would grant my only wish. Only he can sign my permission slip. I waited three hours; he didn’t turn up.

As a replacement activity I was instead taken on a tour of one of Baku’s many luxury hotels. We drove out along the Absheron Peninsula, which juts rudely into the Caspian Sea, where politely I inspected the ornate ballroom, spa and a gilded presidential suite that goes for €8000 a night. There was sushi in the top floor restaurant and boogie woogie from a transparent grand piano in the bar.

It was being styled as a beach resort – temperatures in Baku can top 40ºC in summer – despite the Caspian’s well-known water pollution problem: oil fields and tankers are thought to leak around 120,000 tons of oil-related pollutants into the sea each year. “There is no problem here,” the hotel manager reassured me.

From a balcony overlooking the beach I spotted long, meccano-like structures on the skyline – towering rigs, linked by long platforms on stilts. “Is that it? Is that Oil Rocks?” I chattered, ecstatic. The manager nodded, bemused at my excitement when I was surrounded by such opulence, and as she did a huge yellow helicopter flew overhead, ferrying the workers out to the settlement.

I was so close I could see it. But you’d have thought we existed in two parallel universes.

***

Today Azerbaijan’s vision for the future can still be found off the Caspian coast, but 20 miles further south. Another sea-city is currently under construction: a series of artificial islands in the shape of a lobster will host hotels, a yacht club, an airport and, at 3445ft, the world's tallest building.

Each new claim from the developer Avesta Concern is more fantastical than the last. The project reportedly has a budget of $100bn (roughly 160 per cent of Azerbaijan’s GDP) and will house 800,000 (equivalent to 8.5 per cent of the entire country’s population). There will be a Formula One racetrack! A new Disneyland!

Fuad Gambarov, Avesta Concern's head of business and investment, told me: "Since the project began in 2011, more than €1bn has been spent. The new city will be over more than 24 islands, big and small. We think and people also prove that there is real demand for such a city. Every year, the economy of Azerbaijan grows higher.

"When the idea was presented to the President, it was positively welcomed by him. After that all necessary procedures and governmental issues related to the project were solved as soon as possible. On May 2014 we are plan an opening ceremony for the 'Skat' restaurant and we hope that president will cut the fillet."

I'm driven past the site, marked by a forbidding white arch like two enormous tusks jutting from the dry ground. The largest of the islands has already been formed, and work is underway on several buildings including a restaurant in the shape of a flying saucer.

Flashy projects like this attract investors like magpies. Or at least, that’s the theory. As Ibrahim Ibrahimov, the project’s mastermind, told the New York Times: “We will create this big building, and then it will, by itself, by the very mere fact of its existence, bring cash. How will that work? Nobody knows.”

This new island utopia is built of capitalist dreams. It is separated from Oil Rocks by only a few miles of sea – but an ideological ocean.

 

George Osborne's Autumn Statement: 10 things to look out for

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Including, when will living standards start to rise, will there be new money for the NHS and how much more austerity is Osborne planning?

George Osborne will deliver his Autumn Statement at 11:15am today but, as so often with these events, it feels as if much of it has already been announced. The imposition of capital gains tax on foreign property owners, the freeze in business rates, the scheduled rise in the state pension age to 70 (in the 2060s) and the scrapping of employers' National Insurance for workers under 21 have all been pre-briefed to the media. 

One reason for this is that Osborne wants as much attention as possible to be focused on the OBR's improved forecasts for growth, employment and borrowing. Having responded to Labour's cost-of-living offensive by reducing green levies on energy customers, his other main aim is to shift the debate back towards the deficit and austerity, issues on which the Tories continue to out-poll Miliband's party. This being Osborne, he'll also have held at least one headline announcement back to triumphantly flourish at the end of the speech. And there's much more to look out for too

1. When will living standards start to rise? And by how much?

At present, while the economy is growing at its fastest rate for six years (and faster than any other G7 country), real wages, as Labour relentlessly points out, are still in decline, with earnings growth of just 0.8% in the most recent quarter compared to inflation of 2.2%. The Treasury's hope and expectation is that this will begin to change next year. How strong the OBR expects earnings growth to be will do much to determine the extent of any pre-election feelgood factor. 

2. More money for the NHS?

With ministers suffering sleepless nights at the prospect of a winter A&E crisis, one persistent rumour in Wesminster is that Osborne will announce additional money for the NHS. As well as helping to prevent the health service from collapse, this would offer the Chancellor a chance to reaffirm his party's commitment to the NHS and to (falsely) allege that Labour would be cutting it. 

3. How big is the output gap? (How much more austerity is needed?) 

One wonkish measure worth keeping an eye on is the output gap: the difference between actual and potential growth. The size of this will determine how much more austerity will be required to eliminate the structural deficit (the part of the deficit that exists regardless of the level of economic output) in the next parliament. 

4. Benefit cuts for under-25s

At every Budget and Autumn Statement he delivers, Osborne always finds a way to put welfare centre stage and today is likely to be no exception. One issue on which the Chancellor is expected to give more details is the coalition's plan to remove benefits from under-25s who are not "earning or learning". 

5. What's happening to income tax threshold?

Having already announced that the coalition's pledge to raise the personal allowance to £10,000 will be met by next April, there's room for Osborne to go further. Nick Clegg has urged him to raise it to at least £10,500, while David Cameron is said to be eyeing a £10,750 threshold. Osborne may well choose to keep his powder dry until the Budget but look out for a hint of further action today. 

6. When will a budget surplus be achieved?

The most significant announcement in Osborne's Conservative conference speech was his pledge to run a budget surplus by the end of the next parliament. With the OBR's updated forecasts, we'll find out when this might be achieved (today's FT suggests 2018-19). Expect Osborne to use this as his essential test of whether Labour is prepared to be fiscally responsible and as a signal of when greater tax cuts may become possible. 

7. Will Osborne halve the deficit by the election? 

Despite borrowing billions more than expected, Osborne is fond of reminding us that the deficit has still fallen by a third since the general election (from £159bn in 2009-10 to £115bn in 2012-13). If the numbers fall right today, he may well boast that he'll have halved it by the time of the general election (the Darling plan, in other words). 

8. Another cut in corporation tax?

Osborne has used almost every one of his Budgets and Autumn Statements to announce that he'll be cutting corporation tax by even more than expected (it is currently due to fall to 20% in 2015-16 from its 2010 level of 28%, giving the UK the joint-lowest rate in the G20). Today he'll publish new Treasury research showing that, in the next 20 years, the cuts are forecast to add around 0.7% to GDP (merely suggesting, as Richard Murphy puts it, that Osborne has finally discovered the multiplier), so it would be unsurprising if he chose to combine this with an annoucement that the rate will fall even further - to 19%. 

