Mars is supposed to be a dead, dry planet. There are clear signs that liquid water used to flow across its surface - remember Nasa mocking up that video of the Mars of 3.7 billion years ago? - but one of the Curiosity rover’s jobs right now is to investigate what we take to be ancient river bed.

This makes it very surprising indeed that scientists saw dark, water-like streaks in the red dust, in 2011. This should not be happening on a planet with no atmosphere.

To be clear, this isn’t proof that there’s liquid water on Mars - it’s just that we’ve seen something that looks a heck of a lot like liquid water. Here’s a slideshow of eight images showing what we’re talking about, provided by Nature:

Those black lines, as spotted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are known as “recurring slope lineae”, and they darken the Martian soil just as water darkens soil on Earth. They were originally found two years ago at seven sites in the highlands of southern Mars, at middle latitudes which warm up in the summer and freeze again in the winter.

This latest study, by the same team of planetary scientists led by Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona in Tucson, has found a further 12 sites with streaks, all on or near the equator. The equator has roughly the same temperatures year-round, and that means that - if there’s liquid water flowing on the surface - there must be a mechanism in place to replenish it. Mars’ low atmospheric pressure means that liquid water on the surface should sublimate into a gas almost immediately.

We now know that there’s quite a lot of water on Mars, be it frozen on the surface at the poles, under the surface elsewhere on the planet, or bound up with the soil itself. The implication of a flowing water source is that it might be the most likely location of life that still exists on Mars - but, conversely, that also makes it more crucial that we don’t send improperly sterilised probes there. If those Earth microbes are to survive anywhere on Mars - and scientists recently discovered a whole new species of microbe that could survive in even the most sterile of spaceship construction labs - then they’ll survive on these slopes.

It's also exciting for future colonists, who will save on energy if they don't have to heat up ice for drinking water. Our best chance of figuring out the exact nature of these lines on Mars is from afar, with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, until we can decide what further action to take. Perhaps even the first colonisers, whoever they be (maybe it'll be Mars One, who want to send people there on a one-way mission starting from 2024) will be able to take advantage of that water source.

George Osborne has made it clear that he plans to introduce "billions" more in welfare cuts if the Tories win the next election, including a possible reduction in the £26,000 household benefit cap and new limits on child benefit, but where does Nick Clegg stand? At the Deputy PM's final monthly press conference of the year, I asked him whether he was prepared to consider a reduction in the benefit cap in the next parliament. He told me:

It’s not something that I’m advocating at the moment because we’ve only just set this new level and it’s £26,000, which is equivalent to earning £35,000 before tax...I think we need to keep that approach, look and see how it works, see what the effects are, but not rush to start changing the goalposts before the policy has properly settled down.

The key words here are "at the moment". While Clegg again declared that he believed the priority should be to remove universal pensioner benefits from the well-off ("you start from the top and you work down"), he was careful not rule out a cut in the level of the cap. Similarly, on the Conservative proposal to limit child benefit to the first two children for out-of-work families, while Clegg said there was "something a bit arbitrary" about"a government saying how many children the state will or will not help support", he refused to oppose the idea in principle. He said:

Is my priority returning to child benefit, as the first port of call, no it's not. But I’m not going to start drawing great circles around this policy or that policy. I want to look at it in the round.

Aware that he will be pushed to support these policies should he enter coalition negotiations with the Conservatives after the next election, Clegg is ruling nothing out. If, as seems likely, David Cameron avoids repeating his 2010 pledge to protect pensioner benefits (Clegg said he had "given up" on trying to persuade the Tories in this parliament), the two parties would likely reach an agreement on further cuts to working age welfare.

Elsewhere during the Q&A, Clegg was asked whether he had his own "little black book" of Lib Dem policies blocked by the Tories and cited housing, border checks and banking reform as areas where they had prevented progress. He said:

I have a fairly thick volume of things that I’d love to do if I was prime minister, which is not of course possible within a coalition with the Conservatives.

Housing today is a good example, I’ve wanted to see community land auctions, which I think would be a great way to get more land leased, to get more houses built on them; that’s something the Conservatives are very reluctant to endorse. I’ve been a long-standing advocate of a planned approach to garden cities, particularly in that part of the country between Oxford and Cambridge, where lots of people want to live, where we don’t have enough places for people to live. Again, the Conservatives have stopped that. I think we would have seen more housing on a quicker scale if we’d been on our own in government.

I alluded earlier to the fact that I find it very frustrating that despite the coalition commitment, which I wrote into the coalition agreement, on reintroducing exit checks at our borders, that seems to have been not acted upon as quickly as it should have been. I think we probably would, frankly, have acted a bit faster on some of the structural problems in the banking system. I’m sure we can compare endless lists.

The boss of manufacturers Ineos - one of the UK's biggest energy consumers - has warned that energy produced from the planned Hinkley Point C power station will be too expensive for business. We answer five questions on Ineos’s boss’s comments.

What exactly has Ineos boss Jim Ratcliffe said?

Speaking to the BBC Ratcliffe said UK manufacturers would not find the price of energy from Hinkley affordable.

Mr Ratcliffe said: "The UK probably has the most expensive energy in the world."

"It is more expensive than Germany, it is more expensive than France, it is much, much, more expensive than America. It is not competitive at all, on the energy front, I am afraid."

How much will energy from Hinkley cost?

The government has signed a deal with France-based EdF to pay a guaranteed price of £92.50 per megawatt hour (Mwh) for 35 years. EdF is developing the station with the backing of Chinese investors.

Ineos owns the Grangemouth power plant in Scotland and has recently agreed a deal for nuclear power in France at 45 euros (£37.94) per Mwh. However, the world nuclear association pointed out this deal was for an unknown duration whereas the government’s deal with EdF is for 35 years.

What have other experts said?

The World Nuclear Association told the BBC: "It should be pointed out that France has the highest proportion of nuclear in its generation mix and lower than average EU power prices, so there is nothing automatically expensive about nuclear power.”

In October John Cridland, director-general of business lobby group the CBI, speaking to the BBC said:

"It's important to remember this investment will help mitigate the impact of increasing costs. The fact is whatever we do, energy prices are going to have to go up to replace ageing infrastructure and meet climate change targets - unless we build new nuclear as part of a diverse energy mix."

However, Dr Paul Dorfman, from the Energy Institute at University College London, added: "what it equates to actually is a subsidy and the coalition said they would never subsidise nuclear".

How much energy will Hinkley provide when it is up and running?

Once developed Hinkley will provide 7 per cent of the UK’s energy mix. It will cost £16 billion to build and is expected to be ready by 2023.

How is Ineos currently doing, wasn’t it going to close a short while ago?

Yes, the company had announced in October the permanent closure of the Grangemouth plant in Scotland, which would have affected 800 jobs. However, when a bitter dispute between Ineos and the unions was called off it was announced that the plant would stay open.

However, Ratcliffe has said that Ineos, which will be the first company to import shale gas from the UK, was on a “knife edge” since that troublesome time.

He told the BBC: "I think Grangemouth has the prospect of a very good future if it can get through the next three years."

"Attitude on the site is much more positive and you can see people are really anxious to move on."

Grangemouth provides 70 per cent of the fuel used at Scotland's filling stations.

Yesterday, the EU officially halted trade talks with the Ukraine. Tomorrow, the country is due to sign a "road map" agreement with Russia aimed at deepening trade relations between the two countries. All of this adds up to a genuine crisis for liberal democracy, the consequences of which no element of the western press has really touched upon thus far.

It is sad but understandable that Stefan Fule, the EU Commissioner for Enlargement, should announce that trade talks with the former Soviet Republic should come to a halt. "Words & deeds of President [Viktor Yanukovych] & government regarding the Association Agreement are further & further apart. Their arguments have no grounds in reality," came a tweet from the official. It is clear that Yankoyvch and his people were asking for what they knew the EU could not deliver simply to force Europe’s hand. But still, it leaves the mass of protesters in Kiev’s Independence Square dangling – all 200,000 of them.

