Every morning before work, an adult female friend of mine watches clips of young girls giving mascara tutorials on YouTube. Serious-faced, in calm voices, they etch their eyes like it’s the most important thing in the world. My friend says she finds it inspiring. It’s an extreme example but teenage entertainment has a place in the life of an intelligent, fully functioning grown-up that isn’t fully acknowledged. Teenage stuff represents both comfort and the glittering void of an unknown future – which we all like to be reminded of from time to time.

“Mean” is one of Taylor Swift’s best songs: a two-finger salute to bullies at school, delivered from the perspective of enormous adult success. There are thousands of thirty­somethings at the O2 Arena on 1 February with their fists in the air; people I know who bought tickets were keen to explain there was “nothing ironic about it at all”. The last time I saw Swift in London, when she was 19, her set contained an innovative name-and-shame section in which ex-boyfriends, played by actors, were shown on-screen and humiliated for being mean to her in the past.

Now that she’s 24 and has played the Grand Ole Opry, things are more age-appropriate. She wears ball gowns and tightly buttoned shirts, projecting Katharine Hepburn-style sophistication, while the ever-shortening shorts acknowledge the delayed dawning of the adult, sexy Taylor. The voice, which would sometimes “run out” during a show, is more powerful. Yet halfway through one of the slickest sets at the O2 in a long time, Swift steps forward and turns, briefly, into a moron: “I started writing songs because I wasn’t invited to parties or sleepovers and I wasn’t noticed by a guy I liked,” she says, almost six foot tall, falteringly picking her banjo. “No matter how hard you try, you can’t make someone like you if they don’t want to and all you need to worry about is how you get through it, whether it’s [by] writing in your journal, or grabbing a banjo like me . . .”

I search her face for signs of distress at having to talk like this. I think of Juliette Barnes, the country pop starlet in the American TV series Nashville (played expertly by Hayden Panettiere) – eyes flashing, lower jaw extended in anger, spitting at her manager: “When are you going to let me lose this glitter-pop crap? I am 24 years old.”

Swift spends the first 20 minutes of the O2 show – before singing anything at all – processing up and down the stalls, hugging the young audience. It’s a bold new step in artist-fan relations but it’s really boring for the 14,854 people craning their necks to see what’s going on. New models of music distribution and revenue have forced pop stars into these kinds of gushing interactions and they’re intensifying all the time: soon, the top ten super-fans in each city will sit onstage, taking turns to join the pop star in a duet. Lose the kids and lose your audience, they say – but you wonder when someone’s going to put their foot down and get on with the show. That someone ought to be Taylor Swift, because a lot of the things that children love about her are precisely what adults are coming out for, too.

I’ve got an internet radio at home. It has thousands of stations from every country in the world, sorted by category – jazz, politics, drama, Christian. There are 100 country music stations from the US on it; for many months, I have not shifted from one called My 90s Country, broadcast from Ohio, which “exists so you can relive the greatest decade in country music history”.

The 1990s were not the greatest decade in country music history but those years did give rise to many of the genre’s more lion-hearted, playfully self-reflexive songs. On a winter’s evening, I will prepare my spaghetti hoops to an evocative playlist that includes Kenny Chesney’s “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy”, Rhett Akins’s “That Ain’t My Truck” (. . . parked in her driveway, so whose is it?) and Reba McEntire’s “Fancy”, in which an impoverished mother pushes her daughter into a life of high-class sex work. The colourful portraits of small-town life, pride, happiness, drama and jealousy simply get more enticing the further I forge ahead into adult life.

It was these romances that drew Taylor Swift to country music when she was a child living in Pennsylvania with her financial adviser dad and ex-banker mum. She started off listening to Shania Twain (“Man! I Feel Like a Woman”) and the Dixie Chicks (“Wide Open Spaces”), performed in talent shows and, by the age of 12, was writing her own songs. When she was 14, she persuaded her family to move to Nashville, where she won a songwriting contract for a deal with a small label called Big Machine (her father soon became a 3 per cent stakeholder).

In her first hits, she cleverly marked out her territory by namechecking the country music stars she would one day work with (Tim McGraw, for instance, was the subject of her song “Tim McGraw”). In her 2008 single “Love Story”, she created potent vignettes of teenage longing appropriate for a fan base a decade younger than her. The life those songs evoke (the boy next door scrambling up the drainpipe, proposing on the front porch) could not be further from her own teenage years, friendless and gawky, driven by unwavering ambition – but neither does it bear much resemblance to the life of an ordinary 14-year-old. The Swift canon traces the emotional arc of girls at an accelerated rate, with, you suspect, many experiences substituted by vivid imaginings. At 24, she is maddeningly naive and self-obsessed but brilliant – like a mainstream, country, iron-clad Lena Dunham.

The Red Tour has been travelling the earth for a year and ends at the O2, stretching five nights over 11 calendar days; she has established a kind of residency in London. She appears as a frozen silhouette for the opening song, “State of Grace” – she has never danced much, being tall and lanky, but her sense of poise is electric, like a marionette held up by the energy of the crowd.

Unfortunately, she has not lost her “Who, me?” face yet (this is the expression that inspired the meme “Taylor Swift looking surprised”, featuring footage from various award ceremonies). She uses the expression to ramp up hysteria in the crowd. That it has not been adjusted despite being the butt of so many jokes is admirable, suggesting the presence of an overbearing personality, stubborn and possibly slightly mad. There are other tasteless moments: a rock violinist; a ringleader outfit; a giant bunny for the 2012 pop anthem “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”. Swift is still growing and it’s interesting to watch.

“Some people are romantics, which means they have a different soundtrack playing in their heads,” she says tonight. The disconnect between her life and art has been noted because she has apparently never had a relationship that lasted longer than four and a half months: this seems a strange criticism to level at someone who is 24, which these days – whether you believe Swift, or Nashville, or Girls– is the age at which nothing works out. Likewise, the charge that she uses these doomed trysts simply to generate song material is not something that was ever levelled at, say, Joni Mitchell in her day (Swift is playing her in a forthcoming film). The only thing that gets my goat is how she pushes the idea that there’s a certain glory in misery: love, hate, infatuation and jealousy are “fun” things to write about, she says, beaming: “Love is TREACHEROUS!”

Swift’s songs offer the sense of a technicolour future stripped of all but the most worthwhile woes. She performs the story of a lovelorn best friend in “You Belong With Me” (“She wears high heels, I wear sneakers”) in a sparkling Jessica Rabbit dress and long gloves. The difference between what you hear and what you see is where the escapism lies. You suspect the little girls in the front, with their slash of vermilion lipstick and cowboy boots, understand that – so she should stop giving the silly talks (“Bravery happens to different people in different ways,” she says in her new Keds shoes ad) and just get on with being a pop star.

When, in late 2012, it was announced that Peter Bazalgette – known to all and sundry as “Baz” – was to succeed Liz Forgan as chairman of Arts Council England, the news was not universally welcomed. A former UK boss of the television company Endemol, Bazalgette was responsible for a slew of reality TV programmes that included Big Brother and Deal or No Deal and thus, in the eyes of many, he was to blame for turning the minds of the nation’s viewers to pap. No matter that Big Brother was initially an exercise in sociological television; its subsequent slump towards (and beyond) the lowest common denominator won him some vocal enemies. He has been roundly abused by, among others, Quentin Letts, Victor Lewis-Smith and, inevitably, the poor man’s Peter Ustinov, Stephen Fry. (Fry complained that Bazalgette was undoing the work of his great-great-grandfather Joseph – the Victorian engineer responsible for London’s sewerage system – by pumping shit back into our homes.)

Bazalgette, who writes a newspaper food column, once said that Marmite was a personal favourite; like that viscous spread, he has proved divisive. His appointment to the Arts Council post was not helped by the organisation’s reputation for ineffectualness and doling out public money to experimental theatre companies and contemporary dance groups. Whatever his services to dumbing down, however, Bazalgette has also been a long-standing and committed cultural advocate. He is an experienced fundraiser and a former chair of English National Opera and was a non-executive director of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport – a public service ethos that reflects that of his great-great-grandfather.

Having begun his four-year term on 1 February 2013, Bazalgette is now celebrating the end of his first year at “Ace” (as it is wincingly known). When we meet, I ask him if he was shaken by the hostility that his appointment attracted. “What attacks?” is his reflexive response. When I list them, he notes drily: “It’s not the first time Quentin Letts has had a go at me. But this is not about me.” Surely, I suggest, that’s exactly what it is about. “Look,” he says. “I’ve spent 30 years encouraging creativity and I’m not going to back off now.”

Bazalgette has had to negotiate a tricky start. He was met by funding cuts that lopped 30 per cent off Ace’s government settlement over four years and a cull that reduced its staff from more than 500 to 400. Although these changes were put in process by his predecessor, Bazalgette has had to contend with this shrunken organisation. He is as happy as he can be with what has been achieved: “Running costs now amount to 3 per cent of our budget rather than 10 per cent and when we were faced with the latest Spending Review, the government wanted to cut us by a further 10 per cent but we managed to get that down to 5 per cent.” It has left him in the curious position of “celebrating bad news”.

Money is Ace’s business. It hands out some £400m a year; £300m to about 700 national portfolio organisations (NPOs) – largely established arts organisations from the Academy of Ancient Music and the Nottingham Playhouse to the Liverpool Biennial and the Bristol Old Vic – as well as a pot of £45m for museums and £50m for Ace’s dedicated music education hubs. The dependence of arts organisations on Ace is something Bazalgette wants reduced: “Ten years ago, the NPOs relied on Ace for 50 per cent of their funding. Now, it’s closer to 30 per cent.”

Central funding, however, will always be necessary and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “We have had a mixed economy for a century,” says Bazalgette. “The arts are part of that. Public funding has given us a world-class cultural scene. Just compare us to Paris, Rome or even New York. The arts are cheap – 14 pence a week per taxpayer goes to the arts, a third of what the French spend. It’s a tiny sum of money.” But the subsidy is shrinking. “I don’t use the word ‘subsidy’. It’s a wet, tedious word. I use ‘investment’. ‘Subsidy’ sounds so passive.”

His focus is now on persuading business to “invest” in the arts more. But why should it? If the arts are vital for the health of society, shouldn’t the government pick up the bill, just as it does for health and education? “The holistic case for investment in the arts starts with the intrinsic value of culture,” he says.

No doubt, but does business really believe that? “Well, it’s true shareholders don’t always like to see what could have been their dividends being spent on the arts,” he tells me, “but there are good reasons they should – altruism, a genuine marketing payback, fulfilling their own corporate social responsibility objectives ...” In the end, however, “There has to be a payback. There is no such thing as a motiveless gift.”

Business investment in the arts fell in the five years to 2011 but the latest figures (for 2011-2012) show a small rise, from £113.6m to £113.8m. Last month, Tate Modern made headlines with a multimillion-pound sponsorship deal with the South Korean car manufacturer Hyundai, which will support the Turbine Hall commissions for 11 years.

Perhaps, I suggest, arts organisations might attract more generous funding from businesses – and more interest from the public – if they focused on high-quality traditional forms, rather than some of the more recherché art that Ace encourages. “The public is not this single group of people. It’s made up of all sorts and there is an extraordinary appetite for the new and exciting. To feed it, you must invest in the future.”

Isn’t there something patronising about an arts cadre assuming it is good for the public – however amorphous – to be challenged? One of the roles of art is surely to offer comfort. “Today’s outrage is tomorrow’s public acceptance,” he counters. “Take Grayson Perry: he’s gone from frock-wearing potter to well-loved public figure. Turning the specialist into the mainstream is a key part of Ace’s duty. Some won’t work but others will.” He cites the example of Danny Boyle, who started out at the Royal Court Theatre.

