Can you imagine earning £1.75 an hour for a hard day’s work?  How is a person expected to live on such a sum? And that the employer who paid that sum was doing it legally. This is not a rhetorical question to shock, but was evidence taken from a woman, who had worked as a home worker for over a decade, by the Low Pay Commission in the late 1990s when considering the level of the minimum wage.

Fifteen years have now passed since the introduction of the National Minimum Wage and cases such as these are now thankfully illegal. It is undoubtedly one of Labour’s proudest achievements in government and it is undeniable that it has been a huge success for employees and employers.

The contribution of those Labour MPs who sat late into the night to ensure this crucial legislation passed should not be underestimated. Whilst Tory naysayers bitterly opposed the minimum wage, Labour persevered to ensure that it became a political and economic fact of life. Many of those who opposed it back in the 1990s are now in ministerial posts, like then Tory backbencher Michael Fallon, now Business minister, whose scaremongering claim in 1997 was that the minimum wage "will add costs to British business". The Tories argued that increasing wages at the bottom would cost more than a million jobs. It did nothing of the sort.

It gave more than one million workers an average pay rise of 10-15% and now nearly two million workers directly benefit from the minimum wage, around one worker in ten. For women in particular, a group in the UK workforce often most susceptible to low pay, the national minimum wage made a significant impact. And over the years, studies have repeatedly shown that the minimum wage has had no adverse impact on aggregate employment, individual employment or unemployment probabilities.

Now the Tories pretend they love the minimum wage, all in an attempt to once again detoxify the conservative "brand". But the problem of low pay has got worse under this government. Families are on average £1,600 a year worse off since David Cameron took office in 2010 and the value of the minimum wage has declined by 5% under his watch, contributing to the cost-of-living crisis that has engulfed the country. But this government have failed to notice, let alone take the action we need.

The Tory-led government is not doing enough to enforce the minimum wage. Despite ministers promising to name and shame firms which aren’t paying, not a single firm has been named so far. Incredibly, this government have made more announcements on naming and shaming firms that flout the minimum wage than actually naming them. Since 2010, three separate ministers have repeated three announcements on the policy.

Today, we have yet another re-announcement, that fines on businesses that don’t pay the minimum wage will rise to £20,000, a repeat of remarks made by David Cameron in November last year. Whilst it’s a small step in the right direction, following Labour’s lead, and in response to the opposition day debate we have called this week, we need the government to back up its empty rhetoric on enforcement with real action. A recent report by the Centre for London found that only two employers in four years have been prosecuted for paying below the minimum wage, despite evidence that over 300,000 people in the UK are earning less than the legal minimum.

And the Lib Dems are no better. At every turn since 2010, they have supported measures making it easier to fire not hire people at work. Vince Cable didn’t vote for the National Minimum Wage and later admitted that he’d had "reservations". In 2003, he warned that raising the minimum wage would set a "dangerous precedent".

The next Labour government will strengthen the minimum wage. In September last year, Ed Miliband announced a review into low pay, led by Alan Buckle, formerly Deputy Chairman of KPMG International, to examine how to restore the value of the minimum wage and promote the living wage.

And in November, Ed Miliband outlined how a future Labour government will provide tax incentives for employers that sign up to become living wage employers in the first year of the next Parliament through new "Make Work Pay" contracts. We also need to see higher penalties for rogue companies who don’t pay employees the minimum wage and far more effective enforcement, including by giving local authorities new powers. Penalties against those rogue employers should be higher and we would set them at £50,000 – a real deterrent to the minority of businesses that exploit workers and undermine firms that do the right thing.

These measures will enable us to earn our way out of the cost-of-living crisis. But this is also about more than pay. The way to get the social security bill down dramatically is to get people into work with proper wages.

It is no surprise that in 2010, the National Minimum Wage topped a poll of political studies academics to find the best policy of the last 30 years. Labour created it and Labour will strengthen it for all of the low-paid people around our country, working together with representatives of both employers and employees to find a consensus and moving together towards the shared goal of making work pay. And it is Labour that will take proper sanctions against those that do not pay it.

The hint from Channel 4 is that Hostages (Saturdays, 9pm) will fill the gap left by Homeland, though it has tried to be clever about this, linking the programmes – both of which are US versions of Israeli series – by pointing out how different they are. I have two things to say about this. The first is that Homeland hasn’t left a gap; it went AWOL a long time ago. The second is that even if it had left a hole in the schedule, Hostages wouldn’t be able to fill it. People who drone on about how great US television is conveniently forget that the good stuff mostly comes from cable channels. Hostages is a network show – and it shows.

The plotting is devised for people with tiny attention spans and an urgent need to visit the refrigerator at least once every ten minutes. It’s stupid and silly and frenetic and boring: so stupid and silly and frenetic and boring that it has yet to be recommissioned for a second season.

The story goes like this. Toni Collette plays a thoracic surgeon called Ellen Sanders (is it my imagination or are glossy but trustworthy US television and movie characters almost always called Ellen?) who is scheduled to remove a suspect shadow from the president’s lung. The night before she is due to carry out this procedure, an armed gang breaks into her house and tells her that if she does not kill the leader of the free world while he is on the operating table, it will kill her family.

At the head of this gang is Duncan Carlisle (Dylan McDermott, looking annoyingly hunky), a brilliant FBI agent. Why does Carlisle want the president to die? I’ve no idea, though this seems somehow to be linked to his wife, who has cancer. Perhaps his dastardly plot is just a complicated way of speeding up health-care reform.

The gang is able to control the family in two ways. First, its members are technical geniuses. In episode two, for instance, they force Ellen to implant GPS tracking devices under the skin of her husband and children. (Incidentally, I watched the second episode because I’m the most conscientious television reviewer in Britain, not because I longed to know if Ellen and Duncan develop some kind of weird sexual attraction to one another – although this is clearly where the story is going.)

Second, thanks to a long and dogged surveillance operation, they have gathered a good deal of dirt on the family. Ellen’s vaguely sleazy husband, Brian (Tate Donovan), has been having an affair with his assistant and if he doesn’t encourage his wife to do the gang’s bidding, they will tell her just what he has been up to.

Meanwhile, Duncan has discovered Ellen’s daughter, Morgan (Quinn Shephard), with a pregnancy test in her hand, so he has a hold on her, too. Another of the gang knows that her son, Jake (Mateus Ward), has drug-related debts. Yes, that’s correct. They would rather their mum assassinate the president than discover what naughtiness they’ve been up to while she was busy at the hospital in her scrubs.

It’s all so preposterous and yet so utterly bland: the series, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (best known for CSI), is shot to look like an ad for a drug to aid erectile dysfunction. The Sanders live in a house that resembles a hotel, all half-raised blinds and Crate & Barrel sofas, and they own a dog so cute – it’s called Berkeley – that the gang members can’t bring themselves to kill him. “But I’m making pasta primavera!” says Ellen, the top surgeon, to her kids in an effort to make them (pre-hostage crisis) stay home. “Your mother wants some quality time together,” says Brian, arriving as back-up in his football coach gear.

Weirdest of all is Collette’s performance. Her eyes roll like pinballs, her bottom lip extends like a coastal shelf and her ears keep poking out of her curtain of hair as if even they longed to exude feeling – and yet she is about as compelling as a shopping trip to a branch of Bed Bath & Beyond. Will she kill President Kincaid? Oh, come on! What do you think? He’s almost certainly a Democrat and she’s a doctor. In the end, the fatal injection is about as likely to be administered as she is to wash her J Crew cashmere with her own fair hand. 

Bruce Springsteen
High Hopes (Sony Music)

There’s an awful lot of goodwill for Bruce Springsteen and rightly so – but I did laugh when Rolling Stone described this album of re-recorded out-takes, live favourites and cover versions as “a portrait of the artist at the top of his 21st-century game”. Not that it’s a damp squib. The jubilant, defiant sound of his 2012 album, Wrecking Ball, is all over these songs, most of them ten years old or more, now beefed up with show-band horns, military snares and huge, ram­shackle choruses.

Every member of the touring E Street Band is featured, including the dead ones, plus 19 additional musicians and Bruce’s children on backing vocals. Nothing sounds dated – apart from, perhaps, the 2001 song “Harry’s Place”, which could have been the theme of Tony Soprano – while the protest song “American Skin (41 Shots)”, inspired by the police shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999, now echoes the story of Trayvon Martin. Springsteen, who is known to tear his hair out about track sequencing, has chosen to open and close the album with cover versions, which must be significant – as is the prominence given to Tom Morello of the rap-rock band Rage Against the Machine, who gets a “featuring” credit on more than half the songs here. Springsteen describes the 49-year-old guitarist, who is currently part of his band, as his “muse”. For me, this is the truly remarkable thing about High Hopes.