Those who still take for granted that the world is on an inevitable march towards more liberal democracy should pay close attention to what happens between the Ukraine and Russia. But perhaps this is an out of date remark in and of itself. What I found most depressing about the recent Russell Brand mania was finding out to what degree people in Britain, particularly young people, appear to take both liberal democracy and peace throughout Europe, at least western Europe, for granted.

This attitude is also evident in discussions surrounding whether Britain should remain part of the European Union or not. It is as if peace has come to Europe via some sort of mystical edict, and as such is now eternal and need be based on nothing whatsoever. This, I believe, is the chief reason that the EU is not synonymous with peace and stability in Britain but rather with strictly a helpful single market at best and with resource draining, unnecessary bureaucracy at worst. I also think this is why no one in any of western Europe’s various cognoscenti, in particular the British version thereof, has any real sense of urgency about what is happening in Kiev right now. People seem blind to the fact that a real battle of civilisations and possible futures is being waged.

Vladimir Putin is trying to rebuild the old Russian/Soviet empire and in doing so offering an alternative to the EU model, one that he personally controls. Ideally for him, this would eventually involve pulling the old Eastern Bloc countries that are currently part of the European Union back into the fold: Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria. Whereas the European model is based on open markets, a standard of human rights for all citizens, and rule of law, the Russian model is almost the exact opposite: a market dictated by the whims of Moscow, a legal system entirely run by local despots loyal to Putin, and widespread kleptocracy. Those who think that the countries which are currently EU members such as Poland being pulled back into the Russians’ sphere is wildly unrealistic are being wilfully naïve and underestimating Putin dramatically (there’s a great deal of depreciating the Russian president’s talents going on across the globe at present, oddly). Don’t think it can’t happen; the man has taken on bigger beasts recently and come out of each encounter with his aims being precisely met.

If Putin achieves another victory, as looks inevitable, and the Ukraine is officially and irrevocably drawn into his terrifying quasi-Soviet trading block, it will almost certainly have grave results for the world very few people appear to be seriously contemplating at present. It is very like western attitudes towards Syria; no one can see just how close to home these battles truly are.

Food bank use in south east England, the region known for its wealth and relative prosperity, is up over 60% this year and thousands of families face the prospect of relying on emergency food handouts this Christmas. A decade ago, food banks were almost unheard of in this area but there are now 59 across the region.

We know this thanks to a report from Green MEP Keith Taylor, who’s released Hungry Christmas, a report into the spread of food banks in his region. The report is published ahead of a debate on food banks in Parliament on Thursday, which came after the public demonstrated its understanding of the issue, with more than 100,000 people signing a petition on the subject within four days, possibly a record for the official government site. A group of public health experts have concluded that the rate of food poverty in Britain should be classed as a medical emergency.

At this year’s Green Party conference we heard from the brilliant Jack Monroe, known for the blog A Girl Called Jack; her story is not unusual. She went from a well-paying job working for the Fire Brigade to being a mother living on benefits that didn’t cover the bills. She had tried and tried to balance work and childcare but was stymied at every turn. Jack’s story hasd a happy ending. Not everyone’s does. Few can expect that – what stretches ahead of them are years and, unless our economy is transformed, decades of endless, grinding struggle for the basics of life.

As today’s report highlights, three new food banks are set up every week to help meet demand. Cuts to benefits such as housing benefit, child benefit and council tax benefit have pushed people to the edge. Increasing use of unreasonable sanctions that leave already desperate households with no income at all, force them to turn to charity. But the rise of food banks is not just a result of government’s welfare policies – although a report for Defra, delivered in early summer and mysteriously not seen since – probably shows how welfare cuts are a critical part of the process, and that’s certainly what Keith’s report demonstrates for this one region.

Low pay is, however, the other side of the story. Eighty seven per cent of people on benefits are in work – and many of those are the one in five workers on less than the living wage. That’s more than five million workers – the staff who serve you in shops, the school dinner ladies, the road sweepers and parking attendants you see every day – who can work a full-time week yet not earn enough money to live on. Then there’s the victims of fast-spreading zero-hours contracts. They’re employed, but they can get to the end of the week without any income, or with only a fraction of what they need to pay the rent, buy food, pay for heating and travel.

For despite the Chancellor’s gleeful posturing in this year’s Autumn Statement, the claim of "economic recovery" is not recognisable to most people. Wages are not in line with inflation, energy and transport costs are spiralling, and many people are in the "heat or eat" dilemma, a problem set to worsen due to this government’s disastrous lack of policies to ensure warm, comfortable, affordable-to-heat homes for all and its failure to invest in public transport and ensure its affordability.

So what is to be done: initially, the government should abandon its plan for a welfare cap – as should the Labour Party. Welfare needs to be paid on the basis of need, not within some artificial limit. It should stop pressuring Job Centre staff to sanction benefit recipients. And it should abolish the illogical, unfair bedroom tax, and ensure councils aren’t pushed to force low-income households that can’t afford it to pay council tax.

And it should make the minimum wage a living wage. Labour is saying it is going to ask employers to pay a living wage and offer tax breaks for doing so. I say we should ensure that everyone who works full-time earns enough money for a basic decent existence – the living wage.

A living wage is a salary people can live on, feed themselves and their children on. It would give people back some control over their lives and the ability to plan for the future rather than live a hand to mouth existence. Now that really would be a Merry Christmas from George Osborne.

The interim report of the government's Airports Commission has just been released and it's ensured a bad start to Boris Johnson's morning. The commission, chaired by Howard Davies, shortlists Heathrow and Gatwick as possibilites for aviation expansion but leaves out Johnson's proposal of a new airport on an artifical island in the Thames Estuary ("Boris Island") as "there are too many uncertainties and challenges". 

While the report promises "further study" of his more recent suggestion of an airport on the Isle of Grain, in north Kent, this is an unambiguous snub to the Mayor. The commission warns that all of his proposals would be "extremely expensive", with the cost of an Isle of Grain airport (described as "the most viable of those presented") around five times that of the three short-listed options at up to £112bn.

It adds that they would "present major environmental issues, especially around impacts on protected sites" and that "the new surface access infrastructure required would be very substantial, with potential cost, deliverability and environmental challenges of its own". Finally, "the overall balance of economic impacts would be uncertain – particularly as an Estuary airport would require the closure of Heathrow for commercial reasons and London City for airspace reasons." 

The three options that have been shortlisted are a new runway at Gatwick, a third runway at Heathrow and an extended runway at Heathrow. The final report won't be published until the summer of 2015, after the general election, so expect the Tories and Labour, as in the case of tuition fees in 2010, to maintain a conspiracy of silence throughout the campaign. 

Here's the key extract from the release: 

The Airports Commission’s interim report published today (17 December 2013) has announced that it will be taking forward for further detailed study proposals for new runways at two locations:

• Gatwick Airport
  • Gatwick Airport Ltd’s proposal for a new runway to the south of the existing runway
• Heathrow Airport (two options)
• Heathrow Airport Ltd’s proposal for one new 3,500m runway to the northwest
• Heathrow Hub’s proposal to extend the existing northern runway to at least 6,000m, enabling the extended runway to operate as two independent runways.

The next phase of its work will see the Commission undertaking a detailed appraisal of the three options identified before a public consultation in autumn next year.

The Commission has not shortlisted any of the Thames Estuary options because there are too many uncertainties and challenges surrounding them at this stage. It will undertake further study of the Isle of Grain option in the first half of 2014 and will reach a view later next year on whether that option offers a credible proposal for consideration alongside the other short-listed options.

