One of the centrepieces of the SNP’s manifesto for Scottish independence is a pledge to keep the British pound. As far as Alex Salmond is concerned, the future of money is the status quo. Meanwhile, on 18 November, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, endorsed the viability of digital money in a letter to the US Congress. Within a week, the price of a single Bitcoin – the best-known web-based currency – had passed $1,200 (11 months ago, it was worth just $13.50). For the technocracy of Silicon Valley, the future of money is in the cloud.

These two seemingly unrelated developments are linked. They represent alternative answers to the questions at the centre of all monetary history: who should govern our money and how? The remarkable thing is that both answers were exposed as dangerous errors centuries ago. While the geeks behind Bitcoin can be excused their ignorance of this, the history-loving Scottish First Minister most definitely cannot – because the man who first explained these answers’ failings was none other than the greatest monetary thinker that Scotland has ever produced.

I don’t mean Adam Smith or David Hume. They were no slouches when it came to economics but on the subject of monetary policy, the palm goes not to those superstars of the Scottish Enlightenment but to a man born a generation before them and much less well known: John Law of Lauriston.

While Smith and Hume spent their formative years swotting in the libraries of Oxford and Edinburgh, respectively, Law – the mathematically gifted son of a prosperous Edinburgh goldsmith – hightailed it down to London to learn the practical business of modern banking from the entrepreneurs, inventors, gamblers and quacks who were busy fomenting the financial revolution that was sweeping London in the 1690s.

When he returned to Edinburgh, all the talk was of a possible union with England. The key economic question, then as now, was what to do about the currency. The conventional answer was the one that Alex Salmond echoes today: to adopt the pound sterling, under the control of the then newly founded Bank of England.

John Law was having none of it. He had discovered an economic truth that we know only too well today – that monetary policy has profound effects on employment, output and the distribution of wealth. As a result, he concluded, it would be “contrair to reason to limit the industry of the people” by acquiescing in the use of a currency “not in our power, but in the power of our enemies”.

How many citizens of Spain, where unemployment is at 27 per cent, or of Italy, where GDP today has fallen to the level of 13 years ago, wish their leaders had listened to the laird of Lauriston’s 300-year-old advice that letting other people manage your money is sheer madness? Yet the SNP’s plan, bizarrely, is to re-create the eurozone within the British Isles.

If letting other people decide the value of your currency is daft, what is the alternative? Law first toyed with the idea of creating a national currency with a value that would be linked to Scotland’s stock of land. That was a similar idea to the solution the English were to settle on in time – a gold standard that fixed the value of the pound to that of precious metal.

The principle behind such commodity-based systems is that the simplest way of avoiding a monetary standard controlled by one’s enemies is to plump for one controlled by nobody at all. No one, after all, can conjure up gold, or land, out of nothing.

That is also the logic of Bitcoin. A physical commodity in fixed supply is replaced by a virtual one subject to a preprogrammed ceiling – but the principle is the same. Don’t let someone else manipulate the supply of the money you use; better that it should be free from manipulation by anyone at all.

This second answer to the perennial question of monetary governance is also flawed. The problem – learned the hard way over the course of two centuries under the operation of the gold standard – is that an arbitrary monetary standard is just that: arbitrary.

There is no reason whatsoever to expect gold discoveries to keep pace with economic growth. The supply of land – let alone of Bitcoins – is even less flexible. The result is a ruinous tendency to deflation. The flip side of the relentless rise in price of a single Bitcoin is the relentless fall in the price of everything else, as measured in Bitcoins.

So John Law jettisoned this second answer, too. Having failed to convince his fellow Scots to reject the Acts of Union, he went to France. There, his avant-garde ideas found a readier audience and he engineered an unlikely ascent that culminated in his appointment as the country’s minister of finance.

In 1719, he took France off its gold standard and introduced paper money, issued at the discretion of the national government. It was the first European fiat currency regime, regulated by the world’s first deliberate monetary policy.

Thus Law furnished a third answer to the central question of monetary history – and it is one for the ages. Rather than ceding the control of one’s money to someone else – the Alex Salmond solution – or abandoning it to the vagaries of blind chance – the Bitcoin solution – the ideal way is to manage one’s money oneself and in one’s own national interest.

Such enlightenment, it seems, can be fleeting. David Hume has his statue on Edinbugh’s Royal Mile and there is one of Adam Smith on the High Street. John Law, on the other hand, hasn’t even made it into the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Much worse than this is that his teachings, too, have been utterly forgotten by those who claim to be the staunchest defenders of his beloved homeland.

Having studiously avoided it for half a lifetime, next year I shall learn to drive. This prospect is terrifying. Not because my wife – as I must get used to calling her, having wed in September – won’t forgive me if I fail to pass. No, what scares me is the fact that driving is an inherently conservative experience. With its celebration of individual freedom and private enterprise, dependence on rules, respect for wealth, national stereotypes and Jeremy Clarkson, no respectable member of the left ought to get behind a wheel without knowing he is also behind enemy lines.

Quite how readers of this magazine reconcile themselves to this vulgar capitalist practice, I haven’t a clue. For a lapsed Whig like me, the temptation to veer to the right will be irresistible, not least because I get an appalling thrill out of speed and will spend all my time in the fast lane. If learning to drive in 2014 does change my life, it won’t be because I can get from Exmouth Market to Exeter in under four hours. Rather, it will be because in becoming a petrolhead, I will have learned to take Jeremy Clarkson seriously.

Right Hon honeymoon 
Such conversions are, I am told, an early sign of the adjustment to married life. It’s been ten weeks now, and the best thing so far is not being divorced. In January, during the bleak English winter, we shall fly off for our second and final honeymoon, to my spiritual home in the Caribbean. That honeymoon is about the four Rs: romance, rum, reggae and reading. The first three I can handle. The last I am soliciting help for. What books to take? My wife is taking our new Kindle. I’m too old-fashioned for that. So far I’ve got: Charles Moore’s biography of Thatcher, Ramachandra Guha’s biography of Gandhi, and Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. You’ll notice a pattern.

Naturally I have to take some political porn too, so I have got hold of Double Down, the sequel to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s superb account of the 2008 US election. Plus, a bit of P G Wodehouse to keep the laughs up. The other day I came across possibly my favourite line of prose ever, when in Very Good, Jeeves, Wodehouse writes: “The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘When!’”. It made me think of a dear friend of mine, who is a Tory columnist.

Up the garden path 
Once the honeymoon and driving are done, the next project for a married man is obviously more domestic. All my life I’ve dreamed of saying, when invited somewhere, that I am too busy contemplating my garden. But a garden is beyond most Londoners today, because of the disgusting injustice and cruelty of housing policy. This is the great hypocrisy and scandal of our age, a shameless and cynical ploy by the rich to rob the poor. It is state-sponsored theft.