Springsteen has been subtly curating his musical middle age for some time now, making surprise cameo appearances along­side bands such as the Gaslight Anthem, whose music is so clearly influenced by his own. The focus of his creativity these days is live shows and these remain captivating: during his three-hour Glastonbury set in 2009, I forgot to move, standing with my weight on one leg, and could not walk properly for two days.

His recent songwriting is geared towards live performance. You can’t overestimate the bonding power of “Death to My Home Town” from Wrecking Ball, its jingle-jangle arrangement evoking the sense of thousands of voices, past and present; its fiery, Celtic treatment missing only a dramatic voice-over from Liam Neeson.

On the new album, “Just Like Fire Would” hits a similar spot: “Five-hundred miles I have gone today/Tomorrow it’s 500 more . . . I go to work and I earn my pay, Lord/And the sweat it falls to the ground.” It was originally recorded by the Australian band the Saints in the 1980s. Springsteen has a knack of picking up songs by tough, workaday rock bands that sound like they could have been written by him: this con­tributes to the powerful feeling that he remains connected to people.

His own composition “The Wall”, which was written in 1998 but gets its first airing here, raises the ghosts of the real-life Jersey band the Motifs and their front man, Walter Cichon, who died in Vietnam. Cichon was “one of those heroes you could touch and speak to”, he writes in the sleeve notes: “cool but always accessible . . . the first person I ever stood in the presence of who was filled with the mystique of a true rock star”.

Springsteen wasn’t a barrel of laughs as a kid himself, by all accounts. Aloof and solitary, “interested only in himself and his music”, according to a teacher at Freehold Regional High School, he’d bunk off class to worry over the chord progressions of Stones and Beatles songs and head up to Fillmore East two or three nights a week on his own. In early interviews, he told reporters that he was so “weird” that he had to see a child psychologist. And at his early gigs, he’d lament his relationship with his father: “He couldn’t accept the idea that I had a dream.”

Walter Cichon is the kind of musician that this complicated, single-minded boy worked to become – connected and collab­orative. Springsteen credits his friend Joe Grushecky with both the title and the “idea” for the song. To acknowledge that creative debt seems bold to me.

Tom Morello first came to Springsteen’s attention after he covered the 1995 ballad “The Ghost of Tom Joad” with Rage Against the Machine (there’s a robust new version on High Hopes). You may remember when that band’s signature tune “Killing in the Name”, a thrashing condemnation of police brutality, became the Christmas number one in 2009, after a Facebook campaign to hold an X Factor winner off the slot. On tour, Springsteen introduces Morello as “the best guitarist in the world”, or some such, then follows one of Morello’s cosmic, brilliant solos with a rather flimsy one of his own. Being seen to be the best is not what this is about.

In promoting Morello, Springsteen is symbolically falling into line alongside gen­erations of American protest singers and musical activists, just as he is whenever he talks about Woody Guthrie onstage. His ongoing transformation into a fully collab­orative, modern folk act repre­sents a new era in his career. Admitting that you need other people suggests that you’re concerned about remaining “useful”. That in itself ensures you are.

For the third time in as many years, Egyptians are voting in a referendum on their country’s future. This time voters are being asked to give their assent to a new constitution drawn up following the removal of the country’s first democratically elected president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi. In July 2013 the army deposed Morsi and imprisoned many of his supporters following mass protests by Egyptians who feared their Islamist president was exhibiting increasingly authoritarian tendencies. The new constitution bolsters the role of the military – it permits civilians to be tried in civilian courts, and allows the military to set its budgets independently of parliament, for instance- and is seen by many as a vote of approval for the armed forces chief, General Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, to run for president.

The Referendum is expected to yield a “yes” vote: many ordinary Egyptians crave stability as years of unrest takes its toll on the economy, the Muslim Brotherhood is boycotting the vote and some people in favour of a “no” vote have been arrested. The only real uncertainty is how large the turnout will be.

A yes vote, in my view, will prove a gross mistake, and here’s why:

1. The Egyptian military instigated a brutal crackdown on its enemies – hundreds Muslim Brotherhood supporters are known to have been killed in August 2013 (the Muslim Brotherhood places the death rate 2,200). Now the military is striking out against the liberal activists that once supported 2013's military intervention. Three prominent pro-democracy activists were jailed at the end of last year, and restrictions have been placed on the right to protest. A “yes” in today’s referendum is a “yes” to a military elite that can and will use military courts against civilians, including pro-democracy campaigners, and that has shown itself unwilling and incapable of practicing the democratic norms of compromise and negotiation. In short, a "yes" today looks set to be a "no" for democracy – and pro-democracy campaigners should brace themselves for the consequences. 

2. General Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, who earlier this week gave his strongest hint to date that he will run for president, is already demonstrating an alarming tendency to cultivate a personality cult. His image is available on anything from chocolates to lingerie, and some Egyptians staged protests because he wasn’t named Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year”. Perhaps the soft-spoken general can’t help it if ordinary Egyptians want to make a hero of him: but it also seems its something he’s actively encouraging. Last year he told the public he'd been experiencing grand, premonitory dreams. In one he spoke to Egypt’s late leader Anwar Sadat about how he, too, was destined to lead Egypt. In another he raised a sword emblazoned with the words “there is no God but God”. 

3. Three years on from Egypt’s revolution, the country is still divided over its future and identity. What role should religion play in the state? What are the limits – if any – on freedom of speech and association? Can Islamists, secularists and Coptic Christians accommodate each other politically? In the long term, the only way to secure national unity and reconciliation is through peaceful negotiation and compromise – but the new constitution looks most likely to usher in a new period of rule by a military unafraid to impose its narrow, inflexible vision for Egypt on a diverse and divided population. 

THE POLITICS INTERVIEW: DOUGLAS ALEXANDER
Just a week after the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, signalled a rapprochement between Labour and the Liberal Democrats in an interview with the New Stateman, his shadow cabinet colleague Douglas Alexander has told the magazine unequivocally that he is “devising a strategy for a majority government” and poured cold water on the idea of a Lab-Lib coalition.

Giving his first major interview as general election co-ordinator for Labour, Alexander rules out a thawing of relations between the two parties and delivers a stinging attack on Nick Clegg:

“They are not the opposition to the Conservative Party, they are the enablers of the Conservative Party. If Nick Clegg hadn’t been sitting around the cabinet table, we wouldn’t have had the bedroom tax, we wouldn’t have had the rise in tuition fees, we wouldn’t have had the mistakes we’ve seen in economic policy.”

Alexander’s views diverge sharply from those of Ed Balls, who last week revealed he was on “very friendly and warm” terms with the leader of the Liberal Democrats, adding that he understood “totally why Nick Clegg made the decision that he made to go into coalition with the Conservatives” and had “no reason to doubt his integrity”.

Alexander insists that the only area of agreement between the two parties is in the matter of televised leaders’ debates in the run-up to polling day in 2015. Although both Labour and the Lib Dems are ready to sign up to a “333” formula (the three main party leaders featuring in three debates over three weeks), the Tories have refused to commit. Alexander accuses the Prime Minister of avoiding his “job interview in front of the British people”:

“There’s only one empty chair at the negotiation and it’s the chair that should be filled by the leader of the Conservative Party . . . David Cameron believes that, with deeper pockets and probably more media support, he can avoid the scrutiny and spotlight of TV debates. But I think his silence will look like arrogance in the minds of the British people if he doesn’t take up the offer that has been made. He can run but he can’t hide.”

On Labour’s “New Year offensive”:
Alexander uses the interview with the NS to signal a clear change of gear ahead of the general election, telling Behr:

“In the coming days you’ll see the opening of a new front in the election battle as we not only focus on the immediate concerns and anger felt by voters about contemporary concerns but talk about how Britain can earn its way to higher living standards in the future.”

On the battle lines for 2015:
With senior Tories expecting a defeat for Ed Miliband in 2015 akin to the one Neil Kinnock suffered in 1992, Alexander argues that the other parties are stuck in the politics of the past:

“The Conservatives and Lib Dems are determined to fight a referendum on the last Labour government, not on the record of this government – and the reason for this is that they have a hopeless record . . . They are admitting that their playbook is an election that took place 20 years ago. They are comfortable with the politics of the past, and I’d argue that doesn’t recognise the pretty profound structural change that has happened in our economy.”