The Commission has not shortlisted proposals for expansion at Stansted or Birmingham, however, there is likely to be a case for considering them as potential options for any second new runway by 2050. In its final report the Commission will set out its recommendations on the process for decision making on additional capacity beyond 2030.

After the Airports Commission all but sunk Boris Island, the mayor sought to put the best possible gloss on the situation during his interview on the Today programme, declaring: "we're not dead yet, I think that's the good news."

Not dead yet, but certainly in the intensive care ward. In its interim report, the commission warned that Johnson's proposal of a new airport in the Thames Estuary would be "extremely expensive", would "present major environmental issues" and would have "uncertain" economic impacts. 

The mayor contested these conclusions, insisting that his policy would not cost "anywhere near as much as he's [Howard Davies] saying" and that he could secure significant "international investment". He described the idea of a third runway at Heathrow as "completely crackers", warning that it would be "catastrophic for London and for quality of life" and would "consign millions of people to noise pollution". 

But he conceded that Heathrow was the likeliest candidate for expansion, noting that while another runway at Gatwick would be "the least injurious" option, it would not deliver the "competitiveness boost" required since "the airlines will still want to go to Heathrow". 

Asked how he would respond if the commission definitively rejected Boris Island next year (in a  separate study) and if David Cameron pledged to support its final recommendation (due in summer 2015), he refused to accept that "hypothesis" but added that it would be a "grievous error" and "the wrong thing for the party". He ended: "I believe in going on and winning fights, rather than flouncing out" but, on this occasion, his struggle will almost certainly end in defeat. 

After all parties rejected the option of a third runway after the 2010 general election, the policy has made a remarkable comeback. But since both David Cameron (who declared in 2009: "the third runway at Heathrow is not going ahead, no ifs, no buts") and Ed Miliband (who nearly resigned as energy secretary in the last government over the issue) have a mutual interest in avoiding the subject, expect all parties to maintain a conspiracy of silence throughout the campaign. 

It’s not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters.
Epictetus

When I first travelled in and around South Africa in 1998, I was struck by how good the roads were. “That’s because it used to be a police state: they had to move the army around quickly,” I was told by a friend from the University of Cape Town. Like many before me, I was shocked on that visit by the huge disparities of wealth – 15 years later, they are even greater – between those who lived abject lives in sprawling shanty settlements and those, mostly wealthy whites (soon to be joined by the new black elite), who lived close by in their gated mansions, protected by high walls, razor wire and “armed response” teams.

Wherever you went, white people in positions of influence grumbled about the effects of “affirmative action” and state-led plans for black empowerment to address decades of racial discrimination. They were fearful about what would happen in the country after Mandela had served his one and only term as president.

Roads not taken

One of the most powerful criticisms of Mandela’s presidency from the South African left is that he was too willing to forgive his Afrikaner oppressors and too reluctant to challenge the corporate power structures that, on the whole, remained in place after the end of apartheid. That he emerged from prison speaking of the need for reconciliation rather than revenge is why he is so revered, a man for all nations and now for the ages, as Barack Obama remarked, in an echo of what was said of Abraham Lincoln after his death. But shouldn’t Mandela’s economic reforms have been bolder and more transformative? Shouldn’t he have implemented affirmative action more systematically, as well as introducing far-reaching land reform of a kind that will one day be necessary in South Africa? In 1994, 87 per cent of the land was owned by white people; it’s little better today. Political apartheid has gone; economic apart­heid remains.

Critical mass

In 2000, on a visit to Zimbabwe, I met the former Rhodesian leader Ian Smith for afternoon tea at his house in a quiet suburb of Harare. “Smithie” told me he felt betrayed by the old apartheid regime in South Africa. Yet even he, who had done so much to prevent black majority rule in Zimbabwe, spoke of Mandela with admiration. Smith expressed the hope that he would live long enough to witness the fall, or death, of his old enemy Robert Mugabe. He did not, of course.

Mugabe was once celebrated as a great African national liberation leader. Like Mandela, he spent years in prison; the experience embittered him. When Mugabe’s Zanu-PF won power in the first democratic election of 1980, he showed flexibility and willingness to compromise. Learning from what had happened in Angola and Mozambique after the flight of the Portuguese in the 1970s, Mugabe encouraged whites to stay on in the new country. Samora Machel, revolutionary leader and then president of Mozambique from 1975 until his death in 1986 (Mandela married his widow, Graça), advised Mugabe to keep a critical mass of white people in Zimbabwe during the early years of transition. Though many whites left for Britain, South Africa and Australia, those who stayed were allowed to keep their farms and businesses. For a short time after the election, Peter Walls, Mugabe’s implacable enemy in the bush war, was even retained as head of the armed forces; he was ousted only after being implicated in plots to assassinate Mugabe.

For all this, Mugabe was an instinctive despot. His North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade militia was responsible for the massacres in Matabeleland in 1982. He neither forgave nor forgot his oppressors and believed in violent struggle: for him, the end always justified the means. However, he turned against white farmers only at the end of the 1990s, after feeling threatened by the emergence of the Movement for Democratic Change.

Out of the ruins

South Africa has been ill served by those who have followed Mandela, though no Mugabe has emerged. As president, Thabo Mbeki, son of Govan Mbeki, who was imprisoned with Mandela on Robben Island, oversaw years of continuous economic growth but without leading the necessary social and economic transformation. He was diminished by his failure to respond adequately to the country’s Aids epidemic, refusing to accept that the disease was caused by the HIV virus. During his leadership, the murder rate soared and corruption became institutionalised.

Mbeki’s successor, Jacob Zuma, the current president of South Africa, is a dictatorial clown but his failures might yet help the country to become a proper multiparty democracy, as factions break away from the ANC to set up rival organisations.

Dark mirror

In her 1981 dystopian novel July’s People, Nadine Gordimer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, imagines a South Africa ravaged by civil war. The borders have been closed and the rich white suburbs of Johannesburg have been overrun, the houses there looted or burned. The sense of terror and despair is palpable.

The central characters are the Smale family, white liberals, and their servant, July. Fleeing from the violence, the Smales retreat to July’s remote ancestral village. They are dependent on him for their safety and survival: the servant has become their master. The novel is an allegory of what could happen if oppression of the majority continued.

“There were times when things were just so bad,” Gordimer once told me. South Africa could easily have had a catastrophic civil war, of the kind feared by Gordimer and many others who lived under and through apartheid and experienced its absurdities and cruelties, or become a Zimbabwe-style tyranny. Things were indeed just so bad and today they are so much better – and that is because of one man, Nelson Mandela.

The debate on Newsnight last night about drug courts - special courts where the presiding magistrate is a recovering drug addict, and which shows more empathy to addicts than the normal criminal justice system - was derailed by the presence of Peter Hitchens, who called addiction a "fantasy".

The actor Matthew Perry (known most famously for playing Chandler on Friends) was an advocate for the courts "because they work", while Hitchens was opposed, on the grounds that the idea is "seeking to fail". He found the idea of a judge "wearing tracksuit bottoms" and "being matey with the defendants" particularly irksome. "It doesn't do anybody any favours to try and be nice," he said.

Poor Baroness Meacher - who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform - was probably included to represent the middle ground, but ended up mostly being talked over. Hitchens was adamant that drug users have control over their actions and compared the characterisation of addiction as a disease to the former psychiatric classification of homosexuality as a disease in the 1970s, to the bewilderment of both Meacher and Perry, who compared Hitchens' stance to "saying Peter Pan is real".

For the record, physiological and psychological addictions are well-documented and have been studied extensively in the medical literature. While there are critics of the characterisation of addiction as a disease, they do not represent the consensus.

The Airports Commission has published its interim report, with Heathrow the clear favourite for expansion (either in the form of a new runway or an extended one), but it won't deliver its final recommendations until after the general election in summer 2015.

