1. The Tories must rescue Nick Clegg in order to save their own skins (Daily Telegraph)

If the Liberal Democrat vote collapses, it would jeopardise any future coalition government, writes Peter Oborne. 

2. A visit by the leader of Hungary’s poisonous Jobbik party reminds us that we can’t just wish away anti-Semitism (Independent)

This bigotry has clothed itself both as anti-capitalism and as anti-communism, writes Owen Jones. 

3. Carney is dressing old policy in new clothes (Financial Times)

The big question is whether declining unemployment has been a false omen of economic recovery, says Chris Giles.

4. Goodbye bongo-bongo land, hello NewKIP (Times)

A powerful movement around Nigel Farage is trying to rid Britain’s fourth party of its oddballs and extremists, writes Tim Montgomerie.

5. 70 years of foreign troops? We should close the bases (Guardian)

US forces in Britain aren't defending the country but lock it into an empire in decline, says Seumas Milne. It's past time for some independence.

6. Ed Miliband's ultimate election battle will be about trust (Guardian)

After the Tories' failure to label him 'Red', or the wrong brother, their final blast will be to claim he's simply not up to the job, writes Martin Kettle. 

7. The police can’t be trusted to stop and search people fairly (Times)

Searching without suspicion must become a thing of the past, says Andrew Mitchell. 

8. Unemployment: counting what counts (Guardian)

The impact of recovery is being felt very unevenl, says a Guardian editorial. In some northern cities, there's no pick up at all.

9. If they want voters to love them, the Tories really must stop hating themselves (Daily Mail)

The more the Tories tack to the centre, and distance themselves from policies which have popular appeal, the better UKIP is likely to do, says Stephen Glover. 

10. Davos lacks the Valley’s revolutionary spirit (Financial Times)

The tech set stands out while a familiar crowd returns to the task of making the world nicer, writes John Gapper. 

After George Osborne began the year by promising to scythe another £12bn from the welfare budget in the next Parliament, Iain Duncan Smith's speech at the Centre for Social Justice, the think-tank he founded 10 years ago, is an attempt to reaffirm his original "compassionate conservative" mission. The message from the Work and Pensions Secretary will be that reform is not about saving money but about saving lives. In a conspicuous rebuke to Osborne, who frames welfare almost entirely as a fiscal issue, he will say: 

We would have wanted to reform the welfare state, even if we had no deficit. As Conservatives, we should hate the idea of people with unfulfilled potential languishing on welfare. Welfare reform is fundamentally about opportunity and life change.

The rhetoric is admirable but, nearly four years into this parliament, the reality is not. After multiple management and IT failures (with £40.1m of assets written off), the introduction of Universal Credit, Duncan Smith's masterplan to transform welfare and "make work pay", has been so slow as to render it almost invisible. At the end of last September, just 2,150 people were claiming the new benefit, 997,850 short of the original target of one million. When Duncan Smith complains today that "the present system makes criminals out of those trapped in its clutches" by "withdrawing up to 94 pence of every pound they earn" through means-testing, it will be a reminder of his failure to reform it in office. 

Rather than Universal Credit, it is Osbornite welfare cuts such as the benefit cap and the bedroom tax that have defined the government's approach. Duncan Smith will again defend the abolition of the "spare room subsidy", but it is something no "compassionate conservative" should. His claim that it has forced people to move to smaller council houses, freeing up space for larger families, ignores the reality that, in most cases, such properties simply don't exist.

In England, there are 180,000 social tenants "under-occupying" two bedroom houses but just 85,000 one bedroom properties free to move to. Rather than reducing overcrowding, the policy has simply become another welfare cut, further squeezing families already hit by the benefit cap, the 1 per cent limit on benefit and tax credit increases (a real-terms cut) and the 10 per cent reduction in council tax benefit. A survey by the National Housing Federation of 51 housing associations found that more than half of those residents affected by the measure (32,432 people), fell into rent arrears between April (when the policy was introduced) and June, a quarter of those for the first time ever.

Worse, the policy takes no account of those for whom additional space is not a luxury but a necessity, most obviously the disabled. Of the 660,000 social housing tenants that have been affected by the bedroom tax, the DWP estimates that 420,000 are disabled. They now face the unpalatable choice of either falling into arrears (by paying an average of £728 extra in rent)  or downsizing to a property unsuitable for their needs. Yet, absurdly, Duncan Smith will claim that his welfare cuts "have helped people feel that bit more secure about their futures, feel more hopeful about their children’s lives and rekindle their pride in their communities". 

The effects of the household benefit cap have been similarly pernicious. To date, there is little evidence that the measure is achieving its stated aim of moving claimants into work (principally because few choose to live "a life on benefits"). In Hackney, one of the London boroughs where the benefit was piloted, a study found that just 74 of the 740 households affected had found work, a number no greater than one would expect without the cap given the regular churn of claimants. In many cases, the lack of affordable childcare continues to represent a insurmountable barrier to employment. Indeed, by requiring councils to relocate families hundreds of miles away, the cap actually reduces work opportunities by forcing them to live in an area where they have no employment history. 

Yet for all the human misery they have caused, these policies will save just a few hundred million between them (merely a rounding error in the social security budget of £201bn). But to judge the cuts on these terms is to misunderstand Osborne's motives. The benefit cap is less a serious act of policy than a political weapon designed to trap Labour ("the welfare party") on the wrong side of the argument and to perpetuate the belief that the unemployed are to blame for their own misfortune. With new proposals such as the abolition of housing benefit for under-25s and the restriction of child benefit to two children, the Chancellor is doing all he can to sharpen the divide between "the strivers" and "the scroungers". It is this poisoning of the debate, more than anything, that means today's speech is not the rebirth of "compassionate conservatism" but its funeral. 

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.

The ideological rivalries between the superpowers now and then look strikingly similar, too, at first glance: on the one hand, Britain then and America now, with their democratic political systems that make governments responsible to legislatures and removable by popular elections; on the other, Germany then and China now, with appointed and irremovable governments responsible only to themselves. A free press and open public on the one hand contrast with a controlled public sphere on the other, in which censorship and the trappings of a police state in effect muzzle the government’s most trenchant critics.

And of course there was, and is, the baleful influence of nationalism, with China’s sabre-rattling over disputed islands today yielding little in rhetorical vehemence to the kaiser’s bombastic speeches asserting German claims in Africa and the Middle East before 1914. The clash of ideologies and religions was evident before 1914, just as it is today, and in both cases concentrated on trouble spots in specific parts of the world.

Currently it is the conflicts in the Middle East we have to worry about, with a vicious civil war in Syria between rival Islamic factions standing proxy for the rivalry between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia, while an additional element of danger is provided by Israel, with its nuclear arsenal, and again Iran, with its persistent attempts to build one. China and Russia are lining up behind one side while Nato and the US line up behind the other.

Before 1914 the critical trouble spot was the Balkans, where nationalist passions were overlaid with religious conflicts between Christian states, such as Greece and Bul­garia, and the Islamic Ottoman empire. The Habsburg monarchy, run by a Roman Cath­olic elite, was being challenged by Orthodox Serbia. Just as there have been wars pre­viously in the Middle East (in 1948, 1967 and most recently in 1973), so too there had been wars in the Balkans, between Russia and Turkey in 1877-78 and between Serbia and Bulgaria in 1885. So 1914, sometimes known in the region as the third Balkan war, was nothing new for these countries.

All the Balkan powers were heavily armed, buying up the latest weaponry from Europe’s leading manufacturers with loans supplied by the British, French and German governments. All of these countries were politically unstable, with governments being violently overthrown and terrorist organisations such as the Serbian “Black Hand” and the Internal Macedonian Revo­lutionary Organisation flourishing.

The Balkan states, much like nations of the Middle East today, to a degree stood proxy for larger powers, notably tsarist Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary. They had come close to the brink during the first Balkan war in 1912-13, when Montenegro in alliance with Serbia attacked northern Albania, where there were virtually no Serbs or Montenegrins among the inhabitants. Austria-Hungary demanded Serbia’s with­drawal, Russia began to mobilise in support of the Serbs, and France declared its support for the Russians. The situation was defused only by a British intervention, resulting in an international conference that guaranteed independence for Albania.

The whole episode was an ominous foretaste of what happened in August 1914. With the break-up of the alliance of the Balkan states in 1913, Bulgaria went over to the patronage of the Germans, while Russia’s only client left in the region was Serbia. Serbian ambitions had already prompted Austria-Hungary to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina, with their substantial population of Serbs, in 1908. It would be just as wrong to dismiss all of this as irrelevant to the ambitions and rivalries of the Great Powers, as Boris Johnson has done recently, as it would be to dismiss the violent antagonisms in today’s Middle East as unimportant to international relations on a wider scale.

And yet the Balkan nations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were no more mere puppets of Germany or Russia than the Middle Eastern states of today are puppets of America, Russia or China. As President Obama has discovered, trying to control Israeli governments is no easy task; he might tell the Israelis not to build any new Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank but they carry on regardless. China and Russia might block western attempts to impose sanctions on the Assad regime in Syria and may continue supplying it with arms, but they have not been able to control it or stop its opponents, so they have become willing to explore ways of ending the conflict peaceably; their co-operation in the removal of chemical weapons signals their refusal to back the regime all the way.