When a very well-placed source had the misfortune to hear me moan about London’s property prices recently, she told me that the people in the Treasury running the Help to Buy (Votes) scheme, who are not natural Tories, refer to it as Osborne’s sub-prime scheme. One difficulty for the Chancellor, as a chap from No 10 explained to me over dinner, is that it is very hard to have a national housing policy, because policies that could help in the north might just make things worse in the south. Another difficulty for the Chancellor is that he needs to be re-elected; inflating an asset bubble is his best chance.

Felled giant 
Last week we launched this year’s Christmas appeal for the Independent titles and Evening Standard in the Attlee Room of the House of Lords. We’re fighting to raise funds and awareness for Space for Giants, a charity that may single-handedly preserve Africa’s elephants from extinction. Dr Max Graham, the charismatic chief executive, showed us a moving video about the threats to this most gracious of mammals. One scene elicited a very loud gasp from those assembled. It showed the flesh of a recently killed elephant being hacked into by a local. Aargh! went up the cry, followed by tears from a few.

Rather ungraciously, I later consoled these watery witnesses and enquired whether or not they are vegetarian, which they weren’t. I thought I ought not to push them. This was a charity do after all. But why is the murder of an elephant any more wrong than that of, say, a cow? It isn’t. The difference lies in the shock caused by the sight of a vast open wound, a bolt of blood and flesh. But – and I say this as a weak, part-time vegetarian (lapsed, you could say) – endless blood has been spilled to give you the meat that ends up on your plate. If you thought about it, or saw it, you’d be shocked. Contrary to what the peerless John Gray has written in these pages, progress does exist and one measure of it is the granting of rights to groups of beings previously deemed unworthy: blacks, women, gays. If man has a moral revolution left in him, it may transcend the species barrier.

A hero comes along
At the launch party of a book by the Authors Cricket Club this summer, my teammate Ed Smith (of this parish) told me that Michael Carberry, the left-handed batsman, was a talent to watch. Now, he is opening for England in the Ashes series in Australia, and looks every inch the Test match player. Carberry may be the most inspirational England player in a generation. A few years ago, a blood clot on his lung nearly killed him. He retrained as an electrician, set up his own company – and didn’t stop batting. What’s more, I’m pretty sure I bowled at him in the nets at Spencer CC when we were both playing in the Surrey championship years ago. Back then we both dreamed of playing for England but only one of us had what it takes. What a hero. l Amol Rajan is editor of the Independent. He tweets as @amolrajan

David Cameron’s recent demand that companies including Google and Microsoft should do more to prevent the trade in child abuse images on the “dark web” exposes a worrying ignorance of how the internet works. Things don’t have to be that way.

It can help to think of Google as working similarly to a fishing trawler – the net gathers everything close to the surface but it misses things further down. Hence the term “deep web”, or “dark web”.

Much of the deep web isn’t indexed by Google because it’s boring, or inaccessible without passwords. Or it’s just not needed – imagine if every frame of every YouTube video was indexed, instead of just the title and description.

People sometimes use the deep web out of necessity, often logging on through anonymising programs such as Tor. Among the users are political activists, as well as criminals – such as those behind Silk Road, the online drug marketplace closed down by the FBI in October. The deep web is where gangs that make and exchange child abuse images like to hide.

This is why the government’s response to online exploitation is so frustrating. It has asked Google and Microsoft to improve their algorithms so as to block child abuse images from appearing in search results, something that both companies have agreed to do.

The Daily Mail described the move as a “stunning U-turn”, but Google has been filtering child abuse images for years. A vital element of any search company’s business model is to tweak and improve its search algorithms, and this includes blocking illegal content. The non-profit Internet Watch Foundation, founded in 1996, combs the web to find illegal images and adds them to its blacklist, which is then automatically blocked by many search engines. The politicians seem to be equating a tech company’s size with its ability to sheriff the internet’s Wild West – but asking Google for help with a dark web problem is like reporting a burglary in London to the New York Police Department.

Monitoring the deep web requires old-fashioned detective work, and yet, for all his bluster, Cameron is quietly squeezing the budget of the agency tasked with tracking down those who create and disseminate child abuse images online. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) has had its budget frozen since 2010 and this year actually cut by 10 per cent, down to £6m. Since its establishment in 2006, it has saved hundreds of children from abuse. It also runs training schemes for schools and community groups to help prevent child abuse before it happens.

In October 2010 Jim Gamble resigned as head of CEOP over fears that the unit would lose its independence after it was absorbed into the National Crime Agency, which became operational this autumn. This summer, Gamble told PC Pro that he feared Cameron was being given inaccurate information on how to police the web. “I really am concerned that [the Prime Minister] is being poorly advised and that some of the information being set in front of him isn’t as accurate as it should be,” he said.

Perhaps Cameron has bad advisers; or he’s more interested in cheap vote-winning tactics than in effective interventions. Whatever the reason for his approach, the end result is that the government has adopted a faulty strategy to tackle some of the gravest challenges posed by modern technology.

The glory days of fake smoking are nearly over. Soon, if the EU and several American states have their way, electronic-cigarette nerds will no longer be able to sit smugly indoors, breathing out clean nicotine vapour, toying with our silly cyberpunk drug-delivery-devices and feeling sorry for the ordinary smokers shivering in the cold. The proposed EU regulations will make it far harder to buy, sell and use e-cigarettes, and might pull them off the shelves altogether.

I’ve been using electronic cigarettes for some time, because I love to smoke but am less than thrilled by the prospect of choking to death in my sixties. I’m unreasonably cross about the proposed legislation as only an addict can be. Imagine the howling rage of a toddler having its teething ring snatched away and combine that with the shaky, instinctive spite of a junkie anticipating withdrawal. That’s the kind of cross I am.

It was just getting to the point where I could enjoy a fake smoke in peace without having to explain to interested bystanders five or six times a day how the device in my hands actually works: a nicotine-glycerine liquid with a battery that super-heats when you draw on it, plus a nifty little flashing light that lets you pretend you’re a robot assassin from the future. I love my robot cigarette and I don’t want anyone to take it away.

Foot-stomping aside, the raft of legislation against electronic cigarettes is preposterous and illogical. E-cigarettes are one of the most effective ways of reducing the amount of damage Britain’s 10 million smokers are doing to their bodies every day, aside from ­going cold turkey, which not everybody is ready to do.

Smoking is responsible for more deaths annually than road accidents, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, murder and suicide combined, so a nicotine delivery system that allows people to avoid the major health risks of smoking while continuing to enjoy their vice would seem eminently sensible, unless you are of the opinion that smoking is a failure of character that should be stamped out.

The problem a lot of people seem to have is simply that electronic cigarettes are cheating, which, of course, they are. You get the basic kick of smoking without having to suck thousands of poisons into your tortured lungs. There are few conclusive studies on the long-term health effects of “vaping” but it’s largely agreed that it’s much better for you than tobacco, and a bit worse for you than not sucking on a stick of nicotine all day. I’m a fan of that sort of cheating. I believe in using technology to save lives, which for confirmed smokers is just what e-cigs are doing.

Micro-tyrannies such as this might not seem to matter much, but for millions of people who find it hard to quit, e-cigarettes have been a lifeline. Nicotine is one of the world’s most addictive substances. It would have to be, since it has to work against millions of years of evolution telling us not to put burning things in our mouths on a regular basis.