But for every Danny Boyle, there is a failure, such as the £9.5m Arc arts centre in Stockton-on-Tees, which had to be bailed out by Ace. Aren’t such cases body blows? “‘Body blow’ is putting it too strongly,” says Bazalgette, before quickly going on to stress the roles of local authorities in arts funding. “Really enlightened ones, such as East Lindsey District Council, are actually increasing their arts spending because they know of the benefits it can bring.” East Lindsey, which includes Skegness, bumped up its funding from £50,000 to £350,000. This made it possible to put up a screen on Skegness beach for live feeds from Garsington Opera, although its popularity, Bazalgette concedes, might have had something to do with Andy Murray’s Wimbledon triumph being shown immediately beforehand.

There is nothing new about the message that the arts bring exponential economic benefits. Skegness is no exception: the Turner Contemporary in Margate and the Hepworth Wakefield gallery in West Yorkshire, for example, have been the catalysts for regeneration in their surrounding areas. The problem is getting both councils and the public not simply to understand that art can attract money (they already do) but to believe it instinctively – and that, Bazalgette concedes, is “a challenge”.

Bazalgette’s first year at Ace has been busy. “I’ve measured out my life in railway carriages,” he says. “I’ve criss-crossed the country.” If you want to see where he’s been, he suggests you look at his Twitter feed. He has long been an arts consumer: “Before this, I was a regular attender of opera, theatre and classical music and a bit more irregular at ballet, the visual arts and literary events.” Now, it is a bit of everything – pressing the flesh, fact-finding, beating the arts drum.

What, I ask, is the art form he’s drawn to most instinctively? “You’re not getting me on that,” he says with a surprising degree of animation. Why not? Most people have a preferred art form but that doesn’t mean they can’t like others, too. After being pressed, he grudgingly concedes: “If I ’fessed up, I would say I look for ‘performance’ but I won’t go further than that. It’s like being asked if you have a favourite child and we don’t do that, do we?”

What we do is discuss the moral power of the arts, their ability to raise the individual and society, and so on. This may be a cliché, but it’s one that Bazalgette claims to believe in with a passion. “I spent eight years on the board of English National Opera. I wouldn’t have done that unless I believed in it.” When Endemol was sold in 2007, it fetched €3.2bn. At Ace, he earns £40,000 a year for two days work a week.

It can perhaps be read as a sign of qualified success that the chatter around Ace has died back and that the non-populist populist at its head is no longer attracting the opprobrium that greeted his appointment. It may irk Quentin Letts et al but if Ace were the Big Brother house, there is no sign that Bazalgette is in any danger of being voted out.

Michael Prodger is assistant editor of the New Statesman

The Olivier stage at the National Theatre is a vast, hulking thing. There’s none of your poky, filigreed, rococo West End nonsense here: this space has drama all of its own. It presents a particular challenge to a director and, for his new King Lear, Sam Mendes has decided that a big theatre demands a big production: we might not get the “hundred knights” specified in the text but Simon Russell Beale’s entourage numbers in the dozens, all decked out in black commando gear like aggressive shadows.

Throughout the play, there is the sense that we are not Lear’s only audience. We start with the king – with a snowy beard and bullet-headed – sitting with his back to us, using a PA system to call his daughters and his court to order. Later, at Goneril’s court, the knights show up with a dead stag and Shakespeare’s stage direction of “horns within” is replaced with a lusty rendition of “Oggy, oggy, oggy … Oi! Oi! Oi!” The theatrical excesses of Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein are deliberately echoed.

Mendes and Russell Beale have worked together many times before, tackling half a dozen Shakespeare plays and a brace of Chekhovs. The production diaries reveal how closely they interrogated the text and discussed its omissions – do all of Lear’s daughters share the same mother? Were Goneril’s and Regan’s marriages arranged? – and that has given them confidence to monkey around with it. Their changes are not always entirely successful. For example, the heartbreak of the final scene, in which Lear emerges bearing the corpse of his favourite daughter, is undermined by having Goneril’s and Regan’s deaths onstage, too, making Cordelia’s body just one of several that litter the stage.

The Tarantino-esque collection of stiffs is just one example of where the production might have been better dialling it back a bit. The blinding of Gloucester is hard to watch, with Anna Maxwell Martin’s Regan almost vibrating with arousal as her husband gouges out his eyes. But did we need him to be waterboarded first? Earlier, Oswald’s hammy outburst – “O, untimely death!” – before conking out, limbs splayed and jerking, was greeted by titters in the stalls. (“It’s not a comedy,” tutted the woman next to me, aghast.) The zenith of this overblown approach was the storm scene, in which Lear and the Fool struggled uphill into a headwind, as part of the stage turned into a ramp. It had the air of a West End musical gearing up for the show-stopper; I nearly risked the wrath of Tutting Woman by imagining Simon Russell Beale belting out “Memory” – “Not a sound from the paaavement ...” – when he reached the top.

None of which is to say that this is a bad production: I’d give it four stars if that wouldn’t prompt Ryan Gilbey to come round to my house with a flaming torch and a pitchfork. It’s just that its successes are quieter than its clangers. Edgar, as played by Tom Brooke (also the lead vagrant in the BBC’s Sherlock) is pitch perfect, switching between naive aristocrat and chirpy Essex-inflected madman with ease. He also manages to act naked without his nakedness becoming distracting, which is an increasingly important skill in the wang-addicted world of modern theatre.

Adrian Scarborough’s Fool achieves the rare feat of playing the ukelele and saying “nuncle” without me wanting to beat him to death (sadly, in this production, Lear has no such qualms and sets about him with a wrench). Of the women, Olivia Vinall’s Cordelia exudes a toughness that makes her attempt to reclaim the kingdom by force seem plausible and Kate Fleetwood’s Goneril is an L K Bennett-clad bitch. Oddly, Maxwell Martin – whose superb Sally Bowles in Cabaret I remember vividly, eight years later – is the least impressive, doing a standard-issue vamp in a chilly nightie.

But it all comes back to Lear: Simon Russell Beale has chosen not to make the king seem “a very foolish fond old man” until late in the play, as he wanders round the cliffs in a straw hat, clutching a bag of flowers. Does that reduce our sympathy with his fall? Perhaps. Yet it’s also a reminder that old age is a great leveller; it withers everyone just the same.
 

1. Alex Salmond no longer has the pound in his pocket (Guardian)

George Osborne's Edinburgh speech will challenge the SNP leader to reveal his plan B for an independent Scottish currency, says David Torrance.

2. Yes, the floods are awful, but we must keep a sense of proportion (Daily Telegraph)

The countries where we send foreign aid suffer disasters on a scale we can hardly imagine, writes Peter Oborne.

3. Tristram Hunt was bang out of order to cross a picket line…and his party is guilty of not standing up for workers’ rights (Independent)

Labour’s failure to make the case that the living standards and rights of working people depend on trade unions is a travesty, says Owen Jones. 

4. A decade of struggle against the State Goliath (Times)

Bureaucrats and politicians must look over their shoulders in case the TaxPayers’ Alliance has them in their sights, writes Tim Montgomerie.

5. Money no object to fight floods? Pull the other one, Dave. We're drowning in debt... (Daily Mail)

Cameron’s promise of unlimited economic assistance without any detailed costing comes from the land of make-believe, says Stephen Glover.

6. David Cameron is wise to want to be the new Stanley Baldwin (Guardian)

He was a quintessential one nation Tory whose steady persona reassured voters, writes Martin Kettle. It may, though, be too late to copy him.

7. No need to feel under the weather – yet (Times)

For all the predictable gripes, this isn’t a major disaster, says David Aaronovitch. So let’s keep calm and be ready for when things get worse.

8. A 'pause' in centuries of British wars is not enough (Guardian)

Britain's record of continuous conflict has no parallel, says Seumas Milne. Now the elite is panicking that they can't get away with it any more.

9. Abe’s ‘womenomics’ needs revolution (Financial Times)

Japan’s glass ceiling is concrete, its women-friendly ‘architecture’ as flimsy as origami, writes David Pilling. 

10. The women of Westminster have had enough (Daily Telegraph)

High-flying female MPs and civil servants have been put off by bullying and one-upmanship, says Sue Cameron.

If there’s one consolation, it’s rediscovering the joys of letting oneself go a bit. One is not, after all, on the pull. Why, for instance, shower every day? No one is going to be smelling me for a while. And showering in a cold house is a drag. With the heating off during the day, the thing to do is stay in bed until it comes on at 6pm or so, which by an amazing coincidence is also wine o’clock.

Meanwhile, everything gathers itself around the body. I’ve mentioned this before: the Scholar’s Mistress, that accumulation of books and periodicals beside one on the bed that eventually assumes the mass of another human being. Mine is now the entire length of the bed and becoming three-tiered. If I listed every book and issue of the TLS in it, I could fill the rest of this column and would probably have some titles left over for next week’s – but that would be lazy of me and boring for you.

Suffice it to say that the right-hand side of my bed is a testament to the enduring worth, power and consolation of the word as printed on paper. And the longer you stay in bed reading a book, the less time you spend on the internet wasting your time doing “What kind of cheese are you?” quizzes on BuzzFeed, strangely compelling though they are. (Apparently I’m a Wensleydale.)

Meanwhile, the smell of apples has gone from the bedroom. The bad news is that it has been replaced by a nasty fug that might partly be the result of having the window shut for the past two months because of the rain. (The rain is beginning to drive me a little crazy.) The combination of stifled air and damp creeping in cannot be healthy and, moreover, I am beginning to worry that if it rains any more, Londoners may well evolve gills before too long.

To avoid this, I am staying indoors as much as possible. Which would be fine except the kitchen has now started to smell. This is definitely a decaying corpse smell but whether it is of some rogue piece of food that has fallen between or behind the interstices of any one of the elements of the loosely fitted kitchen or one of Mousie’s compañeros who has bitten the dust, I cannot say. I have just put half a lemon that had been nestling in a glass and growing a splendid coat of grey-green mould on its skin into the rubbish, so it may have been that. We shall see.

The problem, or shall we say one of the problems, is that all this seems to be turning me into a bit of an agoraphobe. The only trips I have made outside since my friend Amel went back to Paris have been either to Majestic Wine for supplies or to the hospital to visit my father. These visits are not as depressing as they could be as he retains his marbles and conversations with him are always amusing, but a hospital is a hospital and – because it is only a mile and a half up the road – I am consumed by guilt that I am not going there often enough. But at the time of writing, he has been discharged, so until I run out of food completely I have no excuse to go anywhere at all. How I am going to cope with getting to Heathrow and then to Gothenburg in this state is beyond me.

It’s a strange feeling, leaving orbit, as it were. Earthly life, with people leading normal lives, seems to be receding into the distance. When, I wonder, was the last time I did the laundry? I remember that the late genius Peter Cook recorded a series of duologues with the still-living genius Chris Morris under the title Why Bother? and I have to say that this is becoming something of a mantra for me.

Cook ended his life sadly, it is glibly said, passing the time in the evenings by calling up Clive Bull’s late-night phone-in show on LBC in the persona of a melancholy, lovesick Norwegian fisherman called Sven, stranded in Swiss Cottage (note, here, the recurrence of the Scandinavian motif). This doesn’t sound very sad to me and the idea of the great Peter Cook giving his talent out anonymously and for free in a final act of generosity is one I find enormously touching.

There is kindness all around. The last time I went to Majestic, I couldn’t find my normal selection on the shelf; when I went to the counter to ask meekly what was going on and what on earth I was going to do, it turned out they’d already packed it and it was waiting for me. How I summoned the self-control not to burst into tears is beyond me.

Crime and punishment: Travis Pitts’s RoboCop tribute in constructivist, Soviet-German style

“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” This advice from Anton Chekhov has developed in the screenwriting business into the law of “Chekhov’s gun”. A Hollywood interpretation of the law might read: “If you put an X on the poster, there’s got to be an even bigger X in the film.” (For X, read: gun, laser, monster, explosion, and so on.)

