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How women have deserted the Tories at the polls

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The party once attracted far more female than male support but since 2005 the reverse has been true.

David Cameron may have insisted that his party does not have a "problem with women" at today's PMQs (as he stood in front of an entirely male frontbench) but the polls tell a different story. The latest YouGov survey gives Labour a three-point lead among men (36-33) but a nine-point lead among women (42-33). 

The female vote was once one of the Tories' greatest electoral assets, with the party consistently attracting more support from women than men, but since 2005 the reverse has been true. In 1992, the female-male gender gap [% Female Con Vote - % Female Lab Vote] minus [% Male Con Vote -% Male Lab Vote] stood at six points in the Tories' favour but it fell to two points in 1997, to one point in 2001 and to minus six in 2005 (among men, the Tories and Labour were tied on 34 per cent). At the last election, the gender gap stood at minus five and, as I've noted, it currently stands at minus six. Here are the numbers in full. 

How men and women voted

1979

Men

Conservative 43

Labour 40

Women

Conservative 47

Labour 35

Female-male gender gap: +9

1983

Men 

Conservative 42

Labour 30

Women

Conservative 46

Labour 26

Female-male gender gap: +8

1987

Men 

Conservative 43

Labour 32

Women

Conservative 43

Labour 32

Female-male gender gap: 0

1992

Men 

Conservative 41

Labour 37

Women

Conservative 44

Labour 34

Female-male gender gap: +6

1997

Men 

Conservative 31

Labour 45

Women

Conservative 32

Labour 44

Female-male gender gap: +2

2001

Men 

Conservative 32

Labour 42

Women

Conservative 33

Labour 42

Female-male gender gap: +1

2005

Men 

Conservative 34

Labour 34

Women

Conservative 32

Labour 38

Female-male gender gap: -6

2010 

Men 

Conservative 38

Labour 28

Women

Conservative 36

Labour 31

Female-male gender gap: -5


“To say it country simple, most folks enjoy junk”: William S Burroughs on addiction, rehab and Opium Jones

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On the centenary of his birth, we republish William S Burroughs's 1966 New Statesman essay on apomorphine, the drug which helped him kick his heroin habit in London.

Junk is a generic term for all habit-forming preparations and derivatives of opium including the synthetics. There are also non-habit-forming derivatives and preparations of opium. Papaverene, which is found in raw opium, is non-habit-forming. Apomorphine, which is derived from morphine, is non-habit-forming. Yet both substances are classified as narcotics in America under the Harrison Narcotics Act. Any form of junk can cause addiction. Nor does it make much difference whether it is injected, sniffed or taken orally. The result is always the same - addiction. The addict functions on junk. Like a diver depends on his air-line, the addict depends on his junk line. When his junk is cut off, he suffers agonising withdrawal symptoms: watering, burning eyes, light fever, hot and cold flashes, leg and stomach cramps, diarrhoea, insomnia, prostration, and in some cases death from circulatory collapse and shock. Withdrawal symptoms are distinguished from any syndrome of comparable severity by the fact that they are immediately relieved by administering a sufficient quantity of opiates. The withdrawal symptoms reach their peak on the fourth day, then gradually disappear over a period of three to six weeks. The later stages are marked by profound depression.

The exact mechanisms of addiction are not known. Doctor Isbell of the Public Health Centre at Lexington, Kentucky, has suggested that junk blankets the cell receptors. This cell-blanketing action could account both for the pain-killing and the habit-forming action of junk. The way in which junk relieves pain is habit-forming, and all preparations of junk so far tested have proved habit-forming to the exact extent of their effectiveness as pain-killers. Any preparation of junk that relieves acute pain will afford proportionate relief to withdrawal symptoms. A non-habit-forming morphine would seem to be a latter-day philosopher's stone, yet much of the research at Lexington is currently orientated in this barren direction. When the cell-blanketing agent is removed the body undergoes an agonising period of reconversion to normal metabolism characterised by the withdrawal symptoms already described.

The question as to what sort of persons become addicts has been answered by the Public Health Department: “Anyone who takes any addicting preparation long enough.” The time necessary to establish addiction varies with individual susceptibility and the addictive strength of the preparation used. Normally anyone who receives daily injections totalling one grain of morphine every day for a month will experience considerable discomfort if the injections are discontinued. Four to six months of use is enough to establish full addiction. Addiction is an illness of exposure. By and large, those become addicts who have access to junk. In Iran where opium was sold openly in shops they had three million addicts. There is no more a pre-addict personality than there is a pre-malarial personality despite all the hogwash of Psychiatry to the contrary.

To say it country simple, most folks enjoy junk. Having once experienced this pleasure, the human organism will tend to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. The addict's illness is junk. Knock on any door. Whatever answers the door give it four and a half grain shots of God's Own Medicine every day for six months and the so called “addict personality” is there ... an old junky selling Christmas seals on North Clark Street the “Priest” they called him, seedy and furtive cold fish eyes that seem to be looking at something other folks can't see. That something he is looking at is junk. The whole addict personality can be summed up in one sentence: the addict needs junk. He will do a lot to get junk just as you would do a lot for water if you were thirsty enough. You see junk is a personality - a seedy grey man couldn't be anything else but junk rooming-house a shabby street room on the top floor these stairs cough the “Priest” there pulling himself up along the banister bathroom yellow wood panels dripping toilet works stacked under the wash basin back in his room now cooking up grey shadow on a distant wall used to be me Mister.

I was on junk for almost 15 years. In that time I took 10 cures. I have taken abrupt withdrawal treatments and prolonged withdrawal treatments, cortisone, tranquillisers, antihistamines and the prolonged sleep cure. In every case I relapsed at the first opportunity. Why do addicts voluntarily take a cure and then relapse? I think on a deep biological level most addicts want to be cured. Junk is death and your body knows it. I relapsed because I was never physiologically cured until I took the apomorphine treatment.

Apomorphine is the only agent I know that evicts the “addict personality”, my old friend Opium Jones. We were mighty close in Tangier 1957 shooting every hour 15 grains of methodone per day, which equals 30 grains of morphine and that's a lot of GOM. I never changed my clothes. Jones likes his clothes to season to stale rooming-house flesh until you can tell by a hat on the table a coat hung over a chair that Jones lives there. I never took a bath. Old Jones don't like the feel of water on his skin. I spent whole days looking at the end of my shoe just communing with Jones. Then one day I saw that Jones was not a real friend that our interests were in fact divergent. So I took a plane to London and found Doctor Dent charcoal fire in the grate Scottish terrier cup of tea. He told me about the treatment and I entered the nursing-home the following day. It was one of those four-storey buildings on Cromwell Road room with rose wallpaper on the third floor. I had a day nurse and a night nurse and received an injection of apomorphine one twentieth grain every two hours day and night. Doctor Dent told me I could have morphine if I needed it but the amount would be small – one-twelfth what I had been using, with quite a cut again the next day.

Now every addict has his special symptom, the one that hits him hardest when his junk is cut off. With me its feeling the slow painful death of Mr Jones. Listen to the old-timers in Lexington talking about their symptom:

“Now with me it's puking is the worst.”

“I never puke. It's this cold burn on my skin drives me up the wall.” “My trouble is sneezing.”

“I feel myself encased in the old grey corpse of Mr Jones. Not another person in this world I want to see. Not a thing I want to do except revise Mr Jones.”

Third day cup of tea at dawn calm miracle of apomorphine I was learning to live without Jones, reading newspapers writing letters, most cases I can't write a letter for month and here I was writing a letter on the third day and looking forward to a talk with Doctor Dent who isn't Jones at all. Apomorphine had taken care of my special symptom. Seven days after entering the nursing-home I got my last eighth-grain shot. Three days later I left the hospital. I went back to Tangier where junk was readily available at that time. I didn't have to use will power whatever that is. I just didn't want any junk. The apomorphine treatment had given me a long calm look at all the grey junk yesterdays, a long calm look at Mr Jones standing there in his shabby black suit and grey felt hat stale rooming-house flesh cold undersea eyes. So I boiled him in hydrochloric acid. Only way to get him clean you understand layers and layers of that grey junk rooming-house smell.

Apomorphine is made from morphine by boiling with hydrochloric acid but its physiological action is quite different. Morphine sedates the front brain. Apomorphine stimulates the back brain and the vomiting centres. One-twelfth grain of apomorphine injected will produce vomiting in a few minutes and for many years the only use made of this drug was as an emetic in cases of poisoning.

When Doctor Dent started using the apomorphine treatment, 40 years ago, all his patients were alcoholics. He would put a bottle of whisky by the bed and invite the patient to drink all he wanted. But with each drink the patient received an injection of apomorphine. After a few days the patient conceived such a distaste for alcohol that he would ask to have the bottle removed from the room. Doctor Dent thought at first that this was due to a conditioned aversion, since the spirit was associated with a dose of apomorphine that often produced vomiting. However, he found that some of his patients were not in the least nauseated by the dose of apomorphine received. There is considerable individual variation. Nonetheless these patients experienced the same distaste for alcohol and voluntarily stopped drinking after a few days of treatment. He concluded that his patients conceived a distaste for alcohol because they no longer needed it and that apomorphine acts on the back brain to regulate metabolism so that the body no longer needs a sedative to which it had become accustomed. From that time he stressed the fact that apomorphine is not an aversion treatment. Apomorphine is a metabolic regulator and it is the only drug known that acts in this way to normalise a disturbed metabolism.