Smoking is an absurdly dangerous thing to do. That, of course, is part of the reason smokers do it. This is not the 1960s and few, if any, smokers can have failed to understand, when they took the first few musty head-spinning drags on their first cigarette, that the habit would kill them one day. Anti-smoking advocates tell us that young people don’t really understand what smoking will do to our bodies but I don’t think my generation have ever believed ourselves “immortal”. We just want a bit more control over the horrible things that will eventually happen to us, and part of being young is believing that you can have that control.

Compassion is the most important feature of public-health policy. I’m no David Hockney, obstinately demanding that smoking legislation of any kind is “the most grotesque piece of social engineering”. In fact, I supported the 2007 smoking ban. The bloodlessness of bureaucracy certainly made elements of the ban vindictive – particularly restrictions on the use of tobacco in mental-health wards and care homes, whose inmates can hardly pop outside for a cheeky one.

Overall, though, I’m a firm believer that humans should be permitted to do as much damage to their own bodies as they like, provided they aren’t hurting others in the process – I would no more light a cigarette in front of a child than I would poison a public fountain for my own pleasure. And that’s where the prospect of a ban on e-cigs, whose vapour is lighter than tobacco smoke, and rarely reaches the lungs of another person, makes no sense. It’s not about public health. It’s about morality.

The idea that e-cigarettes should be subject to the same restrictions as the leaf-burning variety once again confuses ethics with petty moral panic. To encourage addicts not to indulge their addiction where it might cause harm to children or the sick is ethical. To claim, as some do, that evidence of addiction is itself offensive and unsightly is simple prudishness. I find it unsightly when otherwise attractive young men grow ridiculous hipster moustaches but I would stop short of regulating public display of facial hair. I just avoid certain bars during Movember.

You can take my fake smokes from my warm, blood-beating hands. No, really, you probably can take them, if “you” are the EU, or the state of New York. We cannot have a compassionate, effective policy on drugs and addiction without starting from a place of compassion, and if our stance on smoking stops with an idea of moral weakness, we have forfeited compassion. Now, stick that in your flashing electronic pipe and smoke it.

Last month, Business Secretary Vince Cable declared that the Government’s Funding for Lending Scheme was not working. He warned that the Treasury had to make considerable changes to the scheme to boost lending unless financing to credit-starved small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Britain shows imminent improvement. His call to action was underpinned by figures, out in the same week, which revealed that mortgage levels had soared to a five year high as consumer confidence returned. However, net lending to SMEs tumbled by £400 million in September.

A day later, Experian released its own research, a survey of 600 SMEs which discovered that almost one third of those that used personal finance had used a mortgage to fund their business, putting their home at risk. Almost half had used personal credit cards to fund their businesses. Resourceful? Maybe. Does it leave them vulnerable? Definitely!

All this news has broken in the last fourteen days, but I wouldn’t say it was a fortnight out of the ordinary for these kinds of headlines. I’m continually seeing reports and articles which highlight the struggles SMEs are facing as they look to recover from a crippling recession.

However, while these stories all highlight serious challenges for the SME sector, it’s not the main problem it faces today. The inability to connect with other organisations, especially enterprises, is proving to be the biggest impediment. Collaborating with other businesses and their respective processes, whether it be procurement, payment or lending, has become a mammoth task. It’s putting a major strain on SMEs’ time, resources and funds and, put simply, it's breaking business.

The lack of connectivity is genuinely hurting SMEs’ ability to access cash – they aren’t getting paid, and with no cash, they cannot evolve their respective propositions. The fact we are seeing, for example, this criticism of the Funding For Lending Scheme, demonstrates that this connectivity needs to be addressed. When you add further challenges into the mix, you can see that SMEs need all the help they can get. Look at Wonga’s unfair rates, which clearly don’t have the interests of SMEs at heart, or the claims that the Royal Bank of Scotland deliberately pushed SMEs to the wall, so they could get their assets on the cheap.

So how have SMEs found themselves with these numerous obstacles and what can they do to overcome them and flourish? All aspiring SMEs aim to form business partnerships with larger organisations in order to accelerate their evolution. Yet they have failed before they start, as all too often they are strangled by large inoperable procurement and finance systems.

For too long, enterprises have demanded all their suppliers adhere to these clunky, inflexible systems, leaving SMEs with two options – spend valuable time and money adopting the systems that the bigger players insist on, or pass up the opportunity and never realise the goal of working with large organisations. Naturally, the SME often ends up bending over backwards and opting for the first. However, once they are finally on their new partner’s system of choice, they are locked in. There is no reason for vendors to improve the software, so SMEs continue to struggle with archaic, expensive processes. They essentially become prisoners, not suppliers. I know a small business that was being forced to pay $9,000 to send an invoice, or, to put it another way, being forced to pay $9,000 to send a 10 kilobyte email. In today’s social, open world, this is a ludicrous situation.

It’s still happening today, but it’s not just SMEs feeling the pain. Today there are so many incredible, innovative start-up businesses that can bring considerable value to an enterprise. However, these larger organisations are missing out on working with these dynamos, which could see their businesses suffer and their competitors prosper. And all because they insist on carrying out business processes “their way”.

What’s needed, both for SMEs and enterprises, is an agnostic approach, to communicate better with each other. Connecting on one platform, which removes barriers to business and facilitates better communication, will allow SMEs to build partnerships with their bigger counterparts. It will enable them to do so much more than just get paid quicker. They will be able to create apps to improve processes, transact faster and more efficiently and discover new partners and customers along the way. This will ultimately boost collaboration, increase revenues and improve business bottom line.

While average wages are forecast to finally rise faster than inflation next year, there'll be no end to the squeeze for public sector workers, who have had their pay increases capped at 1% until at least 2015-16 (a real-terms cut). The average worker is already £2,000 a year worse off compared with 2010 after the two-year pay freeze. (In the most recent quarter, their pay fell in nominal terms by 0.4%.) 

Based on current trends, the OBR forecasts that public sector will fall by 8% relative to private sector pay between 2012-13 and 2018-19. In a new analysis today, the IFS warns that, as a result, "some public sector employers may well find it increasingly difficult to retain and recruit high quality workers". it adds: "both the government and pay-review bodies need to pay great attention to indicators of whether the public sector is facing any difficulties in recruiting and retaining high-quality staff, and decide on settlements in light of any such evidence." 

Alternative, it says, the government could increase the level of public sector job cuts beyond the (remarkable) 1.1 million planned by 2018-19. But this, too, would risk harming services. The longer austerity continues, the clearer the consequences for public services (and those most reliant on them) will become. The IFS has forecast that merely to maintain the current level of cuts, taxes or welfare cuts will need to increase by £12bn. If Labour and the Lib Dems intend to avoid sticking to Osborne's plans, the urgent question is how they will fill this fiscal gap. 