For all of the main parties, this is remarkably convenient. David Cameron (who declared in 2009: "the third runway at Heathrow is not going ahead, no ifs, no buts") and Ed Miliband (who nearly resigned as energy secretary over the issue and opposed a third Heathrow runway after becoming Labour leader) can bat away questions about aviation expansion during the election campaign by stating that no decision will be taken until after the final report has been delivered. 

This conspiracy of silence is reminiscent of that over tuition fees in 2010. Both Labour and the Tories knew the review of university funding chaired by Lord Browne would propose an increase in fees (and that they would support it) but it suited them to avoid acknowledging as much. Neither party outlined a position on tuition fees, with both merely stating that they would respond to Browne's report. Labour said in its manifesto: 

The review of higher education funding chaired by Lord Browne will report later this year. Our aim is to continue the expansion of higher education, widening access still further, while ensuring that universities and colleges have a secure, long-term funding base that protects world-class standards in teaching and research.

[We will] consider carefully the results of Lord Browne’s review into the future of higher education funding, so that we can unlock the potential of universities to transform our economy, to enrich students’ lives through teaching of the highest quality, and to advance scholarship

‘‘Small latte ...” The barista in my local coffee shop hands me a cup and I blush like Jane Austen in an erotic bakery.

“Thanks,” I say, “Wow – you know, I can never understand how you guys make those hearts in the foam. It’s just so skilful. I could never do that. I bet I could practice for, like, a decade and I couldn’t do it ...”

I continue to ramble on about the artistry of foam, while the barista smiles and nods. My cheeks are hot and everything just feels ... clammy. Weird thing is, I’m talking to a dude.

No, I’m not trapped in a Sophie Kinsella novel – I just go very weird around good-looking men. Along with attractive straight women and important writers – don’t even get me started on attractive, straight, important writers – handsome men are one of the Acid Reflux Three: the types of people who trigger my most violent outbreaks of social anxiety.

I didn’t sign up for this. I’ve shunned men and donned an earthy wheaten coat and wooden knickers combo. When I embraced lesbianism, part of the deal was that I’d never have to be weird around male humans. Ever. So why does it keep on happening? And why does it feel so startlingly similar to sexual tension?

As an exercise in creative writing, I shall now attempt to appreciate a man’s handsomeness, in words. I haven’t done this since I was 12 and I wrote a poem about a boy at school I thought I fancied. In retrospect, I wasn’t attracted to him – I kind of wanted to be him. It’s complicated. Anyway: Coffee Guy’s jaw is definitely the right shape. It’s angular and rugged, a bit like a sexy cliff. He has golden brown eyes that bore into your spleen, and black, wavy hair that’s probably quite texturally pleasing. I haven’t touched it but it’s a bit like freshly cut grass or bubble wrap, in that I’d really, really like to.

As I sit, staring into my decorated drink, I begin to realise what’s going on re: me and handsome men. See, I assume that Coffee Guy assumes that I fancy him. I also assume that he assumes that I assume he assumes I fancy him. Keep up. So eager am I to signal to him that this isn’t the case, I get flustered and begin to display the very symptoms of physical attraction he’s probably expecting from me. The blushing, the rambling, the clamminess; it’s all born out of my determination to assert my gayness.

I glance over at Coffee Guy. He’s being all, “Look at me with my nice hair and my penis,” brandishing his barista tools like a middle-class Viking.

“I am not afraid of you,” I tell myself.

In my head, I drain my cup and get up to leave. As I near the door, I spin around on my heel and look Coffee Guy straight in his stupid, handsome face.

“I don’t want to have sex with you,” I say.

The coffee drinkers gasp collectively. A grey-haired woman in a fleece stands.

“The spell ... the spell is broken!” She declares,“All hail the Light Bringer.”

All fall to their knees. Coffee guy turns into a tin of Heinz potato and leek soup.

In reality, this happens:

I leave in silence, then go home and google other nice coffee shops near where I live.

The best part of a year has passed since David Cameron’s speech promising to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s European Union membership and to put the ensuing deal to the country in a referendum. Since then, there hasn’t been much clarity about the kind of reforms that would persuade the Prime Minister to campaign for the "in" side.

We have learned something about what he doesn’t like. Or rather, we know that he has located the feature of current EU membership that seems most to inflame public hostility – free movement of workers between member states – and wants to be seen to be doing something about it.

On 1 January 2014, transitional controls that have limited the rights of Romanians and Bulgarians to live and work in the UK will be lifted. Nigel Farage is terribly excited by this prospect since it effectively launches Ukip’s campaign for May’s European parliamentary elections without him having to lift a finger. The Tories are putting in all the groundwork, ramping up the issue, reinforcing the impression that a horde of welfare-snaffling foreigners is massing on the border. Voters who are most animated by fear of a migrant tsunami will not believe the Conservatives can hold back the tide.

And they can’t. Cameron understands that free movement is an integral part of the single market. He has given private assurances to the European Commission that Britain will do nothing unilaterally that would breach existing rules. What he hopes to do is persuade other member states that those rules can, in time, be amended. In all likelihood that would mean adjustments to the accession arrangements for any future candidates for EU membership. Retrospectively clawing back rights from existing members or rewriting the very basis on which workers move around the bloc would require treaty revision on a scale that no other country wants to consider.

In other words, when Cameron says he is getting tough over the arrival of Bulgarians and Romanians in two weeks time, what he actually means is that he intends to start a conversation about a possible negotiation about what might theoretically happen with some Croatians at an unspecified point in the future.

Making announcements that sound like Ukip propaganda but without the policy of EU exit to support them is ultimately just an incitement to vote Ukip. Meanwhile, briefings from the Home Office that something drastic will be done serve only to nurture in Tory eurosceptic hardliners the hope that, if they push hard enough, Conservative policy will merge with Farage’s. (The government’s Immigration Bill has already been blown off course by a Tory backbench amendment calling for Britain to renege on its treaty obligations to Romania and Bulgaria.)

This situation is a source of bafflement and rising alarm in other European capitals. Most EU leaders and Brussels officials are prepared to engage with Cameron’s renegotiation ambitions to some extent because, by and large, they want Britain to stay in and they recognise that institutional reform is needed. It helps that the Prime Minister now talks more about pan-European changes than about unilateral "repatriation" of powers. When Cameron goes to Brussels, the carving out of custom-made exceptions for the UK – enjoying all the trading perks of open borders without any of the accompanying social and employment protections – is not seriously on the agenda. Yet that is the only kind of deal that many Tory sceptics would consider acceptable.

When Cameron allows his party to dwell on fantasies of a bespoke British EU package, the rest of Europe starts to lose patience. It is seen as either weakness – a failure to confront the Tory party with a realistic account of what is available in "renegotiation" – or it is viewed as a cynical game, ramping up euroscepticism, making the threat of exit seem ever more likely in the (mistaken) belief that this strengthens Britain’s hand. "We don’t like to use the word blackmail, but sometimes it is the word that comes naturally to your lips," one Commission official tells me.

Perhaps the most surprising element in all this is the Tory party’s willingness to indulge the pretence that Cameron has even embarked on a process of giving them what they want. There is really no evidence that he has. There will be a referendum in 2017, if the Tories form a government after the next election – and that is far from certain. Meanwhile, it remains the Prime Minister’s stated policy to support continued EU membership in that vote. When does he suppose he will fit in the negotiations to secure a deal that doesn’t tear his party in half? He shows no intention of starting soon. Is such a deal even possible? The rest of Europe – led by Germany – is eager to find some accommodation, but they can’t help if they don’t really know what it is that Cameron wants. (And there are divergent views between the parties in Germany’s ruling coalition and within them of how far Berlin should go to accommodate Britain.)