9. More public sector job losses?

As well as publishing new forecasts for growth, inflation and borrowing, the OBR will release its new estimate of how many public sector jobs will be lost over the course of the austerity programme. In the most recent Budget, this figure was put at 1.2 million but with Osborne planning further spending cuts to pay for tax cuts and benefit increases (free school meals), it could rise today. 

10. A cut in fuel duty?

The Chancellor has already vowed to freeze fuel duty for the remainder of this parliament but with the improvement in the public finances will he go further and deliver an outright cut? If Osborne is looking for a headline announcement designed to show that the government is not indifferent to the "cost-of-living crisis" this is the most likely candidate. 

In this week's New Statesman | Burnout Britain

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Steven Poole takes on "the cult of productivity", George Eaton interviews Home Office minister Norman Baker, Sophie McBain reports from Blackpool, Amol Rajan writes the diary and much more.

6-12 DECEMBER 2013 ISSUE

COVER STORY: BURNOUT BRITAIN AND THE CULT OF PRODUCTIVITY

THE POLITICS INTERVIEW: THE NEW HOME OFFICE MINISTER NORMAN BAKER ON WORKING IN “ENEMY TERRITORY”, THE DEATH OF DAVID KELLY

– AND TUITION FEES

RAFAEL BEHR MEETS EU COMMISSIONER LÁSZLÓ ANDOR

SOPHIE McBAIN REPORTS FROM BLACKPOOL, A “DUMPING GROUND” FOR THE SOCIALLY EXCLUDED

To purchase a copy, visit www.newstatesman.com/subscribe or visit the App Store

PLUS

MEHDI HASAN: WE MUST NOT TREAT THE EUROZONE CRISIS AS A MORALITY TALE ABOUT “LAZY” SOUTHERNERS

FELIX MARTIN, AUTHOR OF MONEY: THE UNAUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY, ON WHY SCOTLAND SHOULD COIN ITS OWN CURRENCY

THE DIARY: INDEPENDENT EDITOR AMOL RAJAN ON BECOMING A PETROLHEAD AND TAKING JEREMY CLARKSON SERIOUSLY

VALERIE GROVE ON THE REAL P L TRAVERS

THE SURGEON ADRIAN MARSTON: “CANCER” IS NOT A DIAGNOSIS, IT IS A LABEL

ANTONY GORMLEY ON ART FOR EVERYONE IN THE NS CENTENARY INTERVIEW

COVER STORY: THE CULT OF PRODUCTIVITY

For this week’s cover story, the author and journalist Steven Poole examines our dangerous obsession with productivity from footballers’ work rates to the world of Big Data.

We are everywhere enjoined to work harder, faster and for longer – not only in our jobs but also in our leisure time. The rationale for this frantic grind is one of the great unquestioned virtues of our age: “productivity”. The cult of productivity seems all-pervasive. Football coaches and commentators praise a player’s “work rate”, which is thought to compensate for a lack of skill. Geeks try to streamline their lives in and out of the office to get more done. People boast of being busy and exhausted and eagerly consume advice from the business-entertainment complex on how to “de-fry your burnt brain”, or engineer a more productive day by assenting to the horror of breakfast meetings.

A corporate guru will even teach you how to become a “master of extreme productivity”. (In these extreme times, extremity is always good; unless, perhaps, you are an extremist.) No one boasts of being unproductive, still less counterproductive. Into the iron gate of modernity have been wrought the words: “Productivity will set you free.”

But, writes Poole, doing nothing may be the best thing for your well-being and your brain:

According to Andrew Smart’s book Autopilot, recent (but still controversial) brain research recommends that we stare vacantly into space more often. “Neuroscientific evidence argues that your brain needs to rest, right now,” Smart declares on the first page. (It took me a long time to finish the book, because I kept putting it down to have a break.)

Smart’s evidence suggests the existence of a “default network”, in which the brain gets busy talking to itself in the absence of an external task to focus on. To allow this “default network” to do its thing by regularly loafing around rather than switching focus all day between futile bits of work, Smart argues, is essential for the brain’s health. “For certain things the brain likes to do (for example, coming up with creative ‘outside of the box’ solutions),” he writes, “you may need to be doing very little.”

THE POLITICS INTERVIEW: NORMAN BAKER

In a candid interview, the Liberal Democrat minister Norman Baker talks to George Eaton from his new berth at the Home Office about working in “enemy territory”, the “unfinished business” surrounding the death of the government scientist David Kelly, and the Lib Dems’ betrayal over student fees.

Baker on the death of David Kelly:

It is just 13 minutes before I succumb to the temptation to ask him whether he still favours a new public inquiry into Kelly’s death. So exercised was Baker by the event that he stood down from the Lib Dem front bench in order to devote a year to writing a 424-page book (The Strange Death of David Kelly) on the subject. “People who attack it by and large haven’t read it,” he says. “And I’d like them to come back and deal with the facts, if they want to deal with the facts, ten years on, but I concluded in 2007 that it was unfinished business and nothing much has moved since then.” Will he use his new berth at the Home Office to lobby for an inquiry? “What would have to happen is: the Attorney General would have to reopen the inquest, which was absurdly curtailed. So that’s a matter for him.”

Baker on the Home Office:

Baker does not attempt to hide the extent of his disagreement with the Home Secretary, describing the atmosphere as “hostile”. “It’s no secret that the Home Office is quite a political department and that the Lib Dems and the Tories probably have more challenges in reaching common positions in that department than in many others,” he tells me.

Baker on tuition fees:

Baker – who admits that “the only time in government that I’ve come close to resigning” was when the Lib Dems broke the “Vote for Students” pledge and backed rises in tuition fees – maintains, “Education should be free.”

“I’m very conscious that people of my generation benefited from free education. I come from a poor background, unlike most people in government, and I couldn’t have got where I was without a really good state education. I’m deeply grateful for that and I couldn’t have done it had I had to pay a lot of money for it, so I feel particularly uncomfortable with the idea of charging for tuition fees as a principle.”

RAFAEL BEHR MEETS THE EU COMMISSIONER LÁSZLÓ ANDOR

In a meeting with the NS’s political editor, Rafael Behr, László Andor, the European commissioner for employment, social affairs and inclusion, explains that David Cameron’s bullish position on the EU risks giving the UK a bad image abroad and could jeopardise the whole European project. 