For Osborne, public sector pay restraint is an essential component of his deficit reduction programme (which, even after recent improvements, remains £51bn offtrack) but if the Tories want to expand their support, they would be wise to offer some relief. As Renewal, the Conservative group aimed at broadening the party's appeal among working class, northern and ethnic minority voters, has noted, the majority of Tory target seats have a higher than average share of public sector workers, including 60% of Labour-held targets and half of the top 20 Lib Dem-held targets. While the Tories are likely to pledge to cut taxes for all workers, in the form of a £12,500 personal allowance, they should also consider easing the squeeze on the public sector.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) has released figures today which show earnings have risen below the rate of inflation for a fifth year running. We answer five questions on ONS’s latest figures.

For the financial year ending April 2013 what amount has pre-tax pay reached?

The ONS said pre-tax pay reached £27,000 a year, an increase of 2.1 per cent over 2012.

Inflation over the same period, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), was 2.4 per cent.

This is in stark contrast to the ten years before 2008 when earnings increased faster than inflation, providing a real increase in living standards.

Was there any good news from the figures?

Yes, average weekly earnings in 2012/13 increased by the largest amount since 2008. The ONS said the median weekly income for full-time employees was £517, a rise of 2.2 per cent.

Part-time pay also rose by 3.1 per cent over the year, outpacing inflation.

What about the gender pay gap?

The gap between men's and women's earnings increased to 10 per cent, this is up from 9.5 per cent in 2012.

This is the first time men's earnings have risen faster than women's.

Which professions are doing best?

Farmers did best, with their pay increasing by 22 per cent, followed closely by undertakers whose earnings rose by 20 per cent.

What have the experts had to say about these latest figures?

"This year has seen a shock rise in the gender pay gap after years of slow, steady progress," said Frances O'Grady, the general secretary of the TUC told the BBC.

"Ministers should be ashamed of presiding over this latest dismal record on pay.”

László Andor speaks English with a Hungarian accent but his hesitations owe more to diplomacy than a lack of fluency. The European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion has already attracted the animus of British Eurosceptics by suggesting that David Cameron’s call for further restrictions on EU migrants’ rights to claim benefits risks giving the UK a “nasty” image abroad. He doesn’t want to meddle in Britain’s affairs, he explains over coffee at a hotel in central London, but when facts in the debate about EU membership go astray, someone has to put the record straight.

“We have to say the truth. We have to avoid portraying the citizens of new member states working in this country as an excessive burden when in reality they contribute a lot,” Andor tells me. The evidence, he says, shows that migrants from eastern Europe come to the UK to work, not to claim benefits, and that their industriousness is a spur to economic growth.

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,” Andor replies laconically. “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.”

That sounds like a coded warning to the Tories not to ape Nigel Farage’s rhetoric. A commissioner cannot accuse a national government of sabotaging the European project, but there is a hint of bafflement on Andor’s part over Cameron’s strategy. If the Prime Minister’s intention is to link benefits, enlargement and free movement as he renegotiates Britain’s EU membership, he needs to clarify what he wants. “We heard this so-called benefit tourism rhetoric some years ago and we asked the British authorities to present facts and figures,” Andor says. “It never happened. If no facts and figures are presented about an alleged problem, I don’t think the EU member states or EU institutions will find it easy to help.”

That is not encouraging for the Tory ambition to “repatriate” powers from Brussels. 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. One country unilaterally diluting the rights of workers cheapens its labour and so undercuts trading partners.

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.”

If Andor’s view reflects a wider European reluctance to indulge Cameron by allowing him a wholesale renegotiation, the Prime Minister also needs to manage his party’s and Britain’s expectations better. As we finish our coffee, the commissioner concludes with a warning to the pro-Europeans who have let “Europhobia” set the terms of debate. “It gets very dangerous when the good things are portrayed as bad things. When a country that gains a lot from migration allows this to be portrayed as a downside, we have a problem.”

Even the most depressed economies eventually recover. The return of growth in the UK, after three years of stagnation under the coalition government, is merely a reflection of this truth. With GDP still at 2.5 per cent below its pre-recession peak, in 2007, the economy has yet to make up the lost output from the crisis. In the US, by contrast, where the Obama administration maintained fiscal stimulus by cutting taxes and increasing infrastructure spending, the economy is now 5.2 per cent larger. But after convincing much of the public that the post-2010 downturn was inevitable, George Osborne has been the beneficiary of low expectations.

According to the Chancellor’s account, the surge in growth is a vindication of his decision to pursue austerity after entering office. This claim is faithfully echoed by a media that loudly endorsed his deficit reduction programme in 2010. Not only does this narrative ignore the tardiness of the recovery – the slowest for more than 100 years – it also obscures the sources of the growth we are now experiencing. It is not austerity but its reverse that explains the upturn.

To the extraordinary monetary stimulus provided by the Bank of England, in the form of quantitative easing and record-low interest rates, have been added large-scale state interventions such as Help to Buy. After imposing damaging policies such as the VAT rise and the dramatic reduction in infrastructure spending in 2010, Mr Osborne has also eased the pace of austerity. Rather than sticking to his original deficit reduction timetable, the Chancellor allowed borrowing to rise and extended his programme from four years to seven. Even under the most optimistic scenario, the deficit is still expected to be at least £100bn this year, £40bn more than forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility in 2010.

When he entered office in 2010, Mr Osborne pledged to rebalance the economy away from its reliance on property and debt-financed consumer spending, cynically fostered by Labour, and towards investment and exports. But growth is again being driven by the former. Exports fell by 2.4 per cent in the most recent quarter, despite the continuing weakness of the pound, while business investment remains 6.3 per cent below its 2012 level. With wage growth (0.8 per cent) still lagging behind inflation (2.2 per cent), the recovery is being built on consumer credit and rising house prices. Like Gordon Brown before him, Mr Osborne has found the attractions of debt-driven growth impossible to resist. If the economy is not to become permanently reliant on ultra-low interest rates, he must act now to promote both public and private investment. Rather than risking the creation of another property bubble through Help to Buy, he should concentrate on increasing the supply and the affordability of housing.

A programme of the kind pursued by Harold Macmillan as housing minister in the early 1950s, when 300,000 homes a year were built, would stimulate growth (for every £100 invested in housebuilding, £350 is generated in return), create employment and reduce welfare spending. As some MPs in his own party have suggested, the Chancellor should also offer incentives to firms to pay the living wage in order to reduce consumers’ reliance on borrowing to maintain their living standards.

At present, GDP is rising but living standards are not. The north-south divide in England is widening, rather than narrowing. Meanwhile, household savings are falling at their fastest rate for 40 years. The economic cycle may finally have turned but the structural conditions for a repeat of the crash remain firmly in place.

The hot dog is the mangina of fast food – and I mean that most sincerely. You’ve only to consider its doughy and plump labia majora, the pubic shock of its fried onions and, yes, of course, the frankphallus itself. A large part of this comestible’s appeal must reside in precisely this: its hermaphroditic union of human genitalia, which exists in lubricious synergy with snackers’ mouths and hands, so enabling them to co-ordinate cunnilingus with fellatio while on the go. 