The treatment is fully described with dosage in Doctor Dent's book, Anxiety and its Treatment. Anyone undertaking to administer the apomorphine treatment should consult this book. It is essential to the success of the treatment to give a sufficient quantity of apomorphine over a sufficient period of time. Vomiting should be avoided whenever possible. If the method of administration is sublingual as much as a tenth of a grain can be given even hour. With sublingual administration it is quite easy to control or eliminate nausea and the entire treatment can be carried out successfully without a single instance of vomiting. The concentration of apomorphine in the system must reach a certain level for the treatment to be successful. I have known doctors in America who gave two injections of apomorphine per day. This is quite worthless. It is important to remember that any opiate or any sedative reverses the action of apomorphine. As regards sedatives, tranquillisers and sleeping pills, absolutely none should be given.

Like a good policeman, apomorphine does its work and goes. The fact that it is not an addictive substitute drug is crucial. In any reduction cure the addict knows that he is still receiving narcotics and he dreads the time when the last dose is withdrawn. In the apomorphine treatment the addict knows he is getting better without morphine.

When you take apomorphine for a severe emotional state you have faced the problem, not avoided it. The apomorphine has normalised your metabolism, always disturbed in any emotional upset, so that you can face the problem with calmness and sanity. Apomorphine is the anti-anxiety drug. I have witnessed in others, and experienced myself, dramatic relief from anxiety caused by mescalin after a dose of apomorphine where tranquillisers were quite ineffective.

I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contradicted for addicts. Addicts should not be led to dwell on or relive the addict experience since this conduces to relapse. The question “Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?” should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.

Can Labour defuse the "borrowing bombshell"?

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An increasing number of Labour MPs believe that the party must make an explicit case for borrowing to invest if it is to counter the Tories' attack line of choice.

In 1992, it was the “tax bombshell” that sank Neil Kinnock and John Smith’s election hopes. The Conservatives believe that the “borrowing bombshell” will do the same to Ed Miliband and Ed Balls in 2015. The shadow chancellor’s refusal to rule out running a deficit to fund higher capital investment has given the Tories the target they wanted. A Times front page warning “Labour’s spending spree to cost £25bn” and Danny Alexander’s subsequent claim that the party would “pile another £166bn of borrowing on to the debt mountain” were the opening shots in the long war that will now be waged on Labour’s economic credibility.

Faced with this assault, the opposition’s instinct remains to change the subject: to its pledge to achieve a current budget surplus, to the living standards crisis, to George Osborne’s failure to meet his own deficit targets. Balls and his aides state both publicly and privately that no decision will be taken on whether to borrow to invest until closer to the election, when the state of the economy is clearer. But few in the party believe it will be possible for Labour to achieve its priorities – a mass housebuilding programme, universal childcare, the integration of health and social care – without doing so. As one shadow cabinet minister told me: “We all know that a Labour government would invest more.” The question, rather, is a tactical one: when and how does Labour make the case for “good borrowing”?

The party starts, as all sides acknowledge, from a position of weakness. The Conservatives’ framing of the crash as the result of overspending by the last government has succeeded in crowding out all alternative accounts. It is the belief that Labour was profligate in the past that allows the Tories to warn that it would be profligate in the future. Yet the facts are on the opposition’s side. In 2007, both the deficit (2.4 per cent of GDP) and the national debt (36.5 per cent) were lower than in 1997 (3.4 per cent of GDP, national debt of 42.5 per cent). It was the crash that caused the deficit (which swelled to 11 per cent after a collapse in tax receipts), not the deficit that caused the crash. But politics is not an Oxford economics seminar. The perception among the public that the last government spent too much is so ingrained that the numbers no longer matter. There is little to be gained from repeatedly contesting this myth, just as there is little to be gained from an insincere apology. The outcome of the election will depend on Labour winning an argument about the future, not the past.

An essential part of this will be a commitment to invest in those areas, such as housing and childcare, that support long-term prosperity. But given the fiscal constraints that Labour would face in office, with £12bn of tax rises required merely to maintain departmental spending cuts at their present pace, it will almost certainly have to borrow to make up the shortfall.

In private, Miliband’s advisers argue that the voters are able to distinguish between borrowing to fund day-to-day spending and borrowing for investment, just as they distinguish between “borrowing to fund the weekly shop” and “borrowing for an asset like a house”. But the Labour leader is not yet prepared to make this case in public. Since an ill-fated interview last year on Radio 4’s The World at One, in which he refused eight times to admit that Labour would borrow more than the Conservatives, Miliband has focused deliberately on market reforms that would not cost government money: freezing energy prices, expanding use of the living wage and restructuring the banking system. When he has made promises that would require new funding, such as the construction of 200,000 homes a year by 2020, the question of borrowing has been deferred.

It is an ambiguity that increasing numbers of Labour MPs believe can no longer be maintained. If the party waits until early 2015 before showing its hand, they warn, it will be too late to win the voters round. The former cabinet minister John Healey told me: “The terms of debate about borrowing are still dominated by the simple sloganeering from the coalition … I think we have to break that argument; there is clearly good borrowing and bad borrowing.” Another former cabinet minister, Peter Hain, similarly argued: “We ceded the territory in the months after May 2010 by being preoccupied with an overlong leadership election. We’ve got to win it back, basically.”

Healey urges Labour to turn the Tories’ household analogies against them: “It makes sense to borrow to buy a house, especially if your mortgage payments are less than your rent. It makes sense to borrow money to buy a car if that allows you to then travel to take up a job that pays better and brings in more.”

The case for borrowing to invest could be made more easily if Labour were to have what one MP calls a “fiscal Clause Four moment”: an act that convinces voters it means what it says about “iron discipline”. It is this ambition that explains Balls’s continued threat to withdraw support for High Speed 2 and the doubt over Labour’s commitment to Trident. But while the party continues its search for an emblem of fiscal responsibility, the Tories are remorselessly increasing their lead on this issue.

Rather than proselytising for borrowing, as Labour’s most ardent Keynesians propose, or entering an auction on austerity, as its most ardent fiscal conservatives suggest, Miliband’s ambition remains to shift the debate towards building “a different kind of economy”, one beyond the conventional terms of exchange on tax and spend. In an era of depressed living standards, it is a gamble that may serve his party well. But if the next election proves more like its predecessors than many expect, he risks being left defenceless beneath the bombshell.

Morning Call: pick of the papers

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The ten must-read comment pieces from this morning's papers.

1. What a fairer Scotland would look like (Independent)

Despite its progressive rhetoric, the SNP would hand big business a mighty cheque, writes Owen Jones.

2. Three cheers for Tory rebels, the real loyalists (Times)

Downing Street expects unswerving obedience, but without the awkward squad we’d be at war – and have dearer petrol, writes Tm Montgomerie.

3. A broken union would unsettle Northern Ireland (Financial Times)

A Scottish Yes vote would open constitutional question at a delicate time, writes Jonathan Powell.

4. We need a counterweight to City and corporate power (Guardian)

Any further weakening of Labour's links with the unions will only deepen the crisis of representation in the political system, says Seumas Milne.

5. As an island nation, we will in the end have to accept that the sea will continue to reshape our landscape (Independent)

It is unrealistic to fortify the whole of the south west and flood defences obstruct open views, writes Mary Dejevsky.

6. We may soon learn France's real role in the Rwanda genocide (Guardian)

In a milestone court case in Paris, unprecedented testimony could reveal the Elysée's links to the 1994 génocidaires, writes Linda Melvern.

7. Carney must avoid more unforced error (Financial Times)

The BoE hitched its wagon to unemployment when what it really cared about was recovery, writes Chris Giles.

8. The Education Secretary is right to take on teacher 'Blobbledegook’ (Daily Telegraph)

Michael Gove takes the outdated view that teaching and learning is the job description of schools, writes Allison Pearson. He deserves all our support.

9. Payment Protection (Times)

Reducing the national debt is not optional for Britain; it is essential to sustainable recovery, argues a Times editorial.

10. Bitcoin is more than a speculators’ currency (Financial Times)

People could gain ownership rights to digital goods similar to physical ones, writes John Gapper.

Staying power: the seemingly exceptional economics of Japan

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2013 was the year the world’s financial markets suddenly became interested in Japan again.

Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival
David Pilling
Allen Lane, 432pp, £20

Until December 2012, Japan was proverbial in the City as the graveyard of global investors. It seemed impossible to get right. How many false dawns on its stock market had the optimists endured over the two “lost decades”, since the collapse of its great bubble in 1990? Then again, how often had the pessimists – warning of imminent default, as Japan’s pile of government debt grew bigger and bigger – turned out to be crying wolf? A frustrated fund manager of my acquaintance summed up the way in which many financial types had come to think of Japan: “I don’t understand what is happening there and I never will: sometimes, I wish it just didn’t exist.”

Yet Japan continued to exist – and despite its lost decades was still the world’s largest creditor nation, its third biggest economy and the undisputed technological leader in a whole host of its most important industries. This apparent paradox has been troubling visitors for years. In the middle of David Pilling’s new book there is a photograph of Tokyo’s dazzlingly futuristic neon cityscape at night. “If this is a recession,” said a visiting politician who witnessed this sight with Pilling, “I want one.” Somehow, Japan has managed to remain both a byword for economic catastrophe and an object of economic emulation. No wonder my friend was so baffled.

