‘‘Could you tell us about your approach to the early-years curriculum?” asks a mother with a definite air of being better informed than I am. I stifle a yawn and try to distract Moe, who is determined to clonk another baby over the head with a toy dinosaur.

I’ve been at the primary academy open day for 15 minutes and I’m already wishing I were anywhere else. There must be over 100 parents crammed into the canteen. The head teacher is rather softly spoken (is that a good sign?) and I can hardly hear her above the noise of her prospective students. They are on the verge of being bored to tears and yet the question-and-answer session shows no sign of abating. Parental anxiety levels – and let’s be honest, they rarely bother the bottom of the chart – are palpably high.

Thus far, I have assumed a position of lofty indifference where schools are concerned. I am not going to be one of those parents who get all het up about it. Our local community school is just round the corner. It’s a nice, old-fashioned red-brick building – a little overcrowded, sure, but it will do just fine for Larry, who will start school next September.

Just when it looked as though things would be that simple, the primary academy came along and complicated things. It has just opened, an offshoot of an existing school elsewhere in the borough. The sponsor academy has an “outstanding” Ofsted rating, and the gleaming, brand-new site is five minutes’ walk away. I couldn’t resist coming along to have a look, just out of curiosity.

During a brief pause in her interrogation, the head teacher suggests we might want to have a look around. A long caravan of parents and buggies moves slowly out of the canteen and into the reception classrooms. There is no denying it looks great. The walls are newly painted a fresh mint green. Cute drawings by children adorn every surface. The best features are the giant glass doors, which look right out on to the park. By London standards, it is idyllic.

I stop for a moment to listen in on a Year One class. The teacher is talking about “mind maps”. I’m not sure what she’s on about and judging by the kids’ blank expressions I’d say neither are they. It’s all much more technical than anything I did at primary school. Islington in the 1980s was the zenith of liberal-lefty education: we spent a lot of time doing African dancing and celebrating Diwali. I loved it but admittedly still don’t know my times tables, or what exactly happened in British history and when. Walking through Trafalgar Square the other week, I loudly and confidently recounted to Larry the story of how Nelson beat the Spanish Armada.

I wonder if they spend much time mind-mapping at the community school. Somehow I doubt it. At their open day, the headmaster struck me as an admirably practical person. He told us what we needed to know and kept the question-and-answer session short. A man after my own heart.

That evening, Curly and I weigh up the options.

“The academy was very nice,” he says.

“Very clean.

“Almost surgical.”

“Hmm.” That settles it. It’s not our kind of place at all.

The GPs in my area are in shock. We’ve just had our first dose of “Lansley’s medicine”. Andrew Lansley was the architect of the coalition government’s new-look NHS; one of a succession of politicians to use the crowbar of competition to prise apart the nation’s favourite public service, coincidentally offering the pickings to the private sector. Lansley’s medicine doesn’t taste at all nice – there’s no spoonful of sugar to help it go down.

We’ve always looked after our patients round the clock. In days of yore, each individual practice made a doctor available at nights, weekends and public holidays. As demand for out- of-hours care burgeoned during the 1990s, the 27 practices in our patch banded together in a “co-op”, covering each other on a rota basis to ensure our working lives remained sustainable. Everyone knew everyone, if not personally then certainly by reputation. We trusted each other to do a good job for our respective patients, and we also knew that our standing among our peers depended on our doing so.

In 2004 the Blair government handed responsibility for out-of-hours to primary care trusts (PCTs). Our co-op became a not-for-profit community benefit society and the PCT commissioned us to carry on business as usual. Periodically the PCT made noises about putting the service out to tender but they never followed through. They appreciated our high standards; we regularly featured in the top flight of national audits.

And then there were the horror stories from other parts of the country, places where private providers who’d undercut local GPs went on to deliver services characterised by long waits and dangerously skeletal staffing levels. Not infrequently these relied on agency doctors, some from abroad, with occasionally fatal results.

In April this year, PCTs ceased to exist and GPs, as clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), took over responsibility for the majority of NHS services. In our patch, one of the most pressing tasks has been to tackle the unsustainable pressure on our local A&E. We decided to relocate the expensive walk-in centre (foisted on us by the last Labour government) to the front door of A&E and reinvent it as an urgent care centre, dealing with the significant numbers of patients presenting to casualty with problems that could be managed by GPs. Part of the vision was to integrate this urgent care centre with the out-of-hours service to provide a efficient response to all urgent and unscheduled care needs.

So far so good. But under the competition regulations in Lansley’s Health and Social Care Act we couldn’t just instate this new service and were obliged to put it out to tender. We felt that our track record in the community would stand us in good stead. We joined forces with the hospital and the ambulance trust to put forward a bid that was the epitome of the joined-up working the modern NHS needs. Our proposal was strong; strong enough to get us into the final two contenders. But not quite strong enough to win.

To be clear: the winner (I’ll call them the Big Beast from the North) triumphed fairly and they do run good-quality out-of-hours services elsewhere in the country. What causes so much upset is that it was agonisingly close. The bids were scored by impartial outsiders according to a fixed rating system, and there was less than 1 per cent difference between us. There was no significant variance in cost.

The Big Beast – an organisation some 20 times larger than ourselves – has a high-powered management team that has experience of competing for several previous tenders (the process is hugely complex, time-consuming and expensive). This was the first time we’d done anything like this. The few extra points they scored essentially came down to knowing how much of what sort of detail to present where.

Our situation exposes the idiocy of Lansley’s reforms. As GPs, we’ve been told we’re best-placed to design services according to our population’s needs and we have been given the power to commission them. But we are also potential providers – the system has an automatic conflict of interest at its heart. To guard against partial decisions, we GPs have to absent ourselves from the assessment of bids.

A rating system, however sophisticated, can only supply crude numerical comparisons and allows no place for mature professional judgement. It is sheer madness to overturn years of successful service delivery and established working relationships on a variance of less than 1 per cent between incumbent and pretender, yet that’s what we now have to do.

Come April 2014, our out-of-hours service will be run by strangers based many hundreds of miles away. As yet, we don’t know the doctors who’ll be looking after our patients. Many of us fear a lack of control over this vital part of primary care. There is a lot of anger and a deep sense of loss. As one of my colleagues put it: we are grieving. The worst thing is it feels like suicide by Russian roulette. Lansley’s legislation compelled us to load a single bullet in the revolver. Conflict-of-interest considerations made us hand the gun to outsiders. They spun the chamber. One more click would have seen us survive. As it is, we have shot ourselves in the head. 

ʼTis the season. Well, almost. In this (rural Scottish) neck of the woods, that season has less to do with shopping malls lit up like the QE2 from mid-October than with fetching in wood for the stove and the usual regimen of power cuts – which remind us, all through the dark months, of how infantile (and wasteful) our attachment to artificial light and entertainment gizmos really is.

It is a season neither Christian nor consumerist but pagan in the truest and fullest sense, which is to say creaturely – a life of the immediate and the sensual, the individual imagination constantly reconnecting itself to the whole through the keenness of the cold and the warmth of the fire, the green of the holly bush and the stark wind howling through the gorse bones on the verge.

Of course, Christmas is celebrated in our house just as it is elsewhere, and some of that celebration will be of the usual, consumerist variety, but mostly, I think, we will stick to tradition – which is to say, to the simple, unstated sense that at the turning of the year, all that we value most is quietly suspended, gone down into the dark and the cold to renew itself by a process that, to this day, I find both beautiful and mysterious.

Mention tradition at this time of year, though, and it’s not long before a certain type of clergyman pops up to bemoan the commercialisation of this holy time, treating us not only to sermons on the proper Christmas spirit but also on how thoroughly we have lost it.

Yet when I come to deck my kitchen with a few branches of holly and a sprig or two of mistletoe, I cannot help but think I will be honouring the real tradition of the season, as I celebrate not so much a few days of absurd excess in a time of steady – if relative – plenty but the power of the imagination to carry itself through hardship, in its stubborn reassertion of creaturely life.