Stands firm against a referendum on Britain in the EU
Alexander upholds Labour’s stance on Europe (reform, not exit) and refuses to back a referendum:

“We’ve been consistent in saying the priority is stability, growth and jobs. We don’t believe that to commit now to an In/Out referendum is the right choice for the country. That was our position last month and last year. The party that has been continually shifting its position is the Conservative Party.”

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COVER STORY: RICHARD J EVANS HITS BACK AT GOVE AND JOHNSON’S FIRST WORLD WAR COMMENTS

Richard J Evans, Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, delivers the definitive riposte to Michael Gove’s comments on the First World War in a wide-ranging essay on the lessons we can learn today from 1914.

In the latest instalment of a war of words between the Education Secretary and the distinguished historian that began in the pages of the New Statesman last March, Evans demolishes Gove’s favoured interpretation of the First World War and condemns his reading as historically inaccurate:

Nothing could be less plausible than the current attempts of Conservative politicians and writers such as Michael Gove and Boris Johnson to portray the outbreak of the First World War as a clash between Britain’s liberal democracy and Germany’s authoritarian militarism.

In 1914 40 per cent of adult males in Britain did not have the right to vote; the troops who signed up were not volunteering to defend rights that nearly half of them lacked. All adult males in Germany could vote. The largest political party in Germany, the Marxist SPD, initially opposed the war, voted for war credits only because the government successfully presented the issue as one of defence against tsarist despotism, and was committed to a peace without annexations. By the second half of the war the kaiser had been forced to concede democratic reforms in Prussia. Kaiser Wilhelm – erratic, indecisive, unstable – was not Hitler. Imperial Germany was not a dictatorship.

Evans argues that the centenary of the First World War is a vital opportunity to gain important insights into the state of the world today:

As we enter the centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War, many uncomfortable parallels with our own time spring to mind. In 1914 the superpower that dominated the world, controlling the seas and ruling over a global empire of colonies, dominions and dependencies – Britain – was being challenged by a rival that was overtaking it economically and building up armaments on land and sea to assert its claim for a “place in the sun” – Germany. All of this is alarmingly close to the situation today, when America’s global supremacy is increasingly being challenged by the rise of China.

In the early 21st century, however, when the threat of a nuclear conflict between the world’s leading powers has receded, the lesson we need to learn from the catastrophe of 1914 is a different one. Although France, Germany and other participants in the First World War will be telling us to stop a repetition of the disaster by building European unity and understanding, the focus of politicians should really be on the Middle East, the Balkans of the early 21st century, which still threaten to explode into a wider, more dangerous conflagration.

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ROBIN INCE: WHY CHRISTIANS AREN’T OPPRESSED
The comedian and writer Robin Ince angrily rebuts claims by Cristina Odone in last week’s issue of the New Statesman that Christians are being pushed out of public life by an intolerant liberal majority. In a forceful column, he argues that Odone has confused a “loss of advantage with an act of oppression”:

Writing in the last issue of the magazine, Cristina Odone says she feels her rights as a taxpayer, a citizen, and a Christian are being trampled on. She warns of a world around the corner in which religion will be a secret activity behind closed doors.

No one in our society has it all their own way: as an atheist, I am just as much of a trampled-on taxpayer and citizen as Odone. I pay for the BBC, yet nobody non-religious is permitted on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. Humanists are not allowed to lay a wreath during the annual remembrance ceremony at the Cenotaph. (The 14 faith groups that reviewed the ceremony decided this – the same groups that have supposedly been pushed out of the public arena.) There are 26 bishops in the House of Lords, there solely because of their religion.

We can all play the victim game if we fancy it. Just as some men bleat that they are the oppressed because of feminism, Odone confuses a loss of advantage with an act of oppression. This is the shock of those who are losing their divine right to dominate.

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THE POLITICS COLUMN: RAFAEL BEHR
In his column this week the NS political editor, Rafael Behr, suggests that doubts are mounting about the wisdom of Lynton Crosby’s “barnacle-stripping” approach as some Tories decide to break ranks:

The Prime Minister’s election strategist advised Cameron to shed small policies that impede the flow of a campaign message through the airwaves. Crosby’s arrival had an immediate impact, with Tory MPs becoming notably more uniform and aggressive in their deployment of centrally dictated attack lines during 2013. But the edges are already fraying and not everyone is persuaded by the virtues of monomania . . .

There is nothing unusual about parties containing rivalries and schisms. Labour is packed with them. What should worry the Conservatives is the apparent trajectory away from message coherence as the election nears. It suggests that Crosby’s skills as a disciplinarian are overrated or that some Tory divisions simply cannot be contained.

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Philip Maughan talks to the novelist
and mental health nurse Nathan Filer

Michael Brooks on the science of modern crowd control

George Eaton on why some Conservatives want to renew capitalism

Helen Lewis draws hard lessons from the trial of two internet trolls

Nina Caplan on the perils of a “dry” January

Commons Confidential: Kevin Maguire’s latest Westminster gossip

The problem with Ed Miliband's decision to adopt a more emollient approach at PMQs is that it only works if David Cameron plays ball. Today's session showed that he has no intention of doing so. In response to a politely worded question from Miliband on bank bonuses ("We all agree with the general points the prime minister makes about bonuses at RBS"), Cameron declared that he had "all the moral authority of the Reverend Flowers", bringing any semblance of a "truce" to an end.

The PM had already taken the wind out of Miliband's sails by announcing that the government would continue to limit cash bonuses at RBS to £2,000 and veto any increase in the overall pay bill. This left open the question of whether it would allow bonuses of up to 200% to be paid (not least because of the thousands of staff RBS has cut, creating the possibility of a per capita increase in pay), but it seemed to catch Miliband off guard and was enough for Cameron to claim a tactical victory.

When Miliband returned to his feet a few minutes later, after splitting his questions, his luck got no better. He noted that there were sites with planning permission where "a quarter of a million homes" could be built, before correcting this to "250,000". When Cameron rose, he pounced on this tautology with ruthless efficiency, declaring "we just had a demonstration of the grasp of maths at the Treasury". After that, Miliband never recovered, with Cameron loftily dismissing his questions on landbanking.

But as so often when he is at his most confident, Cameron overreached himself. In response to a question from one Labour backbencher, he boasted that "real wages are rising". In reality, they remain 1.1% below inflation after falling for every month bar one (April 2013, when bankers deferred their bonuses in order to benefit from the reduction in the 50p rate of tax) since 2010. While Cameron has a better economic story to tell than at any point since the general election, he would be wise to avoid any hint that the living standards crisis is at an end. Anything else just allows Labour to repeat its favourite "out of touch" attack.

There's been outrage among Lib Dem activists this afternoon at the announcement that an independent party review has cleared former party chief executive Chris Rennard of sexually harassing female members and that no further disciplinary action will be taken. QC Alastair Webster said Rennard "ought to reflect upon the effect that his behaviour has had and the distress which it caused", and that "an apology would be appropriate, as would a commitment to change his behaviour in future". He added, however, that "it is my judgment, considering all of the evidence collected, that it is unlikely that it could be established beyond reasonable doubt that Lord Rennard had intended to act in an indecent or sexually inappropriate way. Without proof of such an intention, I do not consider that such a charge would be tenable."

In the statement he issued in response, Rennard went as far as to claim that he looked forward to resuming his "roles within the Liberal Democrats", prompting even greater anger among activists. But when I put this suggestion to a Lib Dem source, I was told that "hell will freeze over" before Rennard returns to his previous posts.

I'm told that a statement from Nick Clegg will be issued at some point this afternoon. Here's what party president Tim Farron has said on the subject:

"The Liberal Democrats have taken the allegations made against Lord Rennard extremely seriously, which is why we appointed an eminent and experienced QC to examine the evidence. As a party we have no choice but to accept Alistair Webster QC's conclusions, but that does not mean I am content. Lord Rennard is not a current employee of the party and therefore the threshold that must be met for disciplinary action is higher than if this was a company HR procedure. In Alistair Webster QC's view, that threshold was unlikely to be met.

"While this process has not found to a criminal standard of proof that Lord Rennard acted with indecent intent, it is clear that he did not behave in the way that a chief executive should behave. Lord Rennard must reflect on his actions and apologise to the women involved.