Ever since the beginning of American cinema, films have been remade – but bigger. “Bigger” in this context means not only bigger budgets and bigger stars and bigger bangs but also bigger pretensions. This month’s example of same-but-bigger film-making is José Padilha’s Robo­Cop, which is an exponential version of Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop.

A brief flashback to 1987 might be useful. While attempting to bring order to the streets of Detroit in the near future, the police officer Murphy is gunned down by psychopathic drug barons – in an extended scene reminiscent of David Cronenberg at his juiciest. Murphy’s bodily mutilation gives an amoral executive at Omni Consumer Products the chance to advance plans for a cyborg law enforcement officer. (“Part man. Part machine. All cop.”)

In a boardroom power play, the “old man” who heads Omni tells his senior president, Richard “Dick” Jones, to green-light the RoboCop project, after an executive is gunned down by a malfunctioning ED-209 military model robot. As RoboCop begins to bring order to the streets of Detroit, he realises that the man who is ultimately causing much of the civic disorder (for evil corporate reasons) is Dick Jones.

Because he is an Omni product, RoboCop is prohibited by “directive four”, programmed into him, from harming the company’s employees. When he first confronts Jones, RoboCop finds that he can’t arrest him, because his robot parts will not obey his brain. In the film’s final moments, Robo­Cop battles his way up to the Omni boardroom and proves to the old man that Jones is the villain. The boss tells Jones, “You’re fired,” and RoboCop is able to effect justice by shooting Jones, who is no longer an Omni employee.

Padilha’s remake largely follows this plot line but changes almost every detail to make it bigger. I say it’s Padilha’s film but those who wait through the Clash’s “I Fought the Law” until the end of the credits will see that to make films bigger these days, it takes a village or even a small commuter town.

You can tell that everyone involved – apart from the countless stunt people who mainly jump sideways and go “Eugh!” as RoboCop blasts them through the aorta – was straining to achieve some profound personal and geopolitical meaningfulness. Unusually, the film has an American actor, Michael Keaton, as the corporate baddie, rather than the default slimy Brit or hissy German. Gary Oldman brings plenty of ethical dilemmas to the role of Dr Dennett Norton, RoboCop’s Dr Frankenstein, and Samuel L Jackson acts as Shakespearean chorus, replacing Verhoeven’s ironic adverts and news reports with the rhetoric of a tech-loving, proto-fascist talk show host. (“Which begs the question – has the US Senate become pro-crime?”)

Amid the bigger explosions, there are some surprising moments of satire and philosophy that Slavoj Žižek (an admirer of the first film) might be able to make appear significant. But, after the underwhelming climax (at least, compared to that of the original), we’re left blaming the screenwriters for too slavishly firing and re-firing Chekhov’s gun until the thing overheats and jams.

The original RoboCop was a very intelligent movie masquerading as a dumb one. The new RoboCop is the reverse. Paul Verhoeven has made a career of Trojan Horse movies: thick, wooden offerings with smart, subversive contents, the best example being Starship Troopers.

Rather like Michael Mann’s The Insider, which begins with a bravura Middle Eastern, terrorist-related set piece, then turns into something far more inward-looking, Padilha’s RoboCop starts with cyber soldiers and updated ED-209s pacifying the streets of Tehran. In one of the film’s more telling moments, a group of suicide bombers sets out to disrupt the patrol – because it is being broadcast live in the US (on Samuel L Jackson’s gung-ho talk show). “The goal is to die on television,” says the bombers’ leader, Arash. They succeed beyond their aims; the ED-209 is recorded blasting to death Arash’s younger brother, who has rushed into the street armed only with a knife. This media Snafu is a setback for Omni’s owner, Raymond Sellars, who had intended to deploy ED-209s on the streets of Detroit “to save American lives” (and to make the corporation billions of dollars).

The film’s most visually powerful scene occurs when Norton shows the RoboCop Murphy what is left of his body. The robotic parts peel away and the human Murphy turns out to consist of one hand, a pair of lungs swishing around in glass tanks and a brain in a jar. Murphy asks to die but is persuaded to continue living – because of what his death would do to his family.

This is where the new RoboCop becomes dumb. Throughout the film, Chekhov’s gun is held up in front of our face and bullets are loaded. We’re shown Murphy’s wife and son and his mutually nurturing relationship with them. We get the doomed-cop-putting-his-child-to-bed scene. We get the we-have-a-kid-but-still-have-hot-sex scene.

Throughout the film, there is a theological and philosophical argument being put forward. The brain in a jar is pure Descartes. “Free will” comes to the fore as an issue – particularly as Murphy’s dopamine levels are dropped to make him pliable. Jennifer Ehle, an Omni lawyer, scoffs at the idea that something within Murphy might resist all these behavioural restrictions: “Like what, his ‘soul’?”

There’s an equivalent of the first RoboCop film’s fourth directive, which ensures that no Omni employee can be harmed by the company’s product. If that kind of situation arises, everyone assumes, Murphy’s robot parts will not obey his brain. But at the climactic moment when, in the first film, RoboCop needs to hear the words, “You’re fired,” we find that in this bigger version (with its bigger – or soppier – heart), Murphy is able to control his robot parts, override his protocols and kill the man who has just waved a gun at his precious son. Bang! Chekhov’s gun has been fired again – and don’t you feel cheated? Because you saw it coming all along.

The point is not just that a slick film with many good things about it has shot itself in the brain. For sci-fi films, the consequences of screenwriters unthinkingly firing Chekhov’s gun are disastrous; and they are most disastrous when those films are dealing with the consequences of firing pistols or guns or lasers.

Because there are a lot of guns and lasers in Hollywood movies and because those weapons, once introduced, have to be fired, there is bound to be a vast amount of collateral damage. All of this, within the dark morality of the multiplex, is forgivable because what is being sought is justice. And violence – glorious violence, in the service of the law and a grand quest for what is right – is the point of these films.

RoboCop is part of a tradition of sci-fi cop movies that includes Blade Runner (1982), Demolition Man (1993) and Judge Dredd (1995 and the 2012 reboot, Dredd). It is Demolition Man– the most underrated of these – that plays off best against the new RoboCop and its conventional bullet-spraying. Where RoboCop strains for angst, Demolition Man tosses off gags. Yet the hard points about American crime and punishment are still made.

In the film, John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone), a 1990s cop reanimated in 2032 to capture an old enemy, says: “Hurting people isn’t a good thing.” There’s a comic pause while Stallone realises that he’s at risk of undermining his entire cinematic existence: “Well, sometimes it is,” he adds, with a slight moue of that much-punched jaw. “But not when it’s a bunch of people looking for something to eat.”

Demolition Man is the perfect example of an intelligent movie masquerading as a dumb one. (Judge Dredd was merely dumb and dumber.) Starring, or more accurately using, Stallone, its witty script undermines all the clichés that RoboCop is so keen to elevate.

It’s a commonplace of thinking about sci-fi movies that they are westerns in disguise but with RoboCop, it is unavoidable: there’s a new lawman in town and he is, in essence, a gunslinger. One significant omission from the new RoboCop film – perhaps because it’s not angsty enough – is Murphy’s trademark twirl of the weapon before he returns it to the holster in his leg. In the first film, it was this detail that allowed Murphy’s former partner to recognise him, even though he has become an anonymous cyborg. It also allowed US viewers to feel reassured that some things hadn’t changed.

Again, Demolition Man punctures this. Just before the “Hurting people isn’t good” comment, Stallone’s character says, “Look, this isn’t the wild west – the wild west wasn’t even the wild west.” This may be the most insightful line Stallone has ever uttered. And despite being a big, dumb sci-fi movie about a lone, discredited gunslinger brought back into town to arrest an escaped desperado, Demolition Man does an excellent job of undermining Hollywood’s cowboy machismo. Perhaps the funniest instance of this is that, while cryogenically preserved, Wesley Snipes’s villain is programmed to be fluent in all kinds of lethal urban terrorism and Stallone’s hero is taught how to knit.

Ultimately, as a result of Hollywood’s conservatism, if there’s a gun, it has to be fired. If there’s a super-bomb, it has to be detonated (in space or out at sea). For cinema trying to say anything truly interesting about justice, this can be fatal. Only in films that have moments of refraining, of weighing the scales, can we hope to watch justice in action.

We see this at the climax of Blade Runner. Here, a cop decides to let the rogue police officer Deckard (Harrison Ford) and his replicant lover escape. After chucking Deckard’s gun to him, he says, “It’s too bad she won’t live. But, then again, who does?” He sees that justice, in their case, is beyond what the law dictates. The cop has a gun but doesn’t use it.

RoboCop has a gun and does use it. And by having him override his protocols because of his love for his family, the film-makers of this new version undermine what distinguished the original movie: Murphy’s inhumanity, his inability to function beyond the laws and interests of a corporation. All they end up saying is that good people are still good, even if bits of them are made of shiny metal.

“RoboCop” is out now

The second issue of Toby Litt’s new monthly comic, “Dead Boy Detectives”, is available now (Vertigo, $2.99)

Once upon a time, there was a Spanish duke at the edge of the known world, who had eyes in the back of his head. Even as he and everyone else looked west – Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the coastal town from which Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan left on their great voyages, was within his fiefdom – he also eyed the chilly island to the north, whose thirsty inhabitants had suffered a terrible reverse a few years before. Bordeaux – English since the 12th century – was won back by France in 1453. If handing over the source of the world’s best wines to your ancestral enemy doesn’t constitute a crisis, I’d like to know what does. I’ve never figured out why we waited another 200 years to have a revolution and then chose to do so over something as trivial as religion.

The duke, meanwhile, had wines to purvey and he believed that the discerning claret drinkers of England could be persuaded to consume a beverage that made up in accessibility what it lacked in prestige. So he abolished wine export taxes and gave English merchants in Sanlúcar preferential status, with pleasing results. By the time the pirate Francis Drake sacked the nearby city of Cádiz in 1587, pilfering 2,900 butts of its finest sherry, he would have had no trouble offloading his booty back home.

There can’t be many forms of beverage that are at once as mysterious and as straightforward as sherry. One grape, mostly. One place of provenance, more or less. No vintages to worry about, unless you really want to. As for accompaniments, dry sherry may be the greatest aperitif ever invented: so pick your poison – nuts, olives – and choose a fino or manzanilla (made in Jerez and Sanlúcar, respectively) to wash it down.

So where’s the mystery? It is the bafflement we feel when lifting a glass that was surely half-full just seconds before to find only a couple of drops remaining: time and liquid have apparently evaporated together. The story of sherry over the past half-millennium is of that evaporation on a grand scale but today’s sherry drinkers make up in enthusiasm what they lack in numbers.

London now has enough dedicated bars for a sherry crawl: start at Pepito in King’s Cross, wend to the chilly surroundings but fine list of Hispania, near Bank, then weave to the tellingly named Fino in Fitzrovia and fall gently into the nearby Drakes Tabanco, the newest addition and purveyor of the wonderful Fernando de Castilla sherries. These places serve the full range of styles, from salty fino to viscous Pedro Ximénez, treacle-black and twice as sweet, made from the grape of the same name (all other sherries are made from the palomino grape). The only kind they are likely to avoid is what most people here know: cream sherry, which originates from an attempt to preserve sherry’s tanginess while making it sweet. This is the stuff that Gran drinks and if you like it, good luck to you – but to my mind, it bears about as much relation to sherry as Spam does to roast belly of pork.