On 1 January, the EU will lift temporary limitations on the rights of Romanians and Bulgarians to enter the UK labour market. That threshold, I suggest to Andor, combined with Conservative fears of Ukip and tabloid hysteria, are the reasons behind Cameron’s aggressive posture.

“It is regrettable that the Prime Minister is under such pressure,” he concurs, adding that other EU leaders have faced similar resistance at home. Is the UK debate unusually toxic?

“The Ukip representatives in the European Parliament bring a specific flavour . . . Since the Ukip members in the European Parliament are very active, I don’t think it helps improve the image of the country. So it’s very important that the more mainstream parties present a different image.”

The sceptics’ main target is employment protection, which many Conservatives consider a burden on enterprise but the rest of Europe sees as vital for a level playing field. . . Employment protection is “one of the cornerstones of the single market”, Andor says. He doesn’t expect Cameron to have any better luck renegotiating free movement. “If you start thinking of raising walls to migration, others will start to think about raising barriers to cross-border capital movements or trade. Then the whole structure is going to unravel.”

MEHDI HASAN: THE EUROZONE CRISIS IS NOT A MORALITY TALE ABOUT “LAZY” SOUTHERNERS

As the suffering and despair caused by austerity intensifies in southern Europe, Mehdi Hasan warns that the scapegoating of countries such as Greece and Spain over the eurozone crisis is both wrong and hypocritical.

It is dangerous, misguided and mendacious, as countless economists from the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to the Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf have pointed out, to treat the eurozone’s ongoing debt crisis as a modern-day morality tale. It isn’t.

Record debts were caused by post-crash bank bailouts and a crisis-induced collapse in tax revenues. Take Spain. That country’s downturn was the result not of excessive government spending or public debt but of the explosion of private debt, particularly in the real estate and banking sectors. Because of the crash, Spain’s public-debt-to-GDP ratio morphed from being one of the lowest in the eurozone to one of the highest.

Another reason why we shouldn’t moralise about debt is to avoid the charge of rank hypocrisy. After all, why pick on the Greeks, rather than the Germans? In the years before the crash – for example, from 2003 to 2004 – Germany persistently breached the budget deficit rules laid down in the EU’s growth and stability pact; the then chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, demanded that his country be exempted from any penalties. In 2006, while Spain and Ireland were running budget surpluses, Germany was in deficit.

SOPHIE McBAIN: HOW BLACKPOOL BECAME A “DUMPING GROUND” FOR THE SOCIALLY EXCLUDED

The NS writer Sophie McBain reports this week from Blackpool as the holiday season ends and “around 2,500 people become unemployed overnight”.  Like many other seaside towns, Blackpool, writes McBain, has become a place of last resort for the socially excluded, unemployed and those involved in substance abuse.

Two hundred metres inland from the promenade, pebble-dash terraces that were once guest houses and B&Bs have been converted into bedsits renting for around £65 a week and attracting a new kind of visitor. Blackpool has become a town where “you can turn up with a bin bag and £150 and you can get a flat,” says Simon Blackburn, leader of Blackpool Council.

We meet in his office in Bay House, a shelter for homeless young people at the end of a street full of run-down bedsits. Here in South Shore, a two-bedroom house is currently on sale for £40,000. Low property prices and fond memories of childhood holidays do attract newcomers, but, says Blackburn, “One of the main reasons someone comes here is because something’s gone wrong in their life.”

Despite facing the prospect of having its budget slashed by half, Blackpool Council is planning to focus its limited resources on an overhaul of the town’s housing stock in the hope that this will help improve individual well-being, unemployment and anti-social behaviour:

Councillor Gillian Campbell is responsible for the selective licensing scheme [which will ensure private landlords maintain certain standards of property management] and often accompanies housing enforcement officers on their visits. “Some of the places we’ve come across have been absolutely awful. You wouldn’t let a rat live in them. It’s been disgusting and quite heartbreaking as well, because some people are used to it, they don’t think they deserve better,” she tells me. Some of the houses she’s visited have had no heating or warm water, or indeed no plumbing or water at all. The team has seen collapsed ceilings, dangerous damp, exposed wiring and people living with dead and decomposing animals. At one point, after carefully checking whether I’ve eaten, Campbell whips out a photo of a corner bath filled to the rim with urine, faeces and loo roll.

THE POLITICS COLUMN

In this week’s Politics Column, Rafael Behr argues that, having made the coalition work, Nick Clegg should now position his party as a guardian of the middle way while the two larger parties fight it out:

Clegg will not match Osborne’s pledge to keep cutting through the next parliament until the Budget is in surplus. Nor does he agree with the Chancellor that all future deficit reduction should be achieved without raising taxes. “It can’t be done,” a close ally of the Deputy Prime Minister tells me. “Or rather, it can be done but not if you care about distributional fairness.” The Lib Dems will let the Tories campaign for ever-stingier benefits, while they promise a “mansion tax”.

So why, if Clegg has stuck to the “liberal centre” so carefully, does his party still languish so low in the opinion polls, asks Behr:

Standard surveys of national voting intentions ask the wrong question where potential support for his party is concerned. In a close race, what matters is whether, in constituencies where Lib Dem candidates have a chance, people see them as a possible insurance policy against undiluted rule by whichever of the big two parties they like less.

PLUS

Jonathan Bate on a new biography of the great satirist Jonathan Swift

Eleanor Margolis joins the “bespectacled butches” at a screening of

Blue Is the Warmest Colour

Laurie Penny succumbs to a tantrum as EU regulation threatens her e-cigarettes

Michael Prodger reviews two new exhibitions on the Georgians

Nina Caplan pays homage to the Rhône and the great wines it helps cultivate

Kate Mossman reviews the new album from Britney Spears, head-shaving pioneer of Middle America

Will Self on the joys of the hermaphroditic hot dog

To purchase a copy, visit www.newstatesman.com/subscribe or visit the App Store

Osborne must be bold to show the Tories are not "the party of the rich"

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The Chancellor should use his Autumn Statement to reward families on modest incomes who have quietly endured squeezed living standards during austerity.

Come on, George. Be bold. Today, the Chancellor needs to throw caution to the wind and announce bold policies that reward families on modest incomes who have quietly endured squeezed living standards during austerity.