"These allegations prompted the party to take a long, hard look in the mirror. The Liberal Democrats are, and must always be, a party where everyone is treated with respect."

Update: Here's Clegg's statement: "People in positions of authority should never subject anyone to behaviour which is offensive or inappropriate. It is as simple as that. I want everyone to be treated with respect in the Liberal Democrats. That is why it is right that Chris Rennard has been asked in the report to apologise, to reflect on his behaviour and why he won't be playing any role in my general election plans for the campaign in 2015."

Another week, another government blunder on Universal Credit. Most attacks on Iain Duncan Smith have been about the administrative shambles at the top. But there are problems just as serious on the ground - and eight million unemployed and low income claimants will suffer the consequences. Here are five key problem areas we can expect to hear more about as a larger number of claimants are transferred to the new benefit.

1. Claimants have to manage benefits online

Under the new system, all benefit claimants will ultimately have to apply for and manage their benefits online. Many will be unable to do this. Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) research released last month suggests two-thirds of their clients will fail without significant help. For some, it's a lack of digital skills and confidence. The government promises support - but it's hard to imagine austerity-obsessed ministers laying on tailored training sessions for several million claimants. Cash-strapped charities and councils are not likely to plug the gap either.

It's also not enough to be digitally literate. Computers and the internet are expensive, particularly on £71.70 a week. Libraries are not the obvious solution they may first seem - 1,000 will have closed by 2016, travel is costly and even impossible in rural areas, and public computers are often time-limited and oversubscribed. 

2. Tenants pay their landlords directly

Universal Credit rolls housing, unemployment and other benefits into one. Currently, around a quarter of housing benefit claimants have their money paid to their landlord directly, because they are seen as "vulnerable" or have previously missed payments. The government wants them to take responsibility for paying rent themselves, and will transfer the money into their bank accounts for them to do so. 

Landlords recently warned this may stop them letting to Universal Credit claimants as they fear tenants will be unwilling or unable to pay their rent. Arrears rose from around £20,000 to £140,000 among council tenants in Torfaen, Wales, just seven months after a pilot of the new system began. Housing associations in some trial areas have had to hire new staff to chase up residents in arrears.

Part of the problem lies in access to banking. Nearly half of the CAB's clients were unable to pay priority bills using a bank account:

Some need help understanding how they can use direct debits and standing orders. Others do not feel comfortable using services that seemingly undermine their ability to control the money that comes out of their pocket. Money may be tight, or they may fear becoming overdrawn and incurring charges.

But much of the problem is linked to the challenges of budgeting on a low income, something not helped by a further part of the Universal Credit reforms - monthly payments.

3. Claimants receive the benefit monthly

Paying out Universal Credit in a single monthly sum makes budgeting far more difficult as money has to be made to last a far longer period. Claimants currently receive different benefits across the month. According to the CAB, many will struggle to "adapt existing patterns of managing their money to spread their costs". Paying housing benefit to claimants only makes the challenge harder. It will be the first time some have had thousands of pounds lining their accounts. 

"If you have more money, it is tempting to use it to cover other, more immediate pressures," said Richard Goodman, a CAB manager in Hammersmith, where Universal Credit has already been rolled out. Keeping warm, getting three meals a day and replacing children's school shoes are often greater priorities than rent.

Some CAB clients also lacked basic budgeting skills. As with IT, there are fears that government funding for support will be inadequate.  Goodman, whose branch currently offer budgeting lessons to those requesting it, says: "We're worried we won't be able to satisfy demand."

4. Officials are unprepared for difficult cases

So far Universal Credit has only been piloted and rolled out in a handful of areas for several thousand claimants. Only the simplest cases - single, first-time claimants without dependents - have been included in the trials and phased launch. Goodman suggested this initial group is likely to be mainly young people, and to pose fewer problems than other claimant types. One can only assume Duncan Smith is more interested in a smooth rollout that appears "successful" than in learning from the harder cases - the long-term unemployed, immigrants, single parents, large families, the sick and the disabled. As Goodman put it:

It’s a soft launch. It doesn’t stress-test the system. For instance, claimants will probably have greater digital literacy than others with more complicated circumstances.

If they’re dogmatic about the 2017 deadline, they’ll squeeze a lot of people onto universal credit without fully testing it. And that means systems crashing, people not being paid and lots of hardship and misery.

5. The cost of living has not been addressed

Budgeting to the last penny is tough on any income, let alone incomes under sustained attack. Half a million people have been forced to turn to food banks, and there is little to suggest the queues will shorten any time soon. With energy firms hiking prices, landlords increasing rents and affordable housebuilding slowing to a trickle, the rising cost of living means every penny has to go further for unemployed and low-income families.

Four in five new jobs pay under £8 an hour, and are often precarious. 2.4 million people are unemployed, chasing 0.8 million vacancies. Benefits have been slashed, capped, frozen and abolished across the board, their recipients stigmatised and sanctioned with ever greater ferocity.

All in all, shoving eight million people onto a botched new benefit in such circumstances is a toxic recipe for debt, arrears, eviction, poverty and distress. Will the Prime Minister evict Iain Duncan Smith, too, in a reshuffle before 2015? Sadly, even if he gets the chop, there seems little prospect of millionaire IDS  having to sign on to universal credit for a taste of his own medicine.

Tom Belger is a student journalist. Follow him at @tom_belger.

Shortly after I joined my practice, my senior partner gave me a memoir to read. It was written by a doctor called Kenneth Lane who had worked in the practice from the late 1920s. As I read stories from his 40-year career, I was struck by Lane’s detailed knowledge of the natural course of infectious diseases, something unfamiliar to my generation. In the case of a child with pneumonia, for instance, Lane would prepare the parents for each deterioration they could expect over the first eight to ten days, culminating in the “pneumonic crisis” – a crescendo of fever, hypoxia and delirium that would, in a quarter of cases, be fatal. Only once the crisis had been survived would Lane start to talk about the possibility of recovery.

Lane never lost the awe he experienced when, in the 1940s, the first antibiotics became available. Suddenly, feared diseases such as diphtheria, pneumonia and scarlet fever could be cured within days. To a doctor used to watching impotently as otherwise fit young people died, these new drugs were miraculous.

I wonder what he would make of how we use them today. Roughly 35 million prescriptions for antibiotics are issued each year in England, mostly for respiratory infections (coughs, colds, sore throats, sinusitis, earache). Studies have repeatedly shown that, in these scenarios, antibiotics do little or no good. The infections are going to get better anyway and antibiotics don’t reduce severe complications, which are, in any event, rare. They do shorten symptom duration by about half a day on average but up to 10 per cent of patients experience side effects. And there is good evidence that antibiotic use interrupts the development of a robust immune response, which makes people susceptible to contracting further infections. The more you use antibiotics, the more you will end up using them.

In the NHS this dismal situation wastes tens of millions of pounds each year but the money is trivial compared to the problem of resistance. Bacteria multiply extraordinarily quickly and in huge numbers. This large-scale, rapid reproduction ensures that, if exposed to an antibiotic, a gene mutation will soon arise that protects the bacterium from the drug’s mode of action.

The “resistant” organism that results will survive and reproduce, its progeny quickly replacing the susceptible strain that is dying all around it. The more antibiotics there are swilling around in the community, the more stimulus there is for resistance to arise. To compound matters, genes for resistance are transmitted by a process known as plasmid exchange: once one strain of bacteria has figured out how to evade a particular antibiotic, the capacity spreads rapidly.

Over the past 30 years, treatment failure – in which an infectious bacterium is no longer sensitive to the antibiotic prescribed – has gone from being an occasional phenomenon to something encountered routinely. And it’s becoming ever more common for bacteria to be multi-drug-resistant, so second- and even third-line antibiotics also fail to kill them. In these cases, there remain “last-line” drugs – agents whose use is permitted only when eradicating otherwise incurable organisms. Despite strict control over their use, resistance to these drugs started to appear around 2007 and is growing exponentially. We face the very real prospect of routinely encountering infectious diseases that we cannot treat – a situation that doctors such as Kenneth Lane were familiar with in the pre-antibiotic era. The threat is so alarming that in September 2013 the Department of Health launched a five-year strategy to tackle the problem.

One approach will be to give incentives to the pharmaceutical industry to develop new agents. Courses of antibiotics are short and new agents are usually reserved for last-line use. Because of this, the volume of sales is small, making research and development economically unviable under the present drugs patent system. A different model is needed.