The trouble is that Japan resists simplification, and the risk for any book about it is, therefore, that it resorts to caricature. That is a danger for a book about any country, of course. But it is a special risk in the case of Japan, with its confusing economic paradoxes – to say nothing of its white-gloved taxi drivers, its Tamagotchis and its musical loos.

Pilling – a Financial Times journalist who was the paper’s Tokyo bureau chief from 2002-08 – is not just alert to this danger. He turns it to his advantage.

To begin with, he confronts Japan’s supposed exceptionalism head on. It is a notion dear not just to orientalising westerners but, he explains, to many Japanese too. Pilling locks horns with some of the most obsessive proponents of nihonjinron– the study of Japaneseness – whose fanatical claims sound hollow next to his disarming irony. The real ingenuity in Pilling’s approach, however, is not to attempt the impossible task of capturing in a single, seamless portrait the essence of Japan but to assemble instead a highly readable collage of evocative vignettes, drawing on historical episodes and his own experience.

The core of the book consists of four sections. The first explains how Japan’s history before the Meiji restoration and in the early 20th century led to its isolation from the rest of Asia. The second covers the decades of Japan’s economic miracle after the Second World War. The third is an exploration of “Life After Growth” – a series of despatches from the Japan of the 2000s, whose economic and demographic stagnation at high levels of wealth and income have recently begun to haunt the west. The last concerns the important implications for Japan of China’s rise.

The overarching theme is that the puzzling combination of an alleged economic depression with exceptional economic success is just the beginning of Japan’s complexities. The Second World War, for example, left westerners convinced that the Japanese were innately totalitarian, and the seemingly inexorable advance of its monolithic zaibatsu (business conglomerates) confirmed them in this prejudice. Pilling quotes the Meiji-era reformer Yukichi Fukuzawa to remind us that, in reality, Japan had a liberal political tradition as venerable as that of many other countries, even if it could be expressed in apparently self-contradictory terms: “the feudal system is my father’s mortal enemy which I am honour-bound to destroy”.

Pilling might equally have plucked a line or two from the poignant letters written by young Japanese pilots to their families during the war in the Pacific. “I am very proud of being chosen as a kamikaze pilot,” wrote one, but “if I listened only to my reason . . . I would know that freedom is certain to triumph in the end. Perhaps I might be reproached with ‘liberalism’. But freedom is the very essence of human nature and cannot be annihilated.”

Yoshi Imagi, the young man who wrote those words in his last letter, before crash-diving his aeroplane on to an American warship in May 1945, knew that the Japanese are not innately different from anyone else. They just live under different institutions.

In the nationalist era those institutions were murderous. In the postwar period, Japan developed a new set of institutions that were equally unusual but much more benign – most famously, the unique corporate system that served as the basis of its economic miracle. Here, too, western prejudice was quick to chalk up Japanese success to racial difference or “Asian values”. But again the truth is that it was really down to the deliberate choice of different, and more efficient, practices – as their later adoption by western firms confirmed.

Yet there is one aspect of Japanese society that Pilling believes is unique. This is the quality of resilience to which the book’s title, Bending Adversity, alludes. To illustrate this point, the core of the book is bracketed by two sections that describe in compelling detail the catastrophic tsunami that devastated Japan on 11 March 2011, and the extraordinary achievements of the Japanese in overcoming its impact and aftermath.

The hardships that the Japanese endured were awful. Whole communities were wiped out in the north-east. The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant prompted the shutdown of Japan’s entire nuclear power industry almost overnight. Yet the country coped. There was no Hurricane Katrina-style breakdown of civil order in Tohoku. Japan’s ultra-modern metropolises instantly adapted to life without lifts and air-conditioning.

The stories have visceral power and are beautifully told. They also give a book that is deliberately fragmentary a satisfying narrative arc. If there is a key to Japan’s history, Pilling argues, it is in its phenomenal ability to turn calamity to advantage.

Pilling’s command of structure is enviable. His sense of timing isn’t bad either. The year 2013 was the year when the world’s financial markets suddenly became interested in Japan again. After 20 years of half measures, the Japanese elected a prime minister in December 2012 – Shinzo Abe – who promised to do things differently. A new governor at the Bank of Japan promptly embarked on the most aggressive programme of monetary easing the world has yet seen.

The Japanese stock market rocketed and the yen collapsed. The consequences for the rest of the world have yet to be fully parsed. But my friend the fund manager is already tearing his hair out at this latest surprise from Japan.

Now I know how to console him: I will give him a copy of David Pilling’s book.

Felix Martin writes the “Real Money” column for the NS. He is the author of “Money: the Unauthorised Biography”

Nagasaki: Midori’s Rosary

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A poem by Rowan Williams.
The air is full of blurred words. Something
has changed in the war’s weather. The children
(whose children will show me this) have been sent
to the country. In the radiology lab,
Takashi fiddles, listening to the ticking bomb
in his blood cells, thinks, once, piercingly,
of her hands and small mouth, knotting him in
to the long recital of silent lives
under the city’s surface, the ripple of blurred Latin,
changing nothing in the weather of death and confession,
thinks once, in mid-morning, of a kitchen floor, flash-frozen.
 
When, in the starburst’s centre,
the little black mouth opens, then clenches,
and the flaying wind smoothes down the grass 
and prints its news black on bright blinding
walls, when it sucks back the milk
and breath and skin, and all the world’s vowels
drown in flayed throats, the hard things,
bone and tooth, fuse into consonants of stone,
Midori’s beads melt in a single mass
around the shadow with its blackened hands
carved with their little weeping lips.
 
Days earlier, in Hiroshima, in what was left
of the clinic chapel, little Don Pedro, turning
from the altar to say, The Lord be with you,
heard, suddenly, what he was about to claim,
seeing the black lips, the melted bones,
and so, he said, he stood, his small mouth
open, he never knew how long, his hands
out like a starburst, while the dialogue
of stony voiceless consonants ground across
the floor, like gravel in the wind, and the two
black mouths opened against each other,
 
Nobody knowing for a while 
which one would swallow which.
 
*

A note on the poem: Midori Nagai was a young housewife from an old Nagasaki Catholic family who died in the bomb blast in 1945; her husband (Takashi) was a radiologist, and after the war became a peace activist. The melted rosary is preserved at a museum in Nagasaki commemorating Takashi Nagai’s work.

Rowan Williams is a poet, critic and theologian, and former archbishop of Canterbury. He is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Dr Williams’s new collection, The Other Mountain, will be published by Carcanet in October.

What set Jack Nicholson apart? On the blinding, now fading jack of hearts

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This relaxed, unoffical biography contains a between-the-lines longing not just for the subtler parts but for the genuine good times.

Nicholson: a Biography
Marc Eliot
Crown Publishing, 400pp, £20

This relaxed, unofficial biography of Jack Nicholson does one thing unusually well: it gives the impression of its subject living a life of ceaseless conversation and genuine interest in other people – surely the greatest virtue as an artist. Raised in New Jersey in the 1930s by a hairdresser who turned out to be his grandmother (his mother was the pretty showgirl he thought was his sister), the young John Joseph Nicholson was surrounded by women fussing and feeding him cake (“It’s a miracle I didn’t turn out to be a fag”). At 17 he was his full height, just under five foot ten (shorter than Steve McQueen but taller than Al Pacino), and chatting fascinatedly to the girls at school.

Arriving in his late teens in Hollywood, poor, well-read, buoyant and analytical, Nicholson continued gassing for over a decade in cafés, in brothels full of starlets and in pool halls. As an actor, working first with the on-the-hoof director Roger Corman, Nicholson’s New Jersey accent and over-demonstrative eyebrows hindered his rise. But by the time success hit – aged an ancient 37, delivering an ingenious, self-written, utopian monologue in Dennis Hopper’s 1969 Easy Rider– the buzz surrounding the actor was intense and his circle of acquaintances enormous. Quickly, he heaped up triumphs (1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), awards (he has won 64 globally) and money ($15m from Batman merchandise alone).

What set Nicholson apart? He was cool but open. He vaulted through the classes with ease and always acted less handsome than he was. And if you don’t think Nicholson was handsome, you’re wrong. It’s the kind of handsome you only recognise a couple of moments after you’ve looked (then you spend hours lovingly cleaning him up in your head – combing the crazy hair, wiping that peeled-back, gun-dog mouth).

Crucially, every moment of Nicholson’s best work was founded on a sense of humour. Think of how funny he is as the unsmiling Eugene O’Neill in Warren Beatty’s 1981 Reds, trying to seduce the careless Diane Keaton even though his heart is breaking. Or in Five Easy Pieces (1970) – tinkling imaginary piano keys up and down on his own chest and belly in the kitchen – until the point in the film in which he painstakingly and terrifyingly stops being funny and you feel as bereft as his co-star Karen Black, looking appalled under her false eyelashes.

No wonder everybody loved him. Everybody, perhaps, bar his hero, Marlon Brando, who lived next door to him on Mullholland Drive – leading it to be known as Bad Boy Drive. One day, the studio executive Peter Guber pulled over to ask a fat man digging up roses on the side of the road, “Mister, mister. Where’s Jack Nicholson’s house?” The fat man, not bothering to turn around but with every syllable revealing himself unmistakably as Brando, murmured, “I ain’t Jack Nicholson.”