In Woody Allen’s New Yorker squib “Yes, But Can the Steam Engine Do This?”, he imagines the creative torment wrapped up in the Earl of Sandwich’s invention of the sandwich: such avant-garde prototypes as two slices of ham with a piece of bread in between them, or three pieces of bread piled on top of each other, fail to grab the public’s attention – although philosophers such as Hume and Voltaire support the revolutionary food technician.

After he finally achieves the world-beating 2:1 ratio of bread-to-filling, the earl is lionised and in a late flowering of genius invents the hamburger, giving flipping demonstrations before admiring crowds in opera houses throughout Europe.

My point here is that Allen says nothing about the invention of the hot dog, because such a creation is impossible – even in jest – to reconcile with the Enlightenment. The hamburger – and all things sandwich-form – is sacred but the hot dog is profane.

If one were to hypothesise a single originator for this most salacious of sweetmeats (why, the very name itself is an incitement to bestiality), it would have to be the Marquis de Sade. You can picture him, banged up in the Bastille, with only spiders for company and bread to eat, when some corresponding Teuton, taking pity, sends him his wurst. The marquis toys with it, inserting it in all the orifices he has to hand – he even tries it on with the arachnid – before, with a stroke of sheer genius worthy of Ferran Adrià, tearing his bread open and sticking the sausage inside.

You can get hot dogs of the de Sade type to this day: the frankfurters are cooked impaled on spikes and then thrust into the core of sectioned sticks of French bread – but let’s face it, these are bastard creations, on a par with an ordinary hot dog bun stuffed with a sausage.

No, for a hot dog to be fully achieved the bun must be bland and white, save for its industrially browned upper lid, and the frankfurter must be red and so tumescent that when you bite into it the meatish filling (a disturbing pulp of pigs’ eyelids, anuses and other unpopular body parts) gushes inside your slavering chops.

And yet . . . and yet . . . the smell of a broiling frankfurter never fails to act on me like the smell-made-sight trails of meatiness that so sorely afflicted Butch the bulldog in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. I used to live near the Queens Park Rangers ground at Loftus Road, and most Saturdays I would still be crapulent and abed when the man whose pitch was immediately beneath my bedroom window lowered the wire basket of chopped onions into the small vat of boiling oil on his stall; the tremendous “Chssshhhh!” this made would jerk me awake and before I had fully gained consciousness I’d find myself standing in the street – on at least one occasion bollock-naked – and grouting the pasty pasty with the mastic gun of the sauce bottle. 

Almost all handheld foods now have their own dedicated chain of outlets but, so far as I’m aware, there’s nowhere in Britain that specialises in the hot dog alone. This could be an anti-German thing, but I think it has more to do with the chimerical nature of the food itself; like the gustatory equivalent of a gypsy, the hot dog is at once cast out – and has also elected – to wander the highways and byways in convoys of little carts.

I quite like hot dogs, and often I’ll cry “Hot dog!” when I bite into one. What other foodstuff allows for such a perfect denotative act? I mean, you can’t imagine biting into a wrap and shouting out “It’s a wrap!”; unless, that is, you happen to be on a film set at exactly the right time. However, I do have problems with the markup. I don’t know why – after all, I’ll tolerate people flogging me bread discs slathered in tomato purée and cheese at ten times the cost of their ingredients without demurring, but three quid for boiled offal in bread? Well, unlike the slickly lubricated hot dog itself, this has a tendency to stick in my craw.

Christmas is a time for family, or so we’re told, and with this in mind I would like to recommend to you a perfect family film about an imperfect family. You might think twice, however, about saving this one for that cosy post-blow-out viewing slot. Child’s Pose, which won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and is released on DVD next week, continues the wave of penetrating Romanian cinema that began in 2006 with The Death of Mr Lazarescu and went on to include 4 Weeks, 3 Months and 2 Days and Police, Adjective—masterpieces of control tempered by a desperate compassion.

Luminiţa Gheorghiu does a complete volte-face from her performance as the kind-hearted medic in The Death of Mr Lazarescu by playing the Medusa-like Cornelia, mother to a slovenly overgrown lump of a son. When he is arrested for running over and killing a 14-year-old boy, she springs into action. Coldly she surveys the child’s grieving relatives at the police station: they are huddled together sullenly in shell-suits and trainers while Cornelia and her sister are barricaded behind furs, bleach-jobs and matching scowls. She wastes no time persuading her dazed son to change his statement while haranguing the cops for “ganging up on my baby like hyenas.” Then she approaches a key witness and throws her chequebook on the scales of justice. She is undoubtedly monstrous, but Gheorghiu keeps her terrifyingly human at all times.

There is a nice balance in the film between the forensic procedures surrounding the accident and the messy emotions over which science has no dominion. Cornelia herself is repressed and detached: rummaging in her son’s damaged vehicle for his mobile phone, she doesn’t even seem to register the blood-flecked windscreen shattered into a spider-web. And her perversion of the legal system is only an extension of her maternal relationship; she pulls on a rubber glove to administer ointment to her son’s wounds, then extends her loving massage further than is strictly necessary. The handheld camerawork provides those qualities we have come to expect from the best of recent Romanian filmmaking: tension, analysis, emotional immersion. In our society which prizes families above all else (especially that mythical and coveted species, the “decent, hard-working” sort), it is encouraging to find a film that interrogates the pernicious influence that family life can sometimes exert.

Child’s Pose is released on DVD on Monday.

Instagram held a press conference today to announce that it was adding a messaging service to its app. That's all. Messaging.

Just to make that clear:

You know how you can send pictures and texts to your friends, using your phone? Now you can do that on Instagram, using your phone.

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) December 12, 2013

Kevin Systrom is the co-founder of Instagram, and his presentation contained some choice cuts of ludicrous Silico-speak. At one point he literally described the act of taking a photo of one’s brunch as “revolutionary”.

We can only wonder what he makes a painting like this:

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

That's Caravaggio's Still Life with Fruit (1601-1605), a painting of some brunch (or lunch, maybe breakfast). It's food, is the point. The art galleries of the world are filled with boring pictures of food - it's a topic that has sustained artists for centuries. There is nothing new about fixating on food. The animals on the walls of Bhimbetka and Chauvet might even count as food portraits.

Ancient human-like figures, like these ones painted onto rock in the Cederberg region of South Africa, might even be selfies:

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

That's a generous interpretation, I realise, but the self-portrait is one of the defining artistic subjects of human art, throughout the world. There are 141 self portraits in the National Gallery's collection, for example. It makes the response to the Oxford English Dictionary's decision to name "selfie" word of the year utterly baffling - there is nothing new about us documenting ourselves.

Think pieces that talked about the selfie's "screaming narcissim" that "sits at the excess of the ultimate theatricalising of the self" seem to treat something rather mundane as something that's - here's that word again - "revolutionary". Smartphones and digital cameras have made it easier to take photos of ourselves and our foods. They've also made it easier to take pictures of landscapes, but you don't see that getting parodied or turned into a Time cover story about the self-obsession of a generation. The difference between now and the Renaissance is the barrier to entry for those who couldn't afford paint and canvas.