China supplies Iran with weapons and with nuclear technology but can do little to mediate its policy in the Middle East, and its approach is tempered by the need to keep up good relations with the United States. Not least because of the growing importance of economic ties with the west, Russia has bowed to international pressure for sanctions on Iran and has curbed its arms supplies to the country. In all of this, there are few indications that the world’s great powers today are being drawn into regional conflicts as closely as they were in 1914.

One important reason for this lies in our changed attitudes to war. In Europe, the wars of the 19th century were limited in duration and scope, and seldom involved more than a handful of combatant nations. All told, deaths in battle between 1815 and 1914 were seven times fewer than combat deaths in the previous century. The wars of German unification in the 1860s, the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 and similar conflicts were swiftly resolved by decisive victories for one side or the other. Even the Crimean war of 1854-56 did not move much beyond the hinterland of the Black Sea.

In the 19th century fear of the upheaval and destruction caused by the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars brought the leading European states together time and again in what was known as the Concert of Europe to resolve potential conflicts through international conferences. Though it was severely damaged in the 1850s and 1860s, the Concert was patched together again in the 1870s, when the Congress of Berlin redrew the map of the Balkans, while another Berlin conference sorted out colonial rivalries (without, needless to say, consulting any of the millions of people about to be colonised) in 1884. These institutions, like the United Nations of today, provided a forum in which diplomats and statesmen could work together to avoid war, and they largely succeeded.

If there is no sign that the UN, for all its inadequacies, is about to collapse, it is not least because the postwar settlement of 1945 rested on a general recognition that international co-operation in all fields had to be stronger than it was under the League of Nations, the UN’s ill-fated predecessor. The destruction caused by the Second World War, with its 50 million or more dead, its ruined cities, its genocides, its widespread negation of civilised values, had a far more powerful effect than the deaths caused by the First World War, which were (with exceptions, notably the genocide of a million or more Armenian civilians, killed by the Turks in 1915) largely confined to troops on active service. In 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided an additional, ter­rible warning of what would happen if the world went to war again.

In 1914, by contrast, very few people had any idea of the cataclysm that was about to descend on them. Just as admirals thought that the war at sea would be a rerun of the great naval engagements of the past, so the generals thought the war on land would be something like the conflicts of the 1860s, opening with rapid, railway-borne advances to the front, followed by a decisive encounter in which the other side would meet with a shattering defeat; peace would then be concluded after a few weeks or at most a couple of months. Since those days, however, barbed wire, patented in 1874, and the machine-gun, perfected in portable form a decade later, had become standard defensive equipment; at the same time, the internal combustion engine and armour plating were not yet advanced enough to produce tanks that could overcome these obstacles effectively and restore movement to warfare. A few recognised these inconvenient facts, notably the Polish banker Jan Bloch, whose Modern Weapons and Modern War, published at the turn of the century, argued that in the next major war, “the spade will be as important as the rifle” and forecast that the war of the future would be a gridlock in which quick victory would be impossible.

But nobody heeded this prediction, because generals, politicians and civil servants were unable to accept its denial of easy victory. By 1910 at the latest, the idea that a war was coming was shared by many – indeed, generated a momentum towards it. Admiral Jackie Fisher wrote of the atmosphere he created in the Royal Navy after 1902: “We prepared for war in professional hours, talked war, thought war, and hoped for war.” The chief of the German general staff declared in 1912 that war must come “and the sooner the better!”. War in this vision appeared as something not only inevitable, but also positive. A German novelist wrote of August 1914: “At last life had regained an ideal significance. The great virtues of humanity . . . fidelity, patriotism, readiness to die for an ideal . . . were triumphing over the trading and shopkeeping spirit . . . The war would cleanse mankind from all its impurities.” The war appeared as a chance to do something glorious in a prosaic age.

In like vein, British writers enthused about the opportunity that war would present:

To die young, clean, ardent; to die swiftly, in perfect health; to die saving others from death, or worse – disgrace . . . to die and carry with you into the fuller, ampler life beyond, untainted hopes and aspirations, unembittered memories, all the freshness and gladness of May – is that not a cause for joy rather than sorrow?

as Horace Annesley Vachell wrote in The Hill (1905). The war appeared as a release, a liberation of manly energies long pent up, a resolution to all the insoluble problems that had plagued European politics and society in increasing measure since the late 19th century: an escape into a simpler, clearer and more glorious reality.

War was also widely seen before 1914 by the upper classes across Europe as an assertion of masculine honour, like a duel, as it were, only on a much bigger scale. Duelling was a common way of avenging real or imagined slights to a man’s honour in virtually every European country at the time. The French politician Georges Clemenceau had fought a duel; so too had the Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin. Duelling was a frequent occurrence among the Junker aristocracy in Germany, and politicians in Austria-Hungary regularly engaged in duels. Only in Britain had they died out: the point of a duel was to vindicate one’s manly honour by standing unmoving as your opponent fired a bullet at you at twenty or thirty paces, and the invention of modern cricket, in which a man was required to face down a different kind of round, hard object as it hurtled towards him from the other end of the wicket, was a satisfactory (and comfortingly legal) substitute. Forcefulness, strength of will, self-assertion and standing firm against an enemy were all part of a code of behaviour of the upper-class men whose actions brought Europe and the world to war in 1914, in contrast to the flexibility and subtlety of the greater statesmen of an earlier generation, such as Bismarck, whose awareness of the precariousness of the German empire’s position in the international order was as great as Kaiser Wilhelm II’s disregard for it.

Such codes of male behaviour appear almost incomprehensible a century later. Politicians of the nuclear age are all too aware of the fragility of the world order. Masculine posturing nowadays earns only ridicule. The horrors of Nazi racism and genocide also put paid to the doctrine of social Darwinism, which had become widely accepted among European elites by the beginning of the 20th century but did not survive the war of 1939-45.

Remember them: wooden crosses recall victims of the 21st-century war in Iraq near Westminster Abbey, London, 2006. Image: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty.

Yet at the same time, the leaders of almost every European nation in 1914 were racked by anxiety about the future. Germany feared the growing might of Russia; Austria-Hungary was made nervous by the rise of Slav nationalism within its borders; Russia was afraid of further humiliation of the kind it had been forced to endure with its defeat in the war against Japan in 1904-1905. Internally, too, European states were in trouble, with strikes, suffragette campaigns and the threat of civil war in Ireland destabilising Britain; assassinations and labour unrest undermining tsarist autocracy in Russia; and the victory of the Marxist Social Democrats in Germany’s 1912 elections causing a crisis of confidence among the ruling elite.

One might point to the parallel of the present crisis in the eurozone, in which all the participant states hope to avoid a collapse but all are also pursuing their own interests and so differ on how it is to be averted; but the social unrest it has sparked has been confined largely to Greece, and the main states have been able to work together to limit the damage, with the result that collapse, so far, has been avoided.

Still, economic factors played a role in 1914 just as they do today. In France and especially in Britain, national debates opened up about the seemingly unstoppable success of the German economy. And indeed, German industry had already overtaken that of Britain by the eve of the war. It had increased Germany’s share of world industrial production fourfold since 1860, while Britain’s share had sunk by a third. Germany was producing twice as much steel as Britain, and dominated the chemical and electrical industries worldwide through firms such as Siemens, BASF, AEG and many others. In science the theories of Max Planck and Albert Einstein were revolutionising physics, while Robert Koch and his pupils were taking the lead in discovering the causes of one disease after another through their pioneering work in bacteriology. The motor car was a German invention, as was the diesel engine. There are parallels between such anxieties and the worry, sometimes extending to paranoia, in the US today about the rise of China. Yet so far American concerns have not translated into political action. The interventions of the US have been directed not against China’s role in other parts of the world but against medium or small regional powers such as Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Before 1914, however, there were many in Germany at least who thought that Ger­man economic and technological growth should, or would, translate into political power on the world scene. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the dominant notion of global power in Europe rested on the possession of overseas colonies. A newly united Germany had largely missed out on the spoils of empire in the “Scramble for Africa” in the 1880s. The British government was not opposed to recognising Germany’s claim to colonies; in fact, at one point there was a deal in the offing whereby London agreed to the Germans’ acquisition of the ramshackle and poorly defended overseas empire held by the Portuguese.

All this points to a huge difference between the world of 1914 and the one of today. A century ago, Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Russia possessed vast colonies with millions of subjects. With its growing power and influence, the United States was also starting to join the club. The First World War was a struggle between empires and one of its products was a repartition of the globe, with Germany’s colonies seized and distributed among the victors.

Colonialism lost all legitimacy after 1945. The early 21st century is witnessing the growth of former colonies such as Brazil, or Nigeria, or India, into major players in the global economic game. In contrast to the decades of the cold war, when international relations were a bipolar system that pitted the Soviet Union against the western powers in direct opposition to each other, we now have a multipolar system. The world has become more like that of the late 19th century, although Britain, despite its vast overseas empire, was nowhere near as dominant as the United States has been since the collapse of communism. Then, too, international relations were constituted as a multipolar system; the difference was that almost all the major competitors were from within Europe itself.