The polling is clear; sceptical voters, especially on more modest incomes and outside the Tories' southern heartlands, still suspect that they are 'the party of the rich'. The politically flawed decision to reduce the top rate of income tax to 45% didn’t help. Electoral progress is thwarted by this deep-seated perception of the party. We need game-changing policies that convince people otherwise. No calculated triangulation. No clever traps for Labour. Enough of all that. Osborne needs to deliver an Autumn Statement which ordinary folk up and down the country will remember.

Same-sex marriage, of course, was meant to make people think twice about the Tories, to demonstrate that the party is comfortable with modern Britain and compassionate; concerned about more than just money and self-advancement. To complement this social modernisation, we now need economic modernisation: which shows the Tories are behind those people trying to keep their heads above the water, who have had to put up with stagnant wages and rising prices fornearly a decade. Time to really support them.

Conservatives should be behind those people working hard to get into the labour market, onto the housing ladder and succeed in the world of business. Behind those knocking on the door, not those sat in their armchairs of privilege. So, drop the clampdown on those on working-aged benefits. For it will backfire, as the growing sympathy towards the unemployed in the British Social Attitudes survey demonstrates. Instead, set out a positive vision that helps people really trying to get in, and then get on in, work.

Some repeat claimants of jobseekers allowances should be rewarded with a financial bonus from government for securing employment within a shorter time period. Pay for this carrot by means-testing universal benefits such as free TV licences and the winter fuel allowance, something even the majority of pensioners now want.

All families who work should have 85% of their childcare costs covered by the government through Universal Credit, including those currently excluded because they are earning below the personal tax allowance. Similarly, basic-rate taxpayers should be eligible for a higher proportion of their childcare costs than the 20% to be covered through the new tax free childcare voucher scheme. These could be paid for by reducing the number of extremely high earners eligible for the new scheme.

Continue to raise the personal tax allowance; commit to it being £12,500 in the next parliament. Increase the income threshold for employee National Insurance contributions. And, do something the public would not expect Tories do to: raise the minimum wage, significantly and sensibly, for certain sectors and businesses.

Get behind those young people wanting to get on the housing ladder. Reduce stamp duty significantly for less expensive properties. And demand local authorities guarantee enough land for the self-building of houses, and encourage it within their area, or else lose their veto over new developments.

Finally, get behind the entrepreneurs, the small business owners working day and night to balance the books and really get the company off the ground. Exempt small businesses from rises to business rates. And increase the Employment Allowance for employers’ contributions to National Insurance.

We need to show the Conservative Party is gunning for ordinary folk wanting to get on in the labour market, the housing market and the world of business.

Ryan Shorthouse is director of Bright Blue

Duncan Smith tries to bury more bad news on Universal Credit

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On the day of George Osborne's Autumn Statement, the Work and Pensions Secretary finally admits that he will miss his Universal Credit deadline of 2017.

Under the cover of George Osborne's Autumn Statement, Iain Duncan Smith has announced yet another retreat on Universal Credit. As recently as September, the Work and Pensions Secretary insisted that all benefit claimants would be transferred to the new system by 2017, but today he finally admitted that this deadline would be missed. At least 700,000 people receiving Employment and Support Allowance will not be moved until after this date. 

For those familiar with the chaotic implementation of Universal Credit, this will come as no surprise. As I noted on Tuesday, DWP figures show that just 2,150 were claiming the payment at the end of September, 997,850 short of the original April 2014 target of one million (since downgraded to 184,000, a target that will also not be met). 

By trying to bury more bad news today, Duncan Smith has guaranteed terrible write-ups from the press (who, as Helen says, will feel it's "a point of professional pride" to cover the story extensively) and has provided Labour with an attack line on what could be a difficult day for the opposition. Here's Rachel Reeves's response: "Iain Duncan Smith has today admitted what everyone has known for months – that Universal Credit is massively behind schedule. But just a couple of weeks ago he was telling Parliament the Government would 'roll out Universal Credit on the plan and programme already set out'.

"It’s clear that David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith have completely failed to get to grips with their flagship welfare reform and millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money have been written off as a result. Families facing a cost-of-living crisis deserve better than this."

George Osborne's Autumn Statement: live blog

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Minute-by-minute coverage of the Chancellor's announcements and the OBR's new forecasts.

12:07pm Osborne ends with the message: "Britain is moving again. Let's keep going." (Please re-elect us.) 

12:04pm Employers' National Insurance will be scrapped on employees aged under 21, Osborne says. 

12:02pm Osborne announces that next year's fuel duty rise will be cancelled, praising the campaigning work of Tory MP Robert Halfon on this issue. But he doesn't deliver the cut that some predicted. 

11:59pm Through gritted teeth, the socially liberal Osborne confirms that the government will introduce a marriage tax allowance from April 2015 and that its value will be increased in line with the personal allowance (which will rise to £10,000 next year). 

11:58am He announces a £1,000 discount on business rates for all retailers valued at up to £50,000. 

11:55am Osborne says business rates increases will be capped at 2% for all premises (rather than 3.4%). 

11:53am Probably the biggest announcement from Osborne so far: the cap on student numbers will be abolished. 

11:51am He announces that anyone aged 18-21 claiming welfare without "basic skills" will be required to undertake training or "lose their benefits". 

11:47am Osborne announces a "priority right to move" for social housing tenants who need to move for a job.

11:46am A striking admission: "if we want more people to own their own homes, we need to build more homes". 

11:42am He announces the well-trailed introduction of capital gains tax on foreign property owners. At present, while British citizens pay CGT at 18% or 28% when they sell a property that is not their main home, non-residents are exempt. But with foreign investors purchasing around 70% of all new builds in central London, Osborne, still burdened by a deficit forecast to be £111bn this year, has spied a revenue-raising opportunity. 

11:41am Osborne has just used the stat often cited by Boris Johnson in defence of the super-rich: that they pay 30% of all income tax. That's true, 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. 

11:35am Osborne has announced three new steps to enshrine fiscal "responsibility":

1. A new charter for budget responsibility committing the government to running a surplus. It will be put to a vote in parliament (a test for Labour). 

2. A cap on total welfare spending (as previously announced in the Spending Review). Osborne confirms that it will exclude the state pension and cyclical benefits such as JobSeeker's Allowance. 

3. Finally, he announces a further £2bn cut in departmental budget and a £1bn cut in the contingency reserve. 

11:28am He announces that the forecast deficit for this year has been revised down from £120bn to £111bn, but that's still £41bn higher than expected in 2010. 