The question it feels more worth asking here is this: why do we use new technologies the same as our old ones? Why is that we keep picturing the same things, again and again, but faster and faster? When is a technology amplifying something in our society, rather than actually changing it? And will every technology always end up, inevitably, a thing for porn?

It rather feels that focusing on the method, instead of the motive, misses the point a lot of the time.

You can get the New Statesman podcast on Fridays from newstatesman.com/podcast, through this RSS feed newstatesman.libsyn.com/rss or by subscribing in iTunes. Alternatively, you can listen using the web player embedded below.

This week, Helen Lewis, Rafael Behr and George Eaton discuss the week in politics, including housing and the London mayoral race. They also discuss George's interview in the magazine this week with Sadiq Khan, who is being talked up as a potential mayoral candidate for Labour, even if he's reluctant to say so himself.

Philip Maughan and Michael Prodger reveal the NS's list of the real books of 2013. We've crunched the numbers on the myriad round-up lists that have appeared in the media in recent weeks, and worked out which titles have been picked more than any others. But should you bother reading them?

Finally, Ian Steadman discusses home genome testing, and asks whether the potential to screen yourself for possible genetic illnesses is actually a good thing.

Happy listening!

This week, two stories have broken about transsexual people and sports. The first was the Daily Mail’s report on transsexual woman Aeris Houlihan not being allowed to play for her local women’s football team despite her GP’s letter stating that her oestrogen levels are within the typical female range after eight months of hormone replacement therapy, and being backed by her club. The second is that the Sports Council Equality Group’s guidance for partner agencies on Transsexual People and Sports, has been published, challenging the consensus that surgical status should determine the gender under which transsexual people are allowed to compete.

Besides the shock of seeing the Mail report take a trans person’s side in any sort of dispute, it was interesting to note that it focused on her blood hormone levels as the critical factor. (The Mail’s mention of Houlihan holding a female driving license and passport is a red herring: these need to be altered after changing name by deed poll, something that many transsexual people do before getting hormone prescriptions via their Gender Identity Clinic, as the GICs often stipulate this as a requirement.)

For domestic competitions, many British sporting bodies, including the Football Association, use the International Olympic Committee’s guidelines of 2004, known as the Stockholm Consensus. This states that transsexual people must be able to verify levels within the appropriate male or female range after 24 months of hormone therapy, as well as having legal gender recognition and having sex reassignment surgery at least two years prior to participation. The Sports Council argue that surgery is not always possible or desirable, and has no bearing on strength or stamina. Nor does the acquisition of a Gender Recognition Certificate, with the expense, the evidence needed to persuade the Gender Recognition Panel to grant one and the legal necessity of dissolving existing marriages or civil partnerships often presenting barriers to this.

Delia Johnston, who worked as an ambassador for LOCOG (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralymic Games) and with the Football Association, helped to produce the Sports Council document.

“There are a number of people playing successfully under the current guidelines”, says Johnston, pointing out that Houlihan does not meet the current requirements, but would be eligible to play in competitive matches with her team under the Sports Council’s criteria. These recommend that transsexual women ‘may compete in [their] affirmed gender in female or mixed-sex domestic competition on providing evidence that her hormone therapy has brought her blood-measured testosterone levels within the range or her affirmed gender, or that she has had a gonadectomy’. (The guidance on transsexual men in contact sport is similar.) The Mail doesn’t mention testosterone levels: Johnston states that although there will be arguments about whatever criteria is used, this are the best way to ensure that transsexual women do not have any legacy of historical advantage: “After a year or more of hormones, testosterone levels drop massively, so the new guidelines are fair and balanced.”

Lou Englefield of Pride Sports, who support LGBT clubs and work towards wider inclusion, said that “I understand that the FA’s policy is under review and that a public-facing document is likely to be available in the new year. I also understand that the FA will undertake individual assessments of players, and decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis.” Englefield added that the FA has not yet clarified whether or not Houlihan will be able to play competitive women’s football under their new legislation.

There have been a few high-profile cases of transsexual people in sports – mostly those wanting to enter women’s competitions, where it has been argued that they will have an unfair genetic advantage. In no instance have these women dominated their field, however, and the numbers in football are low: writing for In Bed with Maradona in 2011, Chris Ledger named 47-year-old Martine Delaney, playing in the Tasmanian League, as the most prominent. Since then, Jaiyah Saelua made headlines as one of Samoa’s third gender fa’afafine community and the first transgender person to play in the World Cup – for American Samoa’s men’s team, as they won a competitive match for the first time.

The odds are stacked against transsexual women becoming top-level female footballers – many do not transition before their physical peak in their mid-twenties, and the masculine norms of men’s football may dissuade them from playing regularly enough to reach a high standard beforehand, with the problems around gendered changing rooms providing a further obstacle to maintaining fitness. The removal of the IOC’s surgical and legal requirements makes matters easier for those who want to compete at any level, and the possibility of individual assessments is also welcome: soon, Houlihan will be able to play, and the unfair disadvantages faced by transsexual people will be significantly reduced.

It isn't just Barack Obama, David Cameron and Helle Thorning-Schmidt who have been busy on the selfie front in recent days.

Never one to be left out, Ed Miliband has appeared in Lily Allen's Instagram attempt:

And here he is with Joey Essex:

With my mate @Ed_Miliband at the #Millies#SELFIEpic.twitter.com/E63ofKCvcE

— Joey Essex (@JoeyEssex_) December 11, 2013

And finally, does it count as a selfie if you snap one of a picture of yourself in a magazine? The Mole thinks it does:

Never thought I'd be asked to write for NME, but here is my debut. pic.twitter.com/6Mkx0tvsvK

— Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) December 4, 2013

As winter settles in, the dangers faced by Syrian refugees will increase – many lack adequate shelter, fuel, food or medicine. Around 2.3 million people have fled the civil war in Syria, most to neighbouring countries. According to UNHCR, 838,000 have fled to Lebanon, 567,000 to Jordan and 540,000 to Turkey – the three countries bearing the greatest refugee burden. These countries are not only struggling with the economic cost of the refugee crisis, but face serious political repercussions too, with fears that sectarian violence is spilling beyond Syria’s borders.

According to an Amnesty International has said that European leaders should “hang their head in shame” at their failure to take in Syrian refugees. Only ten European countries have agreed to host and resettle Syrian refugees – and the UK is not one of them. The most generous is Germany, which has agreed to take 20,000 and the remaining countries are taking on just 2,340 refugees together.

In the UK, some have responded by pointing out that its pledge of £500m of humanitarian aid to Syria is more than all other EU countries combined. According to Oxfam in September, the UK has given 154 per cent of its fair share to Syria (relative to its GDP) so this is something to be proud of. In contrast, France – which has consistently taken a more hawkish stance on Syria – has only given 45 per cent of its fair share.

Britain’s commitment to humanitarian aid is a positive, but this shouldn’t be used as an excuse to close the door to refugees. Perhaps the government, wary of anti-immigration rhetoric, is afraid of how the public might react to several thousand Syrians being resettled here. But the reality is the UK can, and should, absorb and resettle several thousand refugees.