For let us be frank: the true Christmas spirit is a pagan affair, its symbolism animistic, its connection to Jesus’s birth a cynical overlay in which an essential local festival was co-opted to serve a proselyting new orthodoxy. By papal decree, the Christian narrative was superimposed on local religious traditions, which may have given it greater currency but also robbed us of a vital element of our live tradition. Now, reading the old stories that Christian monks committed to paper, we have to work hard to recover the reality of those pagan tales and their ways of connecting us to the earth, not just because the scribes altered the content of the pre-Christian stories, but also because there is something magical about an oral tradition that the written word cannot capture.

In the bleak midwinter, there is something psychologically, even physiologically reassuring about the colours red and green, for reasons we shouldn’t even try to explain rationally. Christmas plugs us back into a live tradition that recognises that the kernel of life is preserved, not by some abstract deity but by the earth itself. By the earth, and by our own, creaturely presences here – and as we eat and drink and dance our way through this pagan festival of light and fire, with its underlying insistence on sap and blood, our connection to the earth is at least capable of being renewed. No need to give up the turkey, or the parcels of frippery under the tree, to feel it – it’s there in the colours, the scent of citrus and conifer, the first snow coming through the porchlight when you return from that last frantic burst of shopping on Christmas Eve.

In one sense, nothing very remarkable is happening here, maybe nothing more than the rehearsal of some tribal sensibility, yet in another it is a kind of revelation, a moment’s remembering that we belong, like the other animals, to the earth from which we came and our richest life is in that connection, no matter how commonplace its evidences might seem.

Next week: Felicity Cloake on food

In 2007, in front of a small group of invited guests and a camera crew, a wedding took place on the left bank of the Seine in Paris. The bride was a 37-year-old American former soldier called Erika and the groom was a French feat of engineering called the Eiffel Tower. The marriage was consummated after the ceremony when the bride lifted her trench coat and straddled one of the groom’s steel girders. Erika was the more sexually experienced of the pair, having previously been in a relationship with San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Her first love affair had been with Lance, her archery bow; she has never been sexually attracted to a human being.

Erika La Tour Eiffel, as she now calls herself, is the one of the world’s 40 recognised “objectophiles”. In the American science writer Jesse Bering’s new book Perv – the British edition of which comes out in February next year – her condition is described as being akin to fetishism, in so far as an object has been invested with erotic appeal. But while the fetishist finds a shoe or a lock of hair arousing because they stand in for a human being, the objectophile is drawn to the object as an erotic target in itself. In addition, objectophiles, many of whom are autistic, believe that their love is reciprocated. “What does your beloved object find most attractive about you?” a researcher asked a number of objectophiles. “Well,” replied one woman, who is in a relationship with a flag called Libby, “Libby is always telling me she thinks I am funny. We make each other laugh so hard!”

I don’t wave at flags, despite their fun-loving side, but I’d be lying if I said I couldn’t see the appeal of the Eiffel Tower. Erika’s husband ticks all the boxes: tall, stable, glamorous, evidently not going anywhere in a hurry. As far as Erika is concerned, the tower is unlikely to let her down. Eija-Riitta Eklöf, on the other hand, a Swedish objectophile who married the Berlin Wall, now considers herself a widow, as does the poor woman who tied the knot with the Twin Towers.

If there were a party game where we could all hook up with an architectural structure, I would certainly tip my bonnet in the direction of the Eiffel Tower. Except – and this is where it gets trippy – Erika doesn’t see the Eiffel Tower as a man at all; she thinks of the 324m erection as female and considers herself in a lesbian relationship. Now that really is perverse.

There are, Bering says, 500 identified “paraphilias” and all of us, whether we like it or not, fit into the spectrum at some point. A paraphilia is defined as “a way of seeing the world through a singular sexual lens”, which cannot be repaired or, in the absence of a lobotomy, easily removed. It’s a genetic and not a moral failing. The cheery chap who does your dry-cleaning might be a plushophile who lusts after stuffed animal toys and spends his weekends looking for sex at “ConFurences” while dressed as a Disney creature. Or he could be a formicophile, who gets his pleasure from the feeling of ants and snails crawling over his erotic zones. But so long as he’s not harming anyone, and does your dry-cleaning on time, why does it matter how he reaches his peak?

Both Bering and the British historian Julie Peakman, in The Pleasure’s All Mine, argue that the concepts of “normal” and “perverse” are meaningless to begin with. “One person’s perversion is another’s normality,” writes Peakman, whose book is grounded in a critique of the work of the hugely influential 19th-century sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing (who popularised the terms “sadism” and “masochism” in an 1886 book) and Havelock Ellis, who in 1897 co-authored the first medical textbook on homosexuality, entitled Sexual Inversion.

The term “pervert” originally referred to an atheist, which means that strictly speaking the world’s biggest perv is currently Richard Dawkins. Today we take heterosexuality to be synonymous with “normal” sex but when the term was first used, in 1892 by Dr James G Kierman, it was linked to “abnormal manifestations of the sexual appetite” in both sexes. In Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary in 1901, “heterosexual sex” was defined as “an abnormal or perverted appetite towards the opposite sex”. Until recently, masturbation and oral sex were considered shameful perversions and if a woman experienced desire at all in the 19th century, she was seen as a nymphomaniac.

Bering suggests that we are so focused on weighing up which desires can be seen as “natural” (ie, also evidenced in the behaviour of non-human creatures) and which are “unnatural” (not performed by birds, fish or animals) that we have lost sight of the real question: is the expression of the desire harmful, to yourself or anyone else? And since when did we take our sexual advice from crayfish and penguins?

Our “syphilisation”, to adopt James Joyce’s term, is obsessed by the kookiness of sexologists. The authority of Krafft-Ebing gave way in the middle of the last century to that of Alfred Kinsey (played by Liam Neeson in the 2004 biopic), founder of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, and the word of Havelock Ellis was displaced by that of Masters and Johnson (whose relationship is currently being dramatised by Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan in the Channel 4 series Masters of Sex). We love the idea of men and women in white coats plotting out sexual categories – but the problem, according to Peakman and Bering, is not the presence among us of objectophiles, exhibitionists, formicophiles and tranvestites; it is the morality of those who have turned lonely individuals into self-loathing pariahs. How did we become, Bering asks, “the insufferably judgmental homonids that we are” and why don’t we empathise with, rather than judge, others?

Jesse Bering and Julie Peakman are probably the most tolerant people who have ever lived, next to the Greeks who inhabited a libertine utopia where every philia, from bird sex to incest, was given the green light. The obstacles to their arguments lie, obviously, in the abuse of children by paedophiles and animals by zoophiles. As far as the latter is concerned, Bering suggests that the same people who are exercised about whether a sheep has given its consent to sexual congress with a farmhand are less bothered about whether the sheep has signed a form saying it would like to be served up with mint sauce on a Sunday.

With children he is less flippant, and the most challenging chapter in Perv is on the varying age of consent (14 in Chile, 13 in Argentina, 12 in Mexico, 18 in Turkey, 15 in Sweden, and so on). Peakman adds that much of our treasured children’s literature, from Peter Pan to Alice in Wonderland, might be said to come from paedophilic imaginations.

The difference between Peakman and Bering is one of position. While Bering uses humour to take a vertical plunge into the depths of the psyche, Peakman stays horizontal, giving an overview of all the nonsense that has been written about sex from the ancient to the modern worlds, and adding some of her own: “It is not so much that the internet has contributed to sex in the 21st century; to a large extent it is sex.” Neither book makes easy reading: Peakman’s because it is lazily written and she has no rapport with the reader, and Bering’s because he takes us into the worlds of those who have not so much been hiding in the closet as quivering in the panic room of a building in a David Lynch film.