The breakdown of this system was one of the main factors leading to the outbreak of war in 1914. Up to 1904-05, Britain had regarded France and Russia as its main rivals for global influence, but as dangerous Anglo-French colonial differences in Africa were settled, and Russia turned away from Asia following its defeat by Japan, the rise of Germany took centre stage and Europe divided itself, along the lines of the later cold war, into two armed and increasingly antagonistic camps. In an atmosphere that fostered largely positive attitudes to war this was an ominous development, and one without parallel in the early 21st century, for all the posturings over Syria or Iran of Russia and China on the one hand and the Nato powers, on the other.

There is another parallel between the two ages. Just as we are in the midst of an era of rapid globalisation today, so in 1914 processes of globalisation were well under way, thanks to the telephone, the steamship, and potentially the aeroplane. Mutual investment by French and German companies created new economic entities that crossed the Rhine. Cultural exchange, tourism, economic interpenetration, all were reaching global dimensions by 1914.

For all the Marxists’ convoluted attempts to prove that the driving forces behind the First World War were economic, the logic of capitalism told against war rather than for it. Yet neither economic rationality nor cultural familiarity proved an obstacle to conflict. The reason for this is not, however, ideological. 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.

One thing that those who want us to celebrate the First World War as a fight for British values have in common with the Blackadder television series is that all of them focus exclusively on the Western Front. But we need to raise our heads above the trenches and take in the wider dimensions of the war. That one of Britain’s two main allies was the despotic Russia of Tsar Nicholas II should banish any thoughts of the war having been fought in defence of “western liberalism” until Russia’s exit from the war in 1917-18. British propaganda of course portrayed the conflict in moral and ideological terms, rightly pointing to German atrocities in Belgium in the opening weeks, though it quickly came to exaggerate them in the process. However, there were many atrocities in the Balkans and on the Eastern Front, too, and it would be wrong if the commemorations about to begin neglected the wider European and global dimensions of the conflict in a simplistic parroting of the British propaganda of the time.

Perhaps the most striking difference between the world in 1914 and that of 2014 lies, in a way that would have surprised our ancestors of a century ago, in the greater power of religion today to disrupt the inter­national order. Whatever the First World War was about, it was a determinedly secular conflict. Only in the Ottoman empire, and the Balkans, perhaps, did religion play a role, yet even the Armenian genocide was justified by the Turks mainly in ethnic and security terms. The leading combatants in the First World War were pursuing decidedly secular interests.

Absurdly, Nigel Biggar, a professor of theology in Oxford, has leapt into the fray in Standpoint magazine to claim, with all the self-importance of his tribe, that morality – in other words, God – was on the British side in 1914. The argument is irresistibly reminiscent of J C Squire’s epigram of the day: “God heard the embattled nations sing and shout/‘Gott strafe England’ and ‘God save the King!’/God this, God that, and God the other thing –/‘Good God!’ said God, ‘I’ve got my work cut out!’”

Terrorism today may be fuelled mainly by religion, and religious conflicts certainly underpin political tensions in the Middle East, yet despite the belief of some on the Republican right in the US that a war over Israel will lead to Armageddon and the Second Coming, there is no evidence that religion plays a significant role in international relations between the major world powers today. For all the parallels with the nationalist passions that swept Europe in 1914, there is even less evidence that they drove Britain, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary or France to war. Statesmen later claimed that popular pressure propelled them into the conflict, but this was an ex post facto self-justification that should be treated with the scepticism every such claim of this kind deserves.

Meanwhile, in 1914 and after, nationalist passions in the main combatant powers were overwhelmingly the product of the war’s outbreak, not the cause. The war inaugurated three decades of nationalist hatreds in Europe, driven by the need to justify the conflict. They were made worse by what now appears the calamitous policy of national self-determination propagated by President Woodrow Wilson in his “Fourteen Points”. Economic rivalries broke out between the new states created after the war, making it impossible to clear up the financially ruinous consequences of the conflict, first triggering a disastrous inflation and then contributing to the catastrophe of the Slump. Democracies collapsed under the pressure of nationalist passions all over Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The idea of an ethnically homogeneous nation state then caused untold suffering and millions of deaths between 1918 and 1948, as minorities were oppressed, expelled and murdered all over central and eastern Europe.

As we commemorate the First World War, we surely need to focus above all on the lessons to be learned from these tragic experiences. During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, President John F Kennedy showed that he had paid attention: his reading of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August convinced him that muddle, indecisiveness and poor communication between the leaders of the Great Powers in 1914 had caused the slide into war, and that a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union could be avoided only if he made his position unambiguously clear to Nikita Khrushchev, as indeed he did.

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.

Richard J Evans is Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

Focus first on wealth: O’Neill argues that, in countries with the right conditions, the will to develop is the prime motor for growth. Image: Clara Molden/camera press.

Thirteen years ago, Jim O’Neill, a chief economist at Goldman Sachs, coined the term “Brics” to describe the four countries he predicted would be among the next global economic giants: Brazil, Russia, India and China. The acronym caught on, to an extent that O’Neill describes as “flattering” – but he also feels “irritated” by having to defend his theory.

“Someone has just written a book called Broken Brics, and I’m just like, yawn,” he says, collapsing into his seat with feigned exhaustion. “If I dreamt it up again today, I’d probably just call it ‘C’,” he adds, perking up. “China’s one and a half times bigger than the rest of them put together.”

But O’Neill, now 56, is moving on, from both banking and the Brics. He left his role as chairman of Goldman Sachs in April 2013 after 18 years of working at the investment bank. Deciding that he couldn’t better his former role, he resolved to do something different. I’m meeting him at a private members’ club in central London to discuss his newest acronym, Mint, and the accompanying Radio 4 series.

“Mint” stands for Mexico, Indonesia, Nig­eria and Turkey: four countries that O’Neill forecasts could be among the ten largest economies in the next 30 years. It was originally Mist, with the S standing for South Korea – but the BBC convinced him that it would be better to include Nigeria. “It’s slightly embarrassing but also amusing that I kind of get acronyms decided for me,” he says. The four countries face very different challenges but are united by favourable demographics: they all have large and youthful populations. “That’s key. If you’ve got good demographics that makes things easy.”

It frustrates O’Neill that although people in the UK are quick to adopt his terminology, they struggle to accept his conclusions. The government has embarked on policies that he believes will hasten the country’s relative decline. “I worry that popularism will take us down the path of doing the wrong thing,” he says, referring to anti-immigration sentiment. “Most economists agree that immigration is basically a good thing, especially in terms of skilled immigrants. Chinese tourists spend six times more in Paris than they do in London, and one of the main reasons is that it’s so hard for them to get here. How on earth do we think we’re going to export to these places if we have that kind of attitude?”

He is convinced that the intensity of the coalition’s austerity drive, combined with reforms to constrain the financial sector, has dragged down economic growth.

O’Neill is “passionate” about reforming the UK’s education system, which is failing too many young people. Since September, he has been a non-executive director at the Department for Education and in 1999 he co-founded Shine, a charity that invests in innovative education and that was one of the first funders of Teach First, a scheme to encourage the best graduates into teaching.

His interest in education is not only work-related. O’Neill describes his background as “complex”: his mother was from a “wealthy Cheshire farming family but with no money” and his father “came from the tough part of Manchester”. “I went to tough schools as a kid in Manchester,” he says, but his father was so passionate about education that O’Neill had to persuade him not to take out a usurious loan to pay for him to go to private school – his main objection being that the school didn’t play football. He is still a big Man United fan, and led a group of investors who tried to buy the club in 2010.

He attended Sheffield University, did a PhD in the economics of oil-producing countries at the University of Surrey, and then went into banking because he was in debt and “needed the money”. “When I left university in 1982, the idea that I could get a job in the City with a British firm – impossible,” O’Neill recalls. He applied instead to Bank of America and was surprised by the culture of US firms: “It was a bit of a shock to be in a mentality where your capability influenced what you did, not where you came from or your accent.” After three decades in finance, he still has his Mancunian accent.

The easy accusation against the Mint theory is that O’Neill overestimates the importance of individual capability and downplays the extent to which political violence, state repression and institutional corruption can hold back even the most enterprising person. He is scathing about the Today programme presenter Evan Davis, who challenged him on this point – it’s clear O’Neill doesn’t respond warmly to criticism – and recounts his conversation with the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, who disagrees with “simple western minds who say that if you’re corrupt you can’t grow”. His message is that we need to stop obsessing about corruption in developing countries and focus first on growth.

And the west needs to stop trying to impose its values on other countries. “The presumption that people value our version of democracy is . . . embarrassing,” O’Neill says. “It’s quite clear that a lot of people in China don’t. They want more wealth and choice but they don’t demand free elections. Quite a few people have said to me, ‘If democracy’s so good, how come only 50 per cent of people vote?’”

The lesson that Jim O’Neill has drawn from China’s extraordinary rise is that countries don’t need democracy to develop and to power economic growth. I can’t help but hope he’s wrong.

I always feel sorry for those fresh-faced, eager but nervous young subs sitting on the bench. The chosen ones get called to warm up, flexing their muscles, flexing their minds, trying to look cool and controlled, but sick inside.

They jog up and down the touchline, doing silly steps and twists, just to show how fit and flexible they are, trying not to hear the jeers when they pass opposition fans or bump into an equally young sub from the rival team, doing his own silly warm-ups.

The sub keeps one eye on the manager, looking for a sign, trying to read his contorted face, and the other on the clock – f***ing hell, only seven minutes left, I am never going to get on, I am never going to be a Prem player, ever.