Meanwhile, thousands are dying attempting to make it into Europe anyway. In October 650 migrants and refugees died trying to enter Europe by sea from North Africa. Greece has been pushing Syrian migrants back to sea, and Bulgaria has detained around 5,000. It’s not enough to simply hand over cash to a crisis we pretend is far away, while the victims of war are dying on our doorsteps.

You could almost hear the whoops of delight from Lib Dem HQ when David Cameron announced he had a little black book of Tory policies blocked by the Lib Dems that will form the heart of the next Tory manifesto. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. And indeed, ever helpful, the Lib Dems have now published the 2015 Tory party manifesto. It’s both an entertaining and slightly troubling read.

It has however, left me wondering where Nick’s little Black Book is?

Now of course, in true Lib Dem style there’s a gargantuan round-Britian-road-trip-and-open-submission-process-and-a-committee-to-boot effort currently going into writing the 2015 Lib Dem manifesto.

But thinking back over the last few years, Lord’s Reform and the Mansion Tax aside, it’s hard to think what Lib Dem policies we’ve had blazing rows about in government that haven’t seen the light of day. Not even the AV referendum – we had it, we just screwed it up.

That’s not to say there haven’t been such rows; just that we don’t talk about them much. And sure, I can list a ton of brilliant Lib Dem policies – Pensions reform, tax thresholds, Pupil Premium, free school meals – that we’ve achieved in government. But you can’t help but feel we were pushing on an open Tory door here, given they were all cracking ideas. And indeed, the Tories now seem set on trying to nick half of them as their own.

I keep hearing that we’re going to spend the next 18 months attacking the Tories and Labour as idealogues, more interested in promoting what they believe than what it actually needed to continue to dig us out of the economic mire.

Can this possibly be true? We’re going to attack other parties because they ‘believes very strongly in particular principles and tries to follow them carefully’ (to use the dictionary definition)?

I wonder if we’ve properly thought that through?

Being the voice of reason, maintaining equidistance between the two parties we may end up in coalition negotiations with come 2015, and maintaining a centrist position is all very well.

But the reason we managed 23 per cent share in the last general election was because people believed we were both ideologues and principled – and not cut from the Tony Blair 'government-by-management' cloth.

Folk will either adore David Cameron’s ideas in his little Black Book, or be horrified by them. But everyone will be certain that he believes them.

I can’t help but think we need a touch of that ourselves.

So Nick. What have Dave and George stopped us doing? I’m all ears.

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

The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug (12A)
dir: Peter Jackson

Cliffhangers have no more currency in modern culture than hand-cranked gramophones. What use could there possibly be in deferred pleasure when our viewing habits are shaped by a demand for gratification that is ongoing and ubiquitous? This is said not in a curmudgeonly spirit – let he who has never binge-watched whole series of Breaking Bad or Louie cast the first stone. But haute cuisine served at fast-food speeds is the least we expect.

In this context, the staggered appearance of the three parts of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit begins to look both antiquated and revolutionary. You wonder what young audiences must make of the narrative limbo at the end of The Hobbit: an Unexpected Journey, released a year ago, and now its follow-up. Perhaps their eyes search the cinema screen instinctively for that clock that counts down in the corner of the Netflix frame as the next episode is cued.

The first face shown in the new film is Jackson himself, who can be glimpsed gnawing on a root vegetable. If this is a gag on the idea that he has bitten off more than he can chew, then the joke is not on him but his critics. Extracting three movies from the same number of Lord of the Rings books was one thing. Squeezing three movies from its single-volume predecessor smacks of hubris. But the results fail to support this reading. The Desolation of Smaug shows a film-maker in command of his medium, balancing mythic weight and delicate detail.

Previously on The Hobbit: a band of dwarves set out to reclaim their kingdom, Erebor, steered by the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen). It was at his suggestion that they enlisted Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), a harrumphing, diminutive chap dressed in 50 shades of beige and one of the few movie heroes required to comb his feet.

In the new film, the group reaches the Lonely Mountain, where an opponent to their campaign lies in the shape of a dragon so enormous that the logical answer to the question, “Where is he?” must be: everywhere. For a director working on the largest of budgets, Jackson knows all about economising. He keeps Smaug under wraps until the final half-hour or so, introducing him via subtle disturbances in the dense, deep blanket of gold coins beneath which he is snoozing. Jackson rations the revelation of wonder, withholding it until the last moment. By the time Smaug rises, the coins raining off him like slot-machine jackpots, half the work of the effects boffins has already been done through the whetting of appetite. Anticipation is one effect that never ceases to be special.

Benedict Cumberbatch provides the gloating voice of Smaug and it’s easy to see him in the dragon’s joyless smile. It’s so wide it would take hours to trek from one corner of his mouth to the other, so deep it must have been chiselled there for generations like a gravestone inscription or a family grudge. But then Jackson always makes us feel the human and the tactile within the artificial. He and his crew are attuned to controlling mood through colour and texture; one coup here is the wistful landscape of autumnal treetops, peppered with powder-blue leaves that transpire to be butterflies, through which Bilbo pokes his head while fleeing an arachnid attack in the forest below.

Not that “arachnid attack” quite covers the giant bulbous spiders with black bowling-ball eyes, clacking limbs and glutinous mouths. Like Spielberg in his prime, Jackson clears space within horror for the comic and the sumptuous. The 3D photography invites us to view the cocooned dwarves through rips in the quivering walls of web, as though we are craning at peepholes in an icky art installation. There is also a visual riff on the nasty childhood pastime of pulling the legs off spiders. It’s not cruel, you see, if the victims are many times the size of their tormentors.

Now that CGI can conjure up anything, the challenge to film-makers is to increase their inventiveness. Jackson rises effortlessly to that. A battle that pits dwarves and elves against the scrunch-faced, Goya-esque Orcs, staged in, over and alongside a ferociously rushing river, is the most purely thrilling set piece Jackson has directed. The camera stays mainly in the water as the dwarves are rushed along in their barrels – all those sopping wet beards give you an idea of what it would be like to accompany ZZ Top on the rapids at Center Parcs.

It isn’t just the sequence’s screwball velocity that impresses, but Jackson’s continuing grasp of clarity within chaos; he never loses his precision or his taste for rambunctious fun. One dynamic composition shows an arrow fired towards us from the background penetrating the side of an orc’s head in the foreground, so that its protruding tip pokes us in the eye.

Martin Freeman provides the movie’s counterpointing gentleness. Films of this size require conspiratorial performers and he is one of the subtlest. Listen to his pauses, each one a pocket of pathos, as he tries to make a confession to Gandalf. Watch his posture as he affects nonchalance, lifting a dainty finger to his chin while Smaug stirs behind him. It is Freeman who delivers the movie’s sign-off line, “What have we done?” Oh, you know, only restored the archaic tease of the cliffhanger and brought to the modern fantasy film the sweep of David Lean. That’s all. Like Bilbo, it’s no biggie.