As important as new drugs will be, the core of the Department of Health’s strategy is to promote the responsible “stewardship” of our existing antibiotics. Surgeries and pharmacies are currently festooned with posters advising against the casual use of antibiotics. Patients who habitually consult doctors with self-limiting infections can be persistent in their efforts to obtain antibiotics. Their beliefs usually have roots in years of inappropriate prescriptions. The reasons why doctors prescribe unnecessarily are complex: the desire to appear helpful, an aversion to conflict, blanket treatment “just in case” serious infection is brewing.

We need to emphasise the skills that were second nature to those like Kenneth Lane. His long experience observing infectious diseases enabled him readily to identify potentially grave cases amid the morass of self-limiting infections. We need to recover the respect Lane had for the antibiotic wonder drugs that transformed his practice. He would, I am sure, be aghast at the complacency with which we employ them and the mess we’ve got ourselves into as a result.

The “Singularity” refers to a proposed moment in time when the collective intelligence of the machines overtakes the collective intelligence of our humans. At that moment, theoretically, the machines will be able to design and produce even smarter electronic brains, beyond the comprehension of our lower intelligence, in a runaway chain of events that with to unfathomable consequences.

(Terminator fans will recognise this as Skynet.)

Robots are, right now, not very physically capable, and neither are they very smart. As illustrated in one of Randall “xkcd” Munroe’s ‘What If?’ columns, humanity would do pretty well out of any robot uprising that happened, say, tomorrow.

But the robots are getting better everyday:

At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment. Bringing a new meaning to the phrase “experience is the best teacher”, the goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behaviour, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction.

RoboEarth offers a Cloud Robotics infrastructure, which includes everything needed to close the loop from robot to the cloud and back to the robot. RoboEarth’s World-Wide-Web style database stores knowledge generated by humans – and robots – in a machine-readable format. Data stored in the RoboEarth knowledge base include software components, maps for navigation (e.g., object locations, world models), task knowledge (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies), and object recognition models (e.g., images, object models).

To emphasise what this is referring to - it’s a network in the cloud, called RoboEarth, the lets robots learn new skills from each other without human input. It’s not the Singularity, but it’s a start.

Here’s a video of an early version of RoboEarth, being used in 2011 by a robot called AMIGO in a care home setting (complete with banging soundtrack):

Today's the day the team at Eindhoven University that created AMIGO and RoboEarth will run a full-scale test. Four robots will be placed into a hospital-like room, turned on, and allowed to learn as they go along what it is that they have to do. To do that, they'll have to download instructions from each other so that they can work out how to tend to a fake patient's needs, be it preparing medicines and food or making sure that they don't bump into each other.

To understand why this is exciting, let's look at Tesla, whose electric cars - which only have a few moving components - are mostly controlled by the effects of software. Instead of costly product recalls, Tesla has been able to wirelessly beam updates to each car in the wild, which within minutes has solved potential overheating issues or extended the range of its vehicles by a few miles.

Our future robotic infrastructure will likely rely on a similar conceit, with incremental improvements in software just as important as they are for home computing. And, just as Wikipedia works through an ever-improving group effort of editing and refinement, something like RoboEarth - with input from both humans and robots - could allow the rapid propogation of better software than any centralised alternative.

Quite a lot like how human societies change, learn, and improve, in fact. Maybe Skynet isn't such a wild comparison.

When prime ministers felt confident in their position they used to call elections after four years. Five is a schlep. Half-decade-old administrations look cornered, spent.

David Cameron has no choice. As a gesture of commitment to coalition in 2010, he surrendered the power of the snap ballot. It was an act of unilateral disarmament, decommissioning the element of surprise. Such generosity doesn’t save him from looking haggard by 2015.

As things stand, the Conservatives have two interlocking reasons to be glad there are another 16 months to go to the general election. They are behind in the polls and the economic recovery, legible on paper, isn’t yet palpable in voters’ pockets. Downing Street expects prosperity and Conservative popularity to grow together this year.

The obvious risks are that the economy doesn’t perform as hoped and that, even if it does, voters don’t go blue with gratitude. Another problem is inactivity as the party waits for the incoming tide to lift it off the electoral beach. The Conservatives have a simple message about what they claim to have done so far – rescuing Britain from Gordon Brown’s ruinous rule. They also have the crude outline of an offer for government after 2015 – more cuts, a European referendum, harsher immigration controls. That leaves a year of thumb-twiddling.

The hiatus is partly a function of a coalition endgame. The Lib Dems, afraid of looking supine, routinely boast of thwarting Tory plans. Cameron has played along, claiming to hoard policies in a “little black book” for when Nick Clegg is no longer leaning over his shoulder. Frustration has become a def­ining feature of Conservative identity.

The Tory agenda has also narrowed thanks to the barnacle-stripping fiat from Lynton Crosby. The Prime Minister’s election strategist advised Cameron to shed small policies that impede the flow of a campaign message through the airwaves. Crosby’s arrival had an immediate impact, with Tory MPs becoming notably more uniform and aggressive in their deployment of centrally dictated attack lines during 2013. But the edges are already fraying and not everyone is persuaded by the virtues of monomania.

It is a poorly kept secret that Andrew Cooper, the founder of the Populus opinion polling firm and until last year a strategist in Downing Street, has doubts about Crosby’s approach. He shares the concerns of moderate MPs that the Australian guru’s method doesn’t work for the specifically British challenge facing the Tories. Crosby tests an issue against two criteria: do voters think it matters a lot? Is it an area where Conservatives are judged to be strong? If the answer is a double “yes” – fiscal rigour, crime, immigration, welfare – the topic is primed with maximum campaigning energy. Otherwise, it is deemed a distraction.

The flaw is that not enough effort goes into messages that neutralise fear of unalloyed Conservative rule, which is the cultural hurdle the party has failed to clear in every general election of the 21st century. Ever tougher rhetoric on immigration doesn’t answer the question of whether the Tories can be trusted with the NHS. Ever deeper welfare cuts won’t dispel suspicion that the Conservatives are a party for the rich.

Message minimalism also denies the effects that low-impact issues can have in human­ising the Tories. For example, Crosby discouraged the recent drive to intervene against the tide of internet pornography. On that occasion he was overruled by Cameron. Although too many micro-initiatives clog up a prime minister’s agenda, there is a role for targeted interventions that connect his personal concerns with the anxieties of voters (in this case, parents freaking out at the ubiquity of digital grot).

Any communications strategy devised in Downing Street also has to compete with noisy agendas elsewhere in the party. Hard­line Eurosceptics are spraying out unrealistic proposals for Cameron’s putative renegotiation of British EU membership. Rural MPs seethe in expectation that their green and pleasant constituencies will be buried under concrete thanks to new planning rules. There are MPs lobbying for a hike in the minimum wage as an emblem of compassion for low-paid workers – an idea supported by Jo Johnson, head of the No 10 Policy Unit, but resisted by the Chancellor. There are MPs itching for tax cuts.

Differences have also emerged on the front benches. The Prime Minister, haunted by his televised promises to preserve rich pensioners’ benefits, guarantees them in perpetuity. George Osborne thinks that pledge expires next year. The Chancellor is also in a feud with Iain Duncan Smith, driven partly by Osborne’s constant raids on the benefits budget and partly by his undisguised belief that the Work and Pensions Secretary is a dolt. Meanwhile, Tory liberals say that Downing Street has no control over the anti-foreigner sirens that broadcast Theresa May’s leadership ambitions from the Home Office.

There is nothing unusual about parties containing rivalries and schisms. Labour is packed with them. What should worry the Conservatives is the apparent trajectory away from message coherence as the election nears. It suggests that Crosby’s skills as a disciplinarian are overrated or that some Tory divisions simply cannot be contained.

For most Conservatives, four years of coalition is enough. The party’s various tribes are impatient for change. The current project has run its course and they want to move on. That is the essential contradiction in the Tory message. The head talks about responsible government; the body language is in opposition.

1. An open letter to Ukip voters (Independent)

I'm in far more agreement with you than your leaders are, writes Owen Jones. 

2. Building more homes won’t cut house prices (Times)

Without a crackdown on property speculators, first-time buyers will always be shut out of the market, says Peter Franklin. 

3. One question for the Tory rebels – whatever happened to loyalty? (Daily Telegraph)

It’s hard not to agree with the 95 Conservative MPs’ letter on curbing EU powers, but it has rekindled a civil war in the party, says Peter Oborne. 