Cameron’s European strategy as it currently stands is to ramp up domestic expectations of a deal that fundamentally changes the basic principles on which the EU operates, while doing none of the diplomacy abroad to make such an outcome even remotely plausible. It is the approach a Prime Minister would take if he didn’t really care one way or the other if Britain stayed in the EU or drifted towards the exit. It is the course that might be expected from a Prime Minister who would rather not engage with the arguments if doing so conflicts with the task of appeasing habitually disloyal backbenchers and fomenting Ukip-friendly, anti-EU hysteria in the process. As a plan for leading the Conservative party that is short-sighted enough. As a way to lead the country it is desperately irresponsible.

I craned in through the window of the cab I was paying so I could get a better look at what, to me, has alway been a bizarre phenomenon. The cabbie was laboriously writing out the receipt I’d requested (I have this exchange all the time: “Shall I leave it blank, guv?” “No, fill it in, please, HMRC know my handwriting,”) and this meant I could get close enough to the weird little vinyl lozenge sewn on to the shoulder of his sweatshirt to read what was printed there. “ZX951 EOTHEN STATE 55-1 PREMIUM WASHABLE INTER-5 90%” it said – or gobbledegook to that effect. Anyway, you get the picture: this was just one among the many thousands of Britons who go about their business all day, every day, wearing clothes with a load of new cobblers written on them.

Where does it originate, this particular instance of sartorial folly? Certainly that other great madness of the crowd, marketing, is implicated – as is the whole psychic anti-cyclone we can capture with the catch-all “commodity fetishism” – but nowadays clothes that merely incorporate their manufacturers’ names as elements of style (D&G, Chanel, Hollister) have started to appear positively comme il faut, when set beside the typographic excesses that flex and stretch all about us.

Then again, back in the 1990s one of my favoured euphemisms for narcotic excess was “spending too much time in underground car parks meeting men with writing on their trousers”. True, it’s clumsy and long-winded for a euphemism but you get the point. The emergent rap culture – straight outta Compton via Balamory – seemed to favour this sort of frankly childish logical positivism: trousers with “pants” written on them, guns labelled “gunz”. And in due course this submerged current – like so many before – surfaced into the mainstream. (If you want an absolutely top-hole example of this, I remember seeing a female newsreader, in the mid-1980s, reading the Nine O’ Clock News with a silver razor blade dangling from a chain around her neck. Of course, the idea that she’d been chopping out lines of cocaine with it before going (very) live on air is preposterous, although not that much more preposterous than her naivety.

Another factor in the spread of this typographic staining has to be globalisation; for all I know, in the sweatshops of Dhaka or Kuala Lumpur “ZX951 EOTHEN STATE 55-1 PREMIUM WASHABLE INTER-5 90%” may mean something quite profound, may in fact be coded message such as “You poor western moron, your cheap sweatshirt was purchased by the sweat of your brow and made by us sweating blood, and neither of us will ever get a piece of the profit.”

Alternatively, it could be that the manufacturers – or possibly the retailers – of these garbled garments hold exhaustive focus groups at which strings of random words, letters and numbers are tried out on representative consumers. Actually, I’d feel a lot better about wearing a jacket with “TRANS-DEF 1117 RA-RA” blazoned on it if I did believe that at least this level of rationality inhered in it, but I fear this cannot be the case – only our governance is managed by such clear articulations of desire.

Taken in sum, marketing, kidult counterculture and the great commercial percolation of English as a lingua franca probably are a necessary explanation as to why the middle-aged woman sitting opposite you as you read this is wearing a pink baseball cap with “Tingly Neurone GG2” embroidered on its brim – but I’m not sure it’s a wholly sufficient one. No, when it comes to wearing meaningless clothes – and recall, it was Sartre who asserted that “Hell is other people’s trousers” – I think there must be an X-factor (or possibly an X2/@-WHITNEY one), and this is a submerged but still present desire in our culture for the vulgate.

Yes, you heard me right: the vulgate; after all, for over a millennium the people of these isles were accustomed to men in dresses standing up in front of them and intoning a lot of mumbo-jumbo – and far from this being regarded as idiotic or offensive, it was intrinsic to our collective communication with the divine. The Reformation put paid to that, and henceforth the liturgy was to be changed in plain English – but our yearning for mystification and the intercession of strange apparel remains unabated, and so in lieu of the vulgate mass we have substituted a mass of vulgar clothing. Here endeth the lesson.

Two things have characterised the debate around fracking in the UK: hyperbolic claims with little grounding in the evidence and poor quality jokes. Today, as the government sets out the shale gas roadmap, expect both the hysteria and the slack humour to resurface.

The jokes are perhaps the least controversial aspect of fracking: proponents from both sides of the argument can agree that Ed Davey’s limp "I’ve been fracking responsible" and his minister Michael Fallon’s "fracking will make your walls shake" are simply embarrassing.

But these moments aside, shale gas extraction is an issue which has been dangerously starved of evidence-led debate. On the one hand, we have the enthusiasts of the right who see shale gas as a silver bullet for all of our energy problems. They argue, without any basis in fact, that shale gas is cheap, clean and imminent. They are wrong on every count.

In his Autumn Statement, the Chancellor once again claimed that shale gas extraction will lead to "lower energy bills", a myth so thoroughly debunked that for about six months the Tories were too embarrassed to wheel it out. Those projections for the cost of extraction in the UK extrapolate directly from the US experience in a way that is completely misleading and fails to take account of the geological, regulatory and market differences. They also ignore the fact that, unlike America, the UK’s gas system is integrated into a European market many times larger than itself, meaning that the cost-reducing benefits of excess supply are quickly dissipated across the continent.

Nevertheless, the Tories have continued to peddle fracking as the single answer to our complex energy supply problems. Ministers have implied that the fracking revolution will be immediate, when instead it will take years before any substantial infrastructure is in place. Writing in the Sun, Boris Johnson even claimed that shale gas was "clean". David Cameron, who has claimed that fracking would create a fantasy "74,000 jobs", has gone quiet on the subject since an independent report cut that figure down by two-thirds.

Against this backdrop of Tory hyperbole, it is not surprising that legitimate doubts about the environmental impact of fracking have been escalated by those with a more fundamental objection to the use of any fossil fuels whatsoever.

Anti-gas campaigners refer to earthquakes and water contamination, drawing on early experiences in the US to suggest that a wrecked landscape is the inevitable consequence of fracking. Yesterday, Greenpeace published a report on fracking linking fracking and the destruction of the local environment. In reality, many of these concerns come down to the question of regulation. Most of the case studies cited are from the US, where initial regulation was dangerously inadequate.

Just as it is irresponsible to suggest shale gas is the answer in isolation, so it is unrealistic to suggest that renewable energy can deliver all of our energy needs in the medium term. The UK will still need significant amounts of gas – both for peaking electricity capacity in the medium term, and to account for the 80% of our heating that currently relies on the fuel.

For this reason, the necessary examination of the potential dangers of fracking must be followed by an evidence-led discussion about how we mitigate those effects. Taking an absolutist position on shale gas, at either extreme, is a good way to get lurid headlines. It does little to encourage a rational and sensible discussion of the place of gas, and the source of that gas, in our wider energy mix.

Labour is clear that we will need to have a balanced energy mix for the future – that mix should be as low carbon as possible without endangering our energy security. It should prioritise the development of predictable renewable technologies and carbon capture and storage. It should be designed with the aim of maximising the amount of growth and jobs we can secure for the UK to help rebalance the economy geographically as well as by sector.

There remain questions to answer about shale gas in the UK, but they are best answered on the basis of evidence derived from carefully regulated and comprehensively monitored exploration. Extraction should only take place with the highest possible level of regulation and on the basis of using an indigenous supply of gas to complement the move to the sustainable, low carbon energy mix that those who are serious about energy know is an imperative for our collective future. Energy policy requires responsible leadership, not simplistic posturing.