But the reader faces other challenges too. Some of us (or all, if Bering has his way) might feel uncomfortable stirrings of desire as we recognise our secret selves on the page; most will feel disgust or the urge to laugh. Once “the disgust factor” kicks in, Bering argues, social intelligence disappears. Desire and disgust are antagonists but they are also bedroom playmates; disgust towards the object of desire is a not uncommon post-coital reaction. As de Sade wrote, “Many men look upon the sleeping woman at their side with whom they have just had intercourse with a feeling as if they could at least thrash [her].” The secret to our success as a species, for Bering, is the way we have kept our disgust under control in the face of bodies that snore, smell, leak, swell and sprout unsightly hairs.

As the open-minded millionaire Osgood Fielding III puts it in Some Like It Hot, when told he has mistakenly proposed to a man, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

The “family Christmas” was institutionalised by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. The Christmas ghost story was institutionalised around the same time by Charles Dickens, who had realised the market value of the holly-festooned gift book and was, in his later years, in the habit of plumping out his weekly papers Household Words and All the Year Round with “double” editions at Yuletide. It wasn’t just the goose that got fat. The seasonal stuffing was fiction, spine-chillers and heart-warmers, short enough to be consumed as hors d’oeuvres to the banquet.

Amid a mood of holiday relaxation, these stories worked best if read aloud, ideally by the paterfamilias, in an atmosphere of intimacy. Dickens liked to read his Christmas stories and books ahead of publication to invited friends around his hearth. There’s a charming sketch by Daniel Maclise picturing the Inimitable reading his 1844 effort The Chimes. Thomas Carlyle is in the place of honour at the author’s right hand, looking as if a particularly sharp spasm of his chronic constipation has just stabbed his vitals.

The best known of the Dickensian ghost stories is the sickly sweet A Christmas Carol. The much scored-over manuscript now resides in the Morgan Library in New York. Legend has it that J P Morgan, the old robber baron, liked to read from it to his family on Christmas Eve.

M R James is, by general agreement, the most accomplished of British ghost story creators. His own age saw his accomplishments differently – as those of a self-made man, a country parson’s youngest son who ended his life crowned with the highest honours won by sheer superiority of mind. The obituaries, when James died in 1936, made scant reference to his spine-chillers. There were greater things to memorialise.

Young Montague (“Monty” to his friends) was brought up in Suffolk. He celebrates the county’s bleak beauty in stories such as “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”. Brilliant from his earliest years, he won a scholarship to Eton, where he displayed an interest in biblical apocrypha and the college’s extensive collection of medieval manuscripts. Winning prizes on every rung of his rise in academic life, he outshone all his contemporaries at King’s College, Cambridge, as undergraduate, fellow and, in his early forties, provost.

True to the monastic traditions of the university, he never married. He was, it is now assumed, gay – but either “non-practising” or so discreet that it amounted to the same thing. To his father’s disappointment, he never took orders and his devotion to Anglican religion was probably formal. In 1918, he was appointed provost of Eton. He died, aged 73, in post. A late-life memoir is entitled Eton and King’s, which just about says it all.

In the time he could spare from his duties (which he took seriously), he undertook a massive cataloguing exercise of medieval manuscripts, books and sundry literary remains. His ghost stories are glistening splinters of that decades-long labour. They, too, became an institution over the years. Every Christmas, James invited a select audience; he wrote until the last moment. Then, as one observer recalled the annual ritual: “Monty emerged from the bedroom, manuscript in hand, at last, and blew out all the candles but one, by which he seated himself. He then began to read, with more confidence than anyone else could have mustered, his well-nigh illegible script in the dim light.” Christmas brings out the ham in all of us.

The BBC got in on the institutionalising racket in the 1970s. It perceived that Christmas viewing patterns were demographically unusual – all the family would gather around the TV set, as they would around the turkey. The result was the series A Ghost Story for Christmas, the brainchild of Lawrence Gordon Clark, which ran over the holiday viewing period as 45-minute episodes from 1971 to 1978 (the series was also revived in the mid-2000s). The first five were dramatisations of M R James stories; the sixth, The Signalman, was an adaptation of a Dickens story published in All the Year Round. It’s a welcome antidote to A Christmas Carol’s saccharine overdose, drawing on the post-traumatic stress of the Staplehurst railway disaster in which the author and his mistress, Nelly, were nearly killed. The result here: a spectral signalman signalling something more sinister than an on-time through train. You can sample the story in the BBC box set or, if you’re a cheapskate, on YouTube.

The Signalman is judged the best of this pioneering set but all are excellent. The opening episode, The Stalls of Barchester, is echt M R James. It runs a dark thread through the cosiness of Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, with the gargoyles’ slime all over the cathedral, let loose by macabre doings in the crypts and cloisters. You’ll never read Barchester Towers in the same way again. There’s something evil under the pews.

The ghost story thrives on that holiday from rationalism, clear thinking and emotional self-restraint, which Christmas induces (even the most rigid of republicans may feel a spark of allegiance at three o’clock on 25 December, fight it as they will). Anyone who gives it a moment’s thought realises it’s a survival from the pagan world, specifically the appetitive orgies of the feast of Saturn. Ghost stories pander to the unextinguished primitivism that, like the fat in streaky bacon (a favourite Dickens image) is still with us. As M R James catalogued that mass of ancient writings it must have gone through his mind: did not these mouldering documents contain a larger grain of truth within them than the latest scientific paper from the Cavendish?

James adapts wonderfully well to the small screen. Mark Gatiss, whose creative juices seem to be running at flood levels at the moment, recalls: “The wonderful adaptations of M R James’s tales that I saw on TV as a child [he’s 47] have been a lasting inspiration to me.” The BBC has duly commissioned him to harness his inspiration for a version of a hitherto unadapted story, “The Tractate Middoth”.

The scenario is simple. A rich, diabolically misanthropic clergyman has surrounded himself with ancient books. He has a “soul like a corkscrew”. He has two possible heirs – one, John, he hates; the other, a harmless widow with a daughter, he despises. As he dies, he resorts to mortmain (“the hand of the dead”), the will that outlasts the body. His vast property he leaves, by one will, to his male heir. A later will leaves everything to the heiress. Yet he has secreted the revised will in an ancient and particularly sinister book: The Tractate Middoth. He has donated this to a rare book library – but which one? And, if it is found (which, 20 years later, it is), what dark forces will the Tractate release?

Gatiss makes confident changes to his source text. He moves the main action from the Edwardian period to the 1950s. He introduces characters, a deathbed scene (which James might have thought a trifle heavy-handed) and Doctor Who-style visual effects. He makes the young hero a jaunty Cambridge undergraduate, not a beaten-down assistant librarian. It all works, although for those who love the story it jolts a bit.

Two things combine to make the M R James story as perfect in its “movement” as a Swiss watch: brevity and a feather-light touch. Henry James had the necessary delicacy but in his over-rated “Christmas-tide toy”, The Turn of the Screw, he went on 100 pages too long. “Ghost novel” is a contradiction in terms. Suggestion, rather than precise narrative linkage, Lawrence Gordon Clark decreed, was the only way to contain a good story within a 45-minute time frame. Gatiss observes the rule of Clark.

The other rule in ghost stories is to appreciate that ghosts are not dangerous in themselves but dangerous in the unsettling effects they produce. Ask anyone what they consider to be the most horrible moment in M R James’s fiction and the chances are that they will come up with the passage in “Casting the Runes” in which, waking in the dark, Mr Dunning puts his hand under the pillow to get his watch and: “What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being.” On the face of it, that mouth should be no more frightening than the false teeth in the glass on the bedside table. The ghostly mouth doesn’t bite or even lick the hand. It’s just there and it shouldn’t be. It stops the heart.

Love them as one does, there’s something inherently donnish about M R James’s stories. And toffish. One appreciates the charm while knowing that one’s not of the class that was invited to those select Christmas events at Eton and King’s. Boris Johnson would have fit in well enough. Not us.