Like Brando, Nicholson got fat. He has a weakness for Mexican food and ate too many chimichangas. His hair kept falling out (the regular transplants never worked) and what was left of it was teased to stand above his head like a depiction of electricity in a cartoon. In case you were wondering, Marc Eliot reveals that Nicholson has always suffered from premature ejaculation. Not that women minded a jot. There is nobody, including the saintly Meryl Streep, that Nicholson didn’t go to bed with. He fell hardest for the otter-sleek Anjelica Huston, who for 17 years loomed over him adoringly, despite his infidelities (she called him “the hot pole”).

Fatally, Nicholson got noisy. By the age of 50, with the $64m-grossing Witches of Eastwick (1987), his on-screen tempo changes had turned into operatics and his once infinitely witty face had hardened into the “incorrigible me!” expression first hinted at in The Shining (1980) and worn all the way though As Good as It Gets (1997) and The Departed (2006).

Am I imagining a drop in temperature in the book here? There is a between-the-lines longing not just for the subtler parts but for the genuine good times, when the actor might buzz about humming, a copy of Camus in his back pocket, and bump into Muhammad Ali or take Bob Dylan for cognac. That’s another thing about Nicholson – he’s always had good taste. He knows his books, his paintings, his music. If you listen to his commentary for The Passenger, it sounds like a film critic speaking, not an indulged icon settling into his memories.

At his best, Eliot is convivial and sometimes more understated. The book memorably features snippets of an entertaining interview with the late, great Karen Black herself, who confesses that she always felt a little too plump for Nicholson. It seems Anjelica Huston never felt gorgeous enough either – the thought of all these sexy, high-wattage Hollywood stars weeping into mirrors is rather depressing. But then you find yourself flicking back to a photo of Nicholson chomping down on a cigar in 1973 as “Bad-ass” Buddusky in The Last Detail with a terrible moustache and a particularly Nicholsonian expression. Of all actors, it is Jack Nicholson who understands that the only proper response to life is delight.

He is 76 now, though, and freely admits his memory is shot and that the scripts he reads are all rotten anyway. He may never act again. Bad Boy Drive is quieter these days. And the movies are so much drabber without Nicholson’s menacing confidence.

Labour MPs urge Miliband to make the case for borrowing to invest

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Former cabinet ministers Peter Hain and John Healey argue that the party must make an explicit case for investment if it is to counter the Tories' attack lines before the election.

Ed Balls's recent confirmation that Labour will leave room to borrow to invest has led to a renewed assault from the right on the party's economic stance. A Times frontpage declaring"Labour’s spending spree to cost £25bn" and Danny Alexander’s subsequent claim that the party would add "another £166bn of borrowing" were a preview of the onslaught that the Conservatives and their proxies will mount in the run-up to the election. In 1992, it was the "tax bombshell" that sank Neil Kinnock and John Smith’s election hopes. The Tories believe that the "borrowing bombshell" will do the same to Miliband and Balls in 2015.

Faced with these attacks, as I write in this week's politics column, Labour's instinct remains to change the subject: to its pledge to achieve a current budget surplus, to the living standards crisis, to George Osborne’s failure to meet his deficit targets. Balls and his aides state both publicly and privately that no decision will be taken on whether to borrow for capital spending until closer to the election, when the state of the economy is clearer. But few in the party believe it will be possible for Labour to achieve its priorities – a mass housebuilding programme, universal childcare, the integration of health and social care – without doing so. As one shadow cabinet minister told me: "We all know that a Labour government would invest more." The question, rather, is a tactical one: when and how does Labour make the case for "good borrowing"?

In private, Miliband’s advisers argue that the voters are able to distinguish between borrowing to fund day-to-day spending and borrowing for investment, just as they distinguish between "borrowing to fund the weekly shop" and "borrowing for an asset like a house". But the Labour leader is not yet prepared to make this case in public. Since an ill-fated interview last year on Radio 4’s The World at One, in which he refused eight times to admit that Labour would borrow more than the Conservatives, Miliband has focused deliberately on market reforms that would not cost government money: freezing energy prices, expanding use of the living wage and restructuring the banking system. When he has made promises that would require new funding, such as the construction of 200,000 homes a year by 2020, the question of borrowing has been deferred.

But an increasing numbers of Labour MPs believe this ambiguity can no longer be maintained. As one told me, "if we wait until January 2015 before making the case, it will be too late to win the voters round." As all sides acknowledge, the party begins from a position of weakness. The Conservatives' framing of the crash as the result of overspending by the last government has succeeded in crowding out all alternative accounts. Having lost an argument about the past, the question now is whether Labour can win an argument about the future and the need for investment in those areas, such as housing and childcare, that support long-term prosperity. 

The former cabinet minister John Healey told me:

The terms of debate about borrowing are still dominated by the simple sloganeering from the coalition … I think we have to break that argument; there is clearly good borrowing and bad borrowing.

You don’t want to be borrowing as a government, or a household, or as a business in order to support day-to-day revenue spending. But there’s a strong principled argument for the value of borrowing to invest when you build up a long-term asset that will be paid for over the long-term, not least because those that pay for a road, a power station, a hospital, a new set of housing will also be those that benefit from it as they service the borrowing. That’s the basic principled case for intergenerational fairness and the rightness of borrowing for that purpose.

Governments, uniquely, have the position and the power to borrow at rates not available to anyone else. They can borrow at low rates for the long-term. And third, uniquely, it’s what governments do in order to pull their countries through bad times.

Another former cabinet minister, Peter Hain, similarly argued:

We ceded the territory in the months after May 2010 by being preoccupied with an overlong leadership election. We’ve got to win it back, basically. And the only way of winning it back is to be on the front foot.

He added: "Our big picture should be the capital investment in housing, with all the hundreds of thousands of jobs and apprenticeships that will create as well as meeting an essential demand. We've got to get that out. I think that argument can be won.

"The Tory-Lib Dems have successfully imprinted a big deceit on the public mind with the help of a largely compliant media, that the public expenditure crisis was all Labour's overspending, rather than the global banking crisis and managing the consequences of that. So we have ground to make up and it can be made up provided we're on the front foot." 

Healey urged Labour to turn the Tories’ household analogies against them:

Governments aren’t the same as families or households but you can make some of the same arguments in Thatcher-like terms. It makes sense to borrow to buy a house, especially if your mortgage payments are less than your rent. It makes sense to borrow money to buy a car if that allows you then to travel to take up a job that pays better and brings in more. Some of the same dynamics are there in good government investment for the long-term.

The case for borrowing to invest could be made more easily if Labour were to have what one MP calls a "fiscal Clause Four moment": an act that convinces voters it means what it says about "iron discipline". It is this ambition that explains Balls’s continued threat to withdraw support for High Speed 2 and the doubt over Labour’s commitment to Trident. But while the party continues its search for an emblem of fiscal responsibility, the Tories are remorselessly increasing their lead on this issue.

Rather than proselytising for borrowing, as Labour’s most ardent Keynesians propose, or entering an auction on austerity, as its most ardent fiscal conservatives suggest, Miliband’s ambition remains to shift the debate towards building "a different kind of economy", one beyond the traditional terms of exchange on tax and spend. In an era of depressed living standards, it is a gamble that may serve his party well. But if the next election proves more like its predecessors than many expect, he risks being left defenceless beneath the bombshell.


How a gift for puncturing fads left one academic lonely but right.

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The academic George Watson was an anti-Marxist but never a conservative

George Watson’s memorial service, in Cambridge this Saturday, celebrates his career as an English lecturer, literary critic and historian. He was a scholar but a generalist, an elitist and yet a liberal, a staunch anti-Marxist but never a conservative; his most consistent quality was a gift for alienating all tribes roughly equally.

No doubt some NS readers will know Watson’s work as an essayist and bibliographer. But he had fewer general readers than he deserved. He was more erudite, more readable and more often right than many other academics who were more celebrated. That underratedness owed much to just the kind of paradox that Watson delighted in analysing. Instead of being conveniently persuaded by intellectual fashions, he was irresistibly drawn towards puncturing the academic and political fads of the moment. A lifetime of exploring uncomfortable truths may have left him without a natural constituency but it reinforced the innate bravery of the outsider, the instinct that informed the central themes of his career.

Watson was a lifelong liberal and stood as a parliamentary candidate in the 1959 general election. His literary career, however, was anything but political, at least not in the careerist sense of the word. He caused deep offence to the left by reminding it of what its intellectual advocates (including the founders of this magazine) had actually said and written. This did not go down well with people who liked to gloss over the more uncomfortable aspects of socialism’s past.

Yet he was equally enthusiastic about debunking conservative myths. He was baffled by what he called “the conservative contradiction”, the sudden attachment of the Conservative Party to the free market. “The free market is not a conservative idea, and for most of its history the Conservative Party was openly against it,” he observed. “Try asking any Tory leader to point to a single social effect of the market that is conservative. Of course there are none, and in their hearts they know there are none.”