Spend an hour with Sadiq Khan and you will leave feeling more optimistic about the future of British politics. The sharp-suited shadow justice secretary combines energy and charisma with a meticulous grasp of his brief and a gift for speaking fluently without lapsing into press-release jargon.

It is these qualities that Khan is seeking to put to use in his new role as shadow minister for London. Eleven months after he took over the post from Tessa Jowell, the MP for Tooting has edited a Fabian pamphlet entitled Our London: the Capital Beyond 2015, with contributions from Doreen Lawrence on racial diversity, Andrew Adonis on transport infrastructure, Bonnie Greer on the arts and the Green peer Jenny Jones on the environment. “It’s not a Labour booklet; I’ve deliberately sought not to be tribal,” Khan says when we meet at Portcullis House, Westminster. “Some of this stuff wouldn’t be in the Labour manifesto, let’s be frank – some of it isn’t Labour policy at the moment – but these are the sorts of discussions we should be having as people who care about London.”

He contrasts his urgency with Boris Johnson’s ill-defined vision. “My big criticism is not that he’s a part-time mayor, or that he’s distracted in his job by becoming the next leader of the Conservative Party. My biggest criticism of him is his lack of ambition for London.”

Khan’s own chapter reflects on what, echoing Tony Blair on education, he describes as the three biggest issues facing the capital: “housing, housing, housing”. Having grown up on a council estate in Earlsfield, south London, before his father, a bus driver, saved enough to buy his own home, he tells me: “I understand how important council housing is. I actually think it’s got so bad that housing is the single biggest challenge facing London politicians of my generation.”

While Ed Miliband has pledged to build at least 200,000 homes a year by 2020 if Labour is elected, Khan points out: “The number of new houses we’ll need in London is, according to councils, 800,000 . . . it’s arguable that London could take it all. We’ve got big, big questions and no one’s talking about them.”

Would he like to see the cap on council borrowing removed to allow local authorities to build more affordable housing? “That’s one of the things we’re exploring with Ed Balls. There are a number of options we have. What I’m hoping is that the lobbying pays off . . . it’s a good example of London setting the agenda.”

The mention of Balls prompts me to ask Khan for his thoughts on the shadow chancellor’s much-criticised response to George Osborne’s Autumn Statement. “The reality is, in that House of Commons chamber, when Ed Balls stood up, there was a wall of sound and it was quite clear, whatever he would have said, that the Tories had orchestrated and organised to give him a hard time, and that was going to happen. You can either plough through it, or allow yourself to be defeated by the Tories.” He ends with those words often regarded as the political kiss of death: “Ed Balls has the full confidence of the shadow cabinet, I’m sure.”

One of the policies announced by Balls and Labour – the introduction of a mansion tax to fund the return of the 10p tax band – was recently criticised by Jowell, David Lammy and Diane Abbott, all likely candidates for the 2016 Labour mayoral nomination, as a “tax on London” that would penalise the asset-rich but cash-poor. Khan does not disguise his anger at their comments. “All I say to colleagues, in the kindest, politest way, is: ‘Actually, you look at the bigger picture. Are you in favour of trying to help those who own the least by giving them a new rate of tax at 10p? If you are, then ask yourself how you go about doing that.’ What I’d [like to] do is work collegiately with senior members of the Labour Party to find a policy that works, rather than going for the cheap soundbite, which doesn’t address the issue of making sure that we’ve got a fair tax policy.”

Lammy, Abbott and Jowell were speaking at an event hosted by Progress at which Khan was scheduled to appear but from which he pulled out. “When I was first asked to do the Progress event, I was told it was going to be a forum to discuss ideas about London and it was quite clear to me that it was turned into a beauty parade,” he says. In an uncoded rebuke to those already positioning themselves to win the mayoral selection contest, he adds: “I’ve got no interest in playing ego politics. It’s about me making sure that I do the job I’ve been given as shadow minister for London with the seriousness it deserves.

“I’m a member of Team Labour. My obsession is to make sure we do the best we can in the local elections in May 2014.”

When I point out that Khan’s pamphlet is likely to be seen as his own pitch for the mayoral nomination, he replies: “I think the job of a conscientious, hard-working shadow minister for London is to bring together the best ideas in the business and do this booklet. If I was running for the job of mayor of London, this would not be the time to be having long, deep discussions about the future direction of London, but I think it’s important for London’s future and for Labour’s future. I’m not interested in a beauty parade or a contest of personalities.”

But he notably refuses to deny that he has an interest in the post: “If others want to flatter me and throw me those compliments, I’m not going to reject them.”

It is hard to believe that in the mid 1980s it was standard care, even in many academic health centres, for infants to have open heart surgery with no anaesthesia but just a drug to keep the infant still.

This practice was blown out of the water by a courageous mother, Jill Lawson, who against great resistance, pushed to publicise the lack of anaesthesia during open heart surgery that her son, Jeffrey Lawson, had undergone at Washington DC children’s hospital. After dozens of letters and requests for a review of the policy and many condescending rebuffs, the Washington Post published her story. All hell broke loose. There were dozens of news stories because every mother knew that babies feel pain. How could health professionals be so stupid?

Careful research by Dr. Kanwaljeet J. S. Anand on the same procedure for his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford had demonstrated the under medication of children following surgery and the massive stress response that infants experience when undergoing surgery without anesthesia. Anand was feted and given a prize by the British Paediatric Society. But his research was also attacked by a group of British MPs because they claimed he was experimentally torturing babies.

Over the last 30 years, there has been a huge increase in research in paediatric pain. There are some real advances in practice. Health centre accreditation standards now require recording and treatment of pain and some children’s hospitals in the USA have used their pain management as a selling feature. So, one would think that after 30 years of advances in the science of pediatric pain there would be many fewer problems with poorly or completely unmanaged pain. But it is still the case that babies are circumcised with no analgesia; sick neonates are often given 25-30 painful procedures a day without any analgesia; although 5 per cent of children and youth have chronic pain and significant disability, at least 90 per cent of them never get help from a chronic pain specialist; many young patients are told that their pain is “all in your head”; there are only a dozen developmental neuroscientists in the world studying pain in children; in most hospitals about 30 per cent of the children suffer significant unrelieved pain; and many children are still terrified of needles because of poor management of pain.

So why is pain in children and youth ignored? Is it because children can’t speak out for themselves and when they cry it is dismissed because “Children always cry”? Because children as a group are not valued? Does it go unchallenged by parents because those parents believe that the doctors would of course relieve the pain if they could? Or is it the case that advocates for children’s pain have simply not been effective? Or is pain just dismissed as “a symptom”, or is seen as unimportant by health providers?

I don’t know why. Perhaps pediatric pain advocates (and most scientists in this area are advocates too) are not aggressive enough. But the science is there. Pain in children is felt, has significant short and long term consequences and there are effective ways of treating it. But will it take 30 more years for adequate pain management be the norm?

Dr Patrick McGrath is a clinical child psychologist and has been a leading scientist in researching pain in children

This post originally appeared on the Oxford University Press blog