Then the nod comes. He strips off his training stuff, struggling to get it over his boots, wishing his mum was there to help, has his body examined for rings and earrings, boots checked for sharp edges, by which time his mind is in a whirl – he’s unable to think straight, know his own number going up, never mind his own name. All those years of sweat and tears, terrors and triumphs, since he was eight years old, and at last this is it: what he has lived for.

Then what happens? Two goons from the back-room staff grab him, one with a laptop with flashing shapes and patterns, the other with a flip chart, flipping it over and over.

How is he supposed to take anything in? He is already a mental wreck, hyped up, face taut, but he nods his head, will agree with anything – “Kill my mother? No problem.” He dashes on to the pitch and makes his first tackle, diving in like a mad dog. He is off, red-carded. Five minutes still to go.

I blame the laptops. In ye olden days, a manager would put a fatherly arm round a young player and say one of two things: “Just go out there, play your normal game and enjoy yourself.” Or: “All I want you to do is get us a goal.”

The latter could be a bit worrying, imposing a burden – it was almost a threat – but it was usually done with a smile and, best of all, it was understandable: nothing technical, nothing abstract, no false number nines, no holes to be filled. Just score us a goal. Simple, eh?

When André Villas-Boas got the sack at Spurs, my first thought was, “Hurrah, this could be the end of the laptops.” Not completely – because they do have their place – but their proliferation behind the scenes is getting out of control.

I used to think it was just the young foreign managers who were technology-obsessed, especially those with humble or non-existent playing careers, such as A V-B and Mourinho. They also bring in their gang from home, speaking their own language, as Fabio Capello did with England, which must really piss off the native old guard. But Sam Allardyce caught the bug at Bolton and he, too, became obsessed by science. Doesn’t seem to have done him much good at West Ham, if he is still there.

Benches at all Prem games these days are filled to capacity – rows and rows of them behind the actual bench, filled with young, smooth graduate video analysts, monitoring every player, from his pass rate to his bowel movements. They do it all week long, not just match days, rushing round the country to look at rivals, then poring over computer screens.

They then present the manager with graphs, video clips and PowerPoint displays about whatever it is they think really, really matters. Yes, the manager still has to make the final decision but more and more he relies on the supposed evidence of science, not his own eyes. Yet good players are good because they know what to do.

Modern technology, on the whole, leads to complications, not clarity. I have just been trying to get some parking vouchers from the council. It used to take me three minutes, filling in a form, posting a cheque. These days, you have to do it online. It took me two hours and was a nightmare. Now I want to go out and kick someone.

Lucky for me, I’m off on my summer hols. See you in two weeks . . .

Hunter Davies returns on 7 February

Taking shelter in the William Morris Gallery in east London on a rainy afternoon, my eyes alight on my favourite quote from the great man: “If a chap can’t compose an epic poem while weaving a tapestry, he had better shut up, as he’ll never amount to anything.”

This usually makes me chuckle but today, quite unexpectedly, it touches a nerve. I stand in front of it for a moment, rocking Moe’s buggy slowly back and forth, trying to work out why. The quote has tapped into a current of thought flowing through the deeper waters of my brain: will I ever amount to anything?

On the one hand, I know it’s a ridiculous, self-flagellating question – I’m a mother to two wonderful boys; I have great friends and a career of sorts; and what does “amounting” to anything even mean? – but on the other, I can’t deny it’s there.

Let’s look at my day so far. I have put in a solid two hours playing Larry’s new favourite game, “animals on the boat”, which involves sitting on a cushion while he delivers a long, rambling, nonsensical monologue about whatever happens to be passing through his head, while pretending to steer a ship filled with stuffed toys. Meanwhile, Moe was screaming, “Caw! Caw!” and clonking himself repeatedly over the head with a dinky car. (Small children are a lot like mad people.)

I have changed a shitty nappy. I have cleaned the kitchen and it’s already filthy again. The closest I came to engaging my brain was a valiant attempt to write some Christmas thank you cards, which was quickly aborted when Moe emptied the earth out of a large plant pot and massaged it into the carpet.

It seems pretty safe to say that my name will not be troubling the canon of great epic poets or, indeed, tapestry weavers any time soon.

I’m not complaining; really, I’m not. I’ve chosen to have children and I’ve chosen to prioritise caring for them over pursuing a full-time career. I am as sure as I could possibly be that both of those were the right choices. That doesn’t mean I don’t notice the impact they have had on other areas of my life. Does it hurt when I see people who used to be several rungs below me on the career ladder streaking blithely past? Does it hurt that I no longer have the right credentials to apply for jobs I’d once have walked into? Of course it bloody does! It hurts like hell!

Perhaps, I think idly as I amble back to the tea room, I should just put the kids into nursery and do the “lean in” thing. The problem is that as soon as you step away from the professional world, you see it for the rickety edifice it is. Before Moe was born, I had a very respectable job, which consisted of having to say and do exactly the opposite of what I really wanted to, at all times.

I’d find it hard to go back to that. Caring for children, for all its boredoms and challenges, is an occupation that engages one’s whole heart and soul – which is surely why so many still choose to do it, despite the economic and social pressure to the contrary. I have a sneaky feeling that Morris would have approved of that, after all.

So, you know, when the time comes, how do you think you’ll do it?” my mum asks me, peering over her cup of Lady Grey.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll baste myself. I just don’t know.”

“Hmm,” she says. “I think that might be your best option.”

A strange thing has happened. Gone are the days when I could look at a baby with an indifference similar to that I’d bestow upon a slightly stale ham sandwich. I don’t even like the word “broody”: it portrays women as milky, bovine life-givers; people whose sole purpose is to heave more nasty little humans out of their privates. Like it or not, though, I’m it.

Last year, I became an auntie. My niece, now approaching her first year as a member of society, quickly turned into one of my favourite people. When I first met her, my voice immediately went weird. It was very high pitched and when I tried to say proper words, things like “Wittle noo noo!” would come out. This is what infants do to me now. All of a sudden, I find them so brain-meltingly adorable that when I’m around anyone under the age of three, I lose the ability to speak English. Before one of them came out of my sister, the best I could hope for around babies, speech-wise, would be an awkward, monotonous, “Hello, small person thing.”

I’ve developed a new-found respect for babies. What I most love about them is their wild, uninhibited spontaneity. In her head, in whatever language she speaks to herself, my niece will say, “I’m going to go into a corner, bite a chair and do a wee.” Then she does it. As much as I’d like to, I just wouldn’t have the guts.

Before I started to find babies so disgustingly enchanting, I never gave much thought to how I’d go about having one. A part of me assumed that if the time came when I wanted to spawn, one of them would appear out of some mist and that would be that. Now, thoughts about procreation are contributing heavily to my budding lesbian frown lines.

It’s not that I’m in any position to start having babies immediately – far from it. But I find myself staring into pots of yoghurt and contemplating the pros and cons of anonymous sperm donors.

Gays aren’t the only people for whom baby-making is a conundrum. But it still frustrates me that another woman can’t just bloody well get me pregnant.

As a family, we all love to watch out for characteristics of both parents in the baby. “Look at that frown,” my mum says of my niece. “Exactly like her dad’s.” It’s likely that my mum would have to be a clairvoyant to say something like that about my potential kid.

In December, my sister and her husband, who live in New York, came over with the baby. One evening, I stubbed my toe. As hard as I tried to scream the pain away with a series of expletives, I was overwhelmed by it and ended up curled on the floor, clutching my foot and begging God (who I don’t even believe in under normal circumstances) for forgiveness. A little later, I limped into the living room.

“Ruth,” I said to my sister, who was attempting to pry the baby away from a bundle of electrical wires.

“Yep?”

“You know when you stub your toe really, really hard? Is giving birth more painful than that?”

She laughed bitterly. Adoption it is, then.

Outlook
BBC World Service

A recent announcement from BBC Radio 3 outlining changes to its 2014 schedule confirms that, as rumoured in November, one of the last remaining music specialism programmes on the station, Discovering Music, which began airing well over a decade ago, is no more: “Instead, music context will be covered throughout the schedule by presenters in discussion with guests during intervals of live concert broadcasts.” This is something that will be hard even for the dogged Friends of Radio 3 to police – an analysis of musical phrasing here, an intense dissection of instrumentation there. But enough. Here’s hoping.

There is, however, some good news. I hear that the cuts-laden BBC World Service is to bring more dedicated arts coverage back into its schedules. In April last year, the station axed the station’s crammed and varied daily arts programme The Strand, instead extending the current affairs programme Outlook with a daily ten-minute section “looking at the people behind the world of music, entertainment, film and the performance arts”. Looking at it in what way? Was the World Service, in effect, being pared back to a rolling news channel?

Yet I admit that the first edition of the new weekend Outlook (Sunday 12 January, 8.30am) –“The best of Outlook’s extra­ordinary personal stories from around the world” – turned out to be the essential listen of the week. A touching and revealing interview with the Cuban ballet dancer Carlos Acosta (“No, I did not like the dance when I was young. The discipline, the monotony, the fingers, the toes, the this, the that . . .”) sat next to an astronaut’s report from space (“We exercise every day and clean off. I never once smelled anybody else’s body odour as such. It’s not really a people smell at all, up here . . .”). A woman reminisced about how she used to send bits of John Lennon’s hair to fans (“I would go over and stand there while the barber was clipping it, scoop it up and stick it in an envelope”). There was also a man with an entirely new species of tick discovered stuck up his nose (“Yes! It was there”).