I am not a sherry purist. That would be impossible: all sherries are fortified and then aged convivially in a solera system, in which the youngest wines trickle gradually down rows of barrels; the dry styles only exist because a yeast called flor grows across the fermenting liquid, giving it that distinctive, fresh-baked tang. Nor is it the cream style I object to per se – but each type of sherry has a distinctive personality and I refuse to believe that to appeal to the majority, it is necessary to administer the vinous equivalent of a prefrontal lobotomy. Most of us aren’t Columbus or Magellan: we don’t go in search of the new. But bring us a novelty that tastes nice and we’ll thank you for broadening our horizons.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing of late from metropolitan commentators about the threat Alex Salmond poses to the unity of these islands. It’s as if they have belatedly understood that soon they could be living in a permanently Eurosceptic, Tory-led, rump United Kingdom while Scotland forges a new identity as a pro-European social democracy on the Nordic model (“Oh, dear Scots, please don’t go!”).

While many of the London elites – media, business, political, economic – have been complacent about the reasons why so many Scots wish to break from or at the very least reconfigure the multinational British state, we at the New Statesman have not.

A few weeks before the 2011 Scottish election we published a leader warning Labour that it was facing the prospect of a defeat in Scotland that would have far-reaching consequences. A few days later, Ed Miliband, speaking to one of my colleagues, expressed bafflement that we should have published such a leading article. It turned out to be prescient; Labour was deservedly routed in Scotland. We were on the road to September’s independence referendum.

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On Tuesday 4 March, Alex Salmond will come to London at our invitation to make his case for independence.“I am looking for­ward to using this New Statesman lecture,” the First Minister said, “to outline how an independent Scotland will be both a progressive beacon and a powerful economic counterweight to the pull of London, which can help rebalance the social and economic structure across these islands which has seen the UK become one of the most unequal societies in the developed world.”

It is this desire among Scots to create a more balanced economy and a less unequal society that makes it certain that even if a majority says no to independence, the SNP would still have won. The present constitutional settlement in the UK is unsustainable. The centre cannot hold. The desire of the Scots and Welsh for greater autonomy is growing and too many people in England feel disenfranchised and disaffected.

It’s not for nothing that last autumn a radical populist such as Russell Brand was able to dominate the political conversation, or that Nigel Farage is so ubiquitous. The anti-Westminster mood is hardening.

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Alex Salmond is above all a gradualist. He might not win independence this time around – I expect the vote to be close – but he knows that, if Great Britain is to remain a coherent nation state, then federalism is inevitable. He also knows that, even if they lose, the nationalists will come again and again. There is no turning back. The status quo is unacceptable to all except the most insular unionists.

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The Financial Times dismissed Alan Yen­tob’s 8 February BBC2 profile of Hanif Kureishi as an “hour of portentous complacency”. Yentob, who is 66, has been working at the BBC since 1968. He mystifyingly still occupies an elevated position as the corporation’s premier arts film-maker, as if in all that time no one of comparable talent has emerged to challenge his authority or replace him. (Why is it the male presenters who last so long at the BBC?)

Yentob has become a hagiographer. Worse still, the BBC allows him to make indulgent, uncritical programmes about his close friends – such as Kureishi and the architect Richard Rogers, husband of Ruth Rogers, chef-owner of the River Café restaurant in west London, a favourite haunt of the bearded arts supremo and his pals.

It gives me no pleasure to say that the only film in Yentob’s flagship Imagine series I’ve managed to watch to the end was last year’s offering on Machiavelli. But even this well-intentioned programme featured contributions from another of Yentob’s friends, the psychologist Adam Phillips, and ended with the BBC man back at Broadcasting House smugly comparing himself to a Machiavellian anti-hero, as if we hadn’t already seen enough of him in front of the camera. BBC Television – which brought us Monitor, Omnibus, Arena and The Late Show– was once celebrated for the distinction and ambition of its arts programmes. When did it begin to go wrong?

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I first encountered Stuart Hall’s writings when I studied A-level politics at my local sixth-form college in Essex. The lecturer was an enthusiast of the new cultural studies and he used to show us recordings of the TV programmes Hall made for the Open University. He also gave me Raymond Williams’s short book on Orwell to read. “Was Orwell on the right or left?” he asked.

Hall, who died on 10 February at the age of 82, was one of the most penetrating analysts of the emergence of the new right. Through his essays in Martin Jacques’s Marxism Today he reached a wider audience and popularised the term “Thatcherism”. A couple of summers ago I sent my then colleague Jonathan Derbyshire to interview Hall. “When I saw Thatcherism,” he told the NS, “I realised that it wasn’t just an economic programme, but that it had profound cultural roots. Thatcher and [Enoch] Powell were both what Hegel called ‘historical individuals’ – their very politics, their contradictions, instance or concretise in one life or career much wider forces that are in play.”

For Hall, Thatcherism was a “hegemonic project”: she did not merely wish to liberalise the economy, she wanted to change the soul of the nation, and she did. We are still living with the aftershocks of the Thatcher counter-revolution, as events in Scotland remind us.

For details of Alex Salmond’s NS lecture, visit: newstatesman.com/events

Largely unnoticed, there was a small but significant Lib Dem rebellion over cuts to local government last night. Party president Tim Farron, former defence minister Nick Harvey, Andrew George, Stephen Gilbert and Adrian Sanders all voted against this year's funding settlement. Harvey, who led the rebellion, warned during the debate: 

The whole model of local Government funding is now so fundamentally broken that there needs to be a cross-party endeavour to rebuild something from scratch on a blank sheet of paper. The situation that we are in now is untenable. Somehow or other, Whitehall convinces itself that by putting this degree of hardship on to local government, the public anger at seeing some of the services that impact on their daily lives most directly will miraculously be focused solely upon the local authorities that send out the bill. I say to my right hon. and hon. Friends that I simply do not believe that that is a sound political calculation. The public are not stupid and they will see the difficulties that local government, regardless of the party running any particular council, is facing at this time, and they will hold central Government to be responsible for it.

He is right to highlight both the undesirability and the unsustainability of the huge cuts to local government. By the end of 2015-16, the budget of the Department for Communities and Local Government will have been reduced by a remarkable 60.6 per cent, with several years of austerity still ahead. On the current timetable, publicly-funded libraries, swimming pools, youth centres, museums and parks will soon cease to exist in parts of the country. 

The rebellion last night, then, is a reminder of the far more open debate needed over the pain to come after 2015. Vince Cable has long argued that it is untenable to ring-fence some areas (the NHS, pensions, schools, international development) from austerity, while cutting others (local government, working age welfare, universities, the police) to the bone. As he said last March, "You get a very unbalanced approach to public spending. I went along with the overall ringfencing approach in this parliament – as part of the coalition we have had to work as a team – but I think as a long-term approach to government spending, it isn't very sensible." But we have heard little from him, or any other major Lib Dem figure, on this subject recently. 

With the party set to back the triple lock on the state pensions, it is worth asking whether it will take the same approach to the NHS, schools and international development. Back in 2010, Nick Clegg declared: "We’re not entering into this dutch auction about ring-fencing. Good outcomes aren’t determined by drawing a redline around government departmental budgets." But more recently he has argued: "I am absolutely convinced that at a difficult time like this, protecting our NHS spending, protecting spending on schools and honouring our international obligations to developing countries around the world was a big decision, was a controversial decision but I think was the right one to take."

The alternative, of course, to cuts to protected departments is greater tax rises. But none of the measures proposed by Labour and the Lib Dems to date, such as a mansion tax or the reintroduction of the 50p tax rate, even come close to bridging the fiscal gap. As the IFS has warned, around £12.5bn of tax rises are required merely to keep departmental cuts at their current pace. One left-wing economist, speaking very much off-the-record, recently told me that the parties ultimately may need to discuss openly the possibility of raising the only taxes that reap reliably large revenues: the basic rate of income tax, National Insurance and VAT. But that is the kind of genuinely "tough choice" that all sides seem desperate to avoid before May 2015. 

There will be no party at the next general election promising more of the same. This is one of the ways that coalition has shredded British political precedent. A governing party usually tries to convince people that it deserves another term in office, while the opposition says it’s time for a change.

Next time, continuity will not be on the ballot paper. Labour will offer the most thorough upheaval but many Tories will also reject features of the government that David Cameron has led. To express authentic Conservative ambitions requires denouncing compromise with the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, Nick Clegg must look relaxed about regime change, as long as he can inveigle his way into the new regime. Ukip will fulminate against all the parties currently represented at Westminster.

Every one of those factors limits the scope of a Cameron re-election campaign. Downing Street believes that economic recovery will be well enough established by May 2015 to allow a plausible claim that the country has been saved from ruin. A problem for the Prime Minister is the number of people on the government side ready to belittle his role as the supposed author of that success.

The Lib Dems will echo the Conservative economic story in so far as it tells of reckless Labour spending reined in by a coalition of fiscal disciplinarians. Beyond that, Clegg’s party intends to paint Cameron as the hostage of fanatics in his party who cannot be trusted to reduce a deficit without recourse to callousness.

On Cameron’s right flank are Tory MPs who give George Osborne’s austere budgets and stingy spending reviews only grudging approval. They see austerity as the launch pad for a more ambitious assault on the whole apparatus of British government inherited from the 20th century. This is not just an economic doctrine. It is a liberation theology. It supposes that the nation’s potential is suffocated by forces inimical to free enterprise – Brussels bureaucrats, Strasbourg judges, Whitehall civil servants, trade unions, public-sector lefties who resist academic rigour in state schools and measure social progress by the size of the benefits bill.

The clearest blueprint for this brand of turbo-Thatcherism is Britannia Unchained, a collection of essays published in autumn 2012 by five MPs from the 2010 parliamentary intake. One of them, Liz Truss, is now an education minister and is sometimes spoken of as a future party leader. The volume is a call to arms against “the siren voices of the statists who are happy for Britain to become a second-rate power in Europe, and a third-rate power in the world”.

Younger Tory radicals are not offended by Cameron’s indulgence of modern social mores. They are less likely than older colleagues to be appalled by homosexuality or working motherhood. Among supporters of a rebellious amendment to the government’s Immigration Bill on 30 January, in effect repudiating Britain’s signature on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), were several MPs who last year voted in favour of gay marriage. Dominic Raab, the 39-year-old Surrey MP who tabled the amendment, was one. What frustrates the new generation is the Prime Minister’s lack of crusader zeal to emancipate Albion from infidel regulation.

The Raab rebellion, rallying 85 Tory MPs, exquisitely probed Cameron’s weakness. The aim was to stop foreign criminals invoking the right to “a family life” as a defence against deportation, appealing to a strain of modern Conservatism that sees human rights law as a Continental virus ravaging indigenous justice.

In another context, the Prime Minister once said that the duty to comply with the ECHR made him feel “physically ill”. On this occasion, Downing Street let it be understood that he had “great sympathy” with the Raab rebels but could not endorse their proposal, because it contradicted existing statute. As a compromise, No 10 let government ministers abstain, leaving it to Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs to make sure parliament honoured the law of the land.

It was a ridiculous abdication of prime ministerial responsibility but not a surprise. It has become routine for Cameron to placate his restive party at the expense of his credibility, especially when anything European is involved.

Each appeasement buys a shorter respite. Last year’s pledge to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EU membership and put the resulting settlement to the country in a referendum was meant to sate rebellious appetites and stem the flow of Conservative voters to Ukip – the concession to end all concessions. It failed.

Since then, Ukip has grown, not least because its supporters are enraged by a lot more than Britain’s membership of the EU. Meanwhile, Cameron has been forced to support a backbench motion enshrining the referendum pledge in law (binding the next parliament, in defiance of constitutional norms). When the Lords thwarted that manoeuvre, Downing Street indicated it might deploy the Parliament Act – a legislative battering ram reserved for a government’s most cherished priorities – to get the phantom plebiscite on to the statute book.

Backbenchers are also pestering No 10 to name the powers that might be “repatriated” from Brussels. They make demands – a halt to cross-border movement of labour, for example – that amount to withdrawal from the Union. This process ratchets Cameron ever further away from realistic negotiations with his Continental counterparts. In the past fortnight, both the French president and the German foreign minister have indicated that the EU will not rewrite its treaties to Cameron’s preferred timetable.