4. Labour on the banks: bonuses, break-ups and the bigger picture (Guardian)

Having been slow to announce anything thus far, Ed Miliband is finally beginning to fashion something that looks like an agenda, says a Guardian editorial.

5. Britain’s muddled European strategy (Financial Times)

The UK is alienating states whose help it needs to push reform, says an FT editorial.

6. What if it was David Cameron accused of having an affair in office? (Independent)

Ask yourself how long David Cameron would survive in office if he left Samantha for another woman, writes Andy McSmith. 

7. Labour and the Banks (Times)

Miliband’s plan to limit banks’ market share is the wrong answer, says a Times editorial. It will not make banks safer or benefit the consumer.

8. Who's to blame for the crisis, bankers or benefit claimants? (Guardian)

Class is the real dividing line in British politics, but politicians only talk about the middle class, writes Seumas Milne. That will have to change.

9. The Civil Service undergoes a peer review (Daily Telegraph)

The House of Lords debate on the future of the Civil Service is likely to expose the tensions and fears at the heart of Whitehall, writes Sue Cameron. 

10. On Europe, Cameron chose party over country – a potential tragedy for Britain (Guardian)

David Cameron's EU referendum pledge has proved to be a failed attempt to reshape Europe and stop the rise of Ukip, says Martin Kettle. 

Nigel Farage has been predicting for months that UKIP will win this May's European elections but the latest poll, in common with all other recent surveys, shows Labour remain ahead. YouGov's poll for the Sun puts Miliband's party on 32%, UKIP on 26%, the Tories on 23% and the Lib Dems on 9% (which would leave them with no MEPs on a uniform swing). 

Given this, you might expect Farage to be lowering expectations, but he remains confident that his party will triumph on 22 May. UKIP figures point out that they only moved into second place in the final weeks of the 2009 campaign after a late surge (aided in part by the expenses scandal). On 8 May 2009, a YouGov poll put them on just 7%, 15 points behind Labour and 12 points behind the Lib Dems. But by 3 June 2009, the day before the election, they were on 18%, two points ahead of Labour and three points ahead of the Lib Dems. They eventually polled 16.5%, finishing in second place, 0.8% ahead of Labour. While recognising that the race will be tight, UKIP strategists are hoping to pull off a narrow victory this time round. 

But the year has not started as they would have wanted. Farage has long vowed to turn the European elections into a referendum on Romanian and Bulgarian immigration but the dearth of migrants since the transitional controls were rlifted on 1 January (just 24 Romanians have entered the UK, according to the country's ambassador) means he may now struggle to do so. Labour enjoys the advantage of simultaneous elections in all 32 London boroughs and all 36 metropolitan boroughs, areas where its core vote is strongest. Party strategists hope that enough voters whose default setting is to put a cross in the Labour box will turn out for the party to see off the Farageist threat (my own prediction is that it will). 

If Labour do finish second, the consoling factor will be that the Tories, for the first time in a national election, will have finished third. While Conservatives hope that such a result is already "priced in", the danger remains that it will prompt another insurrection from Tory backbenchers determined for their party to adopt an even tougher line on Europe. This would detract from the party's central message that Labour can't be trusted to manage the economy and ensure that it continues to obsess over an issue of little or no interest to most voters.

As polling by Ipsos MORI has long shown, the EU does not even make it into the top ten of the public's concerns. Lord Ashcroft's recent study of Tory-leaning voters found that an EU referendum is "a sideshow" for most of them. He wrote: "A surprising number of those we spoke to did not realise it was even on the agenda, and were nonplussed when they found out it was. Those for whom it is important know all about it (though they sometimes doubt it will come to pass even if the Tories win). But to make it a major theme of the campaign would be to miss the chance to talk about things that matter more to more people."

For the Lib Dems, the worst case scenario is that they finish fifth, behind the Greens (who won 8% of the vote last time round). At the Lib Dem conference last year, one senior party activist suggested to me that this prompt a leadership challenge against Clegg. With a year to go until the general election, there would be still be just enough time to send for Cable or Farron. 

More than on any previous occasion, all three of the main party leaders have good reason to dread the count on 22 May. 

One of the mysteries of British politics is why the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, should be regarded as a man of mighty intellect. He is a journalist of crude, populist instincts, as demonstrated by his Daily Mail article on how the First World War should be commemorated. Schoolchildren, he argues, should learn about it “in the right way”, honouring “the heroism and sacrifice of our great-grandparents” and rejecting the supposedly left-wing view, propagated by fictional TV programmes such as Blackadder, that the war was “a misbegotten shambles”. In other words, he wants to replace one oversimplified account with another.

The point of studying history is neither to honour nor to denigrate our ancestors but to understand how it shaped our world. That understanding changes as our world changes. For example, it is impossible to comprehend the resilience of the project for European unity, even after the near-collapse of the euro, without some grasp of the effects of the continent’s two 20th-century wars. Gove, a Eurosceptic, doesn’t want teachers to dwell on that. He prefers them to present the 1914-18 war as an old-fashioned tale of goodies and baddies.

Performance test

I first met the Guardian journalist Simon Hoggart, who has died aged 67, in curious circumstances. In the early 1970s, I flew to Paris for the Observer to interview his father, the sociologist and cultural critic Richard Hoggart, over lunch. On my arrival, Hoggart Sr, then an assistant director at Unesco, said that his son Simon, who happened to be in town, would join us and he hoped I wouldn’t mind.

I was trying to write an intimate profile of Hoggart Sr, whose best-known work, The Uses of Literacy, was partly autobiographical. So Simon sat through a two-hour meal as I invited his rather earnest and high-minded father to talk about his working-class family from Leeds and, since The Uses of Literacy referred to sexual experience in the working classes being “more easily and earlier acquired than in other social groups”, his youthful sexual experiences. Simon looked, by turns, bored and embarrassed. “How would you assess my performance as a parent?” his father asked him at one stage. For possibly the only time in his life, Simon was speechless.

Light entertainment

Though he always had lightness of touch, Simon began his career as a journalist covering Northern Ireland, Washington and then Westminster as a political editor. His eventual move towards the lighter side of the trade – parliamentary sketchwriting, food and wine columns, a chatty Saturday column – may have been a form of rebellion against his father’s serious and moralistic tone. The miracle was that he got away with poking fun at Nicholas Soames’s corpulence, Sir Peter Tapsell’s speech defect, John Prescott’s deficiencies of syntax, Michael Martin’s accent, and so on. Such are the staples of sketchwriting, but Guardian readers (or at least Guardian sub-editors) usually frown on mockery of such afflictions. Hoggart sailed on, sometimes even mocking belief in global warming.

Learning to be selfish

The Tories’ commitment to protect pensions while looking for yet more cuts in welfare benefits for younger age groups is driven purely by electoral considerations. Three-quarters of pensioners bother to vote against barely half of under-25s. The fault, I suspect, lies with the schools, which, if they try to explain democracy to young people at all, concentrate on extolling its abstract virtues. Instead, teachers should broadcast a simple message of self-interest: if you want lower university fees, higher welfare benefits and better wages after you leave school, ignore Russell Brand, set aside your smartphones and get yourselves down to the polling station.

History repeating

The nearest precedent for the England cricket team’s calamitous performance in Australia was in 1958-59. Then, as now, England had won three consecutive Ashes series and were confidently expected to win a fourth. The touring team included at least ten all-time greats such as May, Cowdrey, Laker, Trueman and Tyson. Yet England lost four of the five Tests by huge margins and, in the other match, drew, thanks partly to rain, after conceding a first-innings lead of 138.

Something in the Australian psyche, it seems, forbids repeated defeats. It also dictates that, once regained, the Ashes will be surrendered only after immense struggle. In the dozen years that followed the 1958-59 defeat, three series ended in ties and two others in Australian victories by a single Test. I fear that piece of history may also repeat itself.

By now, you probably know the story: Closer magazine sent a paparazzo to prove French President Francois Hollande was having an affair with a younger actress, he rocked up to see her on a moped, and the rest is newspaper history. News has emerged that his so-called "mistress", Julie Gayet, who in the furore has been keeping something of a low profile, is to sue Closer for breach of privacy. As the story broke, first lady Valerie Trierweiler was immediately hospitalised with the "shock" of finding out that her already-unpopular partner was being accused of being a philanderer; Hollande, who was not married to Trierweiler, hilariously announced today that he would "clarify" whether she is "still" first lady before his trip to Washington DC in February. 