In 1972, reviewing “The Exorcism”, an episode of the BBC series Dead of Night, Raymond Williams asked if socialism had any place in the ghost story genre. The episode, written and directed by Don Taylor, centres on a middle-class couple entertaining friends on Christmas Eve in their enviably comfortable second home in the country. It’s a converted artisan’s cottage. A family once starved to death there, at Christmas, after the man of the house was hanged for taking part in a labourer’s revolt. “It is,” wrote Williams, “a feeling many of us have had, who live in old houses: that the walls might speak, ought to speak.” But, somehow, Williams concluded, “The Exorcism” doesn’t quite work. Such real horrors are out of place in the ghost story, which requires you to turn your brain off. So, as you tune into The Tractate Middoth this Yuletide, don’t think, enjoy.

“The Tractate Middoth” is on BBC2 on Christmas Day at 9.30pm, followed by the documentary “M R James: Ghost Writer” at 10.05pm. The six-DVD box set “Ghost Stories for Christmas” is out now (BFI, £59.99)

Some like to imagine that grammar schools are a panacea to Britain’s lack of social mobility. Yet in Kent, which has 33 grammar schools, the system is making it harder for the poorest pupils to succeed.

This isn’t the opinion of a teaching union. It’s the verdict of Michael Gove and David Laws, both of whom have said that grammars aren’t doing enough to reach out to poor pupils. The statistics are damning: in the selective local authorities in the UK today, pupils in the poorest 40 per cent of families do worse than average and those on free school meals do especially badly. Rather than enabling the most deprived children to rise, educational streaming seems to choke off their development.

The entry test for grammar schools could have been designed for middle-class parents with the sharpest elbows: at two grammar schools in Kent, over 40 per cent of pupils previously attended a private prep school. This is social mobility but only for the middle classes. No wonder grammar schools are so popular: the richer your parents, the better you do in grammar systems compared to the national average.

What’s going wrong? A recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies argued that it was the application system or the admissions system that was responsible – or, most probably, both.

The most common counter-argument is that not enough poor pupils go to grammars because there are too few of them and they are limited to middle-class areas. Build more and everyone could achieve their potential. But in selective local authorities, kids on free school meals at grammars travel less far than those at non-selective schools.

There’s something intrinsic in the grammar school model that fails poorer pupils. While the phenomenon may be getting worse, it isn’t new: research has shown that overall educational achievement of the poorest pupils was no better relative to richer pupils during the height of the grammar school system. A few poor pupils did better but the majority performed worse academically.

That’s because those who miss the grades at 11 do worse than under the comprehensive system. Children are more perceptive than we realise: if they go to a second-class school, they behave like they’re second-class pupils.

The international evidence suggests that the later you divide children by ability, the better. In general, the younger children are placed on different academic tracks, the worse the country performs on the Pisa tests measuring educational attainment in OECD countries.

Grammar schools did not improve social mobility, as the popular myth would have it. The system only seemed to work because there was more room at the top; the probability of a working-class child getting a professional job relative to that of a middle-class child has remained constant for a century. It’s a delusion to think a return to grammar schools would positively transform British education. For the majority of the poorest children, it would make things worse.

In his Autumn Statement, George Osborne announced that the UK government will provide £270m to build a national network of quantum technology research centres. The idea is to “support [the] translation of the UK’s world-leading quantum research into application and new industries”. The money would no doubt be welcome but there is a fundamental mismatch between the aims of the government and the aims of scientists. Einstein said it more than 50 years ago: “Only when we do not have to be accountable to anybody can we find joy in scientific endeavour.”

“Quantum” is more than just a buzzword: there is perhaps very little as exciting as this area of research. It concerns the strange behaviour of things at the level of atoms and molecules downwards. There is “superposition”, in which an atom or a photon of light can do two contradictory things at once, such as simultaneously existing in two different places. Then there is “entanglement”, in which particles share a ghostly, almost telepathic connection. Another celebrated oddity is the uncertainty principle, which demonstrates a fundamental limit to what is possible for us to find out about a quantum system.

We fund research into these areas knowing that there is barely an area of scientific inquiry that hasn’t yielded something that is useful or profitable eventually. In the quantum arena, however, few people are making a profit yet. Quantum computers, which use superposition and entanglement to create computing power beyond anything ordinary computers will ever achieve, are far from a commercial proposition. Quantum cryptography is a little closer to market. This hangs on the delicate nature of entanglement: it ensures that tampering with or eavesdropping on communications is always detectable. Less exciting quantum technologies, such as highly sophisticated sensors and measuring techniques, are likely to be the first areas to generate financial gains.

For all this potential, it seems that no one who is doing the work is interested in making pots of cash. Take Raymond Laflamme, director of the Institute for Quantum Computing in Ontario. He was one of the speakers at the Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit in London on 10 December. His talk was hosted by the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Employment, which no doubt hopes that quantum technology will make the state money. Yet it’s grappling with the nature of the universe, not the lure of lucre, that motivates Laflamme.

More frustrating for the purse holders is that science is now done in global collaborations with no guarantee of payback for individual nations. Quantum scientists also openly help the competition. Laflamme’s deputy, Michele Mosca, is on the board of advisers of the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore: he actively assists Asia-based quantum researchers to do better things.

That must be particularly hard for the Business Secretary, Vince Cable. One of the researchers Mosca helps is his his son: the Singapore-based theoretical physicist Hugo Cable. Vince once suggested Hugo give up quantum physics and make his fortune in finance. Hugo said he wasn’t “that desperate” and went to Singapore, where there was money to do the esoteric quantum science he loves. So perhaps this latest initiative is also a father’s attempt to lure his son back home.

Writing about sport throws up a unique challenge. The affection for the subject that most, if not all, sports writers have means that the usual journalistic scepticism wrestles constantly with the desire to believe that what we want to see is what we are seeing. Sport engages because of the glory that comes with achievement, because of its capacity to inspire, its ability to help us escape the everyday, if only for a moment. So when doubt emerges, when a tiny something suggests that all is not as it seems, it’s easy to look away.

It’s something the Sunday Times journalist David Walsh goes into in some depth in his book Seven Deadly Sins, in which he details his growing realisation of the enormity of cycling’s doping culture and his pursuit of the truth about Lance Armstrong. Everyone wanted to believe that cycling had cleaned up, and everyone wanted to believe that Armstrong had battled back from life-threatening cancer to achieve sporting glory. It was a magnificently inspiring narrative. For some years, Walsh was a pariah for questioning it but now, thanks to his efforts and the bravery of the cycling insiders who decided to speak out, we know it was untrue.

The need to believe fuels sporting passion, and it drives an increasingly lucrative market for sporting memorabilia. The chance to own a piece of sporting history is the chance to make a physical connection with the magic. That’s why, in 2006, a cricket ball was sold at London auction house Christie’s for a staggering £26,400. For this was not just any cricket ball. It was the ball that cricketing legend Sir Garry Sobers smashed for six sixes in one over at St Helen’s in Swansea during a match between Glamorgan and Nottinghamshire in 1968. Sobers was the first batsman in first class cricket history to achieve the feat, and it has only been matched three times since. The ball came with a signed certificate of provenance from Sobers himself, and fetched a world record price.

The trouble is, it is not the ball with which history was made. Journalist Grahame Lloyd discovered that fact, for fact it is, when writing a book on the 40^th anniversary of the Six Sixes over. And he’s still trying to set the record straight.

The ball auctioned by Christie’s was made by Duke & Son. But the balls used by Glamorgan throughout the 1960s were supplied by the Stuart Surridge firm. The bowler who bowled the over to Sobers that day, Malcolm Nash, remembers the ball was a Surridge, not a Duke. In the lot notes, Christies said the ball was one of three used during the over. Nash is certain he did not change balls. What’s more, BBC TV footage of the over clearly shows the same ball being returned to Nash after the first five sixes, and then hit out of the ground for the sixth. (It was returned two days later by a schoolboy who found it in the street).