Reddit’s science section - r/science - is one of the site’s default sections (or “subreddits” in the site’s parlance), and is one of the main places on the internet where experts and lay people can come together and chat about science. Its moderators, like the rest of those in charge of subreddits, have to juggle the site community’s strong belief in free speech with the need to prevent arguments, trolling, or anything else that could derail genuine scientific debate.

That’s why they’ve taken the step to ban “climate change deniers” from the subreddit. One of the moderators, chemist Nathan Allen, has written a blog post to explain why the decision was made (I’ve picked out the key paragraphs):

While evolution and vaccines do have their detractors, no topic consistently evokes such rude, uninformed, and outspoken opinions as climate change. Instead of the reasoned and civil conversations that arise in most threads, when it came to climate change the comment sections became a battleground.

...

After some time interacting with the regular denier posters, it became clear that they could not or would not improve their demeanor. These problematic users were not the common “internet trolls” looking to have a little fun upsetting people. Such users are practically the norm on reddit. These people were true believers, blind to the fact that their arguments were hopelessly flawed, the result of cherry-picked data and conspiratorial thinking.

...

We discovered that the disruptive faction that bombarded climate change posts was actually substantially smaller than it had seemed. Just a small handful of people ran all of the most offensive accounts. What looked like a substantial group of objective skeptics to the outside observer was actually just a few bitter and biased posters with more opinions then [sic] evidence.

Negating the ability of this misguided group to post to the forum quickly resulted in a change in the culture within the comments. Where once there were personal insults and bitter accusations, there is now discussion of the relevant aspects of the research.

I used to work as a barman in a pub with a semi-famous regular who obsessively tried to argue that renewable energy was a scam and nuclear power was a better option, and who would pick drunken arguments with other regulars about it just for the sake of it. It was very weird, and it made uncomfortable, so we barred them. This is a bit like that.

If you want to see an example of a good discussion about climate change, then head to the comments on r/science about this blog post. There’s a lot of discussion about whether this is a genuine pro-science move, whether it’s a suppression of genuine criticism, and what kinds of tone are acceptable when posting contrary opinions.

For example, there’s a small debate over the politicisation of the word “denier”, and how some who are sceptical of climate models feel they are equated with “holocaust deniers” for daring to speak out. It’s stupid, obviously, but the point is it’s a civil debate compared to what you might see elsewhere when it comes to climate change.

The final question that Allen poses, though, is an interesting one - why don’t newspapers ban people like this too? The scientific consensus that climate change is happening, and is driven by humans, is extremely comprehensive and compelling - but media outlets like the BBC tend to offer "balance" by giving fringe sceptics an equal platform.

r/science has roughly four million monthly unique visitors, which makes it roughly twice as popular a website as the New Statesman, and an influential scientific resource. Perhaps some editors could look to reddit's science moderators for inspiration.

George Osborne was finally able to boast of improved borrowing forecasts in the Autumn Statement (even if this year's deficit, at £111bn, is still £51bn higher than expected in 2010) but the national debt will soon be £30bn larger. Painfully for the Tories, the increase is due to new EU accounting rules, which have forced the ONS to reclassify the state-owned Network Rail as a public sector body. Oddly, it had previously been classified as a private body despite having no shareholders. 

As a result of the change, Network Rail's current liabilities of £30bn (2% of GDP) will appear on the national accounts for the first time from 1 September 2014. That will make it even harder for Osborne to meet his target of reducing debt as a share of GDP by 2015-16 (already pushed back to 2016-17), with the level now forecast to peak at 82%. The change is also expected to increase annual borrowing by an average of 0.2% from now on. 

Another consequence is that ministers are now responsible for approving bonus payments to the body's executives and for other financial decisions. With five bosses set to receive £2m if performance targets are met, this is likely to become a matter of political controversy in the future. Labour MP Tom Harris tweeted earlier: "Now that Network Rail debt is officially govt debt, no excuse for ministerial "hands off" approach. 1st casualty should be directors bonuses". 

Our media culture values certainty, consistency and dogmatism. Television and radio debates encourage intellectual trench warfare: we're over here, you're over there. Everyone else, pick a side.

Twitter and other social media (sorry, but you knew this was coming, didn't you?) make the whole thing worse. Arguing in short bursts, without the benefit of all the non-verbal bits of conversations, is difficult enough, without the added problem that it's much easier to be an arsehole to someone when you don't have to get the same Tube home from the pub afterwards. 

Under those conditions, there's a seductive appeal about hanging on to bad positions, just because they'll get you less grief, and defending stupid things you've said in the past, because to concede any weakness during an argument feels too much like giving your opponent an advantage. But that's toxic: I don't want to be forced to defend everything I said in 2003 in order to have an opinion in 2013. I was an idiot in 2003. I only hope I'm slightly less of an idiot now.

Changing your mind is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength: that you have continued to test your ideas, even the ones that you held most strongly, against the evidence. Sometimes, the evidence will change. Other times, you will. 

I asked our bloggers if there was any subject on which they had changed their minds since they started writing regularly. Six of them were kind enough to respond, and their responses are below, along with mine. 

Eleanor Margolis

When I first came out as gay, I was a bit suspicious of bisexuals. I was 19 and I’d spent a few years identifying as bi myself, then realised I was just in denial about being a lesbian. I assumed that, because of my own experience, bisexuality was a kind of gateway drug to full blown dykedom. Either that or a fleeting deviation from heterosexuality. It didn’t help that, the year I came out, Katy Perry was singing about kissing girls and liking it. For many women, sexual experimentation was the new It Bag.

But I came to realise that applying my own reality, when it comes to sexual identity, to anybody else’s was a huge mistake. I was recently quoted in the Guardian, saying that I don’t believe in sexual fluidity. That’s not true. What I actually meant was that I resent being told that, as a woman, I am inherently sexually fluid. As a teenager, I worked hard at sexual fluidity and it was an unmitigated disaster. That’s not to say that for many people it’s an absolute fact. Strange things happen; one day I could wake up fancying men. A woman in China did sprout a horn, after all.

Frances Ryan

When I was 22 a stranger died. Daniel James was injured in a rugby training accident, became paralysed from the chest down in 2007, and a year later flew to a Swiss euthanasia clinic to end his life.

I remember the strange feeling of anger at the time – at him perhaps, and the many who read Daniel's desire “not to live a second class existence” and glossed over it as if it was obvious. His choice felt like a personal slight. Complicit in a presumption that life with physical limitation was less of a life, one that could be extinguished with the mercy of putting a sick dog out its misery.

Five years later I was dedicating a Guardian column to defending a disabled person's right to die.

I'd like to say the change came from discussion. From hearing the opposition and conceding to rationality. Truth is, the problem was never too little rationality. It was too much emotion. There's something about listening to another disabled person's desire to die that touches the pit of your stomach.

If a Daniel James case emerged today, I'm not sure I'd feel any different than I did back then. His was the extreme end of assisted suicide in a debate I don't think anyone has all the answers for. But as time went on, and other cases emerged, I became sure blanket bans didn't do the issue justice, and certainly not because I felt another person's choice for death was a reflection on my life.

Sometimes, I think, changing your mind requires a change in your gut.

Ian Leslie

Before and for some time after the 2003 invasion of Baghdad, I was convinced that military action was the only way to deal with Saddam Hussein. Then, at some point during its long, bloody and WMD-free aftermath, I came to see that it had been a terrible mistake, and thus found myself in agreement with a lot of people I thought were wrong about almost everything. I won'’t lie to you: that was galling.