That suits the Tory militants just fine. Their goal is to ramp up expectations of “Brexit”, issuing unrealistic demands to justify the claim that Brussels apparatchiks are beyond redemption. Thus they tug Tory policy towards an unambiguous “better off out” position. It is hard to see how, if he is still prime minister after 2015, Cameron could sustain his current queasy Euro-pragmatism without facing a leadership challenge. With a year still to go, he will surely be prodded further towards the EU exit before polling day.

Downing Street hopes that recent rebellions represent a last spasm of indiscipline before MPs take fright at the prospect of Ed Miliband becoming prime minister and fall into line. While most of the parliamentary party is ready to unite in battle formation, there remains a kernel of safe-seated Tory extremists who see losing in 2015 as a staging post on the road to purification of party doctrines. Their next opportunity for organised disruption will come after the elections to the European Parliament this May. Ukip will perform well, possibly pushing the Tories into third place for the first time in a nationwide vote. No one doubts that this will provoke anxiety in Conservative ranks. The question is whether it will trigger prolonged panic.

Much depends on whether, in the intervening weeks, Labour’s lead in the opinion polls holds steady or dips towards parity with the Tories. The second scenario would suggest an economic dividend for the government, likely to grow in the run-up to a general election. That would support a view of May’s result as a self-contained protest vote. As one cabinet minister puts it: “The European elections will indicate as much about a general election as European elections always do, which is bugger all.”

However, if Labour’s poll lead is not soon whittled away, some Tories will start to calculate the rising probability that they are heading for opposition. “At that point, we go into the death spiral,” says a pessimistic MP. “The government will start to look like a mangy three-legged dog that needs to be put out of its misery.”

Nigel Farage’s popularity also has a psychological impact on Conservative associations that goes deeper than poll performance. He reminds members how uninspired they are by their own leader. Ukip has put the Tory grass roots in obstreperous mood. MPs do not dare ignore members’ concerns when high-handedness can be punished with deselection. An angry constituency association increasingly has a stronger hold over an MP than the whips’ office. Cameron is now at the bottom of the Tory chain of command with disgruntled activists at the top.

For a certain breed of Tory radical this is a healthy democratic development. More liberal-minded Conservatives see it as a continuation of the slide towards mean-spirited reaction that accounts for the party’s failure to win a majority since 1992.

There was enough concern on that front to mobilise a delegation of about 25 MPs last November to warn the Prime Minister against constant indulgence of the right-wing fringe. They were spurred into action by reports of Cameron’s dismissal of environmental policy as “green crap”, although their grumbles covered a wider range of problems. A particular source of irritation is the way the Prime Minister ignores loyalty and rewards rebellion.

It was, according to those involved, a heated exchange that left the complainants disappointed. Their intention had been to show Cameron that he could not keep taking the quiescence of his moderate MPs for granted but, in reality, he can. For all their frustration, they know that the current leadership is the most liberal one they are likely to get.

While civil war could break out if the Tories end up in opposition, the threat this side of an election is death by attrition. The rebels keep setting the agenda because Cameron’s emollient response gives them permission to do so. Moderate advisers and MPs in marginal seats are leaving, though many of them arrived in parliament as recently as 2010. Disproportionate numbers of those standing down are women. Louise Mensch quit in 2012. Lorraine Fullbrook won’t be contesting South Ribble, Jessica Lee is stepping down in Erewash and Laura Sandys, one the ringleaders of the moderates’ delegation to Cameron, is leaving South Thanet on the Kent coast. It is one of the seats that Farage is thought to be eyeing as a possible entry point to parliament.

Privately, many Tories concede that even a small exodus of women doesn’t look good. It feeds the public perception of a party in coagulation. The once-fluid culture of British Conservatism is shrivelling and hardening. Cameron has already proved that he cannot reverse this decline. Membership has halved on his watch.

The defence of his leadership is that the job is nigh impossible and that no one could have led the party better. The same argument is deployed to advertise his achievements as Prime Minister. In 2010 the country was in crisis, say Cameron’s allies, and the electorate had delivered an uncertain verdict. Yet, four years later, the coalition is still holding together, the economy is growing, the deficit is being tackled. This has been accomplished only because the Prime Minister has exhibited a combination of unyielding self-belief and intellectual agility. Thus, the two traits most often cited as Cameron’s failings – arrogance and lack of a fixed creed – are reconfigured as assets.

Yet underpinning this account is a recognition that the Prime Minister’s chief accomplishment is the running of a coalition, which will not be contesting the next election. He is par excellence the candidate of more of the same when there will be no party campaigning under that banner. There is an irresolvable tension between the man the Conservative Party proposes as prime minister – representing continuity – and its members who cry out against the status quo. That impulse might be suppressed for the duration of an election campaign but not for long afterwards.

By May 2015, David Cameron will have led the Tory party for ten years and the country for five. It was not clear to begin with what his ambitions were, other than to hold the title of prime minister, which is one reason why the voters denied him a majority. What he imagines doing with a second term is even more obscure. His leadership is defined by the constraints imposed on it. His political identity is a latticework of improvisation and compromise. His friends say his self-assured vagueness is his strength, in keeping with venerable traditions of well-meaning, patrician Tory pragmatism. That is indeed his best recommendation. But it also offers him up as a prime minister of the old school, marooned in a party and in an age that is restless for something new. 

In just over 7 months people in Scotland will decide whether or not to walk away from the United Kingdom.

The stakes couldn’t be higher

or the choice clearer.

The certainty and security of being part of the UK

or the uncertainty and risk of going it alone.

At the very heart of this choice is the pound in your pocket.

Why?

Because the currency we use is about so much more than notes and coins.

It’s about the value of our savings

our power to purchase the everyday things we need

and how we make the wheels of trade and commerce turn.

A stable currency is the bedrock of our economy

It underpins our jobs, our mortgages, our pensions

our public services and our taxes,

And the opportunities for our children and our grandchildren

I don’t have a vote on 18th September.

But I know where I stand.

The pound is one of the oldest and most successful currencies in the world.

I want Scotland to keep the pound and the economic security that it brings.

And I hope passionately that the people of Scotland - who make such an important contribution to life on these islands - choose to stay within our family of nations here in the United Kingdom.

And why wouldn’t we keep the UK together?

The UK works. In good times, and also in bad.

Together we have faced the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Government debt sky-rocketed, hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, banks were bailed out, and as a nation we were made poorer.

But we avoided the economic collapse other nations around us in Europe faced. Because together, we had the strength to confront our problems and overcome them.

Reducing our deficit, cleaning up our financial system, and working through a long term economic plan for the country.

A long term plan that will allow people to feel secure again.

We’re seeing signs now that we have turned the corner.

The UK economy is growing faster than any other advanced economy in Europe.

And within the UK, Scotland is growing faster than the rest.

We’ve had 6 consecutive quarters of Scottish growth.

Growth not just in services but in manufacturing and construction too.

Over a hundred thousand new jobs have been created in Scotland in the last four years.

Sixty five thousand fewer people unemployed compared to 2010

But the job is not yet done.

These hard-fought gains could be easily lost.

And nothing could be more damaging to economic security here in Scotland than dividing our United Kingdom.

That’s not the outcome I want.

I ask you to look ahead to the longer-term challenges we face as a country

competing for jobs and business in the global race…

providing good careers for our children

supporting an ageing population

managing with lower North Sea oil revenues

And consider: to which of these great challenges is dividing up the United Kingdom the right solution?

Today Scotland is one of the most economically successful parts of the UK.

with growth per head the same as the smaller independent European states the Scottish government would like Scotland to join…

but with far more stability and less volatility than them, thanks to being part of the wider UK.

So for me the positive answer is to work as one and to tackle these challenges together.

Nowhere are the risks to Scotland’s economic security more apparent than in the debate about currency.

Last year the Chief Secretary and I came to Glasgow to share the rigorous and objective analysis the Treasury had done on the question of Scotland’s future currency.

I said it was unlikely that an independent Scotland would be able to share the pound and share the Bank of England.

Today I am here in Edinburgh to consider with you further rigorous and objective analysis by the Treasury which builds on that work – and draws on what we have learnt in the last year.

Alongside this analysis I am also taking the exceptional step of publishing the internal advice I have received from the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Nicholas Macpherson.

Since I spoke last April, the Scottish government’s proposal for sharing the UK pound has been questioned by one independent economist after another

Including by DeAnne Julius, a distinguished former member of the Monetary Policy Committee, and John Kay, one of Alex Salmond’s former economic advisers

Many prominent supporters of the Yes campaign have raised doubts about the nationalist’s plan,

From Jim Sillars, the former deputy-leader of the Scottish National Party, to Dennis Canavan, chairman of Yes Scotland, and Patrick Harvie, the leader of the Scottish Green Party.

Businesses and the financial services sector have started to speak out.

Last week the President of the UK Chamber of Shipping and the Chief Executives of Scottish Financial Enterprise, of Simmons&Co, and of Sainsburys all expressed their concerns.

The American Chief Executive of one of the biggest investors in Scotland, BP, said that the huge unanswered questions over the currency and economic policies of an independent Scotland could put big investments in this country at risk.

And now my two predecessors as Chancellor, the current Chief Secretary, Shadow Chancellor, Scottish Secretary and First Minister of Wales – all from different political parties to me – have raised the same questions I raised almost a year ago.

But perhaps no contribution has been more decisive and unquestionably independent than that offered by the Governor of the Bank of England when he spoke about the currency union, here in this city, two weeks ago.

Dr Mark Carney is a Canadian citizen who speaks for no side in this debate, but instead offered the people of Scotland, and the people of the whole UK, his technical and independent advice.

Today I want to pick up where the Governor’s speech left off.

So it’s worth recalling exactly what he said.

He said that the existing UK has proved “durable and efficient”

He said that we “would need to consider carefully what the economics of currency unions suggest are the necessary foundations for a durable union, particularly given the clear risks if these foundations are not in place.”

And he warned us of the risks that could arise if an independent Scotland tried to stay in a currency union with the UK, without both nations ceding significant sovereignty not only over banking but also over spending and tax decisions.

And in the face of these questions posed by the Bank Governor, what have the Scottish government said?

They have just simply asserted it’s a common sense proposition.

Wrong.

Common-sense is when you’ve got something that works really well already

you don’t throw it away

you don’t replace it with something that certainly won’t work as well

and you certainly don’t embark on a high-risk experiment that may not work at all.

And have the Scottish government engaged in the technical arguments the Governor made? No.

Have they attempted to offer answers to the questions he posed? No.

We’ve had nothing more than confusion, wild assertion and empty threats.

Let me deal with this so-called response, before we go into the real economic issues.

First of all, the Scottish government say “it’s as much Scotland’s pound as the rest of the UK’s”.

They are like an angry party to a messy divorce.

But the pound isn’t an asset to be divided up between the two countries after break-up as if it were a CD collection.

The value of the pound doesn’t lie in the paper and ink that’s used to print it.

The value of the pound lies in the entire monetary system underpinning it.

A system that includes the Bank of England and the tens of millions of UK taxpayers who stand behind that financial system

It is a system that is supported by political union, banking union and automatic transfers of public spending across the United Kingdom.

A vote to leave the UK is also a vote to leave these unions and those transfers and those monetary arrangements.

That’s part of the choice that people in Scotland are being asked to make.

There’s no legal reason why the rest of the UK would need to share its currency with Scotland, as the Treasury’s publication today clearly shows.

So when the nationalists say “the pound is as much ours as the rest of the UKs” are they really saying that an independent Scotland could insist that taxpayers in a nation it has just voted to leave…

had to continue to back the currency of this new foreign country

had to consider the circumstances of this foreign country when setting their interest rates

stand behind the banks of this foreign country as a lender of last resort

or stand behind its foreign government when it needed public spending support.