Not content with confronting political positions, he set about combatting his own profession. During the upheavals within English studies in the 1970s and 1980s, he was among the first and most strident opponents of deconstruction. He also charted, with mischievous delight, the migration of ex-Marxists towards new creeds that helped them to avoid dealing with awkward wrong turns in their pasts. “There is one important respect in which politics is more honest than academe,” he wrote in 2005. “In politics, when you are shown to be wrong, you have to change your mind to survive. Professors are unfortunately under no such compulsion . . . Ex-Marxists took refuge in subjectivism: no perception is false, all values are merely personal. It turned out to be a cosy place for the disillusioned.”

In person, Watson could be awkward, even gauche. He had good friends but was undoubtedly lonely. Yet this unwillingness or inability to learn easy sociability coexisted with a deep grasp of manners and etiquette. He understood that no amount of egalitarian good intentions could replace the natural human instinct for status. “If you totally abandon conventions,” he wrote in a piece about formality, “you find conventions re-entering the back door.”

Watson was long retired when I got to know him as an undergraduate in the late 1990s. He would send me his eclectic essays, published in a dizzying array of American journals, and I invariably found something new and surprising in them. Above all, they were fun, elegant and witty. “He had many wives,” Watson wrote in a memoir of his friend and colleague Hugh Sykes Davies, “four of them his own.”

A few years after graduating, I realised I’d kept 30 or so of his essays and hatched a plan with John Gross, formerly the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, that we might collect Watson’s best pieces in one published volume. Gross died before we’d managed it; now Watson, too. Sadly, this column will probably be the closest I ever get to curating his talents and ideas.

Yet he would have celebrated my failure: despite being a prolific writer, Watson despised workaholism and regretted the demise of idleness. He felt it sustained the civilising tradition of conversation. “The lazy talk well,” he would say. Conversely, Watson was suspicious of what he called the Achievement Age. “In earlier ages people overworked, to be sure, but commonly because they were forced by poverty or impelled by a sense of duty. Now work can be a neurotic addiction.” Watson realised that workaholism was more about style than getting things done. Workaholism is just inverse-sprezzatura.

He also identified and skewered celebrity culture long before it became a common intellectual curiosity. He realised that the obsession with hard work strangely legitimised those who worked simply at being well known: “The Achievement Society can be faintly perverse in its judgements, and what it esteems above all else is fame. I once attended a concert at the Royal Albert Hall which happened to be televised. Sitting by chance behind the piano soloist, I was caught by the cameras and found myself congratulated for weeks afterwards as never before. Even being famous for nothing is apparently a great achievement.”

Everyone can see that now, after Big Brother and all the rest, but Watson was writing in 1991. As with many of his positions, he suffered from being ahead of his time, then tired of repeating his own stance just as it became popular. By then, it was time to attack the next voguish mistake. All the way to the end, he remained often right but rarely savvy. The opposite arrangement, after all, is very well-occupied territory.

Ed Smith’s latest book is “Luck: a Fresh Look at Fortune”(Bloomsbury, £8.99)

Why the US should apologise for deaths in Iraq

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A US apology will not bring back the thousands of dead Iraqis, but at least it will amount to an acceptance of moral responsibility.

After the invasion of Iraq, the US electorate sent a clear message to the world. By voting for Barack Obama, the American people signalled their rejection of President George W Bush’s foreign and domestic policies and his destruction of Iraq.

Today, Iraq’s sovereignty is destroyed. Its cultural heritage has been looted or vandalised. Its natural resources have been squandered, and its once-elaborate and sophisticated infrastructure has been laid to waste. Safety, security and the rule of law are virtually non-existent. Terrorism is on the increase. The whole Middle East has either been destabilised or is, as a result of the chaos in Iraq, at high risk of instability or even meltdown. Southern Iraq is largely under the control of Iran. And yet the Bush administration somehow failed to anticipate this outcome.

Hundreds of people were assassinated or kidnapped, or simply disappeared every day. According to Iraq Body Count, over 180,000 have been killed as a result of the war, including up to 134,000 civilians.

The dismantling of the Iraqi state was at the heart of the US invasion. The war was never intended to be one of liberation; there was never an exit strategy. Instead, the focus was on diverting attention from the real strategic aims of the war, and its human and financial costs. The ultimate goal was to control Iraq’s vast oil and gas resources and to remove Iraq as a military and political threat to Israel.

The problem isn’t just the catastrophic failure of the war, or the suffering it has caused: it is the Bush administration’s unforgivable dishonesty towards the American, British and Iraqi public.

In 2005, the Sunday Times reported that the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove had told Tony Blair and his leading advisers after a visit to Washington in 2002 that “the facts and intelligence” were being “fixed round the policy” by the Bush administration.

Senator Obama’s campaign message to the American public was one of change. The fundamental change needed now is honesty, transparency and accountability with respect to the war against Iraq. Iraqis also want explanations for the destruction of their country.

Real not politicised justice must be seen to be done, to right the wrongs committed in Iraq. The Iraqi people deserve an unequivocal apology for the pain and suffering inflicted upon them. There must also be an offer of compensation, in accordance with international law, for the collateral damage to both people and infrastructure. The war was illegal.

A US apology will not bring back the thousands of dead Iraqis, or ease the suffering of those who have lost their loved ones; it cannot heal the injured, nor will it shelter the displaced. But at least a US apology will amount to an acceptance of moral responsibility, and an admission that it has deceived the Iraqi people.

The hope is that a tragedy of this kind will never take place again, that the public will never again be deceived in this way, that international law will never again be so flagrantly violated.

Unless and until someone is held accountable, those who committed atrocities against Iraqi civilians will continue to walk the streets of London and Washington, safe in the knowledge that they have got away with murder: not only of Iraqi civilians, but also of the members of the British and US armed forces who have been betrayed by their seniors.

Dr Burhan Al-Chalabi is the publisher of The London Magazine and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

Why the 50p tax is lenient, sponsoring the Queen and how to deal with noisy pigeons

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The Queen, we learn, is down to her last million.

Labour proposes to restore a 50p tax rate, and from the reaction you would think it was planning a dictatorship of the proletariat, with gulags for dissidents. The top rate of income tax was set at 60p for nine of Margaret Thatcher’s 11 years in power. For the two years before Nigel Lawson cut it to 40p in 1988, it was levied on incomes above £41,200, a sum that would be worth £93,631 now.

Put another way, the threshold for the 60p tax was set at less than five times average annual earnings, and 50p tax started at less than three times average earnings. Labour’s proposed threshold of £150,000 is roughly six times average earnings.

What is the point of a Labour Party if it doesn’t propose, during periods of public spending strain, that we should at least approach levels of taxation on the rich that prevailed in the Thatcher era? If former Labour aides and ministers, such as Lord (Paul) Myners and Lord (Digby) Jones, disagree, why were they ever involved with Labour in the first place? We know the answer. They supported Labour only as long as it pursued Tory policies. They regarded New Labour as a heaven-sent opportunity to tame the British left and secure the gains of the neoliberal revolution for the corporate sector and the wealthy elite.

Teachers taught

Right-wing think tanks and Tory aides accuse Ofsted of supporting 1960s-style, child-centred approaches to teaching and of traducing schools, particularly some of Michael Gove’s precious free schools, that use more formal methods. Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector, says he will not bow to such intimidation.

Really? Can Wilshaw explain why, this very month, he issued “subsidiary guidance” that includes the following? “Inspectors . . . should not criticise teacher talk for being overlong . . . Do not expect to see ‘independent learning’ in all lessons and do not make the assumption that this is always necessary or desirable. On occasions, too, pupils are rightly passive rather than active recipients of learning.”

Gove and his friends will accord those sentiments a hearty ovation.

Brand Bess

The Queen, we learn, is down to her last million. Her palaces and castles are crumbling. She should seek sponsorship like everyone else. Why does she not live in the Tesco Palace, London or the Npower Castle, Windsor and travel on the Vodafone royal train? Hallowed cricket grounds now carry the names of commercial benefactors and I see no reason why royal residences should be too grand for such treatment. The Queen would command a higher price than anybody else, relieving the taxpayer of any need to support her.

Bird-brained

The police tendency to overreact to small incidents goes back many years. A former public health inspector recalls that, in the early 1970s, he was called by an elderly lady who feared to leave her house, which was under siege from noisy pigeons. The inspector took an air rifle and fired a single shot and the birds flew off. Within minutes, sirens wailed and he was surrounded by a police armed response team. They demanded at gunpoint that he lie on the ground with his hands behind his head. He escaped arrest only by surrendering the rifle.

This story comes from Putting Wrong Things Right, a new history of environmental health officers (as they are now called), sent to me by its editor, William Hatchett. It is a salutary reminder of how much we owe our improved health and longevity to these unsung public servants who were still dealing with significant typhoid outbreaks in the 1960s, one of which brought Aberdeen to a virtual standstill as more than 500 residents were quarantined in hospital.

Red flags not flying

A friend told me the other day that the day after Thatcher’s death, he was passing through Hereford and spotted the St George’s flag at half-mast on the cathedral tower.

He strode in and demanded to see the dean. The cathedral, he pointed out, was making a politically partisan gesture. Had it also flown the flag at half-mast on the deaths of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan? “Possibly not,” the dean confessed. But in a letter to the Hereford Times, he later stated that “in future, I would think it very likely that the cathedral would wish to mark the passing of our leaders . . . irrespective of their political persuasion”.

As the only living ex-Labour leaders are in their early sixties, they are likely to outlive both me and my friend. But I trust younger NS readers in the Hereford vicinity will check, when the time comes, that the cathedral keeps its word.