The discovery presented Lloyd with a dilemma. He had wanted his 40^th anniversary book, Six of the Best, to be the definitive record of an iconic sporting moment. But what he had uncovered called the integrity of Sobers, not only a cricketing colossus but a boyhood hero of Lloyd’s, into question. Also called into question was the judgement of Christie’s, an institution firmly embedded in the British establishment and with an international reputation. When you are an individual journalist about to go up against such reputations, and such power, you think twice. Lloyd thought, and decided that not to pursue the case would not be cricket.

In his book on the anniversary, he raised the doubts. In his latest book Howzat? The Six Sixes Ball Mystery, he pursues the protagonists in an effort to discover how the wrong ball came to be sold, and to set the record straight. It’s a meticulously-researched investigation featuring a rich cast of characters, deployed with a deft storytelling touch by Lloyd.

I have been trying to work out lately whether I am clever or stupid. On the one hand, I have been brooding for some time now over Boris Johnson’s remarks to the effect that clever people are rich and stupid people are poor, by which reasoning it would follow that I am not very clever at all. I am, if you ignore such expenses as child support and so on, cleverer than most teachers and all nurses and far cleverer than many writers, whose average annual earnings are, I learned this week, £5,000; but I am not as clever as any doctor, most lawyers and certainly not nearly as clever as Boris Johnson, who, as I never tire of reminding people, considers the £250,000 he earns for his piss-poor column of atrociously written personal propaganda in the Telegraph to be “chicken feed”.

Then again, when Borisconi (as Suzanne Moore recently dubbed him; the name deserves to stick) was asked some relatively simple IQ-proving questions on a radio programme to show how clever he was, he got them wrong and I got them right; I have also been going through a very strange and disorienting phase in which I have been able to complete about three-quarters of the Guardian prize cryptic crossword every Saturday. I never finish it (I once did, some years ago, about a week after the deadline – it was an Araucaria, too – but no one believes me; I’m beginning to doubt I ever did; the only thing that makes me confident I did is the recollection of the feeling of despair and futility I experienced when I filled in the last clue) but I have been getting enough clues to feel as though the mind isn’t too far gone yet.

It’s not firing on all cylinders, though. The other day, I introduced the writer Robert Hanks to someone as “Tom”, a faux pas that gave me insomnia that evening and had me softly keening the word “Robert!” in the still watches of the night. It was almost as bad as the evening, many years ago but still horribly vivid in the memory, when I kept calling the powerful and classy literary agent Peter Straus “Richard”, which I suspect is one reason he has never gone enthusiastically into competition to have me on his books. The only encouragement I can draw from these dismal examples is that this is something I have always done and not something I have started doing.

However, I also learned last week, from an article on the New Statesman website, that a team of Finnish researchers had come up with the conclusion that if you drink lots, then you’re cleverer than someone who doesn’t drink at all. I give you the gist but isn’t it nice to know that the excellent joke in Andy Riley’s book Great Lies to Tell Small Kids– “Wine makes mummy clever” – isn’t a lie at all? This is very encouraging news and would tend to suggest that I am very clever, indeed. I am not, of course, as clever as the late George Best, or the late Jeffrey Bernard, or even the late Christopher Hitchens and the late Hunter S Thompson – but I’m up there. It would certainly explain why I got those IQ questions right and Borisconi didn’t, although I wouldn’t put it past him to have been merely applying some low political cunning and simply pretending to fluff the answers, in order to try to reclaim some of his reputation as the politician that blokes and blokettes (to use the kind of baby language B J would) can relate to. A doomed enterprise, perhaps, but not without some savvy, although I am glad to see how everyone is beginning to realise that without his humour, he is a rather repulsive little man, seemingly driven above all by nothing more than his insecurities.

But enough about him. The main thing to do is to try to manage the finances so that I can remain as clever as possible over the Christmas period. Majestic currently has on offer a brain juice going for £6.39 a bottle that is not only drinkable but pleasantly so. The problem here is the one I have become acutely familiar with over the years: I drink up all the stocks, the offer closes and I am obliged to try various kinds of mouthwash until I can find something within my price bracket again.

What gives me heart this time around is the knowledge that it is in a higher cause: that of the intellect. For only by maintaining a high standard of cleverness can I keep churning out the stuff that keeps my children in shoes and buys them small but heartfelt Christmas presents year after year. I may also become clever enough to finish the Guardian prize crossword one day and – who knows? – finally become about a fifth as clever as Boris Johnson.

London is one of the greatest cities on earth. The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games showed London at its best. The Games were, for many Londoners, the proudest moment in recent British history. London is a diverse, dynamic and youthful city, with a vibrant community and an impressive arts and cultural scene.

But like many large cities worldwide, London has its share of problems – overcrowding, child poverty, unemployment and homelessness – to name a few. Poverty and inequality are growing. The jobless rate in my constituency, Bethnal Green and Bow, remains among the highest in the country, and many are struggling to make ends meet. The cost of living crisis is leaving many Londoners behind and our booming population is putting unprecedented strain on our transport and infrastructure.

It will take bold and decisive action to tackle these problems to build a better city over the next decade. In his new book, Our London, published by the Fabian Society, Labour’s shadow London minister, Sadiq Khan MP, sets out ambitious and exciting ideas for how Labour can make the capital a better city for Londoners.

It’s encouraging to read about innovative ideas for London’s future. Our mayoral system means that elections disappointingly look more like a beauty pageant than a battle of competing visions for our city. With consecutive elections for London councils, Westminster and the mayoralty over the next three years, Labour must ensure this does not happen again. 

Sadiq has brought together leading experts including Andrew Adonis on transport, Doreen Lawrence on equality, Jenny Jones on the environment and Tony Travers on the powers of London Government to get to the heart of the major challenges that London faces. It is refreshing to see a leading politician encouraging debate on a crucial issue that affects the lives of some eight million Londoners.

This book contains many interesting ideas. A London minimum wage to match our higher cost of living; free school meals for all children; more powers and financial freedom devolved from Whitehall to City Hall and Town Halls; restarting the'‘London Challenge' to make all our schools outstanding (something which along with exceptional leadership by teachers saw record improvement of schools in my borough over the past decade); strategic planning for the NHS across London; and a new infrastructure programme to build more roads, bridges, tunnels and train lines.

I am delighted that in his foreword for the book, Ed Miliband says that Labour will consider these ideas as we plan our manifesto for 2015; if even just a few of these ideas are picked up, it could vastly improve the lives of millions of Londoners.

As an MP for a London constituency which has high levels of inequality and deprivation, Sadiq’s chapter in which he outlines our plans to tackle London’s housing crisis is particularly striking.  Week in week out, I meet people who have to live at home well into their thirties and even forties. Overcrowding occurs at a distressing level. Buying a house in London is increasingly an unaffordable dream for all but the wealthiest. Sadiq’s plans to make renting more affordable and secure and improve standards in the rented sector could radically change lives in my constituency and would put ‘affordable housing’ back into the reach of ordinary Londoners.

Our London is a must read for everyone concerned about our capital’s future. It shows that Labour is most powerful when encouraging debate rather than closing it down. It shows that we can achieve more change when working together. It shows that we can be ambitious for the scale of change we want to achieve, even during a time of tightened finances. I hope that this book does kick-start a conversation about the future of our city. London can and must do better than it is and we must all work to ensure it doesn't become a divided city that squeezes out most people from the city apart from the wealthy. 

Our London is edited by Sadiq Khan and published by the Fabian Society. You can download a copy here.

1. The real lessons of the crisis (Financial Times)

The real work that needs to be done is finding ways to recover lost output and productivity, says Martin Wolf. 