The show was riveting. Here were the arts as they should be, nestled inside all of this other life and sounding out with rhythm, wit and confidence.

One year ago this week, David Cameron promised to renegotiate the UK's role in the EU and hold an in/out referendum by 2017. It was an attempt by a weak Prime Minister to close down the EU debate and head off a backbench revolt and the UKIP insurgency. It has not worked. In the last 12 months he has talked about little else and viewed key political debates on welfare, immigration and jobs through the prism of EU membership.

This year things could get a lot worse. In May, the European Parliament election could see the Tories come third, behind Labour and UKIP, for the first time ever in a national contest. More important is the choice of the UK's next EU commissioner in October. The uninspiring names of fired cabinet ministers such as Andrew Mitchell and Michael Moore have been floated, although the long-held Tory hope that Nick Clegg would slope off to Brussels looks dead.

The lack of obvious candidates leaves a more intriguing possibility. Cameron has written to industry and business leaders to ask whether the next commissioner should be a non-political figure. The choice is politically toxic. Any candidate would need to bridge the huge chasm between the coalition parties' views on Europe. No eurosceptic could effectively fight Britain's corner in Brussels but anyone seen as pro-EU would be fiercely opposed by large sections of the Conservative Party.

The next commissioner will be Cameron's key EU cheerleader with the unenviable task of achieving unprecedented UK-led reforms. In 2009, Britain's choice, Labour peer Cathy Ashton, was handed the foreign policy brief in what is now seen as a major error. Michel Barnier, the French-born commissioner for internal markets, has wielded by far the most power in the last five years. Ashton's role has been far more limited.

Now the UK is seen as an outlier on financial services - it was outvoted 26-to-1 on introducing a bankers' bonus cap - the chance of a Brit succeeding Barnier to the post is remote. This leaves the trade and competition briefs as the two key roles for the UK reform agenda. Employing someone with expertise could boost the chances of taking these positions.

So, who should get the job? Names in the frame include the CBI director general John Cridland. He runs a pro-European, pro-business lobby organisation but has also tussled with EU regulations and its tortuous policy-making process. Leaders of financial service trade bodies also have a pedigree of battling EU rules and winning key victories for the UK and the sector. 

Liberal Democrat MEP Sharon Bowles is a Brussels veteran and international expert on financial services regulation. In her role as chair of the powerful Economic and Monetary Affairs committee no one has seen more EU horse-trading. She likes the idea of a technocrat, telling me: "It's an interesting idea. If you put forward good business credentials there is a good chance the new President of the Commission will look at the talent and put them in the best position.

"I always thought Cameron would look among his own kind. There are still people supportive of the Conservatives even if they are not politicians. I don't know how someone who has never been involved in politics will find it because it is quite political. However, it is an interestingly refreshing thought."

Samuel Dale is politics reporter at Money Marketing

The anniversary of the birth of Richard Strauss, 150 years ago this June, is already being marked across the country. In Manchester, the major musical establishments – the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic, the Camerata and the Royal Northern College of Music – are holding a joint festival of nine concerts spread across the first eight weeks of the year, concentrating on his songs with orchestra and his tone poems. This generous observance is a contrast with the rather cool celebration of his centenary in 1964. Still rumbling on 50 years ago were the prejudices of those who accused him of being a supporter of the Nazis.

Strauss was born in Munich on 11 June 1864. His father, Franz, was the principal horn in the Munich court opera orchestra and his mother was the daughter of the owner of the Pschorr brewery. He began to compose when he was five and news of his prowess soon spread; his second symphony, composed when he was 19, had its first performance in New York.

As an adult, music was his prime interest in life, followed by his devotion to his wife, Pauline (a tempestuous soprano), their son, Franz, and his wife, Alice, his two grandsons and the card game Skat. He was a fine pianist, particularly as an accompanist, and a great conductor whose recordings of his own works and of Mozart symphonies are classics. Strauss reached an international audience with the tone poems he wrote between 1888 and 1915, transforming into music the stories of Don Juan, Don Quixote, the German medieval rascal Till Eulenspiegel, Macbeth and – in Ein Heldenleben (“A Hero’s Life”) – a hero, loosely based on himself, whose enemies were the music critics of Munich who had savaged his first opera.

His other subjects were Nietzsche’s “superman” (Also Sprach Zarathustra, whose opening fanfare appears in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey); climbing in the Alps (Eine Alpensinfonie); and a day in his family life (Symphonia Domestica). He once said, “I want to be able to depict in music a glass of beer so accurately that every listener can tell whether it is a Pilsner or a Kulmbacher.”

Strauss’s operas Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909) were sensations because of the lurid treatment of the melodies and the lyrical expressiveness with which he wrote for the female voice. When he was working as the conductor of the Berlin State Opera, his employer, Kaiser Wilhelm II, said to him: “This Salome will do you no good.” Strauss later wrote in his diary: “The ‘no good’ enabled me to build my house in Garmisch.”

His opera Der Rosenkavalier (1911), with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Harry Graf Kessler, enchanted the public with its 18th-century Viennese setting, waltzes, glamorous costumes and romantic plot. The operas that followed broke new ground: a chamber opera, Ariadne auf Naxos (1912); the mysterious and symbolic Die Frau ohne Schatten in 1917; and Intermezzo (1923), in which he used a personal marital glitch as the plot.

From 1942 until his death in 1949 – his “Indian summer” – Strauss wrote a series of orchestral pieces tempered by age and experience, of which the Metamorphosen (1945), a piece for 23 solo strings, might be his best. It was his elegy for the German culture that had been destroyed by the Nazis – “these barbarians”, as he called them. His final work, Four Last Songs (1948), crowned a lifetime of songwriting that ranks alongside Mahler, Schumann, Wolf and Schubert. His death at 85 evoked glowing tributes. But there was a cloud over the eulogies.

In 1933, Hitler became Germany’s chancellor at the head of the National Socialist Party. The non-political Strauss professed not to be worried, telling his family that this government would not last long. “I made music under the kaiser,” he told them. “I’ll survive under this lot, as well.” Strauss’s beloved daughter-in-law, Alice, was Jewish and she had two sons; his publisher, Adolf Fürstner, was Jewish and he was working on the libretto for his next opera with the Austrian-Jewish playwright Stefan Zweig, a comedy based on Ben Jonson’s The Epicene (Die Schweigsame Frau) and intended for a premiere in Dresden.

In 1933, Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda who was responsible for all aspects of cultural activity, set up departments to deal with each section of the arts; in November, he appointed Strauss president of the Reichsmusikkammer, overseeing music. Asked later why he accepted, Strauss said: “I hoped that I would be able to do some good and prevent worse misfortunes.”

He viewed his appointment as a chance to achieve some of the reforms he had long hoped for, chief among them that Germany should sign the Berne Convention on copyright law, raising the period of protection from 30 to 50 years. Thinking he had Goebbels’s support, Strauss in gratitude wrote a short song – it lasted about 95 seconds – called Das Bächlein (“The Little Brook”) and dedicated it to the minister. It was never performed in its original form. Its last line contained the word “Führer” repeated three times; for some time these words were attributed to Goethe but this has never been confirmed. When, during the war, a complete edition of his songs was proposed, he ordered Das Bächlein to be suppressed.

Strauss should have suspected something about Nazi rule when he was told he could not go to the Salzburg Festival in the summer of 1934 to conduct Fidelio. Eventually, the ban was lifted and meeting Zweig in the city, Strauss told him, “I have asked Goebbels if there are any ‘political objections’ against you, to which he answered, ‘No.’”

Over the Christmas period of 1934, Strauss composed Olympische Hymne for the 1936 Berlin Games, a commission from the German Olympic Committee, not the government. He implored Zweig to write another opera with him but the playwright was more realistic, knowing that the Nazis would not sanction a Jewish librettist. He offered to suggest subjects and supervise the completion of librettos written by acceptable authors. In a letter to Zweig, Strauss retorted: “You drive me to despair! This Jewish obstinacy! Enough to make a man anti-Semitic!” The letter, which mocked the idea of Aryan music, was taken by a member of the Gestapo from the mailbox in the Dresden hotel where Strauss was staying while attending rehearsals of Die Schweig­same Frau and was forwarded to Hitler.

At the dress rehearsal, Strauss suddenly called for a copy of the programme. He saw that Zweig’s name had been left out. He demanded its reinstatement or he would leave Dresden that day. The intendant, Paul Adolph, acquiesced – and was dismissed a few days later. The first performance went well. Hitler and Goebbels had promised to attend but did not do so; Hitler had now seen the letter Strauss had written and Goebbels demanded his resignation from the chamber “on the grounds of ill health”. Terrified for his family, Strauss wrote an obsequious letter to Hitler, asking to see him. There was no reply. In his private notebooks, Strauss wrote: “I consider the Jew-baiting by Goebbels a disgrace to German honour.”

Then followed ten years in which the Nazis played cat-and-mouse games with the ageing composer. They knew that the safety of his family was paramount in his life. They also needed his music. Goebbels wrote in his diary in February 1944: “Unfortunately, we still need him, but one day we shall have our own music and then we shall have no further need of this decadent neurotic.” Another official told him, “Other heads than yours have already rolled, Herr Doktor Strauss.”