Borrowing in 2014-15 is forecast to be £96bn, then £79bn in 2015-16, £51bn in 2016-17 and £23bn in 2017-18. That leaves him on track to halve the deficit (it was £159bn in 2009-10) by 2015-16, the same speed promised by Alistair Darling in 2010. 

11:26am On borrowing, Osborne announces that the OBR expects the government to run a budget surplus by 2018-19. 

11:23am Osborne boasts that employment is at a "record high" of 29.95m. That's true, but only because the population has risen. The rate, at 71.8%, remains well below its pre-recession peak of 73.1%.

11:21am Here are the OBR's revised growth forecasts: 1.4% (up from 0.6%), 2.4% ( up from 1.8%), 2.2%, 2.6%, 2.7%, 2.7% 

11:20am Tory MPs cry "apologise" at Labour as Osborne reminds MPs that GDP fell by 7.2% during the recession. 

11:19am Osborne tries to shoot Labour's fox by saying he will help families with the "cost-of-living" where he can. 

11:16am Osborne is up. He wastes no time in delivering his key political message: I have a "long-term" plan and "the biggest risk" comes from those who would "abandon" it. That's Ed Miliband and Ed Balls in case it wasn't clear. 

11:11am While we wait for Osborne to begin, here's 10 things to look out for today. 

What would an independent Scotland look like?

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I want to imagine that independence could be a success - but grubby, difficult questions about money, jobs and services are not going away.

I want to imagine a world where Scottish Independence is not the disaster some think it will be. I want to imagine a world where it is a success.

Imagine that Scotland enters a phase of unprecedented economic growth, spurred on by the oil revenues that have been diverted from it for all these years. Coupled with the lowest corporation taxes in Europe, the Scottish economy is thrumming along with luxurious healthcare, free education up to and beyond graduate level, a supportive welfare state and pensions that are the envy of the world. Tax revenues from oil and corporation tax help the budget deficit stay in check. Even though there is a heavy dependency on the oil price, the markets give Scotland the benefit of the doubt – the sovereign credit rating of Scottish government debt is higher than the UK and their government bond yields trade well below that of the UK gilt market.

Meanwhile, in England and the rest of the United Kingdom, the government badly miscalculated the benefits Scotland brought to the Union. Bereft of trade and oil revenues the provision of local and national services has gone into a rapid generational decline. Taxes are high for individuals and businesses in a vain attempt to balance the budget, which is continuing to rise to record levels, while the cuts to government spending only serve to exaggerate the decline.

People and businesses have been voting with their feet for some time now. Migration from the once prosperous South of England is increasing at an alarming rate; both businesses and the most talented people are leaving in their droves, sending English property prices, which peaked just before the referendum in 2014 into a long-term secular decline. Meanwhile, Scottish property prices continue to make new highs each month. This is causing problems not least of which is the increase in inequality of wealth distribution in Scotland as house building can’t keep pace with the growing population.

The Scottish government is struggling to control the effects of house price appreciation because it has retained the pound and tied itself to UK interest rates. Much as Hong Kong experienced when tied to the US dollar and it had US interest rates and Chinese growth rates, Scotland now has a high growth rate and generationally low interest rates. Inflation differentials are rising between Scotland and the UK; inflationary Scotland habitually has a cost of living much higher than the deflationary UK. Broad money supply is growing at an uncontrollable rate. There are concerns over Scotland’s financial institutions. There are dark mutterings about the “Darian Scheme” – the financial disaster that drove Scotland into the arms of the English in 1707.

At the same time South of England immigration is having a profound impact on the political landscape; the history of Scottish voting patterns since the Second World War shows that Scotland hasn’t always been a centre-left country as some assume. There was a time when it was split 50/50 between Labour and the Conservatives (see graph). The latent conservatism of Scotland has now been unleashed mainly because it is dissociated from English conservatism but also because the new immigrants have a tendency not to vote for Labour or Scottish Nationalists. Scotland has become Conservative while the UK, because of its problems, now habitually votes Labour, a reversal of the pre-referendum status quo.

Scotland had been exporting some 30,000 people annually until the late 1980s. However, this tailed off and as the referendum approached Scotland had already become a net importer of people. Official estimates of population growth had already expected the Scottish population to rise above 6m in the years following the referendum. But global recognition that “Scotland has done something right” has led to an influx of Scottish talent that left the country in the thirty years prior to the referendum. First and second generation Scots have returned and converted their nationality from Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and US back into Scottish passport holders, further pressurising housing shortages and claims on the state. Scotland population swells from 5.3m in to nearly 8m in just fifteen years...

It’s quite good fun to do this; to go into a world of utopian Scotland and a dystopian UK, and one could go on for some considerable time. We haven’t even imagined a Scottish financial system (would it cheapen the argument to be the first to call for the Scottish stock market index to be called the SNP500 or their government bonds Scottish Guilts?) But what does emerge is that if you think independence can be seen merely as an exercise in democratic extension, that it isn’t about grubby things like money and jobs and services, then you should think again. A fully independent Scotland will have profound effects on the very nature of Scotland for generations to come, not all of which were obvious at first sight or, ultimately, a price worth paying.


Carrie and Oldboy may lack spark - but there's nothing wrong with remaking horror classics

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Remakes always happen for a reason, even if that reason is obscure. Horror and sci-fi director John Carpenter puts it down to a perpetual "nostalgia cycle" inherent in American pop culture.

Two high-profile remakes in two weeks of films that were hardly obscure in the first place has got me wondering: who are these movies for? The answer is different in each case. Carrie, released last week, is a serviceable remake of Brian De Palma’s 1976 version, incorporating elements from the Stephen King novel from which that picture was adapted. De Palma’s ripe, operatic reading has been replaced by a flatter, more clear-headed one, which is to say that it’s rather boring. But the story itself—about a downtrodden, sheltered adolescent girl with telekinetic abilities—is resilient enough that the film will connect with its target audience: teenagers who haven’t seen the original, and may not be able to see past the garish 1970s fashions and perms and shag-cuts even if they did.