From the looks of the reports on this side of the channel, you'd think that this triangular saga might be the Frenchest thing that has ever happened. Experts are being wheeled out left, right and centre to speculate on the pathological unfaithfulness of French men and on the tolerant behaviour of their female counterparts. The Telegraph columnist Brooke Magnanti even went so far as to suggest that Trierweiler's retreat to a hospital bed has made her unpopular with French women, supposedly because French women are not "supposed" to be publicly heartbroken but to put up and shut up for the sake of their husbands' political careers. Whether or not this rampant speculation on the part of the former Belle de Jour has any grounding in reality remains to be seen, though as far as we can gather the only French thing about her is her pseudonym. We expect every French female journalist in the city has a phone ringing off the hook right now thanks to editors searching for the female angle. They're missing a trick, however. The behavioural prescriptions being levied on Trierweiler have nothing to do with her Frenchness, and everything to do with her femaleness. 

Take the the New York Postʼs unforgiving headline: "French prez Hollande will pick lover in time for Obama visit". So far, so continental. Mix in a bit of classically British curtain-twitching and you get the Independentʼs "Valerie Trierweiler: Five facts about the French first lady", not to mention the Daily Mailʼs claim that she is ʻa rottweiler whoʼs now been bitten herselfʼ. Included in the Independentʼs factsheet is the curious tidbit that Trierweiler was made cover star for Paris Match magazine - the magazine that she wrote for as an arts correspondent - in 2012, under the stomach-turning moniker "Hollandeʼs charming asset". On seeing this blatant insult, she tweeted: "My thoughts go out to all angry women" - surely one of the best sentences of all time - while calling out the mag on its sexism. It was a brave move, especially considering that the position of the "first lady" has been exclusively ornamental for so long. Open your mouth and identify yourself as a human being while daring to be married to a high-powered politician, and the media is unlikely to look kindly upon you.

Weʼve seen this sad state of affairs played out many a time: many will remember, for instance, the media criticism that Cherie Booth faced while playing "first lady" to Tony Blairʼs prime minister. The general tabloid consensus at the time was that sheʼd failed to adapt to the role very well, having committed such outrageous atrocities as continuing her own (very successful) career. See also Carla Bruni being slut-shamed for being audacious enough to have had a sexual past that pre-dated Sarkozy. Meanwhile, Michelle Obamaʼs professional and philanthropic efforts have been consistently overlooked in favour of her fashion sense ever since her husband came to power. In 2012, the Huffington Post reported that sheʼd been publicly singled out by one Virginia voter as one reason why he wouldnʼt vote for her husband, claiming that "she doesnʼt act or look like a first lady". When asked to elaborate upon that, however, the mouthy voter became a lot less sure of himself. Was he referencing her race, her haircut, or her failure to conform to a the tragic, stylish-but-silent stereotype that still persists in the public imagination? Possibly all three. As far as the media and some of the voting public is concerned, behind every great man is a perfectly put together woman. And if she manages to combine the perfect looks of a Stepford Wife with the decorum of a dowager, all the better. 

While writing this article, it struck us that we've never actually heard Samantha Cameron's voice - nope, not even on WebCameron - and yet she's bandied about by the Tory party as their "secret weapon", the woman who keeps David Cameron "grounded". While Justine Miliband insists bravely in front of the nation's media that she is "more than a dress", after reading the newspapers you'd think that Sam-Cam was little more than a walking Boden shift dress. And what if, as Camilla Long has speculated, a similar menage-a-trois was to emerge here, with David Cameron being caught red-handed in a tryst with Helena Bonham Carter? What would be expected of Sam-Cam then? Hospitalisation for heartbreak would certainly not be in line with that perennial British belief in the stiff upper lip.

So who is the ideal "first lady"? Is she a woman who sacrifices her personhood to become a supportive wife? Is that the cultural paradigm we're sticking with as a global community, despite years and years of supposed progress? This week Douglas Hurd suggested that the sheer number of women in public roles could risk our country appearing "ludicrous" - despite the fact that female MPs still occasionally get mistaken for secretaries. The implication is, as ever: know your place. And though that place may be on the campaign trail, it's still better if you stand behind your husband. 

It's disappointing that, in 2014, first ladies are still expected to have all of the qualities of a stereotypical 1950s housewife: excellent social engagement skills, good hostessing, pretty dresses, a lack of personal ambition, excellent hats, and few opinions. While it isnʼt exactly a job, itʼs tacitly expected that any first lady worth her salt wonʼt take an actual job while performing the role. Like the perfect princess, she becomes a pleasing appendage, a woman who, unlike "first men" such as Denis Thatcher and Joachim Sauer, is not regarded with suspicion. Because as far as the word is concerned, she is exactly where she should be.

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

When Ron Weasley was a child, he reveals in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, his brothers Fred and George magically transformed his teddy bear into a giant spider, thus triggering in their younger sibling a life-long and totally understandable fear of spiders. What’s harder to comprehend is that one in three (Muggle) women and one in four men have arachnophobia – even though none of them has witnessed the transformation of a favorite toy into an oversized arachnid, and most have never had a traumatic encounter with a spider (one study found that out of 118 adults with a fear of spiders, only eight had ever had a “traumatic” experience involving spiders).

Myths and misconceptions about spiders abound despite the fact that, with the exception of a few species, they’re basically harmless. In a study of 200 elementary-school children, 62 percent indicated that they believed spiders are dangerous to humans, especially when humans are asleep; 72 percent thought – wrongly – that tarantula bites could be fatal. Fear of spiders is so severe today that mere depictions of them on TV can provoke anxiety in viewers. Did our ancestors have the same reaction to representations of spiders on rock art? In December, archaeologists working in Egypt’s western desert discovered our first example of spiders on rock art in the entire Old World. Based on nearby finds, they estimate that the spiders date to about 4,000 B.C. How did our ancestors feel about spiders? Why are we so afraid of spiders – and has it always been this way?

One of the most widely cited explanations for our fear of spiders, put forth by psychologist Martin Seligman in 1971, is the “hypothesis of biological preparedness.” According to this theory, humans developed an aversion to spiders because at some point in our history, spiders presented a real threat to our ancestors. Different strains of this theory have also been used to explain fears of snakes, darkness, and heights – all of which clearly did pose problems for our ancestors, and can be pretty healthy fears even today.

Slovakian biologist Pavol Prokop found further support for the evolutionary hypothesis in a comparison of high school students’ attitudes toward spiders in Slovakia and South Africa. When he surveyed 300 high school students in each country, he found that South Africans admitted a greater fear of spiders. This makes sense in light of the biological preparedness hypothesis: South Africa is home to more poisonous spiders than Europe.

Other researchers, however, have argued that the fear of spiders has a cultural origin. When Graham Davey, then a psychologist at London’s City University, surveyed 260 British adults on their attitudes towards different animals, he found that people who are afraid of spiders are also more likely to fear animals such as cockroaches, snails and slugs. None of these animals is predatory, but they all have one thing in common: They evoke disgust. Davey believes there is a single variable, “disgust sensitivity,” underlying all these fears – and that it’s cultural, not evolutionary. “It is unlikely that this single underlying factor is an evolutionary predisposition to fear either venomous or harmful animals, because it is difficult to conceive of the selection pressures that would have selected for fear of some of the animals in this covarying group," wrote Davey. “It is unlikely that our ancestors ever had to avoid packs of predatory slugs or snails.”

Davey suggests three ways these animals could have taken on their “disgust-evoking status”: by being associated with the spread of disease (like rats); by having features that resemble things associated with disease, like mucus (slugs); or by being associated with dirt or rotten food (maggots). The historical association between spiders and disease, according to Davey, dates back to the Middle Ages:

In most of Europe during the Middle Ages, spiders were considered a source of contamination that absorbed poisons in their environments (e.g. from plants). Any food which had come into contact with a spider was considered infected. Similarly, if a spider fell into water that water was then held to be poisoned (Renner, 1990). In Central Europe during the Great Plagues, spiders were seen as harbingers of the plague and death… Until the late seventeenth century many European spiders were thought to be ‘poisonous’ in the sense that their bites caused a variety of illnesses.

And though fear of spiders is widespread, it’s hardly universal. In some African cultures, the spider is honored as a wise creature; in Ashanti cosmology, the god Anansi sometimes takes the form of a spider. In parts of Indo-China and the Caribbean, spiders are traditionally eaten as a delicacy, and Hindus in eastern Bengal even consider them a sign of good luck.