But who I am to judge? On probably the gravest political issue of my adult life, I made the wrong call. Perhaps surprisingly, this doesn'’t seem to have dented my confidence in my own judgement. When I find myself part of what Mrs Merton used to call “a “heated debate”” about, say, Syria, I don'’t raise my hands, smile ruefully and say, “Guys, I’'m going to sit this one out. I just can'’t be trusted.” I jump in with both feet. Sometimes I make hand gestures.

According to the psychologists, a certain margin of self-delusion is necessary for our mental well-being. Most sane, happy people are wrapped in “positive illusions”, and one of them consists of a feeling that we'’re basically right about most stuff, most of the time, because we are smarter than most cookies. Empirical evidence to the contrary can wake us from this happy dream, but not for long.

Then again, maybe I’'m wrong about this, and I'’ve been right all along about everything. It'’s worth considering.

Jonn Elledge

Ten years ago or more I came perilously close to ruining a party by having an argument with my then girlfriend about (I'm sorry; I'm so sorry) the Euro. She was anti; I was pro.

I was very pro, in fact. “Britain should join it” levels of pro. “Happy to ruin parties by banging on about it” levels of pro, even. I claimed to be beset by terrifying visions of London's economy upping sticks and moving to Frankfurt, purely because of our silly backwards currency, but that wasn't the real reasoning behind my opinion at all.

My real reasons for being pro-Euro were entirely emotional. I was annoyed at foreign media tycoons who spread lies about the EU for their own personal reasons. I was, and am, embarrassed about Britain's petulant Euroscepticism, and our constant threats to take our ball away from a sensible, if flawed, international project. Support for the Euro was a way of showing that I wasn't one of those people.

And I was completely wrong.

Everything that annoyed me then still annoys me now, of course. I'm still pro-European, and I still cringe whenever ministers start talking about the EU like it's nothing more than a foreign enemy that it's our patriotic duty to hit with a stick.

But everything that has happened since, in Greece and Ireland and Portugal, has convinced me that joining an international currency on that basis would have been a bloody terrible idea, and that perhaps the best thing Gordon Brown ever did was to keep us out. In 2003, I now realise, I had no idea what I was talking about. I just wasn't clever enough to hold that opinion.

My pro Euro stance, in fact, was a mirror image of the little Englander Euroscepticism I professed to despise. Given that, I'm bloody glad I've grown out of it.

Helen Lewis

For years, my opinion on everything from Page 3 to pornography to prostitution was this: if both sides in the transaction are consenting adults, what business of mine is it to have an opinion? 

Recently, I've realised that was a cop-out, driven by my desire to be seen as "pro-sex", i.e. not one of those dried-up old husk battleaxes of the second wave that everyone enjoys being mean about now. In my desire to seem edgy and cool and un-Mary-Whitehouse-like, I'd become the living embodiment of that Onion article: Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does.

Now, my position is different, although still wishy-washy enough that it won't please either "side". I think that, as someone who lives in a world where porn and sex work happen, I do get to have an opinion. (I just need to figure out what it is.) 

I've got this far: I don't think that sex having an economic value is, overall, a good thing for women. (Yes, not all sex workers are female/heterosexual, but it seems wilful to deny the prevailing gender dynamic.) Selling sex reinforces the idea that sex is something which men want, and women have to be persuaded to give up. That's the same logic which fuels the historically conservative idea that marriage was needed to obtain sexual access to women, or the modern one that you use flowers, chocolates and nice dinners. It's all reflective of a society in which men have the money and power, and use that to get what they want. 

In The Sex Myth, Brooke Magnanti counters concerns about the safety of sex workers with the retort that Arctic fishing is also a dangerous profession, but no one gets their knickers in a twist about that. She has a point - I am instinctively wary of the idea of policing female sexuality - but the analogy doesn't really hold. We don't live in a society where the foundation of most relationship is assumed to be Arctic fishing, and it's generally accepted that men like Arctic fishing more than women, and if women don't give them all the cod and haddock they need, they'll be forced to fish elsewhere. 

While my view on sex work has changed, though, what hasn't altered is my belief that harm reduction is what all feminists should be aiming for. As my colleague Laurie Penny says, inviting media along on raids on brothels risks compromising women's safety, and the Proceeds of Crime Act is open to abuse. If legalisation makes sex workers safer, then that's the way we should go. And we shouldn't stigmatise and ostracise sex workers: who among us hasn't contributed to oppressive systems in our lives? Let she who scrupulously boycotts every tax-dodging firm and forsakes all battery chickens cast the first stone.

Juliet Jacques

I’ve always been open to changing my mind, having spent my entire adult life somewhere on the left but unable or unwilling to identify myself with any of the post-Marx positions, let alone any party or movement that represents them. In the run-up to the US election in 2004, I found George Bush’s depiction of John Kerry as a “flip-flopper” absurd: he reconsiders his position according to new experiences and changing situations! How can anyone trust him? Bush won Ohio, and thus the US, but my faith in American democracy had been sorely shaken by the rumours about Bush’s victory in Florida four years earlier (and I spent a lot of time as an undergraduate laughing along with Bill Hicks’s take on the subject).

But looking back, few of my political opinions have shifted much since I was an angry student, even though pretty much everything else in my life has. I still think alternatives to capitalism are desperately needed, and that Labour’s shift to neoliberalism is a disaster; that the Iraq war was illegal, ill-judged and wrong; and that LGBT politics should not purely assimilationist.

Under Blair, I often said that the two major parties were exactly the same, although since studying Attlee and Thatcher as a History student, I was careful to remember that this was a recent development. This position, similar to Russell Brand’s now, was one reason why I didn’t vote in 2001, but another was that baseball cap-wearing, fourteen-pint-drinking Conservative leader William Hague was clearly unelectable, and if the opinion polls had been closer, I might have roused myself from my skunk-induced stupor to register in Manchester.

I’d always loathed the Conservative Party, even though I’d never known any Tory government besides the slow, hilarious collapse of John Major’s. But since May 2010, I’ve despised them more every day, which I suppose is a change of sorts. For the last two general elections I was living in Brighton and voted Green as they had a chance of winning a seat – and I was glad to contribute to Caroline Lucas’s success three years ago.

I still think there are too many similarities between Conservative and Labour, but now attribute them to the stranglehold that various financial and industrial interests have over parliamentary politics, rather than who enters each party at grass-roots level, and after 13 years of New Labour and three years of the Conservative-led coalition, I’d rather have the former – I don’t think the assault on the public sector, benefits or the NHS, nor the rises in tuition fees, would have been quite so brutal, even though I know that these are extensions of Blairite policies.

So, in 2015, acknowledging the sad reality of being away from a place where voting Green or Socialist would make much impact, I will probably vote Labour, albeit with the heaviest of hearts.

Unless I change my mind at the polling station ...

Sarah Ditum

One of the problems with writing about feminism is that there are very few people who want to hear about violence against women. However, it is possible to overcome this rule of silence, and the way to do it is this: initiate a discussion of pornography. Instantly, people will demand to know how feminist energies be squandered on causes such as Lose the Lads’ Mags or No More Page 3 when there are lives to be saved, rapes to be prevented.

I know this because it’s an argument I’ve chucked about myself on occasion. It is, I think now, a completely flawed one, but seductive – because it releases you from the imperative to be critical of pornography, and being critical of pornography is never a super-fun position to take. You are, after all, impinging on someone else’s pleasure. Dan Savage, whose writing on sex I enjoy a lot, is insistent about defending straight men from “smut shaming”, and who wants to be the girl who smut shames? It’s much simpler to adopt a studiously liberal position that gives preeminence to the rights of consumers and producers.

But it’s also insufficient: all of us live in a world where the messages of pornography shape our most intimate relationships. Much of the “proof” presented to show that porn is inherently damaging is more than a little flawed, but there is convincing evidence that lads' mags, for one, promulgate the attitudes held by rapists. That doesn’t mean pornography is a direct cause of rape, of course, and it doesn’t mean I think you’re a bad person for liking porn, but it does mean we should acknowledge that much of the pornography currently on offer is liable to be complicit in the attitudes that cause rape and violence against women – and that seems to be true even when the material in question doesn’t portray rape or violence.