2. How Britain made it through the year of living dangerously (Daily Telegraph)

From crime to jobs to the rise of the far right, the prophets of doom have been confounded, says Fraser Nelson. 

3. Charity is a fine thing, but it can't justify the wealth of the 1% (Guardian)

The rich pretend the option is the status quo or outright communism, writes Polly Toynbee. But giving is no excuse for gross inequality.

4. Obama's NSA review gives the lie to Britain's timid platitudes: a debate is possible (Guardian)

In the US, the official response to Snowden's revelations celebrates journalism and calls for real change, writes Alan Rusbridger. In Britain, the picture has been rather different.

5. A good year for Putin but bad for Russia (Financial Times)

Pardoning Khodorkovsky was the act of someone who pretends his nation is still the equal of the US, writes Philip Stephens.

6. A History Boys education is not for everyone (Times)

The real problem for our schools is helping the majority who are left untouched by academic selection, says Philip Collins. 

7. The Lib Dems send in a big beast, but don’t expect carnage (Daily Telegraph)

Even staying distinctively Lib Dem is no guarantee that a junior minister can make an enormous impression, writes Isabel Hardman. 

8. Lee Rigby murder: What do we mean by ‘radicalisation’? (Independent)

After the conviction of Rigby's killers, it’s a term we need to apply carefully, writes Mary Dejevsky. 

9. A History Boys education is not for everyone (Times)

The real problem for our schools is helping the majority who are left untouched by academic selection, says Philip Collins. 

10. The EU is in denial over its failed currency (Daily Telegraph)

While Britain and the US kickstart their economic recovery, Europe clings to its sinking ship, says Jeremy Warner. 

After doing battle with the banks, the energy companies, payday lenders and landhoarders, Ed Miliband is turning his attention to betting firms. For months, MPs of all parties, led by Tom Watson, have been pushing for action to curb fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs), machines that allow people to gamble up to £300 a minute (leading them to be dubbed the "crack cocaine of gambling"), warning that they "take money away from those who can least afford it". 

In response, Miliband will commit Labour today to passing legislation to give local councils the power to revoke or reduce the number of FOBTs and to changing planning and licensing laws to allow councils to contol the number of betting shops in their area. Bookmakers, who make £1.5bn of their £3bn in-store revenues from the machines, will also be required to introduce longer time breaks between plays and pop-up warnings to gamblers.

Here's what Miliband will say in Kilburn today:

In town and cities across Britain today, you can see how the old bookies are being turned into mini casinos. In the poorest areas, these are spreading like an epidemic along high streets with the pawn shops and pay day lenders that are becoming symbols of Britain’s cost-of-living crisis.

In Newham there are 87 betting shops with an estimated 348 machines and across the five Liverpool constituencies there are 153 betting shops with around 559 FOBTs. This has huge consequences for our communities, causing debt and misery for families, and often acting as a magnet for crime and anti-social behaviour.

But currently, there is almost nothing that can be done to stop the spread of FOBTs. Laws passed restricting betting shops to a maximum of four of these betting machines has meant more betting shops in clusters sometimes open from 7.30am to 10pm at night.

The time has come to give local communities the right to pull the plug on these machines - the right to decide if they want their high streets to be the place for high stakes, high speed, high cost gambling. 

But he will stop short of meeting campaigners' demand for the maximum fixed-odds stake to be reduced from £100 to £2, telling the Mirror: "That’s something we should continue to look at and we will continue to assess the evidence as it comes in."

Miliband's intervention will, however, put greater pressure on the coalition to act. The Lib Dems have long supported action to restrict FOBTs and to reduce the maximum stake, with Nick Clegg photographed with campaigners at his party's conference. Having pledged at PMQs to take "a proper look" at the issue, David Cameron is currently awaiting the outcome of a study by the Responsible Gaming Trust into whether the machines are addictive before deciding whether to intervene.

There are some Tories who will undoubtedly advise Cameron not to follow Miliband's lead and to avoid playing on Labour's "turf", but on this occasion he would be wise to do so. As I noted, it is not just Labour MPs but Tories too (among them Peter Bottomley, Stewart Jackson, Zac Goldsmith and Charles Walker) who have been calling for action, alongside the Daily Mail, which takes a socially conservative line against the machines. If he is to avoid being seen as indifferent to the harm they are causing, Cameron can't afford to allow Miliband to own this issue. 

Something very unusual happened last night: Anjem Choudary turned down a media interview. The BBC Panorama investigation into the Woolwich murder of soldier Lee Rigby had shown that Choudary  lied about how close his personal links with Michael Adebolajo were.

"The last time I saw him was two or years ago', he had told Newsnight last summer. Yet Panorama had video footage of Adebolajo at an event organised by Choudary on Christmas Eve last year. Choudary told the programme that he had not organised the event, which is surprising, since they could show that his was mobile number was on the flyer as the contact number. Panorama also understood that Choudary had overseen Adebolajo's marriage, and put this to him. Choudary, having agreed to an interview with the programme, cancelled by email. He chose to ignore the question about overseeing Adebolajo's marriage.

Normal service was resumed this morning - as Choudary was given the prestige 8:10am slot on the Today programme. Choudary refused, as usual, to condemn a murder that he has previously been willing to condone and justify. But he was not asked the questions that he pulled out of the Panorama interview to avoid, or about whether his links with Adebolajo went deeper than he claims. Nor was any other British Muslim voice offered the opportunity to counter him, though the government's anti-terror coordinator Alex Carlile was invited to offer context afterwards.

The Choudary-less Panorama had to instead use extensive clips of an interview with Omar Bakri, another figure who played a key role in the radicalisation of the killers, and who could also be seen declaring his pride in them on Channel 4 News yesterday evening.

These are tricky editorial decisions. The idea of a ban is a red herring: extremism needs to be reported and scrutinised. That sometimes will involve interviewing extreme voices. Clearly, Bakri and Choudary have an important role in the backstory of the making of the Woolwich killers. The core issue is around making editorial decisions about how to scrutinise and report on that - in the form that the coverage should take, and the questions that need to be asked.

American Hustle (15)
dir: David O Russell

Film-makers have been reluctant to find an alternative to the words “based on a true story”. (It wasn’t a story! It was somebody’s life!) But for American Hustle, the writer and director David O Russell comes up with an improvement – “Some of this actually happened” – which foreshadows the film’s theme: the intangibility of truth. The part we can be sure about is the Abscam scandal, a sting operation in the late 1970s in which FBI agents colluded with a con artist to snare bribe-happy politicians. Into this period setting, Russell inserts fictional characters, many of whom have reason to ask the same question: is this real? The answer is rarely straightforward.

Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) is a confidence trickster who pockets whopping commission fees on loans that he knows his customers have no hope of getting. His new girlfriend, Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), appoints herself his sidekick and poses to his clients as Lady Edith, a cut-glass dame with London banking connections. One of the poor saps she lures in is Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper, his permed hair clinched into tiny springs), who turns out to be not such a dope after all. He’s an FBI agent who agrees to drop the charges against Irving and Sydney if they participate in his undercover operation.

This trio takes turns providing the voice-over, delivered as if from the pages of a cheap pulp novel (“Where would that wildness take me? I didn’t know but I was going to find out . . .”). Irving consents to Sydney’s suggestion that she should feign attraction to Richie to get the better of him but neither man can be sure whether she is exhibiting genuine desire.

Everyone is keeping their cards close to their chest: we learn early on, for example, that Irving has a stay-at-home spouse, Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence). David O Russell is fond of putting the 23-year-old Lawrence slightly out of her depth: she played a young widow in his last film, Silver Linings Playbook, but casting her now as the neglected Rosalyn is nuttier and more inspired. Her lack of self-consciousness makes her hazardous to Irving but vital to the movie. She is first seen with a tornado of vanilla hair and a red face from overexposure to a sunlamp that catches fire (her volatility is contagious: she also causes a microwave to explode). To the tips of those glued-on nails she taps on the kitchen countertop, she has an uninhibited realness to which everyone else in the film aspires. Overcome with passion in a nightclub cubicle, Sydney and Richie chant at one another: “No more fake shit!” A mob boss drawn into the operation is singing the same song. “We are real,” he says, menacingly. “We are a real organisation.”