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

With the income tax personal allowance at long last rising to £10,000 this April, attention can turn to what further tax cuts might be offered at the general election. The Lib Dems want to build on their most high profile policy win and raise the allowance again, to an annual equivalent of the minimum wage. The Conservatives may follow suit, and Labour have been forced to differentiate by offering a tiny and unnecessary 10p tax band.

Whether cuts in direct tax should take priority over VAT and other indirect taxes is a question for another day. But even amongst direct tax cuts, a new report from CentreForum argues that changes are needed to ensure future offers really do help the low paid. For one, all three parties are wrong to focus on income tax when National Insurance cuts are ripe for the picking.

Why focus on raising the income tax threshold to over £12,000 when National Insurance begins at under £8,000 (£6,000 for some)? Most workers on the minimum wage pay more in National Insurance than income tax. By focusing only on income tax, whether a higher allowance or a 10p band, and ignoring National Insurance, politicians will pass over millions of low income workers and the self-employed. These are the same people they profess to be helping.

The priority should be to increase the National Insurance thresholds to £10,000 – in line with income tax. This would simplify the tax system , too, where basic taxes can begin at ten different thresholds. And while cutting National Insurance for low earners, we shouldn’t ignore the (separate) threshold for employers – especially as a rise could allow for a higher minimum wage without increasing employment costs.

Our report also looks at whether tax thresholds should be linked to the minimum wage, as the Lib Dems have suggested. It concludes that an expert-recommended, hourly wage, limited to avoid risking jobs, could not remain linked to an annual, political, tax level: they are both too important. A better goal would be to take the absolute poverty line out of all tax. This is around £10,050 in 2014/15 for a single adult. It would make sense for our tax system to avoid pushing non-parents below the government’s own poverty line (if you have many children your poverty line goes up). The coalition’s changes have almost taken this line out of income tax, but now action is needed to ensure National Insurance does not turn low pay into poverty pay.

There are many more questions surrounding direct tax cuts, but the big one is cost. The coalition’s allowance increases have cost a massive £11bn, and the Lib Dems’ new tax proposal would likely be even more expensive – particularly if the minimum wage is boosted. Parties therefore need to be honest about how tax cuts would be funded. Would the Conservatives cut welfare to pay for tax cuts that go to richer families? And the Lib Dems may find the many tax increases they would need, but would that leave any room for progressive, tax-funded deficit reduction? National Insurance cuts would be cheaper than raising the Personal Allowance, and could be well targeted on low earners through small rate increases.

The Lib Dems should rethink their policy, and other parties should seize the chance to help a poorer set of workers than the Lib Dems propose. And if we see another coalition in 2015, let’s hope the most progressive and sensible option prevails.

Adam Corlett is an economics researcher at CentreForum, the liberal think tank

Illustration: Ellie Foreman-Peck

What is the most important invention of the past hundred years?

Contraception. It has allowed a part of the population to be economically independent, in terms of monitoring how they want to use time in their lives. That’s why I still find it extraordinary that the world doesn’t look upon the Catholic Church as if it’s trying to prevent human rights.

What is the most important scientific discovery of the past hundred years and why?

String theory. It allows you into the extraordinary imaginative proposition that space and time are the same. You can see how vague I’m being – it took me three attempts to pass A-level science. It’s theory I find the most exciting and creative.

What is the greatest sporting event of the past hundred years?

The first Paralympics in 1948 – they changed our understanding of what human beings are capable of doing.

Who is the most influential or significant politician of the past hundred years?

Nelson Mandela. To have used his time in detention to build a picture for himself of what peace could look like and then implemented it is politics at its finest.

And author?

Doris Lessing. She was an extraordinary intellect and an amazing charter of the sexual, political and economic conflicts of women. I’m amazed she got the Nobel Prize so late in life.

And playwright?

Samuel Beckett. He’s an absolute minority taste, an example of an artist who reshaped form. He is the ultimate playwright, who dramatised our existential quest for meaning.

How about anyone in business?

Anita Roddick. When I was growing up she was overt and unabashed about saying that business could and should be ethical. She was often ridiculed and was very much a lone voice, so she has been a huge influence.

And sportsperson?

Muhammad Ali. Boxing is something I instinctively want to turn away from, as I feel slightly repelled by the idea. But he used his celebrity status and incredible talent to speak about politics and racism.

What is your favourite quotation?

I love the thought that went into “the price of everything and the value of nothing”. If economic value is the most valid proof that people want, it’s a bit like wanting to prove that love has fiscal value.

What is your favourite speech?

Prospero’s speech in Act IV, Scene One of The Tempest. It’s a speech about understanding mortality. It is wonderfully poignant and is essentially about being able to say farewell to everything on a daily basis.

What do you think will be the most significant change to our lives in the next hundred years?

The next phase of women’s emancipation. Life is already unrecognisable in some countries in some ways. Although progress feels slow, you look back to women still trying to get the vote at the turn of the 20th century and you think, “That’s extraordinary change.” I’m convinced in another hundred years men and women will play different roles altogether.

What is your greatest concern about the future?

Climate change. Because it’s another one of those things that can be abused. First of all, none of us has any idea of the real impact of what could happen. Millions could become refugees – and then how would other countries cope?

What will be the most dramatic development in your own field of work?

Speaking about the coming 100 years, can everyone learn to read and write? Could they or should they? No one asks that any more. In my field of work there is still the idea that some people have artistic feelings and others don’t. I don’t think that’s true: everyone has a powerful imagination and the capacity to be expressive. The most radical thing is already happening. And it is that the population will participate in the arts not as audiences, but they will become part of the expressive work. It will become part of their normal activities, and will change their cultural status.

What is the top priority for the future well-being of people and our planet?

Learning how to navigate the brain. Neuroscience is telling us an enormous amount about what triggers operate in us; where we store our memories and our feelings. We’re beginning to understand scientifically and intuitively a great deal about our sense of being. That could change both domestic and community life.

Jude Kelly is the artistic director of the Southbank Centre

This sense of human scale depends on well-proven measurements, physical perspectives and relationships that derive from, and so remain in harmony with, our bodies and the environments in which we dwell; what militates against it now is an industrial system in which destructive, out-of-scale enterprises proliferate, in pursuit of never-ending “growth”.

Since it was first coined (by the US congressman Stewart McKinney) in the mid-1980s, we have all become increasingly familiar with the phrase “too big to fail”. Long before that, however, Sale and others were pointing out that corporations had grown so large as to exist beyond all meaningful regulation, circumventing government control by “lobbying, tax breaks, bureaucratic interlocks, overseas plants, simple non-compliance and the threat of job losses”, and that the only way out of this situation was a revolution in the scale of our thinking, restoring those measures that the urban designer Paul D Spreiregen defines as “related to people and their abilities to comprehend their surroundings” (or what some would call right/just dwelling).

This critique would make human scale the main principle in sustainability: a vision, as far as Sale is concerned, not only of appropriate technologies, but of participatory dwelling, in which creaturely being is prized, nothing is merely a resource and the environment is deemed beyond further compromise. Sale is quick to warn us against corporate-industrial appropriation of the phrase: “Yes, they have come up with this idea now called ‘sustainable development’,” he says, “but it is actually the most odious oxymoron going around. Development of the kind that is meant in industrial civilisation is destructive of communities, people’s lands, and eventually livelihoods. Sustainable development is a convenient industrial myth.”

This practice of co-option by the industrial system is in many ways our biggest stumbling block. Sale foresaw how readily some of us would compromise with consumer capitalism, as long as it rebranded itself as “green”. In Human Scale, he notes that even renewable energy, when it takes the form of “power towers, solar ‘farms’, gigantic wind machines”, can become just another element of the destructive industrial paradigm: “All attempts to take a basically decentralised form of energy, centralise it with some large machine, convert it into electricity, transmit it back to decentralised users . . . will inevitably prove as sensible as killing a fly with a cannon.”

Contemporary greens would do well to heed this point. No matter how clean or how low-impact a technology may seem in principle, once it is blown out of a scale appropriate to people and their understanding of their surroundings, it becomes part of the industrial system and just another part of the problem – and because corporations and big landowners derive huge subsidies from out-of-scale projects, they are further empowered to damage and expropriate the soil, seas and perspectives on which right dwelling depends. This model of industrial-scale appropriation has become a commonplace in farming, workplace relations, urban design, all aspects of security, education – the list goes on.

That Sale foresaw it all so clearly as far back as 1980 makes Human Scale an essential book for our own times.