China's latest “popaganda” campaign: Ruhan Jia

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Music is one of China's most valuable cultural exports, and the Chinese government is hoping Ruhan Jia will be their first global pop hit.

Ruhan Jia has two ambitions. The first is to master the edgy tones of Christina Aguilera; the second, to become China’s first global pop sensation. And she has the backing of the Chinese government to reach for both.

Pop culture’s export value is becoming increasingly clear. Soft power is hard currency, and China has a lot of catching-up to do to compete on the global stage. In 2011, China launched Earth’s Music, a ten-year scheme aimed at boosting China’s global brand by producing pop stars to compete on the world stage. The government sees Earth’s Music as so important that it has included it in its five-year economic development plan.

The project was pitched to the government by the state-owned media firm and record label Synergy, and Ruhan is the first person signed to it.

“If you have a strong economy, people think of you as a big country – and we have a strong economy,” says Bill Zang, vice-president of Synergy. “But only when you are strong culturally are you seen as a superpower.” The challenge now for Synergy is to find a star who will combine traditional Chinese music with western pop.

I visited the company’s Shanghai headquarters in December while producing a documentary for the BBC. The city was suffering some of the worst pollution in its history, and Ruhan wore a mask to protect her voice from the fumes. Synergy is based in a former factory that produced CDs and cassettes. Today, its focus, like much of China’s changing economy, has switched from manufacturing to innovation.

The buildings, studio and rehearsal rooms are all paid for by the government. It is hoped that by giving the right people the right resources, China will produce a star to crack the international market. There are high hopes pinned on Ruhan.

“I spend all of my time in here, weekends and holidays. It’s like my second home,” she tells me. It is here that she hones her stage show, practises new songs and, crucially, learns the vocal techniques of western singers in an attempt to appeal to western ears.

Each month, Synergy provides her with piles of CDs to study, a task Ruhan calls her “musical education”. “Michael Jackson has a good beat, Elvis is very sexy, Queen are very rock, and Ke$ha teaches me to be more wild,” she explains, breaking into song to imitate husky R’n’B numbers, smooth jazz and even a dose of heavy metal. Such music would have been forbidden to her when she was growing up.

Born in the 1980s at the start of China’s one-child policy, Ruhan spent her childhood practising the piano and singing. She wasn’t allowed out to play like the other children from her block of flats in the northern city of Shijiazhuang. But, she says, the hard work has paid off.

Many Chinese musicians would envy the opportunities she has had since signing to Synergy. They still have to struggle through layers of bureaucracy and censorship to put on a concert.

Ruhan is reluctant to talk about the political side of her sponsorship. “The Chinese media just want to know whether I have a boyfriend,” she laughs. “Europeans always ask about politics. All I care about is finding a good company that can promote my career. I sign to Synergy, the government say they like that, so why not?”

Her success so far has been modest. She has 310,000 followers across several social media sites but sales of her first album, Time to Grow, were not as strong as hoped. But, as the album title suggests, she feels this is just the beginning.

“The Documentary: China’s Global Popstars” is part of the BBC World Service’s Freedom 2014 season

The plight of Thailand’s save fishermen on the BBC World Service

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As part of the World Service's Freedom 2014 series they are communicating in that pragmatic, low-temperature World Service way the call of workers' rights abuses in Thailand.

Freedom 2014: Thailand’s Slave Fishermen
BBC World Service

“A reek of fish is in the air. I’m among piles of nets ...” Becky Palmstrom, an occasional contributor to From Our Own Correspondent from Burma, presented a documentary about slave labour on Thai fishing boats (25 January, 9am) as part of the BBC World Service’s Freedom 2014 season. Flitting between Siamese, Burmese and English, she interviewed a Thai captain and some of his illegal immigrant crew. The captain readily admitted, “Men have to be forced on to the boat. They really don’t want to go on the boats.”

A government minister sighed that of the 60,000 fishing boats thronging Thai waters, less than 20,000 are registered, the rest largely crewed by men and boys trafficked from Burma. Fishermen spoke of whippings with stingray tails, sick and injured workers thrown overboard to be eaten by sharks, hands and legs broken as punishment for attempting to escape. Most are never paid. Some might earn $30 for five years’ work.

This information was delivered in that pragmatic, low-temperature World Service way – putting in the brutal facts but never allowing them to lure the programme into dramatics. No awkward scrap of voice-over recalled the conventions of exposé documentaries and Palmstrom didn’t shake with bottled-up intensity when speaking to officials who had clearly spent years approving every kind of outrageous deal and arrangement. One said, “The problem is if the workers are legal – registered and with ID cards – then they know they can get a better deal elsewhere. So what we want is for the papers to say they are legal but also say that they can only work on fishing boats ...”

This is part of a three-month season from around the world “considering what freedom looks like today”; it includes a piece about Japan’s and China’s troubled history, a documentary on exiled Persian musicians in Dubai and an investigation into hate campaigns launched on Twitter by senior Turkish politicians. The cuts-savaged station continues to deliver news that is beyond the ken of most mortals and, without pomp or explicit provocation, puts it in our reach.

Michael Rosen: Everything, all human life, is history

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To live with this paradox of history, being on the one hand “gone” yet at the same time being “with us at all times”, is what it is to be human.

All history is pointless. You can’t change it. It’s over. It happened.

Yet we’ve all got history. Even the person in a coma and the person with Alzheimer’s are who they are because of their history. You can see their history in the shape of their bodies, the marks on their hands, the shadings of their skin.

To live with this paradox of history, being on the one hand “gone” yet at the same time being “with us at all times”, is what it is  to be human. History is all that’s not there any more and yet we are nothing without it. Animals don’t do history the way we do it. Even if some of them remember stuff, they can’t talk about it. This gives us the pain of loss and the pleasure of memory. It gives us a country we can’t go to and yet we start every day in the place where it left us. History gives us who we are today by being who we were yesterday.

Today we’ll all do history. Maybe we’ll talk about what we saw on TV last night. Maybe we’ll talk about something from when we were children, or something we saw on the bus. Maybe we’ll remember something odd, or strange, or funny. Maybe we’ll look in the mirror and notice a line on our face, a look in our eyes, or that shirt – when we bought it.

I do history for a living. No one calls me a historian, though. People say I write poems, or I broadcast. Or I teach. But in truth, I’m the bloke going on about things my mum or dad or brother used to say to me, or the places we went. That’s history. I’m the bloke scurrying about trying to find  out stuff to do with my great-grandparents or great-uncles and aunts. More history. Or I’m the bloke wondering why British people say “I’ve got” and Americans say “I’ve gotten”. Or wondering how come Joseph Heller came to write Catch-22. And where did he get that “catch-22” thing from anyway? And why do so many of us say “it’s a catch-22 situation”? All history.

People all around us sing songs, tell stories of what’s happened to them, talk about their parents and grandparents, where they used to live. We remember some of this, and somehow it all becomes us. I just happen to be one of those people who mash it up and turn it into writing or telling stories or discussing it in books or on the radio.

Even a joke is history – it’s been told over and over again, someone nicked a bit of its shape from one place, someone nicked a bit of the punchline from somewhere else. We are inheritors of all this stuff.

I happen to be someone who spends hours and hours every day on it. Most people aren’t quite as into it as that. Even so, everyone does it a bit. Either way, a lot or a little, none of us can escape from what we’ve inherited – and I don’t just mean the genetic things. That gesture you make, your name, the languages you speak, the way you say the words, the food you like and don’t like, the work you do, or want to do – all inherited or acquired from people you’ve known and heard.

But I’ll turn this on its head. If all we are is the stuff we inherit and acquire, we’d just be animals. We wouldn’t be able to choose anything or change anything. When I say we are historians, I mean we are creatures who can make something of what we inherit and acquire. We can get to work on it, thinking about it, expressing it, changing it. We work on all the old stuff, to make new stuff.

But how free are we to do that? Can we change anything and everything? We can find that out only if we try things, if we explore what’s possible, if we invent things. And here’s my last paradox: one of the best ways to find out what is possible . . . is to  explore the past. History.

“Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story” by Michael Rosen is out now (John Murray, £16.99). The “What Makes Us Human?” series is published in association with Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show

Images by Lee Jeffries, who can be found on twitter @Lee_Jeffries

Strange geometries: Sensing Spaces at the Royal Academy

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Seven installations by seven architectural practices – life-sized interventions designed to confront the senses and engage the mind.

Sensing Spaces
Royal Academy of Arts, London W1

The “Sensing Spaces”exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts aims to cultivate a wider audience for architecture, while asking some fundamental questions: what is it to feel present? How do our senses locate us in space and time? The answers come in the form of seven installations by seven architectural practices – life-sized interventions designed to confront the senses before engaging the mind.

With the irrepressible rise of cities, it is easy for the cultural and human values of architecture to be obscured from the public gaze by a focus on architecture as the expression of power and investment. Implicit in “Sensing Spaces”is the notion that a more modest approach could now be viable.

Architecture is its own province – it is neither an art nor a science – and the context in which it is created is as organic and reactive as the context in which it is best understood. Here lies the problem of making an exhibition about architecture: to explain its complexities is almost impossible and passing judgement on buildings as simply sculptural forms is to misunderstand where the power of architecture resides.