In Garmisch, Strauss’s grandsons were stoned on their way to school and called “dirty Jews”. Their parents, Franz and Alice, were twice questioned by the Gestapo and 32 members of Alice’s family were incarcerated in Theresienstadt concentration camp, where they perished.

At the end of the war, Garmisch was in the US occupation zone and an official arrived at the villa to commandeer it. Strauss stood up to him and said, “I am the composer of Der Rosenkavalier and Salome. Leave me alone.” Conditions were so bad in Garmisch that the old couple were permitted to go to Switzerland. There, Strauss was surprised to encounter a good deal of hostility. A newspaper stated that he was not welcome in the country and a Swiss opera singer protested because the leading role in a Strauss opera in Zürich was taken by an Austrian soprano who had sung in Germany during the war. In 1947, Strauss made his first flight to conduct concerts in England arranged by his old friend Thomas Beecham. He was deeply depressed by having to justify himself to the denazification board, which was investigating those thought to have collaborated with the regime. In June 1948, he was cleared on all counts.

He and Pauline returned to Germany before the celebrations of his 85th birthday in Garmisch and Munich. His health was beginning to fail and he died on 8 September 1949. He said to Alice: “Dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung.”

Despite Strauss being cleared of collaboration, for decades his music suffered the same fate as Wagner’s: the composer’s association with the Nazis sullied the work, which was banned, ignored or reviled as a result. While Wagner is still verboten, Israel lifted its embargo on Strauss in the 1990s. Most audiences can now sympathise with the position in which Strauss found himself: a well-connected, pragmatic musician, hopeful of using his influence for good, anxious to help his Jewish friends and colleagues and determined to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren.

Michael Kennedy is honorary patron of “Strauss’s Voice”, a series of concerts at Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, running until 8 March. His book “Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma” is published by Cambridge University Press (£39.99)

The resignation of Michel Djotodia as president of the Central African Republic on 10 January prompted a rare eruption of joy in the beleaguered capital, Bangui. But after weeks of turmoil the situation remains extremely volatile.

Political violence has stalked the Central African Republic (Car) since French colonialists left in 1960. A half-dozen military coups have wrecked the country’s infrastructure, and entrenched ethnic divisions as each group in power has promoted its own interests. After Seleka, an alliance of predominantly Muslim militias, overthrew the national government in March 2013, violence once again took hold. From the beginning of December, Bangui suffered a wave of sectarian killings. Thousands of French and African Union soldiers struggled to secure the city.

Residents across Bangui have lived in fear of street battles between Seleka and its opponents, known as the anti-Balaka, who emerged in Car last summer. The anti-Balaka, rumoured to be supported by Djotodia’s predecessor as president, François Bozizé, have been killing Muslims indiscriminately.

By Christmas, up to a hundred thousand of the city’s residents were sleeping out at the airport. Thousands of others had sought shelter at monasteries and community centres – anywhere with a veneer of security. The streets surrounding the main morgue stank of decomposing flesh. Most shops were shut for ten days and the banks for two weeks, so very little money was circulating and many were hungry. The curfew was from 6pm to 6am; after dark the streets were empty except for military and militias. Inside the hôpital communautaire, or public hospital, young men lay bandaged and bleeding in the corridors and a woman wept, telling me: “Both sides are killing us like animals.”

At least 1,100 people have been killed in recent weeks and many more injured. According to the UN, roughly 370,000 people, almost half the population of Bangui, fled their homes amid “unprecedented” attacks on children, including the beheading of two children on New Year’s Eve. Across Car, one million people – a fifth of the population – have been displaced.

When Michel Djotodia and his prime minister, Nicolas Tiangaye, resigned during regional peace talks in neighbouring Chad, celebrations erupted in Bangui. Djotodia was Car’s first Muslim leader. What credibility he had was eroded by his failure to control rogue elements of Seleka and his inability to stem December’s chaos. He was particularly despised by many Christians, who make up 80 per cent of Car’s population. “The Christians were really celebrating,” says the journalist Vera Macht, “but there were also some anti-Balaka guys getting drunk and chanting, ‘We kill Muslims today.’”

Much of the reporting on Car has described the country as being on the brink of a war between Muslims and Christians, but many Central Africans disagree.

“This terrible crisis is about politics, not religion,” says Joseph Bidoumi, president of the Central African League for Human Rights and a veteran activist. “Since March [2013] people have been living in terror of the government.

“There has been complicity between some Muslim communities and Seleka. But the anti-Balaka are equally capable of horrific violations. Trust between communities has been completely shattered by this political violence, and we have to rebuild it.”

As news of Djotodia’s resignation spread, those camping out around the international airport began to pack up their scant belongings, saying they were now free to go home. In the ragged district of Bimbo, on the outskirts of Bangui, Seleka and anti-Balaka fighters laid down their arms and embraced each other.

The challenges facing Car are still vast. French and African Union troops will double to 6,000 by the end of this month but there are weapons everywhere. The National Transitional Council has just two weeks to organise a presidential election; parliamentary elections are also due in the next 12 months. But infrastructure has been badly damaged by decades of strife.

Yet finally there is some sense of hope in Bangui. Joseph Bidoumi insists he is “optimistic” that Car can pull itself back together. Despite the rampant killings, he points out that there are still cities and towns across the country where mixed communities are coexisting peacefully.

“Right now state institutions such as our judiciary are barely functioning,” he says. “But with security and the rule of law, our broken communities can start to be reconciled. We have to relearn to live together.”

Which is the better way to understand mental illness: a medical textbook, or a novel? Is there any reason to bother raking through three hundred pages of prose, when irregular human behaviour can be reduced to a simple clinical term, such as “bipolar”, or “autism”, or “schizophrenia”?

Nathan Filer thought long and hard about whether to include any of these words in his debut book, The Shock of the Fall, which won the Costa First Novel Award on 6 January. It tells the story of Matthew Holmes, a headstrong, quick-witted teenager haunted by the death of his brother on a family holiday when he was nine years old.

“I don’t diagnose him with schizophrenia, in that I never have a character in a position of authority say he’s got it,” Filer told me shortly after the prize announcement, “but then, he does end up on a community treatment order being given a depot injection against his will, so I guess it’s pretty strongly implied.”

In many ways Filer, a registered mental health nurse who worked for four years on a 19-bed open acute ward for people with a range of mental illnesses, is writing against the trend. The American essayist Marco Roth has charted the rise of the “neuronovel”, in which bad behaviour becomes synonymous with bad brain chemistry: think of Jed Parry in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, or Christopher Boone in Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. For Roth, this represents a loss of confidence in fiction: an allegory of the fear that science has become the best and only reliable measure of the human condition.

There is an increasing sense that inwardness, subjectivity and selfhood – the basic stuff of fiction – ought to be discarded as soon as possible. “I never quite understood why you would read fiction to understand the human condition,” Richard Dawkins told the New Republic last year. As cognitive therapies give way to cheap and readily available pharmaceuticals (the number of people in the UK taking antidepressants doubled between 2000 and 2011), the reduction of mind to brain in literature may well have been foreseen.

“It’s a temptation to write the illness and then bolt the character on to it,” Filer says, “but having worked in the field for so many years, it became a little bit more natural for me to see the person and see the illness as one facet of their character.”

We have been depicting mental illness in art far longer than we have been diagnosing it. Hamlet may have been bipolar, but that is not all that he was. It is not unreasonable to assume that observation and imagination may still paint a broader picture than textbooks, or even help them along.

Filer speaks fluent NHS: he still works occasional shifts as a nurse and uses expressions such as “service user” and “pathologise” without sounding cold or patronising. In his book, Matthew becomes a kind of challenge – to look beyond the disease and see what remains.

“The only way we’re ever able to diagnose people in mental health – we don’t put patients in an MRI scanner – is through the way they interact with people,” Filer says, explaining how he used his novel to ask questions, arising out of his work, on the location of mental illness.

“If we say that his schizophrenia is located in him,” he goes on, “and look at his mother (clearly there’s some anxiety and depression there), it seems that their respective problems are located in the space between them.

“The catalyst for breakdown is always stress: it’s life events. If you want to depict mental illness accurately, then the interplay needs to be shown. Fiction can do that.”

When Ed Miliband delivered his Labour conference speech last year, pledging to freeze energy prices if elected, the Conservatives revived their original line of attack against him: that the opposition leader, “Red Ed”, is a dangerous socialist. It proved no more successful then than it did in 2010. This is not just because, nearly 25 years after the fall of Berlin Wall, such scare tactics have lost their political potency, but also because the model of capitalism the Tories defend is no longer working for the majority.

GDP may be rising at its fastest rate since the crisis but median wages are still forecast to be below pre-recession levels in 2018 and no higher than they were in 2003. A broken energy market, in which six companies control 98 per cent of supply, has left 4.5 million people in fuel poverty. Extortionate rents have forced millions to rely on housing benefit. If the Tories are to triumph over Labour in 2015, they will need to offer answers to the failings of the market, rather than, as is so often the case, excuses.

One group that understands this challenge is Renewal, the organisation founded by the former Conservative candidate David Skelton last year with the intention of expanding the party’s appeal among working-class, northern and ethnic-minority voters. When I spoke to him about the organisation’s new project, Renewing Capitalism, he told me: “First the Tories have to accept that it [the market] isn’t working as well as it could for the low-paid, or for people not on the housing ladder, or for people waiting for social housing. Or people living in deindustrialised towns, which still haven’t recovered, or those unemployment black spots, which have been unemployment black spots for decades.”