That is patently absurd.

If Scotland walks away from the UK, it walks away from the UK pound.

The Scottish government also asserted after Dr Carney’s speech that sharing the pound would make sense to the rest of the UK because of the huge volume of trade the rest of the UK does with Scotland.

I’m the first to say that our deeply integrated businesses and their suppliers are compelling reasons for keeping the UK together.

70 per cent of Scottish trade is with the rest of the UK. That is a massive proportion.

And trade with Scotland is important to the rest of the UK – but at only 10 per cent of the total trade, it is a much smaller proportion.

These trade figures don’t make the unanswerable case for a shared currency that the Scottish government assume.

After all, 40 per cent of the UK’s exports go to the euro area, but we chose not to join the euro.

And almost 20 per cent of our exports go to the United States – are the Scottish government suggesting that we should adopt the dollar?

When his economic arguments fall apart, the First Minister resorts to reckless threats.

He says “an independent Scotland will refuse to accept its fair share of national debt if the UK refuses to share the pound”.

That’s like saying: because my neighbour won’t agree to my unreasonable demands, I’m going to burn my own house down in protest.

Currently Scotland benefits from the whole UK’s credibility in the gilt markets.

credibility that is hard won by tough policy decisions and responsible actions – like our recent statement from the Treasury that we would honour all UK gilts in the event of independence.

The fact our commitment was immediately accepted by investors here and around the world was a sign of that credibility and strength.

And it’s that strength and credibility that delivers every day low mortgages for Scottish families and low rates for Scottish businesses borrowing to expand.

Independent experts already estimate that even a new Scottish state which had accepted its fair share of UK debt would have to pay an ‘independence premium’ to borrow from the markets.

The premium has been put at between 72 and 165 basis points above UK rates.

For the average mortgage-payer in Scotland, that could be an extra £1,700 a year in mortgage payments.

But the premium would be as nothing compared to the millstone the Scottish people would have to carry if an independent Scotland failed to honour its fair share of national debt.

In that scenario international lenders would look at Scotland and see a fledgling country whose only credit history was one gigantic default.

And they would demand a punitively high interest rate as a result.

That would be crippling for every Scottish household with a mortgage or personal loan, for every Scottish business with credit, for the public finances and therefore for public services and for taxpayers, and for the whole economy.

If an independent Scotland reneged on its debts it would become an outcast among the family of responsible economic nations.

So it is a reckless threat.

And Alex Salmond knows it.

And the fact that he issues this reckless threat shows how all his other arguments have been exposed by the serious analytical work of the Treasury, the wider economic community, and now the independent Governor of our central bank.

So let me return to the real economic issues that the Governor raised.

Mark Carney ended his speech last month by saying this.

He said “a durable, successful currency union requires some ceding of national sovereignty.”

He concluded that “Decisions that cede sovereignty and limit autonomy are rightly choices for elected governments and involve considerations beyond mere economics. For those considerations, others are better placed to comment.”

And that’s where I want to pick up today.

I want to give you my assessment of the merits of a currency union, as the elected politician currently responsible for the overall health and stewardship of the UK economy.

That assessment is based on the new Treasury analysis which I publish today. Prepared by civil servants, it sets out in detail the problems that we would face if we attempted to create a currency union between an independent Scotland and continuing UK.

The Treasury analysis highlights four major requirements for a currency union between an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK.

The first is the requirement for a banking union.

As the Governor said, without a banking union “the viability of the [currency] union itself [is] undermined.”

If we have learnt one thing from the euro crisis, it is that a currency union is unstable without a shared financial supervisor, common resolution mechanisms, a lender of last resort, and credible deposit guarantee schemes.

It would be important for Scotland, where financial sector assets are worth more than twelve times Scottish GDP, to be able to call on the deeper pockets of the neighbouring UK government in a crisis.

Otherwise it is extremely difficult to see how Scotland could remain a home to large financial institutions like RBS.

RBS would have undergone a disorderly collapse without the support of the whole UK in 2008 – and even for a country of our size, it was a huge endeavour.

An independent Scotland would have been unable to bail it out.

Without a shared banking union, the Scottish Government would also struggle to create a depositor guarantee scheme which was as credible as the one we have now in the UK.

That in turn would make an independent Scottish state a less attractive place to be based as a deposit taker like a bank.

The consequence would be a loss of business and a loss of jobs.

So a banking union is important for an independent Scotland. But it would also be an essential demand for the rest of the UK if we were to contemplate a currency union.

After all, the rest of the UK would be tying its currency to a country with a big financial sector, capable of inflicting huge damage on it – and it would demand supervisory control as a result.

Just as Germany has now done, through the ECB, in the aftermath of the Spanish and Irish banking problems.

But how could I propose such a banking union to the UK public after an independence vote?

We have fought hard to keep Britain out of a banking union in Europe – a union that includes Ireland, whose banking system is also integrated with ours.

So why would the rest of the UK now join a banking union with Scotland?

For at heart this banking union would involve putting UK taxpayers on the line for banks in a foreign country.

Asking them to underwrite a Scottish Government guarantee on deposits held in Scottish Banks.

Asking to put their money at risk whenever Scottish authorities extend emergency support to Scottish banks.

And with little prospect of any benefit flowing in the other direction – for Scotland could only make a limited contribution to supporting a big English bank.

It is very difficult to see how after a ‘Yes’ vote, any UK politician could propose such an asymmetrical arrangement.

What would be in it for the rest of the United Kingdom? Nothing but exposure, again, to the risk of a failing bank – this time not even in our own country, but in a foreign one.

The second requirement for a successful currency union is for much greater fiscal risk sharing.

As the Governor said, that fiscal risk sharing is needed not just to underpin a banking union – in other words, to pay out in the last resort when banks fail - but also to smooth over economic shocks.

In our case, the continuing UK would be almost ten times the size of the Scottish economy. So this would be a totally one-sided deal where UK taxpayers would have to transfer money to an independent Scotland in times of economic stress, with limited prospect of any transfers the other way.

We got Britain out of the eurozone bailouts. Now we’d be getting into an arrangement that was just the same.

The citizens of the rest of the UK could not sign up to such a deal. And frankly, even if we could, I do not think Scotland would want to either.

For the logic of a currency union would mean that Scotland would have to give up sovereignty over spending and tax decisions.

Look at the direction the euro is heading in – supervision and consent to member budgets, deficit controls, debt reduction rules.

In a crucial sense, Scotland would have less independence than it has now – because spending and tax decisions would still have to be agreed by the Parliament in Westminster, but now there would be no longer any Scottish MPs in that Parliament or Scottish members of the Cabinet.

And the citizens of the rest of the UK would have to concede at least some sovereignty and supervision of our own Budget to a foreign country – something we’ve fiercely resisted up to now and would in the future.

The Scottish government claims to accept this in principle.

They talk about being prepared to agree a fiscal pact.

But at the same time, Mr Salmond said to the Financial Times only a few days ago that the pact:

doesn’t need to cover rates of taxation, I don’t think there’s any need for that.

And John Swinney has said that “A shared currency will mean an independent Scotland having control of tax policy, employment policy, social security policy, oil and gas revenues, immigration policy and a range of other levers to suit our own circumstances”

That is a million miles away from the fiscal risk-sharing the Governor has said is the foundation of an effective currency union and the Eurozone is working to.

It shows that a greater fiscal union is not acceptable to the Scottish government – and would not be acceptable to the rest of the UK.

The third requirement for a currency union is, of course, the same monetary and exchange rate policy.

Within a currency union, an independent Scotland would not have exchange rate flexibility or the ability to set interest rates specifically to suit conditions in Scotland.

Scotland’s economic conditions are taken into account today by the Monetary Policy Committee. On top of that we have full fiscal risk sharing across the UK.

Without that fiscal risk sharing, the full force of any adjustment to an economic shock would have to be borne in full by Scottish taxpayers.

Consider for example the impact of a substantial fall in the oil price – something we’ve seen several times over the last thirty years.

As part of the UK, Scotland is insulated from the impacts that this would have on tax revenues.

In the last Autumn Statement for example the Office for Budget Responsibility cut its forecast for North Sea revenues by almost £4bn over the next three years.

But instead of needing to cut spending, the Scottish Government saw its budget rise by more than £300m.

Under independence, if the Scottish Government did not have the flexibility to cut interest rates – and lacked the fiscal risk sharing it currently has – it would have to respond to a fall in oil revenues by cutting public spending dramatically or raising taxes hugely in response.

The Treasury analysis published today shows that for each 20 dollar fall in the oil price, an independent Scotland would lose 11,000 jobs, whereas if it remained part of the UK it wouldn’t lose any.

To put this in context, between 2008 and 2009 the global oil price fell by over 60 dollars.

So Scotland would be forced to take more drastic fiscal measures in times of crisis, and the pressure would quickly grow to leave the pound so that Scotland could regain control of its interest rates and its exchange rates.

And it would be in the UK’s interests to have separate interest rates as well.

Just consider a scenario where the value of oil increased.

The Scottish government have asserted that the rest of the UK would want to make a currency union work, because Scottish exports – especially oil – make a substantial contribution to the UK’s balance of payments.

As it happens independent experts think the effect would be broadly neutral, but let’s put that aside for now.

According to the Scottish government’s logic, if the value of oil exports went up, contributing more to the UK balance of payments, then we would have an even greater interest in making a currency union work.

But the opposite is the case.

Because if Scottish oil did make such a substantial contribution to the UK’s balance of payments, then it would be artificially increasing the value of the pound – and that would be to the detriment of exporters in other parts of the UK.

That’s exactly what many members of the euro have discovered over recent years.

That’s an argument against currency union, not for it.

This leads me to the fourth and final requirement, which is about the permanence of any currency union.

If currency unions are to succeed then the markets must believe they are built to last.

Look at the massive damage to confidence and stability in 2012 when there was doubt about whether Greece would remain in the euro – despite the protestations of everlasting currency union by all involved.

My commitment as UK Chancellor of the Exchequer – and the commitment of the UK government – to Scotland and to Scotland’s place within the UK is absolute.

In the event of independence the Scottish government’s commitment to the continuing UK would be the opposite of absolute.

As both its own Fiscal Commission and White Paper make plain, the Scottish government’s vision is of a currency union of convenience, not conviction.

Their White Paper said, “It would of course, be open to the people of Scotland to choose a different arrangement in the future.”

The Fiscal Commission said that the currency could evolve “should the people of Scotland wish for further reform or should economic conditions change.”

They go out of their way to tell us that a currency union would be a temporary arrangement that can be ditched as Scotland’s circumstances change.

This makes it unsustainable.

Imagine what would have happened to Greece two years ago if they had said they would consider going back to the Drachma.

It would have happened the next day.

The markets would try to break a Sterling currency union – knowing that, unlike with Greece, the Scottish Government were actively stressing how temporary the arrangements were.

Just look at what happened to the last two nations who tried to form a currency union following separation – Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Their union fell apart after only thirty three days as capital flowed from one to the other in pursuit of the safe haven.

We would face the same risk if Scotland tried to keep the pound.

Signing-up for arrangements that are inherently unstable would risk over time breeding huge resentment on both sides of the border.

We want to bring people closer together, not drive them further apart.

So to what conclusion does this analysis of the requirements of a workable, successful currency union lead us?

We have seen how it would be impossible to construct an acceptable banking union, or fiscal union…

We have seen that we would be ill-served by the monetary policy arrangements, and that the permanence of the currency union would be in serious question from the outset.

On this basis, the official advice I have received from civil servants in the Treasury is that they would not recommend a currency union to the Government of the continuing UK.

Listening to that advice, looking at the analysis myself

It is clear to me:

I could not as Chancellor recommend that we could share the pound with an independent Scotland.

The evidence shows it wouldn’t work. It would cost jobs and cost money. It wouldn’t provide economic security for Scotland or for the rest of the UK.