Then there is Spike Lee’s new take on Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy, the Jacobean-style revenge thriller which won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival ten years ago. (How I wish I could tell you that the president of the jury in 2003 was Nora Ephron or Richard Curtis. But no. It was Quentin Tarantino.) This might seem like an instance of Hollywood hijacking a foreign-language title with which most audiences will be unfamiliar, except that the appeal of the original Oldboy is pretty broad; it’s not some obscure curio. Lee’s version is dogged and stylish, if rather lacking in intensity—with the exception, that is, of a performance of Nick Nolte-like gruffness from Josh Brolin as the businessman who is imprisoned in a room for 20 years by unseen tormentors, framed for the murder of his wife, then released apparently arbitrarily. The “yuck” factor is also surprisingly low. Either that or I’ve become dangerously inured to the sight of people being shot at close range or attacked with the contents of a tool belt. The gooeyness of Park’s original is kept to a minimum, though there is a nice in-joke about that version’s most notorious scene, in which the hero devours a live octopus. That creature gets off lightly here. Others are not so lucky. Stuart Little just became that little bit sadder.

So why remake Oldboy? Clearly Lee was energised by the material. Together with the cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, he brings a slick metallic gloom to it that is very New York. Beyond that, the reason must simply be that Oldboy’s time had come. Remakes are cyclical. “I know there are a lot of 1970s and 1980s titles around again right now,” the director John Carpenter told me in 2007. “But my theory is that there's a 20- to 30-year nostalgia cycle in American pop culture. We long for those great old movies of yesteryear. In the 1950s, there was a nostalgia for the Karloff/Lugosi Universal monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s. It’s difficult to look into the future, but I don’t think that trend’s going to change.”

When it comes to the craze for revisiting movies from the 1970s and 1980s, Carpenter may be the most remade of living film-makers. Hollywood studios are eating through his back catalogue like locusts in a wheat field, with remakes of Assault On Precinct 13 and The Fog already released, and filming underway on new versions of Escape From New York, Halloween and The Thing. Carpenter, who is himself responsible for witty takes on the Howard Hawks classics Rio Bravo (as Assault On Precinct 13) and The Thing From Another World (as The Thing), was sanguine about this glut of remakes when I spoke to him. “I’m flattered if someone comes to me with the idea of remaking one of my films. Remake or original, making a movie still comes down to old-fashioned hard work. If it’s based on another film, well, so be it. Remakes have been part of cinema since its earliest days—think of A Star Is Born, which was remade numerous times. And they’re especially big right now because it’s become increasingly difficult to lure audiences into theatres. Advertising a remade title that may be familiar to audiences can hopefully cut through the clutter of titles and products that one sees.”

It’s true that some remakes acquire the taboo ring that the word “Macbeth” has in theatre dressing rooms: think of Diabolique, Get Carter, The Ladykillers, The Wicker Man. But the remake is not in itself an objectionable concept. Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped was a brilliant adaptation of James Toback’s Fingers, as well as a rare US-to-France remake, while Gus Van Sant’s colour Psycho, though vastly unpopular, was an authentically avant-garde experiment. Consider also The Magnificent Seven, Roxanne or Jim McBride’s Breathless—not masterpieces, perhaps, but each of them fast and free and full of possibility. Reinterpretations, not rehashes. Oldboy can’t claim to be original, but with its distinctive visual palette and fresh (if convoluted) plot twists, it strives in its own way to be new.

Carrie is on release. Oldboy opens on Friday.

Zombie drone flies around, hijacks other drones, creates zombie drone horde

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A programmer has rigged up a quadrocopter drone to go around in search of others to hijack, turning them into identical "zombies".

It’s not quite the Walking Dead, but it’s still pretty cool - a programmer has figured out a way of programming a drone to hunt down and reprogram other drones, creating, in effect, a horde of flying zombies.

Samy Kamkar - who some people may remember as the guy who broke MySpace in 2005 with a worm that let him add more than a million friends to his profile - wrote a speculative blog post this week about Amazon’s drone delivery PR stunt, wondering “how fun would it be to take over drones, carrying Amazon packages…or take over any other drones, and make them my little zombie drones”.

The result is SkyJack. It's targeted at Parrot AR.Drones, one of the most popular models from one of the main domestic drone manufacturers, small quadrocopters that can be controlled with a program on a computer or smartphone. Kamkar wrote a program on his Raspberry Pi that searches for any Parrot drones within Wi-Fi range, forcibly disconnecting them from their operator and hijacking them. It can tell which Wi-Fi addresses are those of other drones as Parrot, like every manufacturer of technology with Wi-Fi in it, has a whole block that it’s reserved for its products.

The original zombie drone becomes the new controller of the drone, and it tells it to go out and search for even more drones to infect. Here’s a video with Kamkar showing it off:

Of course, we don’t live in a world where there are so many drones flying around that you could imagine such a program spreading very far. There's not a lot you can do with a zombie horde of drones, either - they can't carry much (maybe 400g each) and it's not like they can do something useful like infect humans.

This is just a cool trick, but if Amazon wants to actually do package deliveries by drones - and there are many, many reasons why that won't happen any time soon - it's going to need to make sure its delivery machines are secure.

It wouldn't hurt to make them bullet-proof, either.

What Osborne didn't mention: wage growth has been revised down

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The Chancellor boasted of higher GDP and employment, but the living standards squeeze is set to continue.

For the first time since he became Chancellor, George Osborne arrived for today's Autumn Statement brandishing unambiguously improved economic forecasts. In the triumphalist manner of Gordon Brown, he boasted of "the largest improvement" at any Budget or Autumn Statement for 14 years. Growth is now forecast to be 1.4% this year (up from 0.8%) and 2.4% (up from 1.8%) next year. Unemployment is forecast to be 7.6% this year (down from 7.9%) and 7.1% next year (down from 8%). Borrowing is forecast to be £111bn this year, £9bn lower than expected in March (although still £41bn higher than expected in 2010), and £96bn next year. 

But there was one set of forecasts that Osborne didn't mention: wages. Unlike every other measure, the OBR now expects earnings growth to be weaker, not stronger, than it did at the Budget. The forecast for this year was left unchanged (at 1.5%), while that for next year was revised downwards by 0.2% to 2.6% and that for 2015 by 0.4% to 3.3%. As a result, after already falling by an average of £1,600 since 2010, wages will continue to lag behind inflation in 2014 and will be flat in 2015. 

The danger for Osborne is that even as the UK grows faster than any other G7 country, most families won't feel the benefits, not least in an economy as unequal as Britain's. Labour will still be able to warn that this is a "recovery for the few, not the many" right up until May 2015. 

For that reason, it is far from certain that the UK's economic gains will translate into political gains for the Tories. When Osborne and David Cameron accuse Miliband and Balls of desperately trying to avoid talking about the economy, they should remember that, to most voters, living standards are the economy.