As a result, Renewal is calling for the building of a million homes over five years, a new secretary of state for consumer protection and a significant increase in the minimum wage. While an increasing number of Tories support the last of these demands, others in the party are still arguing for an alternative direction, the libertarian Free Enterprise Group recently saying small businesses should be exempt from the minimum wage and from parental leave regulations.

In response, Skelton said: “I think Conservatives have to remember that one man’s regulation is someone else’s time to spend with their family. I think we need a different approach to regulation and a different approach to low pay, because Conservatives should care as much about things like community and family. We’re not an economically libertarian party, we’re not an economically reductionist party.”

Rather than the slimmed-down US-style state favoured by Tories such as Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan, as well as commentators such as City AM’s Allister Heath and Fraser Nelson of the Spectator, Skelton’s vision seems closer to the social-market economy championed by centre-right parties such as Germany’s Christian Democratic Union.

Having once accused Miliband of living in a “Marxist universe”, George Osborne has more recently echoed his rhetoric, arguing that the state “needs to step in to create the rules of the market”, after announcing that the government would introduce the cap on payday loan charges demanded by Labour.

To ask whether the Tories’ libertarian or interventionist instincts will win out is also to ask whether they will remain relevant in an era when it is the unrestrained market, not the state, that voters fear more.

“Sugar,” my late mother would declare, shovelling extra dollops of the stuff on her grandchildren’s breakfast cereal despite my protests and my wife’s, “gives you energy.” This was the almost universal view of her generation – formed by the ubiquitous propaganda of the sugar industry – and it was correct.

Unfortunately, most people never burn off the energy and the surplus turns into fat, leading to obesity, which in turn leads to Type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and other ills. Or so, if I understand them cor­rectly, scientists are telling us.

The latest shock horror is that the fruit juice you buy in supermarkets, hitherto recommended as one of the “five-a-day” portions of fruit and vegetables necessary for a healthy diet, has become so laden with sugar that it is as bad for you as Coca-Cola and should be avoided, or at least diluted, at all costs. I am reminded of how yoghurt, an ancient food praised by Pliny the Elder for its “agreeable acidity” and widely hailed for its nutritional value 50 years ago, was transformed by commercial manufacturers into a sugary confection almost indistin­guishable from blancmange.

For consumers, it is all very confusing. One sometimes suspects that health experts have a vested interest in the confusion, which allows them to sit on committees drawing fees and expenses while they delib­erate on opaque systems of food labelling.

There is no need for any of it. The gov­ernment should simply treat food as though it were tobacco or another dangerous drug and slap a punitive rate of tax on all of it except fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts, pulses and grains, sustainable wet fish and (within guidelines) bread – and put the onus on manufacturers to prove, case by case, that any other product is sufficiently healthy, nutritious and good for the planet to deserve exemption, along with permission to display a kitemark to that effect. This would relieve us of dilemmas about what to eat and create substantial extra revenue for the National Health Service.

Bought the farm

Ariel Sharon, who has died at the age of 85, was born on a moshav in central Pales­tine. The moshavim, like the better-known kibbutzim, are a reminder of why Israel once commanded wide support on the left.

Unlike the kibbutzim, they allowed inde­pendent households but most originally functioned as workers’ or farmers’ co-operatives. Even in the 1960s, many of us on the left saw Israel as the most promising model for a society that would avoid the worst of both Soviet communism and western capitalism.

Nearly all of its land was (and, excluding the occupied territories, still is) owned by the state or state agencies. We even used to applaud Israeli military victories as show­ing how social democrats could be more efficient as well as more socially just. Now Israel is just another privatising, neoliberal state, as well as one that is widely perceived as aggressive, imperialist and racist.

Private space invaders

The French press is still learning how to invade privacy, British-style. Confronted with evidence of presidential shagging, one must have every possible detail of where the shag allegedly took place, including the price of the property, its owner and names of any prominent neighbours.

In a helpful demonstration, our own Daily Mail“can reveal” that President Hollande’s “Paris love nest” is valued at £2.5m; the neighbouring owners include the “multi­millionaire fashion designer Pierre Cardin”; “the French actress Emmanuelle Hauck . . . uses the flat”; and, most importantly, since you need a “public interest” angle, it is registered to “a convicted criminal with Mafia links” (though the ownership remains unknown). QED.

Secret of our succession

For my wife’s birthday, we went to Kensington Palace, which ought to be interesting (even to a republican like me) because it was the home of Diana and now accommodates Mr and Mrs William Windsor. I was unimpressed. I realise that museums now offer “experiences” rather than information and that the palace is marketed as “enchanted”. But in very dark, overheated rooms, it was impossible to know what one was looking at or why. I spent a long time staring at a model that, I was told, represented the 44 potential successors to the throne who, on Queen Anne’s death in 1714, were bypassed in favour of the elector of Hanover who became George I.

How this was intended to elaborate (in a slightly misleading way) what I already knew – or to enlighten somebody unfamiliar with the English succession – was unclear. I cannot improve on a comment on the Time Out website: “Absolutely avoid this money-grubbing tacky experience.”

What is the most important invention of the past hundred years?
The Pill – one small step for a woman to take control of her own life but a giant step for womankind. And at least as important as the invention that put men on the moon.

What is the most important scientific discovery of the past hundred years?
That global warming is real, and a direct result of our use and abuse of the planet.

What is the most important sporting event of the past hundred years?
The 1968 Mexico Summer Olympics, when the medal-winning athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, with Peter Norman’s support, raised black-gloved salutes to protest against racial segregation in the US and South Africa, and racism in sport. Their subsequent vilification by some governments and the Olympic establishment belies the myth that sport can be a politics-free zone.

Which book has had the greatest impact on you?
Socialism Made Easy by James Connolly, a gift from my grandad. The film: Nostalgia for the Light by Patricio Guzmán (2010).

Who is the most influential or significant politician of the past hundred years?
Clement Attlee, for his recognition that the greater the economic difficulties, the greater the need for social justice.

Who is the most significant author or playwright?
Roy Williams, author of the play Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, who can transform the audience as well as the stage.

And which artist has had the greatest impact on you?
Francis Bacon, whose brilliance offended the taste of the narrow-minded.

How about anyone in business? With the centenary year of the Dublin Lockout, I will interpret this broadly and give the honour to “Big Jim” Larkin. His promise that new unionism could lead to new hope and inspiration still holds true.

And sportsperson?
The former Arsenal Ladies captain Faye White, who also won 90 caps for England. For the record, she retired because her knees were dodgy – not because she had a baby.

Who is the most influential philanthropist of the past hundred years?
I am struck by research which shows that, as a proportion of income, the more money people have, the less they give. A pinstriped philanthropist is hard to find. But the lifelong dedication to people’s well-being and rights shown by the former president of Ireland Mary Robinson offers a good example of the original meaning of the term.

What is your favourite quotation?
From the poem “London” by William Blake – which explains why we need the power of imagination to free ourselves:

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

What is your favourite speech?
The Clydeside trade union activist Jimmy Reid’s speech to Glasgow University in 1972, because it serves as a reminder to trade unionists that our ultimate goal is not just the betterment of workers but the fulfilment of human beings.

What do you think will be the most significant change to our lives in the next hundred years?
The development of artificial intelligence. As with any new technology, how it will shape our lives depends on whose interests it is used to serve.

What is your greatest concern about the future?
That unpopular governments will resort to conventional methods of digging themselves out of an economic hole: war.

What will be the most dramatic development in your own field?
There will be a movement for economic democracy in the 21st century akin to the Chartist movement for universal suffrage in the 19th century. The global concentration of power, wealth and capital is unsustainable.

What is the top priority for the future well-being of people and our planet?
Greater equality and democracy. As the book The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrated so profoundly, it is our best chance of liberating the human spirit.

There are two kinds of Coen brothers films: the good ones and the bad ones. As with Woody Allen or Robert Altman or Federico Fellini, very rarely do they fall between two stools. The reasons for the artistic success or failure of a Coen brothers film can usually be determined according to a simple rule. The good ones combine an expertly evoked mood with a tight and convoluted plot hinging on genre conventions (even if those conventions become twisted or subverted). The bad ones don’t have much in the way of plot, so that no matter how diligently the mood is sustained, or which genre the script appears to have sprung from, the impression is superficial, affected, soul-less.

Their new film, Inside Llewyn Davis, shares with the likes of Barton Fink and A Serious Man this malady. It is confident and self-congratulatory in its ability to evoke unease or melancholia or claustrophobia in a single cut or composition or camera angle. The world of the (fictional) struggling folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), trying to make his way in early 1960s New York, is one of long, narrow corridors, oppressively rumbling subway trains, grotesque faces shot from unflattering angles. Shoes squelch, winds whip, a car harrumphs noisily over the potholes in a road, a man hitchhikes in the fog. We feel comfortingly uncomfortable.