This is a practical discipline: the results surround us and exist beyond the gallery – rather, they are the gallery – and can only be truly understood through subjective experience. Buildings may be the ultimate carriers of meaning but they can be difficult to decipher. It is the remit of the architecture exhibition to help decode them.

The Royal Academy show addresses the dilemma by focusing on the experiential and visceral qualities of architecture. The choice of seven architectural practices from six countries, representing four continents, is an unusual and clever move. As each practice uses its own language in the form of an installation to explore the sensory perception of space, the myth of a single global architecture is exquisitely and quietly exposed; the individual architects’ nationalities become visible.

The rooms of Kengo Kuma – a Japanese architect whose new outpost of the V&A will soon rise over the Dundee waterfront – interpret the sensory aspect of architecture in a quite literal manner. His barely lit spaces are elegant and ethereal; he has created an installation from tiny bamboo strands, woven together and infused with the scent of tatami mats and Japanese cedar wood. These are apparently smells that evoke Kuma’s childhood, that comfort him and send him “to the sleep of the innocents”. Your footsteps disturb the inner calm; you are an interloper, all too clumsy and western.

The darkened room by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects – designers of thoughtful education spaces across Europe – creates the most immersive experience here and it leads you to confront your expectations of light and space. Nothing touches the floor: instead, a large concrete-like form descends from above; light plays across the surfaces from an aperture over our heads. The structure is at once pendulous and strangely uplifting.

You can almost see the lines that were erased in pursuit of this final precision. It gives the onlooker insight into the meaning behind a line, encouraging us to think about the architects’ manipulation of light and volume.

Álvaro Siza is the grandfather of the show – he is an accomplished architect of churches, houses and museums across his native Portugal. He has the courtyard as his canvas and has installed slabs of concrete, one lying down, one standing up, intended as columns – yellow, apparently, because he saw the flash of a bus pass by Piccadilly ... though our buses are red.

It’s an obscure entrée for the show – but then perhaps Siza feels no need to express the meaning behind his work: you simply have to visit one of his many buildings to feel and understand it.

It is significant that the Royal Academy, a beaux arts institution, is confronting the thorny issue of communicating architecture to the general public and attempting to answer the overarching question, “What is architecture all about?” The ambition is admirable; the difficulty is deciding whether it has succeeded or simply left the visitor bemused.

The exhibition runs until 6 April

 


Squeezed Middle: Why I should definitely not have another child

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Is that what I want? Is it? Yes. . .

‘‘Do you ever think we should have another baby?” The words are out of my mouth before they have even passed through my brain. Where did they come from? Has my womb established some kind of direct line to my vocal cords?

Curly turns pale. After a few seconds, he gathers himself sufficiently to utter one syllable: “No.”

“Oh,” I say. “OK.”

That’s fine. I knew he’d say that. And he is 100 per cent right. There is nothing I want less than to go through the whole messy business all over again. I swore I never would after the last pregnancy, which incapacitated me for five months with relentless, broiling nausea. I swore it the morning I was sick on a businessman’s shoes on the 8.42 train to Liverpool Street (he was amazingly nice about it) and again when I got acute mastitis, passed out on the kitchen floor and had to spend the whole of Christmas Eve in casualty. I swore it every time Moe woke up more than four times in the night. Which was every night. For six months.

I certainly swore it when Curly and I nearly split up and I got that weird depression that was maybe more hormonal than I thought, looking back on it. If you’ve had that kind of thing once, the chances are you’ll get it again.

Now that things have calmed down and life is nice and fluffy again, it would be so easy to forget what a tremendous palaver the whole process is; to look at my two beloved boys and imagine, ever so idly, how lovely it would be to have another.

I must resist. I must not think about cute, chubby baby legs, or the pure animal exhilaration of giving birth, or how fun it would be to have a great, big, noisy gaggle of a family. I must not think about how I’m nearly 35 and that’s the age at which, according to some newspaper article or other, my fertility will “drop off a cliff”.

No, no, no. I must think of the practicalities: there is no way we could stay in the slightly-too-small flat if we had another child. We would have to sell up and move to Hull, though perhaps even that wouldn’t be an option now that it’s going to be the City of Culture in 2017 and prices have probably rocketed and I’ve left my job and there’s no way a reputable mortgage lender would look on us with anything other than amused pity. The more I think about it, the worse the idea seems.

Satisfied, I hum a little tune as I trundle off to get the boys ready for their bath. If only all decisions in life were this straightforward. I wrestle Moe on to his changing mat, strip off his clothes and tickle his pudgy tummy. His legs are so big now, they are hardly baby legs any more. He can walk and say “hiya” and “car” and “teddy”. Soon, he won’t be a baby at all; he’ll be a boy. And then I will never, ever have a baby again.

Larry and Moe will grow up and go to school and I’ll crack on with my life, start thinking about the outside world again, working . . . Things will get easier, more manageable, less intense.

Is that what I want? Is it? Yes, I tell myself firmly. It is.
 

Lez Miserable: The tragedy of a twentysomething living in the parental home

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That there are so many other adults trying to take themselves seriously while being handed plates of fish fingers makes me want to laugh, cry and vomit at the same time.

One twentysomething living at home is a tragedy. A million twentysomethings living at home is a statistic. Actually, there are 3.3 million people between the ages of 20 and 34 doing just that in the UK, according to a recent report by the Office for National Statistics. Over a quarter of young people have now returned, their tail between their legs, to their childhood bedrooms – and I’m one of them. Our walls are still pockmarked with Blu-Tack stains from Blink-182 posters. Covering those blemishes with prints by Norwegian graphic artists does little to convince us that we’re functioning members of society.

When I discovered that 3,299,999 other members of my generation have also reverted to adolescence like a horde of dejected Benjamin Buttons, I felt troubled and comforted in equal measure. That there are so many other adults trying to take themselves seriously while being handed plates of fish fingers makes me want to laugh, cry and vomit at the same time.

But is living at home all that soul-destroying? Parents are lovely. That’s something you learn when you complete puberty and suddenly they no longer stand against everything you believe in just by asking you how comfortable your shoes are or offering you a piece of fruit. Completely unprompted and seemingly by some kind of witchcraft, these people fill fridges with cheese and Gü puddings. Since moving back home, I’ve rediscovered the joy of hearing the phrase, “I’m going to Sainsbury’s, do you want anything?”

Then again, parents’ fridge-stuffing skills have to be weighed against their inability to knock on doors. I’ve learned to switch off my vibrator so fast that I’m pretty sure I once broke the sound barrier.

And sex chez parents is a tough one. I’m lucky to have the kind of folks who would be delighted for me to bring a girl home but not all parents are so accepting of their gay kids. I have queer friends who live at home and have to be as clandestine as possible about their love lives. These are adults in grown-up relationships, whose bedrooms are coital no-go zones. It’s a surreally retrograde state of affairs.

Living at home is having some freaky psychological effects on me and plenty of others in my position. I think we may have invented a brand new type of existential crisis. Some of my most successful friends have their parents for housemates. For more than a few of the highest earners in my age bracket, rental prices in London are too steep even to contemplate. For those who return from work (where they’ve been doing proper, serious things) to the house where they learned to use a toilet, it’s easy to ask, “Who, what and why am I?”

I’m not sure when I’ll move out. I’m hoping it’ll be before my 30th birthday but uncertainty about my domestic future has wormed its way into my core. I’m so practised at explaining my living situation to people I meet that I could probably pole-vault while talking about the Dickensian greed of landlords and the dismal prospects that young people have of ever landing so much as a toenail on the property ladder.

Now excuse me while I explore the delights of my parents’ fridge.


I’ve got the brains, I’ve read the books – let’s make lots of money out of Baker Street’s finest

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I have no idea whether Sherlock Holmes got his name from Sherlock Mews – but perhaps I can tell it to American tourists for £250 a head.

I feel a new terror when travelling on the bus, at least the 113 – and it’s because of the video cameras that observe and relay pictures of the passengers. There’s a screen placed just above the stairs, so while you wait on the bus as it inches through the clot of traffic that always builds up at the lights just before St John’s Wood Tube station, you are offered several vistas, shown in rotation, of your fellow “customers” (as Transport for London whimsically calls us) looking bored, or dopey, or fretful. People don’t look their best on these cameras but, even knowing this, I was unprepared for the shock I got when I caught a glimpse on the screen of a little old man waiting to get off and realised it was me.

Do not be deceived by the image that adorns this column: should you wish for a more accurate one, I suggest you find a bottle of Tipp-Ex and paint the hair white. Tempus fugit and all that, but these days it seems as though it’s running for its life. Yet, every so often, it loops round and meets you coming back the other way, as occurred when my mother announced that she had made a dentist’s appointment for us both the other day. I don’t know about you but I think 50 is too old to be going to the dentist with your mother, so I feigned illness and cancelled in the morning. Also, it was raining. It seems to be doing a lot of that at the moment.

Left to my own devices as I am at the moment – as I might have mentioned – I am given  to introspection, very much  of the unwelcome what-am- I-doing-with-my-life variety. I’m stuck, still, in a kind of limbo, without a real job, without any money until next Thursday, without a place I can call my own, without a girlfriend in the same country, without all sorts of things. One thought experiment that keeps cropping up unbidden revolves around what would happen if, should I choose to marry again, a putative mother-in-law peers through her lorgnette at me and asks, witheringly, “And what precisely are your prospects, Mr Lezard?”