But how real is American Hustle? It’s one part Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and one part Ocean’s Eleven to two parts Boogie Nights; it takes a while to find the film beneath all that familiarity. If Russell has a trademark, it is his skill with an ensemble cast, reflected in the Oscar nominations that went to all four pugnacious main performers in Silver Linings Playbook, with Lawrence winning Best Actress.

True to form, there is an electrifying rapport in American Hustle: the group dynamic keeps the film fizzing. But it seems at times that Russell is going undercover just like his characters. Unusually for an idiosyncratic director so far into a magnificent career, he keeps drawing from Martin Scorsese’s box of tricks here: the camera that swoops at high speed on to an actor’s face, the medleys of 1970s hits (Steely Dan, Todd Rundgren, ELO), the flashbacks to nostalgic scenes of boyhood crime – what is Russell doing if not remaking Goodfellas in miniature?

Gradually, the point of all this is revealed. American Hustle doesn’t conform to one genre, though it has elements of farce, screwball, heist thriller and caper comedy. In dressing it up like a Scorsese-style crime movie, Russell brings an unusual weight and tension to what is, in essence, a gentle, rather lovely romantic comedy about tentative people trying to trust one another. The film is not without moments of physical jeopardy. The overriding danger, though, is that someone may engage prematurely those words that are as explosive as any bomb, or as final as a bullet: “I love you.”

Last night's This Weektried very, very hard to take hipster Ugly Sweater Parties mainstream.

Christmas Farage!

Portillo in a onesie! Self-depracating hashtags!

A dog (for some reason)!

That dog's face says it all. Buzzfeed's Jim Waterson is right about the real "Portillo moment":

So @bbcthisweek nailed its "Westminster on cheap drugs" feel with this shot. Man on right was almost Prime Minister: http://t.co/r8IGQ6XT3j

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) December 20, 2013

It's not quite the pre-Olympic rave end-credits scene from 2011, but it's not far off:

1. Dennis Skinner denounces the "heartless monster" Atos

The beast of Bolsover delivered one of the most powerful parliamentary performances in recent memory at PMQs in October. As he recounted the story of a constituent who was stripped of his benefits by Atos and waited 11 months for an appeal before his cancer "took his sight, his hearing, and then - last Friday - took his life", the House fell to a rare silence. He closed:

Two things the Prime Minister should do. One, with immediate effect, make an ex gratia payment to his widow to cover the pain and loss of income, and second, abolish this cruel, heartless monster called Atos. Get rid of it!

Whatever their views on welfare cuts, all were agreed that it was a masterful piece of oratory from the 81-year-old. 

2. Mehdi Hasan lets rip at the Daily Mail

Whoops of delight were heard across liberal England as the NS columnist tore into the Mail for its attack on Ralph Miliband as "the man who hated Britain", denouncing it as "immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining" and "gay-baiting". 

3. Anna Soubry stands up to Farage's scaremongering 

Appearing on Question Time last month, Conservative minister Anna Soubry unexpectedly - and brilliantly - departed from the Lynton Crosby script and attacked Nigel Farage for his scaremongering over immigration. Rather than pandering to the UKIP leader, as so many Tories do, she declared: "You do not talk facts, you talk prejudice. That’s what you talk, and you scaremonger and you put fear in people’s hearts.

"Look, times are tough. We know that. But when times are tough, there’s a danger and history tells us when things are not good, you turn to the stranger and you blame them. And you shouldn’t. That is wrong. And I’m proud of our country’s history and I’m proud that people come here."

4. Godfrey Bloom thwacks Michael Crick

After beginning the day by referring to UKIP's female activists as "sluts", Bloom continued his apparent mission to destroy the party's conference by hitting Channel 4 News's Michael Crick over the head after he challenged him on the absence of non-white faces on a party brochure. Bloom was subsequently suspended from the party and now sits as an independent MEP. 

5. Glenda Jackson on Thatcher: "A woman? Not on my terms"

Most of Margaret Thatcher's fiercest Labour foes chose to stay away from the parliamentary tribute to her, but Glenda Jackson couldn't allow the occasion to pass without criticism, declaring that the former PM wreaked "the most heinous, social, economic and spiritual damage upon this country", and concluding: "a woman? Not on my terms." 

The Labour MP for Hampstead was jeered and booed by Tories, with Tony Baldry declaring that her speech was against the "conventions of the House" as "this is not and has never been a general debate on the memory of the person who has been deceased, but an opportunity for tribute". But John Bercow rejected the criticisim, stating that "nothing unparliamentary has occured".

"We are debating a motion that says ‘this House has considered the matter of tributes to the Baroness Thatcher’ - that is what we are doing and nothing has got in the way of that."

6. Alastair Campbell blasts Paul Dacre: "you're dealing with a bully and a coward"

When the Daily Mail put up its deputy Jon Steafel to defend the paper's attacks on Ralph Miliband, Alastair Campbell seized the opportunity to tear into the absent Dacre: "You [Emily Maitlis] said the Mail is a formidable opponent. The Mail is not a formidable opponent because it's run by a bully and a coward and, like most cowards, he's a hypocrite as well. Paul Dacre hasn't got the guts to come on this programme and defend something that I know Jon Steafel believes is not defensible."

He added: "These people do not believe in genuine debate. If you do not conform to Paul Dacre's narrow, twisted view of the world as all of his employees, like Steafel, have to do, you get done in. All I say to all of the politicians in Britain is that once you accept you're dealing with a bully and a coward, you have absolutely nothing to fear from them."

Those on the left who have never forgiven Campbell for his conduct during the Iraq war were moved to rare praise. 

7. David Cameron 'gets' it on Syria

The most dramatic moment of parliamentary theatre this year came when Cameron ruled out military action against Syria after becoming the first prime minister since 1782 to lose a vote on a matter of peace and war. When Miliband asked him to assure the Commons that he would not use the royal prerogative to approve intervention, he replied:

Let me say the House has not voted for either motion tonight. I strongly believe in the need for a tough response to the use of chemical weapons, but I also believe in respecting the will of this House of Commons. It is very clear tonight that while the House has not passed a motion, it is clear to me that the British parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that and the government will act accordingly.

With Obama responding by halting the US's rush to war and Syria agreeing to dismantle its chemical weapons (to be followed by a nuclear agreement with Iran), rarely has one voted proved more consequential. 

8. Eddie Mair takes on Boris Johnson: "you're a nasty piece of work, aren't you?"

The usually unflappable Boris Johnson met his match when he was confronted by Eddie Mair on The Andrew Marr Show. As he was reminded that he was sacked from the Times for making up quotes, sacked from the Conservative frontbench for lying to Michael Howard about his affair with Petronella Wyatt and that he listened uncritically as Darius Guppy plotted to beat up a journalist, the mayor helplessly pleaded: "why don't we talk about something else?" 

9. Cameron confronted by protester over NHS privatisation

The day after it was announced that the NHS-owned blood plasma supplier PRUK had been sold to US private equity firm Bain Capital (the company co-founded by Mitt Romney), David Cameron found himself heckled by a protester at the Olympic park over the privatisation of the health service. Unable to deny the charge that he was "privatising the NHS", the PM could only offer the non-sequitur that the government was "putting more money in". 

10. Miliband at PMQs: "is there anything he could organise in a brewery?"

The Labour leader delivered his finest PMQs zinger to date when he responded to the government's U-turn on minimum alcohol pricing by asking Cameron: "is there anything he could organise in a brewery?" The best the PM could manage in response was another hackneyed jibe at Ed Balls. 