Today, in an attempt to show that he is not oblivious to the squeeze on voters' incomes, the Chancellor offered baubles including a freeze in fuel duty, a reduction in green levies, free school meals for infant pupils and a £1,000 cut in business rates for small firms. But for voters enduring the longest fall in living standards since 1870, that is very small beer.  

Ed Balls's response to the Autumn Statement: full text

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"We know they’re not very good at shooting badgers...they're not very good at shooting other people’s foxes either."

Mr Speaker,

The whole country will have seen today that, for all his boasts and utterly breathtaking complacency, the Chancellor is in complete denial about the central fact which is defining this Government’s time in office.

That under this Chancellor and this Prime Minister, for most people in our country, living standards are not rising, they are falling year on year.

So Mr Speaker, let me ask the Chancellor to demonstrate that he’s not completely out of touch with the cost of living crisis facing millions of people in our country.

Can he confirm that on average working people in our country are £1600 a year worse off than they were when he and the Prime Minister took office?

And that today’s OBR forecasts show that prices will continue to rise faster than wages this year and into next year too?

And that, as a result, people will be worse off in 2015 than they were in 2010?

Mr Speaker, isn’t this the truth – after three damaging years of flatlining, after the slowest recovery for over 100 years, from a Chancellor and a Prime Minister who said ‘we’re all in this together’ and then gave a huge tax cut to millionaires – working people aren’t better off under the Tories, they are worse off under the Tories.


And Mr Speaker, for all their complacent boasts, after three damaging and wasted years, for most people - in the constituencies of honourable members on all sides of this House - there is still no recovery at all.

So let me ask the Chancellor about the promises he made to this House on growth and living standards three years ago.

He said then that the economy would grow by more than 8.4 per cent by the end of this year.

But even after today's welcome upward revisions, growth is set to be half of that.

And Mr Speaker, didn’t the Chancellor pledge to get the banks lending – but net lending to businesses is now over £100 billion lower than in May 2010?

Didn’t he make the number one test of his economic credibility keeping the AAA credit rating – but it has been downgraded, not once but twice?

And as for his promise to balance the books by 2015, didn’t he confirm today that, in 2015, he is not balancing the books, he is borrowing £79 billion?

For all his smoke and mirrors he is borrowing £198 billion more than he planned in 2010.

More borrowing to pay for three years of economic failure. More borrowing in just three years under this Chancellor than under the last government in 13 years.

He used to say he would balance the books in 2015. Now he expects us to congratulate him for saying he’ll do it by 2019.

With this Government it’s clearly not just the badgers that move the goalposts.

And on energy bills, after their panicked and half-baked attempt to steal Labour’s clothes, we know they’re not very good at shooting badgers...they're not very good at shooting other people’s foxes either.

Because for three months the Leader of the Opposition has been calling for an energy price freeze.

And did the Chancellor announce an energy price freeze today? No he did not.

Can he confirm that when the energy companies have already announced price rises of £120 this year, his policy will still see energy prices rise by £70 this winter?

Mr Speaker, under this Chancellor, the only freeze this winter is the one facing millions of people who can’t afford to heat their homes.

Does he really think he can get away with tinkering around the edges? Moving the green levies that his own party introduced off the bills and onto the taxpayer and - surprise, surprise - letting the energy companies completely off the hook. They’re not paying a penny, Mr Speaker.

Doesn’t he realise that for millions of hard-pressed families, pensioners and businesses across our country, nothing less than a freeze will do?

And rather than hard-pressed taxpayers, it should be the excess profits of the energy companies that pick up the tab?

And as for the Prime Minister’s flagship policy for families of a tax break for marriage.

Why won’t the Chancellor admit the truth and tell the Prime Minister that this policy won’t even help the families he claims it will?

Because his own Treasury Minister has finally let the cat out of the bag.

I have it here in black and white. The Exchequer Secretary says “just under one-third of… married couples” will get the married couples tax allowance. And just one in six families with children will benefit.

Contrary to the Prime Minister’s claim in this House a few weeks ago, a married couple where both are paying basic rate income tax will get no benefit at all.

No wonder, Mr Speaker, his own Chancellor has this week told the Daily Telegraph that he thinks the Prime Minister’s policy is, and I quote, ‘a turkey of an idea’?

A turkey! The Chancellor thinks the Prime Minister’s flagship policy is a turkey. Merry Christmas, Prime Minister, Merry Christmas.

On this one I think the Chancellor’s right – the Prime Minister’s policy is a turkey of an idea.

I have to say, Mr Speaker, on the cost of living crisis and energy, and on supporting families, this Government just doesn’t get it.

And there’s a reason why this Prime Minister and this Chancellor are so out of touch that they believe most people are better off: it’s because the people on their Christmas card list have seen their bonuses rise and their taxes cut this year?

We have a Prime Minister and Chancellor who will stand up for the energy companies, they’ll stand up for the hedge funds, they’ll stand up for people earning over £150,000 – who get a tax cut.

But they won’t stand up for the millions of families and pensioners in our country, people struggling with rising energy bills, falling wages and higher childcare costs.

We all know and agree that rising life expectancy means we are going to have to work longer and that the Chancellor’s failure on growth and the deficit over the last three years means more tough spending decisions to come in the next Parliament.

But when the country is crying out for a government that will work with business to promote investment and wealth creation and build an economy that works for the many and not just the few does this Chancellor really think he can get away with tinkering at the edges, let the free market rip and wait for wealth to trickle down?

Mr Speaker, isn’t what the Chancellor has announced today the clearest evidence yet that they just don’t understand the scale of the challenge we face if we are to secure an investment-led recovery that works for all and not just a few – a strong recovery that’s built to last?

So let me ask the Chancellor, with housebuilding under this Government at its lowest level since the 1920s, doesn’t he see: his Help to Buy scheme to boost mortgage demand can only deliver a strong and balanced recovery if - as we and the IMF have urged - he matches it with more supply by building more affordable homes?

And can he tell the House why has infrastructure output actually fallen by 15 per cent since 2010? No wonder the CBI is upset.

On investment, why hasn’t he used the money from the planned increase in spectrum licence fees to endow a proper Business Investment Bank?

On tax avoidance, can he tell the House why has HMRC reported that the amount of uncollected tax rose last year?

And with almost one million young people now unemployed, a record number of people who want to work full-time being forced to accept part-time work, the work programme a flop, the welfare bill rising, and, as we learned today, the Universal Credit in complete and utter chaos.