So I am much cheered when my old friend the Moose comes round. (He has not, I suspect, really come to see me: he has come to see another old friend of mine, Amel, who has nipped over from Paris for a couple of days.) He also has no money, although that is because the machine ate his bank card. He does have an American Express card, which, as we discover, and as I suspected, is one of the most useless bits of plastic that can burden this unhappy planet, for it is seemingly not accepted by any restaurant within walking distance except the punitively expensive Royal China on Baker Street.

As I toy with my boiled rice, I prick up my ears as the Moose tells us of an interesting wrinkle a writer friend of his has come up with in Paris: he signs rich Americans up for walking tours around his neighbourhood and asks them to pay 250 (euros or dollars; it matters little) for the privilege. That’s each. He takes them  here and there, coming up  with any old rubbish about the area – it’s near the Odéon, so the details are not exactly obscure – and then, as the Moose puts it, condescends to let them buy him an enormous dinner at the fanciest restaurant he knows. He is, we are assured, very fat and very  well off as a result.

This gets me thinking. One of the few pleasant things about my situation is that I live fairly near Baker Street. And it has not escaped my attention that there has been a revival of interest in its best-known resident. Slowly, the rusting cogs of my brain start creaking into action. “Hmm,” I say aloud. “I wonder . . .”

OK, I think you’re beginning to get the idea. Although it sounds rather like hard work, the idea of shepherding ten to 15 wealthy Americans back and forth from the Hovel to Sherlock Mews at 250 smackers a head and telling them that that was where Sir Arthur got Holmes’s first name from – I have no idea whether this is true, or whether the name Sherlock Mews post-dates the detective; maybe a reader can enlighten me – has its attractions.

Like many schemes that are dreamed up on licensed premises, this may prove to be pie in the sky. But, as I go online and contemplate the  area of desolation that, once again, is my bank account,  I think maybe now is the time to get off my arse and do something for once. Then I would be able to look Lady Strebe-Greebling, or whoever, squarely in the pince-nez and say, “Madam, I am an entrepreneur.”
 

The mystery tan and the snore that threatened a marriage

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Two needles in the haystack of general practice.

According to one adage, general practice is like looking for a needle in a  haystack. The needle is “proper  pathology” – the stuff you find in medical textbooks. The haystack is the bewildering array  of nebulous complaints that people bring to their doctors: pains, fatigue, palpitations, nausea, rashes, pins and needles ... The list goes on. All of these symptoms could signify something serious, yet much of the time they don’t amount to anything that could be given a diagnostic label.

I don’t agree with the adage because it implies that a general practitioner’s raison d’être is to find needles, whereas helping people make sense of their particular haystack is just as important. Nevertheless, every now and then, we will come across a needle and we must be continually alert to spot it, before it pricks our fingers.

Tim was one of my registrars – a younger doctor I was training. Cheryl was a patient he’d seen on several occasions. She had just turned 40, yet she had markedly raised blood pressure and, try as he might, Tim couldn’t get it under control. I joined him for the next consultation – he wanted advice about what to add to the cocktail of medications Cheryl was already taking – and the longer it went on, the more intrigued I became.

It was mid-October and, even though we’d had a fine English summer, most people were once again pale. Not so Cheryl. On closer inspection, there was an unusual slate-grey tinge to her tan. I scrutinised her more carefully. Her forearms, visible below rolled-up sleeves, were hirsute. Conversely, her head hair was subtly thinning in a “male pattern”, at the crown and at the temples. And although it fitted with her cheerful manner, her facial complexion was distinctly ruddy. As Tim closed the consultation, I asked Cheryl if she would mind undertaking some tests.

The pituitary gland is a pea-sized organ buried deep within the brain. It releases a variety of hormones that orchestrate our growth, metabolism and reproduction. When a benign tumour (adenoma) arises in the gland, its cells pump out far too much of their particular hormone. One of these, ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone), stimulates the production of steroids in the adrenal glands. An ACTH-secreting adenoma sends  the adrenals into overdrive  and the excess steroids eventually wreak havoc, thinning bones, provoking cataracts, elevating blood pressure, precipitating  diabetes and causing heart disease – something called Cushing’s disease.

Cushing’s disease affects just ten in every million people in the UK each year, so the majority of doctors will never encounter a case in their entire working lives. The secondary conditions it presents with – blood pressure, diabetes and so on – are, on the other hand, very common. Rarely do they have an underlying cause. As a result, Cushing’s disease is extremely difficult to diagnose.

What rang a bell for me was a fact that I had learned decades before at medical school. As well as driving the adrenals, ACTH has the side-effect of stimulating pigment cells in the skin. People with Cushing’s disease have unaccountable tans. I explained my suspicions to Tim after Cheryl had left. He wasn’t convinced. Cheryl’s unusual tan could easily have been induced by a sunbed or have come from a bottle. And he hadn’t spotted the hair and facial signs that were also suggestive.

Laboratory confirmation takes weeks. Finally, the biochemistry consultant rang to say, yes, Cushing’s it was. Most doctors get a thrill when they pull off a rare diagnosis – but for the doctor who has been sifting through the hay and who failed to spot the needle, it can be painful. Things look so neat and so obvious when viewed through the retrospectoscope. Of course it was Cushing’s: that explains why her blood pressure was so difficult to treat. It was a textbook case.

An experience like that could have undermined Tim’s confidence. As well as imparting factual knowledge, one of my roles as a trainer is to prepare my registrars to cope with the ups and downs of medical life. To that end, I told Tim the story of a GP who’d been consulted by a male patient with marriage-threatening snoring – another haystack symptom. For over a year, the GP had tried in vain to help; even the ear, nose and throat specialists had eventually drawn a blank. In desperation, the patient was referred to a sleep clinic. There, a fresh pair of eyes took one look and diagnosed acromegaly, another vanishingly rare condition caused by a pituitary adenoma, this one secreting growth hormone, which enlarges the extremities, including the tongue and jaw, resulting in intractable snoring. The GP who’d failed to spot the (retrospectively) blindingly obvious diagnosis was me.

Both acromegaly and Cushing’s disease can be arrested by surgery to remove the adenoma. For doctors involved in their diagnosis, there are lessons to be learned. When we identify one, we should feel pleased but not proud. When we miss one, we should evaluate our performance honestly but we should not unduly run ourselves down.

Don’t let the faux greens sell off our environment

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People like Chris Huhne are willing to talk the talk while in office, but they will usually capitulate to business interests.

In February 2012, the BBC’s then environment correspondent, Richard Black, described Chris Huhne’s departure from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC)as “the exit of a minister ... generally regarded as having fought tenaciously for ‘green’ policies”. It was a view echoed by many mainstream, business-friendly “greens”, who were presumably impressed by Huhne’s readiness to talk the talk while in office.

“One abiding set of values that all Liberal Democrats share is a respect for our environment, natural systems and sustainability,” he told the Lib Dem conference in 2011, adding that, with its backing, “We will hold course to be the greenest government ever.” Some may have been less impressed by his promise, a month later, that: “Renewable energy technologies will deliver a third industrial revolution. Its impact will be every bit as profound as the first two.” Apparently it had not occurred to this champion of natural systems that it was the fallout from those previous industrial revolutions that got us where we are in the first place; or, as Robert Burns noted, on a visit to the Carron iron works in 1787: 

We cam na here to view your warks 
In hopes to be mair wise, 
But only, lest we gang to Hell, 
It may be nae surprise.

Still, compared to many of his coalition colleagues, Huhne was at least pro-renewables – well, maybe not solar – so his heart seemed to be in the right place. But was it?

After the DECC, Huhne seems to have had second thoughts about our natural systems. Now we all know about his lucrative consultancy post with the Texas-based company Zilkha Biomass Energy, whose website contains such priceless (if rather alarming) comments as: “Today we let much valuable forest resource go unmanaged. A managed forest, compared to an unmanaged forest, is able to sequester much more CO2, making trees better solar batteries.” And recently, unburdened by the need for conference-friendly rhetoric, Huhne seems to be letting his true colours shine through.

He has never opposed fracking (“Shale gas may be significant,” he wrote in 2011; “If it comes good, we must be ready to take advantage of it”), but talking to John Humphrys on the Today programme last September, he came over as something of an enthusiast, at least for importing cheap, US-produced shale gas.

His disregard for natural systems became most apparent on 19 January, when he called for more greenfield sites to be given over to development. “The brave political promise would be to recognise that the supply of housing land and sites – brownfield or greenfield – is ultimately the government’s responsibility,” he wrote in the Guardian. “The tougher the planning controls, the higher are house prices.”

Huhne’s words were carefully chosen – we cannot help but agree that people need houses – but history teaches us that calls for the relaxation of planning laws are never about homes, as such; they are always about development – and the consequence, always, has been the loss of woodland, meadow and wetland habitats: “our” natural systems.

As Fiona Reynolds remarked in 2011, when she was director general of the National Trust, what little we have left of those systems “has all been protected through good planning and the moment you let good planning go, it’s lost forever”. Recent developments, such as the Trump Organisation’s Scottish government-backed destruction of the dunes at Menie, in Aberdeenshire, show that what our environment needs is more protection, not less.

But then, that wouldn’t be business-friendly. And, as every politician knows – faux greens such as Chris Huhne included – to be business-friendly is everything.

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