I always feel a little uncomfortable when priests speak about the need for Christian values in business. This isn’t because I feel there is no place for values in the world of commerce, nor that I am especially hostile to Christians (I know some really good ones) but rather that I think they shouldn’t be exclusively Christian. Why shouldn’t they be Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist or Jewish or humanist values? Or maybe just values? So I squirmed a bit when the Archbishop of Canterbury raised this in his speech on bank reform and the financial crisis to the Bible Society where he spoke of the need for professional standards among bankers.

On reflection it seems quite appropriate for the Archbishop to say this as it reflects the views of Christ, who seemed to have a particular dislike for money-lenders and cleared them from the Temple. Maybe my discomfort is because the words always seem a little smug, as though the Church has the right answer rather than approaching the issue more humbly with a question. But, good for him for saying something.

The point is, values matter. However, I think we could look to another Christian group for a more practical example of what this could mean.

When giving evidence on the Libor rate-fixing scandal to the Treasury Select Committee Bob Diamond was asked by John Mann if he knew the founding principles of the Quakers who first set up Barclays. He didn’t. Funny that. (They are honesty, integrity and plain dealing). Quakers became involved in banking because local merchants and traders trusted them to look after their money. Quakers see no separation between religious and public life: one lived both by the same rules. Poor business practice – including looking after someone else’s money badly – could get one expelled from the Meeting, the unit of Quaker community. This operated, I would say, as a form of regulation.

The 20^th and early 21^st century narrative around business has seen the triumph of the market in all aspects of life, and the crowding out of social norms by market ones. This has driven a wedge between business and society, creating a false distinction and permitting business to act in its own self-referential interest.

There has been a “de-valuation” of business expunging the need for values-led decision-making, reducing everything to a numbers-based market-priced business case. How common is it today to hear people betray, in their conversation, a divide between their work and home personas, one of which is value-laden - the other devoid of ethics. The sentence usually runs along the lines of “as a parent I understand ... however I can’t see how that applies at work”. And so this is carried over from a distinction often not so much between business and society but business and values. And to go slightly further here: I don’t think the issues are about long and short-term decision-making but about values-based decisions that create long-term value.

Banks prospered because they built trust. This is what we call social capital and that trust has largely evaporated today in no small part because we now treat the law, rather than behaviour, as the defining point. If your acts aren’t against the law then they are acceptable, seems to be the assumption. But are they? Is there a simple binary decision to be made that if actions are enshrined in law, they are appropriate? Does that mean you are somehow not responsible for exercising your own judgement?

Of course not. There is often a gap between what the law says (and let’s face it, the law is not black and white) and what is the right thing to do. In that gap we have to use our judgement and take responsibility for doing so. And isn’t it our values that guide this judgement?

I’ve said in a previous piece for the New Statesman that in the context of the financial crisis, we (society) have been singularly reluctant and slow to identify individuals who should be held to account, conveniently blaming the system instead. In other words they didn’t break the law and so they aren’t accountable. This has to be nonsense. People may not have broken the law but society – and especially one that has just bailed out what can only be described as a failed system – has expectations of the financiers and traders that reach beyond the law.

This is the concept of a profession and while this concept is highly wrought in some areas - the medical, legal and accounting professions, which have codes of ethics and conduct and oversight – the banking community only has the notion of a profession, which seems to be all benefit and no cost to them.

If we accept that there is a role for the professions then isn’t it time the banking profession professionalised as the Archbishop of Canterbury suggests, and gained some values?  Shouldn’t we be able to bank on those values – by this I mean, rather than hearing about how the banks need to increase their regulatory capital, isn’t it time that we noted the other important factors in maintaining the system and pump in some social capital as well?

I have been very lucky to be part of a project that has become a movement – the Finance Innovation Lab – and my friends and colleagues there have, amongst many other amazing initiatives, developed one called Transforming Finance. It has a true and inspiring vision of what a good banking system might look like and a charter you might want to sign up to. Most exciting of all there is also a documentary, which I recommend to you.

The coalition government, and in particular its Conservative wing, has been described as "Maoist" on public service reform. They have taken inspiration from Tony Blair’s lament that the only thing he regrets is not moving further and faster on the reform of the public sector. To remind himself of this, Michael Gove even has a picture of Lenin on his office wall.  Across government, there has been a premium on radical structural change undertaken at great speed.

Public services need reform: taken as a whole they are still not meeting the expectations of the modern public and they are poorly configured in particular to tackle complex problems that cut across different social domains. The state has got pretty good at things like reducing hospital waits and strengthening basic levels of education. It is pretty ineffective at tackling problems like anti-social behaviour, mental illness and long-term unemployment. So the need for reform is not in doubt - the question is what kind of reform and how it is to be carried out.

And it is here that the government’s record looks pretty poor. If we look across departments we find big structural changes undertaken at great speed, which have ended in predictable trouble. The NHS has spent three years undergoing a vast and expensive reorganisation, which has wasted time and distracted professional and managerial energy that should have been focused on improving services.

This is not the only car crash: the implementation of Universal Credit has got into the familiar trouble that bedevils big IT projects, the Work Programme is failing to help those who are sick or disabled into work, and the rush to get as many new free schools as possible has come at a price in terms of quality. The Ministry of Justice itself now says that Chris Grayling’s high speed probation privatisation will put the public at risk. These problems are not just embarrassing for ministers, they affect millions of people.

Instead of taking inspiration from Mao, ministers would have done better to listen to one of Labour’s most successful public service reformers, Andrew Adonis. In a little noticed speech three years ago, he set out six lessons for successful reform. Good reforms, he argued, build on failed ones and learn from their mistakes. They are incremental and do not try to achieve 'whole-system' transformation all at once. They are based on existing best-practice, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. They require huge political drive, considerable support from stakeholders and create a new consensus in the general public.

Adonis's argument is backed by research across disciplines including economics and the behavioural sciences that social systems improve most if they are allowed to evolve incrementally. In this way, actors and institutions can try things out, learn from their mistakes and improve their practice continuously over time. Look at the recent public service reforms that have really lasted: Teach First (now the largest graduate recruiter in Britain) and academy schools. Both started small, both built on previous reforms and both grew gradually over time. Compare that legacy to what has happened in health: over the last 20 years, the whole structure of the NHS has been reorganised four times - often in an attempt to reverse the mistakes made in the previous reform. Very few people would claim that any of those structural reforms were the main reason for improved clinical outcomes.

If this is true, why are politicians so addicted to top-down structural reform? Because there are big political incentives to introduce 'look at me' reforms, to show through speed and scale that one is being radical, and to focus on structure as something muscular that politicians can directly get their hands on. The content and the timetable of Chris Grayling’s misconceived reforms to the probation service are a classic example of this pathology in our political system.

The first order challenge is clearly to decide what type of reforms are required for our public services. As Rafael Behr points out, Labour has yet to settle on a public service reform agenda.  In the new year IPPR will be publishing a paper that sets out our prospectus. But politicians also have to address themselves to the question of pace and scale, revolution or evolution.  Labour would do well to eschew Mao and listen to Adonis: start small at first and then grow out across the system, allow for trial and error, do not change all of a system’s 'tectonic plates' at once but be clearly focused on driving through reform in those areas that need to change, and build coalitions to sustain reform over time.  If Labour does that, the changes it will introduce will last and ultimately have greater effect.

Rick Muir is Associate Director for Public Service Reform at IPPR. His new paper Many to Many: How the relational state will transform public services will be published in the new year. 

This week's New Statesman is a triple issue Christmas and New Year Special (available on the newsstands now).

You'll find plenty in this issue to keep yourself stimulated over the holidays including an 8-page profile by Peter Wilby of the most successful and feared newspaper man of his generation, Paul Dacre. To accompany this profile the NS art desk commissioned Ralph Steadman to produce this memorable portrait. . .

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Paul Dacre by Ralph Steadman