Davis had a singing partner, Mike, who committed suicide, though the insinuation is that it is actually Davis who died: he seems to exist in a limbo between the living and the dead. He may not even be human; there is a suggestion that his soul may have been decanted into the body of a cat. (Taking down the message “Llewyn Davis has the cat”, a woman mistakenly writes “Llewyn Davis is the cat.”) A last-minute structural trick in the script’s chronology reinforces the idea that he is trapped in a no man’s land. Certainly a grave couldn’t be any colder than the world through which Davis trudges. This is the sort of the thing that the Coens can do by numbers. Dread is their bread and butter. The film’s interior life, though, is inert. Gimmickry does the job of characterisation. Effect is everything. Nothing else matters.

The Coens need story more than most. They require the harness of narrative to prevent their natural artistic self-indulgence and philosophical smugness from smothering the material. It is of little consequence that the dense plot of The Big Lebowski doesn’t amount in the final analysis to a hill of mung beans: it keeps the filmmakers focused and generates a pleasurable friction with the main character’s baggy, ambling nature. It isn’t a watertight rule: despite being plot-heavy, Burn After Reading fails because where the audience’s privileged knowledge of proceedings, our position several steps ahead of the characters, undercuts the comedy. The Coens are nothing if not dedicated audience-flatterers: they love to make us feel smart. (As far back as 1996, in a review of Fargo, Adam Mars-Jones asked: “The Coen brothers are very knowing, but what is it that they know?”)

As a helpful guide, I have listed the good and bad Coen brothers films below. The anomalies—that is, those which fail for a reason other than a prevalence of mood over narrative—are Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers and Burn After Reading.

Good Coen brothers films:

Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?

Bad Coen brothers films:

Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, True Grit, Inside Llewyn Davis.

Inside Llewyn Davis is released on 24 January.

As the world’s wealthiest and most influential businessmen and politicians fly into Davos for the annual World Economic Forum, and book into hotels like the Belvedere Hotel - which has stocked up on 1,594 bottles of champagne and prosecco, 80kg of salmon and 16,805 canapes to feed the high-profile delegates setting the world to rights – it’s worth revisiting Oxfam’s recent figures on the state of global inequality today:

1. The richest 1 per cent own almost half the world’s wealth ($110tn).

2. The richest 85 people own the same combined wealth as the poorest half of the world.

3. The richest 10 per cent own 86 per cent of all assets, while the poorest 70 per cent own just 3 per cent of the world’s assets.

4. The combined wealth of Europe’s 10 richest people is more than the total cost of stimulus measures implemented across the EU between 2008 and 2010 (€217bn v €300bn).

5. The pre-tax income of the richest 1 per cent increased between 1980 and today in 24 out of 26 countries on the World Top Incomes Database. In China, Portugal and the US the incomes of the richest 1 more than doubled their share of national income in this period.

6. Since 1970, the tax on the richest has decreased in 29 out of 30 countries measured.

7. An estimated $18.5tn is held in offshore tax havens on behalf of multi-national companies and wealthy individuals. This is more than the GDP of the US.

8. Between 2008 and 2010 Sub-Saharan Africa lost $63.4bn in aid a year due to tax avoidance and evasion, more than twice the amount it received in aid.

You can read Oxfam’s report here.

Nigel Farage was treated to a classic dismantling by Andrew Neil on The Daily Politics today. Asked if UKIP was against replacing Trident, he replied: "I'm not sure where you got that from", to which Neil deadpanned: "from your website". Questioned on whether he still wanted a "compulsory dress code for taxi drivers", he answered: "do we? News to me". Asked whether it was still party policy to require trains to be "repainted in traditional colours", he responded: "I've never read that, I've no idea what you're talking about." Challenged on how the party could possibly afford its pledge to cut taxes by £90bn and increase spending by £30bn, he mused: "let's see". 

The Tories, who are stepping up their rebuttal of UKIP, have pounced on the clip as evidence that Farage is "simply not credible". But even if we ignore his vow to relaunch all UKIP policy after the European elections ("none of it stands today"), it is doubtful that such incidents damage him. It is precisely Farage's flippancy and his lack of formality ("when it comes to websites, I'm not the expert") that voters find endearing. All that the public, who pay far less attention to policy than most imagine, need to know is that UKIP stands against the Westminster establishment, against immigration, against "human rights", against overseas aid and against the EU. With no expectation that it will hold any significant power after 2015, voters have little interest in its stance on fiscal policy or defence. 

If Farage wants UKIP to eventually become something bigger than a protest party, he will not be able to afford such gaffes. But for now, they merely add to his lustre. 

The job of making UKIP appear less like the fringe party enjoying its day in the sun that it is, and more of a serious political contender, continues to be a tricky one for Nigel Farage. As befitting a party whose key demographic is older than any other (71 percent older than 50, only 15 percent younger than 40), its website is clunky, badly-formatted, difficult to navigate, and full of out-of-date information - or, at least, that's Farage's excuse for some of the barmier policies featured on there, which include a dress code for taxi drivers and a demand that the old-style liveries from the days of National Rail be reinstated on regional train lines.

This morning's Daily Politics, with Farage as guest, tried to pin down exactly what it was that UKIP believes in. "You don't need me to tell you that Nigel Farage is UKIP’s man," said Andrew Neil. "He wants out of the EU and he’s not particularly fond of immigration - but what does UKIP stand for?"

One of the few areas where UKIP has a clear stance is defence policy, opposing cuts to the armed forces. But, UKIP also wants to cut Trident, Neil points out. "No, I'm not sure where you've got that from," a confused Farage replies. 

"Your website," Neil responds. (The video above begins from this exchange.) "It says, 'we've committed to cancelling the Trident defence'."

"That is not the case. Not the case, no. It was the case.”

"Are you going to take it off the website then?"

“When it comes to websites I’m not the expert.”

That much was obvious when the UKIP leader was asked about the party's demand for a compulsory uniform for taxi drivers ("Do we? That's news to me"). “Under the last leadership, at the 2010 election, we managed to produce a manifesto that was 486 pages long. You can quote me all sorts of bits from it I won’t know, which is why I’ve said none of it stands today and we will launch it all after the European elections.”

The thing is, Farage isn't wrong -  UKIP's website, and the party's 2010 manifesto, is filled with bizarre stuff like this. These are also the only policy positions that voters have to go on, as Farage might not like to admit. Here's a non-exhaustive list of examples:

• "The earnings of employed people are not a legitimate target for taxation."
• "We are unconvinced of many of the arguments behind the man-made ‘global warming’ scare."
• "Britain and Britishness are in trouble. They are being attacked and undermined, both externally and internally. They are threatened by the European Union (EU) and corporatist Americanised pressures from without, and betrayed by misguided politically correct ideology, extremist Islam and errant nationalism from within ... The UK Independence Party wishes to remain a close friend of the United States, and deplores the rampant anti-Americanism of Continental Europe as racism."
• "Welsh, Scottish and Irish nationalists constantly speak of their desire to be 'independent' of England. UKIP sees this as bogus independence."
• "Regarding the Islamicisation of Britain, UKIP would ban the covering of the face in public buildings and certain private buildings."
• "UKIP would safeguard British weights and measures (the pint, the mile etc.), which have been undermined by the EU."
• "UKIP would support the Monarchy by replacing the media frenzy around state support by transferring sufficient amounts of Crown Estate assets back to the Crown to provide suitable income." 
• "UKIP will encourage British designers to create a reinvigorated "British style." 
• "UKIP would formally strike out the unhelpful verse starting with 'rebellious Scots to crush' from the national anthem. UKIP would require the UK theme medley to be restored to BBC Radio 4."
• "The phenomena of political correctness itself has its origins in the Frankfurt School of Marxism of the 1930s."
• "The UK Independence Party believes that a wise investment would be a 'British Ambassadorial Ship'." 
• "UKIP will give tax relief for real ales." 
• "The BBC and the British Film Council will have their remits altered to back films that promote British values and British talent and locations. They will not be allowed to back films that denigrate, attack or oppose British values. For example, the Film Council would not back a pro-IRA, anti-British film in ‘The Wind That Shakes The Barley’ by the Marxist Ken Loach or projects like ‘This is England’, which glorifies hooliganism."
• "The low point for the BBC came when a former Director-General admitted the BBC was “hideously white” - a remark that is simply racist."
• "We would welcome a return to traditional British headdress and uniforms for the police and armed forces. UKIP would also welcome the replacement of US-style baseball caps from all public services, particularly the police and armed forces, with traditional British headdress. UKIP will encourage a return to proper dress for major hotels, restaurants and theatres."
• "British passports will return to their proper larger size and design."
• "UKIP notes that in the 2007/8 football season, two British teams reached the European Champions League final, yet not a single British Home Nation qualified for the European Championships that same summer ... UKIP blames the EU for this ... UKIP would place a maximum of three foreign players in the starting line up."
• "UKIP will encourage higher standards of behaviour in society, including greater politeness, courtesy, manners, not swearing in public."
• "The patchy and biased teaching of history in schools, often very anti-British, is a major problem for a cohesive society. The issue of slavery in particular would also reflect the greater levels of trade by Arab slave traders (including the seizing of English citizens for slaves from the South West), the role of African tribes in the trade and Wilberforce‘s world leading abolition campaign. The Slavery issue has been deliberately used to undermine Britishness."

...and those are all from just the first page.

And finally, Buzzfeed today posted a quiz challenging people to guess which policies are UKIP's and which are the Monster Raving Loony Party's. It's (unsurprisingly) tricky.