No mention of Universal Credit in the statement. IDS: In Deep.. Shambles.

Isn’t the fact Mr Speaker, for all the shambles and chaos and rising welfare bills, what he has announced on youth unemployment is too little too late?

Help only for the under 21s only happening in the last weeks of this government in 2015.

Why isn't he being more ambitious? Why won't he repeat the successful tax on bank bonuses to pay for a compulsory job for young people – a job they’ll have to take or lose benefit?

Why won’t he remove the winter allowance from the richest 5 per cent of pensioners?

And why won’t he reverse his tax cut for hedge funds and protect disabled people in our country by scrapping the unfair and perverse bedroom tax?

Why won't he go further on the Bank Levy to expand free childcare for working parents and make work pay?

Can he confirm that, even after what he has announced today on fuel duty and his increases in the personal allowance his VAT rise, his cuts to tax credits and cuts to child benefit mean that on average families with children are worse off because of this Chancellor’s budgets. That's the truth Mr Speaker.

Giving with one hand, taking away much more with the other.

Mr Speaker, energy bills still rising this winter, no real action to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, no proper plan to earn our way to rising living standards for all and not just a few. Surely Britain can do better than this?

This complacent Chancellor sits there and thinks he deserves a pat on the back. I have to say, with bank bonuses rising again and millionaires enjoying a big tax cut, this is a policy which is working for a few.

But, as this Autumn Statement shows, with this out of touch Chancellor and Prime Minister, hard-working people are worse off under the Tories.

Prawn crackers at the chippy: growing up Chinese in Manchester

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Charles Dickens’s soot-stained Coketown of “unnatural red and black” faded away, now most of those warehouses are listed buildings.

The old warehouses in the centre of Manchester resemble outsize Italian palazzos. They were built by proud Victorian textile barons when the city was Cottonopolis, the pumping heart of the world’s first Industrial Revolution. Today, the buildings are scattered over the city like the skeletons of a race of alien gods.

I remember sitting in the ribcage of one of these architectural curiosities some 25 years ago. It was Sunday and I was filling my exercise book with Chinese characters, surrounded by other Chinese-British children from Manchester, all engaged in the same wholesome orgy of repetition. We were attending a Chinese community school — a school for children to learn the script of a land 5,000 miles away, in a draughty Italianate warehouse, in the heart of a city that felt like it was under siege from a vindictive government. As a child, one accepts such juxtapositions without blinking.

Manchester deindustrialised. The cotton mills closed down. Charles Dickens’s soot-stained Coketown of “unnatural red and black” faded away. Most of those warehouses are now listed buildings. Other symbols of the industrial past, such as Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, have been appropriated by that welfare state for the upper classes more commonly known as the National Trust. My family used to escape at the weekend to Quarry Bank. We would gaze upon a recommissioned gin as it clattered furiously, looking like it was trying to chew the devil out of the thread in its jaws. Then we’d retire to the café for scones and tea.

Now there was an irony. We were on a pleasant day out to visit an industrial relic but, in the 1980s, tens of millions of young farmers in China were being sucked into new factories (not that different from Quarry Bank) on the Pearl River Delta, where my father was born. Another Industrial Revolution was gathering pace on the other side of the world, one that would give us plastic toys, cheap clothes and iPhones. China, however, was somewhere that people like my father, who emigrated in 1960, had come to Britain to get away from. Not somewhere to think about on your day off.

There are around 400,000 Chinese Britons, 20,000 of them in Manchester. The Chinese community is not very cohesive compared with other ethnic groups. Rather than clustering together like Indians or Pakistanis, it’s spread out geographically. It’s what economists call “path dependence”. Chinese Britons worked in laundries and there was more money to be made splitting up.

There was racism in the past. After the world wars, Chinese merchant seamen who had married British women in the nearby Liverpool and started families were abruptly sent back to China. (The shipping bosses were intimidated by the seamen’s unions, which wanted to get rid of this supposedly cheap competition.)

There’s still some xenophobia — more, probably, than gets reported — but there’s affection, too. A Chinese footballer named Sun Jihai played for Manchester City (in the days before the oil money gushed). To the tune of “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain”, Sun was serenaded by fans: “Singing ai ai yippee Sun Jihai, ai ai yippee Sun Jihai, singing ai ai yippee, his dad’s got a chippy, ai ai yippee Sun Jihai.”

Ah, the Chinese chippy. I remember the most expensive item on the menu of the one at the bottom of our road in Chorlton: a quarter of chicken, peas, chips and gravy. How decadent that combination seemed. I remember the shelf, high up, where they kept the huge bags of prawn crackers, to be distributed free with every order. Kipling was wrong: east and west could meet.

Chinese in the north have been adaptive. When the laundry business was killed off by domestic washing machines, they opened restaurants. Now their children are entering the professions. They are sucked away to London like the rest of the aspirational younger generation. Meanwhile, more Chinese are coming into Manchester every year as students. They speak Mandarin, not Cantonese like my father’s generation. Many will return to China but some will stay.

My own speech has changed since I came to London 13 years ago. “You don’t have an accent,” people often say, when I tell them I was born in Manchester. They should listen more carefully: I’ll debase myself in all sorts of ways to get ahead in the Great Wen but I will never say “barth” or “glarse” when I mean bath or glass. The Manchester accent matters. It’s part of the identity. Chinese brought up in the north all absorb it. The sons and daughters of the new immigrants will, too. They’ll be Chinese northerners.

Manchester is also pretty adaptive. The old chip shop in Chorlton is now a Persian restaurant. The locals take it in their stride. On the site of the Peterloo massacre, they built the Free Trade Hall. Now it’s a hotel. There are financial and legal services to replace cotton spinning and manufacturing.

The memory of what the city once was still aches a bit. How could it not? But there are new opportunities. Chinese firms have agreed to invest in the redevelopment of Manchester Airport. Many of those grand warehouses have been turned into bars, nightclubs and fancy flats.

These still hold a few Chinese. My grandmother lives in a housing scheme for the Chinese elderly in a converted warehouse directly overlooking the gay entertainment hub of Canal Street. It’s an eyrie of Chinese grannies overlooking a river of exuberant trannies. In London, they’d probably extol that diversity, make a fuss of it. In Manchester, they just get on with it. You see, in this greatest of northern cities, the exotic has long been a fact of life, like a Venetian palace overlooking the Manchester ship canal.

Ben Chu is the author of “Chinese Whispers: Why Everything You’ve Heard About China Is Wrong” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99)

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