It’s customary for anyone making these arguments to be accused of being anti-sex, specifically anti-male sexuality. But pornography as it currently exists is not an inevitable expression of male sexuality: it’s one that’s been chosen, and one which encodes a story about female subordination to masculine pleasure. It is largely directed by men, made by men and viewed by men. Of course you can find pornography that doesn’t just replicate the crudest impulses of patriarchy, but you have to go looking for it: the great mass of explicit material, including the stuff that is respectable enough to be sold through newspapers and supermarkets, just doesn’t see women as people.

That’s not because representations of sex are inevitably dehumanising of women. It’s because, as things currently stand, we’re still blinking into an awareness that women are capable of and entitled to agency and pleasure in sex. When we don’t teach consent as part of sex and relationships education, when boys are given the message that sex is something you take from girls and something that comes entwined with contempt, of course there are teenage boys who feel entitled to take, demand and share explicit pictures of girls. Why wouldn’t they when the broad social tolerance of porn comes with no provision that women are equal participants?

What’s the answer to this? I support the campaigns to get pornography off supermarket shelves and newspaper pages; I’m less keen on porn blocks and direct censorship, which seem liable to failure and corruption. Maybe what we need is more porn but of a very different kind: Cordelia Fine makes the half-wry suggestion that “Until we have [a] just society, only women are allowed to make porn and watch it. Then, once we’ve got equality, proper equality, men can join in.” Whatever the solution, though, I’m no longer happy with not asking the question. Criticising porn isn’t a distraction from making women safe: it’s a necessary part of creating a world where being female doesn’t mean living in the shadow of violence.

Update, 12.29pm: We've had a late entry by Willard Foxton. It was too good not to add here. . .

Willard Foxton

I used to be a Climate Change denier. I thought the whole thing was made up by the Green Lobby - it seemed, conveniently, to fit exactly their goals. Also, things like the fact glaciation and a "new ice age" were being confidently predicted in the 1980s made me fundamentally sceptical about the whole thing.

I remember two distinct phases of realising I was wrong - firstly, when I put my oh-so-clever "Well, glaciation was the big fear in the 80s" point to a Tory friend who also happened to be a climate scientist who pointed out computer models done on 1980s computers were a hell of a lot worse than ones done in the mid 2000s.

The second, more visceral point was when I was involved with a campaign to have a child name an Iceberg as part of the Hay Festival. Icebergs aren't named you see, they are numbered, and we thought that was rather a shame. A truly huge iceberg broke off the icecap - I seem to recall it was about the size of London - and my job was to track it. My boss at the time had a morbid fear that an ocean liner would crash into it, you see.

At the time it broke off, it was the biggest iceberg on record; by the time it was named (the child in question called it "Melting Bob"), it was the 4th biggest on record - because three bigger ones had broken off. One was about the size of Belgium. I realised if we were getting bigger and bigger icebergs, something must be going on, and all these scientists probably knew a thing or two.

1. Miliband's challenge is to prove he can do without Santanomics? (Daily Telegraph)

Labour’s hopes depend on whether Ed the house-builder can also reconstruct the state, says Mary Riddell. 

2. Why does Wonga even exist? It's a question no one on the left asks (Guardian)

Reining in payday loan firms is seen as the only 'realistic' way to tackle poverty, writes Zoe Williams. It's beyond depressing.

3. Do we really want the state to run politics? (Times)

If taxpayers fund parties it won’t be long before quangoes control what politicians can say and do, writes Daniel Finkelstein. 

4. Whether or not it's Heathrow, airport expansion is just another glamorous project for the rich (Guardian)

David Cameron's Heathrow U-turn capitulated to the toughest corporate lobby of our times and its claims of what's best for 'UK plc', writes Simon Jenkins. 

5. Britain should not have a two-child policy (Times)

Tories want to cut benefits for large families but we need more children to support our ageing population, says Alice Thomson. 

What prompted the death of a man whose life was more valuable to Assad than any other foreigner’s in Syria, asks Robert Fisk. 

Stagnation has made politicians, and perhaps voters, desperate for anything that sounds like it might turn on the economic jets, says a Guardian editorial. 

8. Why Abenomics will disappoint (Financial Times)

Signs are that deflation can be beaten but hopes for faster trend economic growth are optimistic, writes Martin Wolf. 

9. The real gift to the younger generation this year would be solving the productivity puzzle (Independent)

This week highlights the financial stretch between wanting everyone to have a good time and worrying about the cost of it all, writes Hamish McRae. 

10. Cameron’s losing proposition in Europe (Financial Times)

The PM should focus on reform, not repatriation, says Charles Grant.

In a rather desperate attempt to demonstrate that he's taking "tough" action on immigration, David Cameron has rushed forward a ban on migrants claiming out-of-work benefits for three months after their arrival to 1 January, the date when the transitional controls on Romanians and and Bulgarians expire. 

He said: 

The hard-working British public are rightly concerned that migrants do not come here to exploit our public services and our benefits system.

 

As part of our long-term plan for the economy, we are taking direct action to fix the welfare and immigration systems so we end the 'something for nothing culture' and deliver for people who play by the rules.

 

Accelerating the start of these new restrictions will make the UK a less attractive place for EU migrants who want to come here and try to live off the state. I want to send the clear message that while Britain is very much open for business, we will not welcome people who don’t want to contribute.

In offering "tough" new measures on immigration, Cameron is seeking to appease the unappeasable. Why, his MPs and others will ask, should migrants only be barred from claiming benefits for three months? And if the PM can rewrite the rules to stop newcomers receiving welfare, why he can't he rewrite them to stop them taking jobs? (Many on the right appear to simultaneously believe that immigrants come to sponge off the state and that they're taking 'all the jobs'.) As Tory rebel David Ruffley said in response: "It's not enough to choke off any abuse of benefits because many want to come here to work.

"The minimum wage in Romania is £1 and, for perfectly rational economic reasons, they want to come here to work for £6 an hour. We were told 13,000 Poles were coming under the Labour government and it turned out to be 500,000, putting pressure on public services."

Rather than challenging those who believe that immigration is always and everywhere an ill, Cameron is reinforcing the view that we should do all we can to deter foreigners from coming to these shores. Again, as any economist will tell you, the reverse is true. There is no evidence that migrants take jobs that would have otherwise gone to domestic workers (studies suggest that immigration increases labour demand as well as supply), or that they depress average wages. But there is much evidence that they are net contributors to the economy, paying far more in taxes than they receive in benefits and services. An OECD report last month, for instance, found that they make a net contribution of 1.02 per cent of GDP or £16.3bn to the UK, since they are younger and more economically active than the population in general.

It's for these reasons that, as the Office for Budget Responsibility has shown, we will need more, not fewer immigrants, if we are to cope with the challenge of an ageing population and the resultant increase in the national debt. Should Britain maintain net migration of around 140,000 a year (a level significantly higher than the government's target of 'tens of thousands'), debt will rise to 99 per cent of GDP by 2062-63. But should it reduce net migration to zero, debt will surge to 174 per cent. As the OBR concluded, "[There is] clear evidence that, since migrants tend to be more concentrated in the working-age group relatively to the rest of the population, immigration has a positive effect on the public sector’s debt…higher levels of net inward migration are projected to reduce public sector net debt as a share of GDP over the long term relative to the levels it would otherwise reach."

One might expect a fiscal conservative like Cameron to act on such advice but, as so often in recent times, the PM is determined to put politics before policy. The irony is that, by allowing UKIP to claim yet another political victory, he isn't even succeeding in these debased terms.