I don’t think any other Chancellor of the Exchequer would come to a different view.

The Scottish government says that if Scotland becomes independent there will be a currency union and Scotland will share the pound.

People need to know – that is not going to happen.

Because sharing the pound is not in the interests of either the people of Scotland or the rest of the UK.

The people of the rest of the UK wouldn’t accept it

and Parliament wouldn’t pass it.

This issue more than any other exposes the gaping chasm at the core of the plans to separate Scotland from the rest of the UK.

People in Scotland are being asked to accept two diametrically opposite things at the same time.

That with independence everything in Scotland will change

and at the same time nothing will change.

It simply doesn’t add up for the Scottish government.

If Scotland walks away from the UK, it walks away from the Pound.

There is an alternative, confident, future for Scotland.

A future in which the nations of the UK work together to provide economic security for our citizens.

A future where strengthened devolved government empowers people from every corner of our land to play their part.

A future of jobs and prosperity and peace of mind.

It’s a strong Scotland within a United Kingdom.

That is a future worth fighting for.

Empathy is at the same time one of the most useful bridges we have between different types of people and a source of some dangerous misunderstandings. You look at someone else, and find what you have in common, and you say “Oh, I get what that feels like” – to put it crudely, you look at a friend with depression and you remember how once you were sad about a love affair for weeks at a time and you think you understand. You remember how you got over it, and you think they can and should, in a week or two. Your attempt to understand is praiseworthy, but it leads to you becoming even more irritating, and potentially oppressive, than if you hadn’t bothered.

You can even slip into discussing their position in terms of a default rhetoric used by people who have an intention to harm them. Your imperfect empathy with them can become empathy with their oppressors.

The standard internet description of you as “clueless” isn’t accurate – it’s not that you don’t have a clue. Because clearly you do: it’s that you fail to follow that clue through to a useful conclusion. It’s frustrating for everybody, not least because of the possibility that part of what’s going on is a resistance to full empathy, a fear that if you understood too well, you’d lose the privileged position of the observer and become part of the observed.

I remember well the point at which, after years of being a little bit patronising to friends who were clinicallydepressed, I accepted that I wasn’t “just a bit sad sometimes”.

The phrase “check your privilege” gets bandied around as a slogan and a club, but it is useful. Sometimes because checking your privilege means that you remember you have it, and sometimes because it means that, actually, you don’t – or rather, you don’t have it in the particular area under discussion but have it in a lot of other ways. Accepting that I had depression meant also understanding that my education, my ethnicity and so on gave me resources for coping and getting help that others don’t.

All of which is why, when someone like Glosswitch, not ill-intentioned and probably not meaningfully describable as transphobic, announces that they are going to talk about gender, alarm bells ring all over the trans* part of the internet. (This is not going to be an attack; like her piece, it’s an attempt to get where she is coming from.)

Part of the trouble is always going to be that word gender, a word which bundles up so many meanings and which everyone discussing sexual behaviour and social roles has to use all the time.

We mean, some of us, at different times everything from “a system socially constructed by the evil patriarchy to force oppression onto women from the inside” to “a range of behaviours broadly associated with human beings of one binarily conceived physical sex or another” to “how I personally relate to my physical embodiment as far as sex goes and how that affects my sense of expected behaviour”. And many other things besides – by telling us that “gender is performance” Judith Butler at once enlightened and confused the issue. Short of tagging each possible meaning and the nuances between them with their own punctuation mark, there’s no easy way round.

I get that, as a young cis woman, Glosswitch experienced major areas of dysphoria about body and social role; I understand that she thinks, not entirely without justice, that these give her some share of what trans people go through. And then, a few sentences later, I see her describing being trans or genderqueer as “another way of maintaining personhood in the face of a dehumanising social code” and it’s not that she is wrong so much as that she is taking one little bit of the truth and making it stand for the whole.

She really thinks, clearly, that people like me transition solely and wholly because “patriarchy-constructed gender” won’t let me express my feels otherwise. She almost got it with the dysphoria stuff, and then lost it again; being trans isn’t about finding a way of expressing your feels, it’s about not having a skin that metaphorically itches all the time. And yes, for a couple of years in my late twenties, I enjoyed a brief period of being a glamorous clothes-horse some of the time, but then I got on with the serious job of being a woman, and a woman writer, with which social roles had less to do than being rigorously honest about everything... My experience of being trans is not everybody’s – Glosswitch certainly doesn’t get that there might be a whole world of differences at play here.

Some of the time Glosswitch really doesn’t get it – empathy fails all together. She’s very concerned that somehow changing the language around reproductive choice and abortion so that it includes and respects trans men and genderqueer people will dilute our concern with free choice. The people who want to abolish women’s reproductive freedome erase trans men, so she should do the same? Doesn’t Glosswitch get that trans men might have additional issues with involuntary pregnancy in addition to the standard ones and that she ought to respect that? Apparently not – which is where her failure fully to get the “sense of physical embodiment” aspect of being trans becomes actively politically dangerous.

What’s also politically dangerous is her assumption that there’s a possible, desirable truce between trans people and those feminists who are trans-exclusionary, or more accurately trans-eliminationist.

Glosswitch talks as if the phrase “waste of pussy” was something trans people say about cis women rather than a phrase associated with straight male rape culture’s attitude to women – I’m not sure why she thinks this. It’s good that she condemns the terrorising of trans people by those feminists through outing and doxxing – I’d like to acknowledge that I asked her to do this, after a TERF plastered the internet with photos of me when young and pretty (in an attempt to prove me to be a fetishist) and she has complied in a thoroughly sisterly way.

What I don’t get is the selective blindness whereby Glosswitch fails to notice that the same women who constantly and vigorously attack trans people’s right to exist are similarly contemptuous not only of sex workers (about which she may agree with them, a bit) but bisexual and heterosexual women. The way forward to the sexually egalitarian future she wants is not through some kind of truce that homogenises and erases difference but by a respect and acceptance that doesn’t iron it out. The range of meanings attached to the word gender are attached to a range of actual lived experiences – that is how a living language about sex and equality develops.

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

The internet. It’s not just an invention – it is a paradigm shift in human affairs.

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

Man-made global warming. The science is still contested and the implications more so, but if most scientists are right, climate change and our need to respond will fundamentally change the world.

And sporting event?

The 2012 Paralympics will be looked back on as marking a turning point in the way we think about disability: from disabled to differently abled.

Which book, film, piece of music or work of art has had the greatest impact on you?

Jonathan Haidt’s hugely readable book The Happiness Hypothesis introduced me to the multidisciplinary world of brains and behaviour, a world I have remained fascinated by ever since.

A lot of music summons up memories for me. One song is Nina Simone’s “My Baby Just Cares for Me”. Unlike much of the music I used to love, I would still take Nina’s Greatest Hits to my desert island.

When I worked at Millbank Tower (for New Labour), I used to go to the Rothko room at the Tate. Often, there were only two or three of us, sitting quietly in reverie. For reasons good and bad, today’s galleries rarely offer such repose.

I also want to mention the online animation series RSA Animate, which not only has raised the Royal Society’s profile around the world (86 million views and counting) but is a wonderful example of how great talks and great creativity can make big ideas accessible to all.

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

Nelson Mandela is the obvious choice but Aung San Suu Kyi is also a hugely important symbol of the role that integrity, stoicism and dignity can play in bringing about peaceful change.

At the other extreme, I hope that history forever sees the century that produced the concentrated evil of Hitler, Stalin and Mao as a terrible one-off.

And author or playwright?

I am more of a reader than a theatregoer. Saul Bellow and Philip Roth told me before what it would be like to become a middle-class, middle-aged man and now they tell me I am not alone in my many frailties. I suspect that if Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith keep producing brilliant novels, they will become 21st-century literary giants.

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

After some reflection, I have chosen Martin Scorsese, not just because I love so many of his films but because film manages better than many other art forms to bridge the divide between aesthetic excellence and popularity.

How about anyone in business?

Paul Polman at Unilever, who is, I think, genuinely trying to lay down the foundations for ethical capitalism.

And sportsperson?

Ryan Giggs, for transforming our expectations of a sportsman’s longevity.

And philanthropist?

George Soros.

What is your favourite quotation?

I can’t remember the exact quotation but in their book The Future of American Progressivism, Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West write something like: “It is not so much hope that leads to action but action that leads to hope.”

What is your favourite speech?

Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” address as president in 1979: it was honest, brave, relevant and massively undervalued (because he subsequently failed to be re-elected).

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

The ageing of the population, hopefully because we will not only live longer but live more healthily, too.

What is your greatest concern about the future?

Our inability to respond to the various challenges of globalisation.

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

The emergence of a new set of institutions that will bridge anachronistic divides between subjects, methodologies and forms of engagement – of which the RSA seeks to be an exemplar.

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

Learning to become the people we need to be to create the future that most of us say we want.

This week Ed Miliband and Jon Cruddas set out the purpose and mission of the next Labour government: "get power to give that power away". How we achieve it matters as much as our ambition to do it.

Boxed in between a market that sees us only as consumers and a state that is too often dehumanising and inflexible, it’s clear that change is long overdue. At a time when resources are scarce in the economy, they are abundant in our communities. Passion, energy, empathy and creativity exist in spades, if only we could see it.

But after four years of cuts which have placed the greatest strain on communities and families least able to bear it, the message that we’ll hand power to people to do things themselves may seem impossible to those who are struggling to stay afloat. They need to know that this is not "politics on the cheap". We recognise that some communities don’t currently have the time, resources or confidence to organise, challenge and create change. Last year research by Civil Exchange showed how, since the "big society", the most deprived areas of the country have fallen further and further behind. The "big society" was based on an entrepreneurial business model, where the state got out the way and communities thrived. The message from Civil Exchange is that they don’t - especially where help is most needed.

There is an inequality in people’s experiences of wielding power and changing this takes time. There are brilliant examples, like the Unicef Rights Respecting Schools Programme, which shares real power with children from the age of 5, allowing them to participate in shaping and running their own schools and learning by doing.

Investing in communities to help build their own capacity doesn’t mean bringing in clever people from Whitehall to set up forums and networks, as the government has done, on short-term contracts. From Wigan to Walsall, those relationships and community groups are already there. The trick is to understand where communities are at their strongest and most energetic and build capacity around them. In Wigan you might start with the grassroots sport clubs which are strong, thriving and have reach across local communities. It’s a big leap from running a football league to taking power back and using it to manage your own cancer care or shape your local health service and there are different ways of bridging it. One approach is through community organisers, like anti-fascist charity Hope Not Hate, which uses a network of grassroots organisers to build capacity to fight racism and fascism across communities.

There are other ways too. In Lambeth, the Young Lambeth Cooperative gives local people the power to make decisions about how their youth services are run. The budget is held in a community trust and services are commissioned by its members with support from the local Council. This is more than localism. Just as power can get stuck at national level, so too it can sometimes get stuck at local level. As Lambeth has shown, to give more power to people sometimes, you have to take it away from local and national government, or you have to push it downwards and give the frontline professionals tasked with helping people the power they need to do it. There are many people who need and deserve help and support to make decisions and manage their own care. Children in care, for example, frequently say decisions are taken without thought to the reality of their lives. They don’t want to make huge decisions by themselves; they want the support of an adult they trust. But just as they don’t currently hold power to make decisions, nor do their social workers. They need access to budgets across health and social care and real power to make decisions.

The lesson of these diverse examples is that they succeed because they recognise the colour and texture of life in different communities. Trying to impose one model squeezes the spirit and energy out of people and communities. As Jon Cruddas told the New  Local Government Network, our job is to help people shape things themselves in response to the needs of their own local communities.

This is so important because too often we hear people’s experience of both market and state is uncaring, unresponsive and inflexible, from incomprehensible computer-generated letters to poor service and lack of redress. Giving people the power and ability to shape services will stop us working in silos, ticking boxes and ignoring the things that matter to people most. Business developments that take no account of the wider impact on the community, a care system that drives a coach and horses through the relationships that sustain children at the time they need them most. The answer is to give children-in-care councils, patient forums and residents associations the power and ability to shape those services around the things that matter to them.

It’s not easy to do but it couldn’t matter more because it’s built on the idea of human potential, replacing a deficit model which focuses on people’s problems with a positive model which focuses on people’s potential.

Lisa Nandy is shadow for minister for civil society and MP for Wigan

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has released new statistics on the number of completed applications for Personal Independence Payments (PIP). Out of a total 229,700 new claims made since the benefit was introduced in April last year, only 43,800 decisions have been made. Many disabled people are being left in limbo as they wait to find out whether they will receive this vital benefit.

These statistics reveal a woefully low decision rate and suggest that we will see an even bigger backlog as more claims are added to the mix. Although some of these claims may be recent, a large number are not being decided within a reasonable time frame. Many of these cases will also be new applicants to the system, young people who have just turned 16, waiting to find out if they will get any support or not.

PIP is the benefit that is replacing Disability Living Allowance and affects everyone with a disability of working age, whether they are able to work or not. The purpose of DLA was to contribute to the extra costs faced by disabled people with care, supervision or mobility needs.  This might have been in the form of a communicator guide to allow a deafblind person to go shopping or attend appointments, or for a family to have a specially adapted car to accommodate a wheelchair. PIP will still contribute to these extra costs, but the Government want to focus the benefit on people with the ‘greatest needs’. In our experience, determining this need isn’t always as clear cut as the DWP might hope.

The needs of deafblind people and those with other disabilities are often complex and make it difficult for them to play an active role in society without support. DLA was key in helping many disabled people overcome these barriers and it would be damaging if the changeover to PIP made lives more difficult for deafblind people or left them without support and cut off from their own communities.

This is not the first time that disability charities, including Sense, have expressed concern over PIP and the adequacy of the assessments being carried out by Atos and Capita. During pilot testing there were worrying examples of unacceptable practices and evidence that assessors were making ill informed decisions. For example, one deafblind person could not be provided with an interpreter meaning that they were left unable to answer questions or participate in the assessment. Another was asked to copy what the assessor was doing – despite not being able to see. When your independence is on the line, you can’t afford for mistakes like this to be made.

The fact is that ten months since PIP’s introduction only around 1 in 5 applications for PIP have not yet been completed and it demonstrates that the DWP is not prioritising this as an issue. There seems to be very little emphasis or resources going in to working through these cases.  As these delays pile up we are going to be left with a system in crisis and one that cannot easily be fixed. We need a greater understanding of what the problem is; the assessments are being made, so what is it that is holding up these decisions?

Being assessed for benefits is often extremely stressful for disabled people. I am also concerned about the level of stress placed on disabled people and it now looks like they face an unduly long wait to find out if they are eligible. The DWP and the assessors must do everything they can to provide clear information and ensure they make the right decision initially so that disabled people do not have to appeal and face even further delays to get the benefit they are entitled to.

Over the past year the impact of benefit reform has been far reaching. Many disabled people and their families have suffered financially as a result of the bedroom tax and have been badly impacted by cuts to social care. PIP should not be contributing to this pressure.

In the last few days we have seen Defra and the Environment Agency locked in battle over who is responsible for the floods. This can’t become another battle of who is to blame for the backlog between Atos, Capita and DWP. Instead we are calling on the DWP to deliver on their end of the bargain and intervene to unblock the delays between disabled people applying for and then awaiting decisions regarding PIP, and prevent more disabled people being left without this crucial benefit.

Richard Kramer is Deputy Chief Executive of deafblind charity Sense

On my hols, thanks for asking, I read two books, two more than usual. The first was the novel Stoner by John Williams, which I had put off reading because people like Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan had raved about it. But it was well good.

Even weller was Steven Gerrard, Michael Owen and … Me, co-written by Keith Miller and an unknown, unsuccessful footballer – at least, unknown to the vast majority of fans – called Mike Yates (the “me”). At 16, Yates was level pegging with Gerrard and Owen, having starred with them in all the Liverpool youth teams. Then, in 1999, Steve Heighway, who was running the Academy in Liverpool, said: sorry, pal, you’re not going to make the first team. And he was out. Like 95 per cent of boy wonders.

I have always been fascinated by those who didn’t make it. Years ago, I was offered the chance to ghost Gary Lineker’s autobiography. I said no: I can’t think of what to ask him that I don’t know the answers to already. A few months later, I thought of an angle: from every stage in his young career, I would dig out his contemporaries, those who seemed just as likely to go far, and get their memories of him and their own stories. But it was too late. Some other hack had got the job.

Reading Yates’s story, as with Stoner, I found myself rushing to the next chapter, despite knowing nothing much would happen. An added fascination of the book, which I was given while I was in Barbados, was that not only was it published in Barbados, but it was co-written by someone who has lived in Barbados for the past 35 years: Keith Miller.

How had Miller got access to so many big names? He includes excellent interviews with Jamie Carragher, Jamie Redknapp, Gareth Southgate, Ian Rush, John Barnes, Steve Heighway, Jason McAteer, Gordon Taylor and others.

Modern footballers are about as hard to get access to as the Queen. Top clubs are as impenetrable as Fort Knox. Players are guarded by agents, managers, lawyers, accountants, sponsors, security. Clubs have become brands, their training grounds ringed with steel, their academies run in secret; even mention their names or flash their logo and you could be in court. Yet Miller is an outsider, living 4,000 miles away.

I had lunch with him at my hotel, Cobblers Cove, and found that he was originally from Liverpool, he was brought up a Red and he’d gone to Liverpool John Moores University. On holiday in Barbados in 1978, he met and married Sally, a local girl, and got a job teaching at a boys’ school, Mapps College. He eventually became headmaster – by which time he and his wife had begun a little publishing company that produced a tourist guide called Ins and Outs of Barbados.

Today, almost every tourist in Barbados finds a free copy in their room and those in Trinidad, Saint Vincent and elsewhere also get Ins and Outs, as the Millers have expanded the idea round the Caribbean. So, he has his own company, Miller Publishing, and his own imprint, Wordsmith International. That meant he could self-publish.

It was by chance that he met Mike Yates, the player who never made it. He happened to come to Barbados to do some coaching with local youths. They became friends. Mike, after moving down the leagues into non-League, is now back at Liverpool, working as a youth coach. Hence Keith was able to get introductions to Liverpool’s background hierarchy. Keith did all the interviews himself, making endless trips back to the UK, and also did a few sessions on Skype. The reason he got them to contribute is that they are serious – about football, not personalities, and about players’ memories of being coached and the problems young players face today when they’re headed for the scrapheap.

The late success of Stoner, originally published in 1965, shows that a supposedly forgotten novel can have another life. Keith Miller has shown that you don’t have to be a professional football hack to write a good book about professional football.

Lesbians are always having “firsts”: the first British pre-watershed televised lesbian kiss (Brookside in 1994), the first lesbian in space (Sally Ride in 1983). These debuts are usually met with a fervent yet fleeting “Yeah, go us!” from the lesbian community, before we go out to look for something to get angry about to balance the joy of progress.

Most recently, we’ve been raising our G&Ts to the Disney Channel’s first gay couple, who also happen to be women. In spite of a spirited, troglodytic protest campaign by the US anti-gay group One Million Moms, the channel has aired an episode of the family comedy Good Luck Charlie featuring a pair of lesbian mums. What are the social implications of the Disney-fication of dykes? I’m sure that lesbian mums being given the Mickey-shaped seal of approval has the “traditional values” salesman Walt Disney turning in his grave like a rotisserie chicken. Then again, the Disney philosophy has undergone some (exceptionally slow) modernisation since its originator’s death in 1966. Bear in mind that there was a black US president before there was a black Disney princess.

Since the 1930s, children have been raised on Disney. I was one of the more recent ones. Some of my earliest memories of possible gay references in films are based on the implicit homosexuality of Disney villains, from the superbly camp Captain Hook (what exactly was his relationship with Mr Smee?) to Aladdin’s sexually ambiguous nemesis, Jafar. At times, it felt as if Disney were whispering in children’s ears: “Gay men are evil.” References to lesbianism were seemingly non-existent.

The lesbians in Good Luck Charlie are minor characters, yet in terms of sticking it to Disney’s socially conservative demographic, it was still a bold move to include them. What’s more, the “two mums” thing isn’t treated as an issue. The scene goes roughly as follows:

Enter lesbians.

Dad: Oh, look, little Susie [or whoever] has two mums – that’s cool.

Exeunt.

In a sense, it’s rather sad to watch as the subversiveness of lesbianism is diluted by Disney. It induces the same kind of disappointment as when Iggy Pop was in those car insurance ads. Perhaps it’s time to admit that being lesbian isn’t punk any more. We get married, vote for mainstream political parties and appear in Disney comedies. If that’s what it takes for children to learn that being gay is normal, then it’s a worthwhile sacrifice.
 

Uxbridge was created by the Redistribution of Seats Act in 1885. Its first MP was the antiquary and genealogist Frederick Dixon-Hartland, a Conservative, whose book A Genealogical and Chronological Chart of the Royal and Distinguished Houses of Europe (1854) was followed by a survey of the tombs of the same royal families.

At the 1910 election, Charles Thomas Mills retained the seat for the Tories, aged only 23, making him the baby of the House. At the outbreak of war, he switched regiments so he could be posted to the front more quickly. He served with the Scots Guards and was killed by shrapnel at the battle of Loos on 6 October 1915.

On the surface, little seems to have been achieved in talks on the three-year-old Syrian civil war, chaired by the UN special envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, and held in Montreux and Geneva. But in diplomacy, appearances can be deceptive. In the first place, despite the deep antagonisms between the Syrian sides, no one walked out of the talks, an achievement in its own right. There were, it is true, no direct discussions between the parties, but neither did they spend weeks debating the size of the table as the Americans and Vietnamese did at the Paris peace talks of 1968. On the contrary, my sense is that a modest base has been laid for future negotiations.

One of the first UN missions on which I served was in the former Yugoslavia. Almost two decades have elapsed since that country’s disintegration, and it is often forgotten that the 1995 Dayton Accords that finally brought peace occurred in the fifth year of hostilities. When it comes to Syria, at best we are at 1994: there is little prospect for an immediate end to hostilities, or even a ceasefire. The end of winter in another month and the raw sectarianism raging through the Sunni and Shia worlds of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq may indeed lead to an intensification of fighting in the coming period.

Despite an apparently gloomy outlook, it is likely that limited agreements can be reached that will be to the benefit of both sides in future weeks – exchanges of prisoners, humanitarian access, and safe passage for women, children and the wounded. The UN is quite adept at negotiating these and nothing I heard from Geneva leads me to believe that agreements of this nature are not possible – indeed, probable. The ever cautious but vastly experienced Brahimi has hinted as much.

It was Brahimi who came to the UN’s rescue in Iraq in 2003, leading its mission in that country after the Baghdad bomb attack that killed another veteran UN diplomat, Sergio Vieira de Mello. And nearly 25 years ago it was Brahimi who choreographed the 1989 Taif Agreement that brought the 14-year Lebanese civil war to an end – an experience acutely relevant to the agonies of Syria at war.

To the surprise of many observers, the main opposition alliance – the Syrian National Council (SNC), led by Ahmad Jarba – held together much better than expected at the Montreux/Geneva conference. Within days of those talks concluding, a dramatic development took place which is likely to have a profound impact. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, invited Jarba to come to Moscow immediately for talks. In itself, this is hugely welcome, even if the cost to western diplomacy’s pride is considerable, and though it is deeply worrying to the embattled regime of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

Last August, after the debacle of the parliamentary vote on British intervention and President Barack Obama’s decision not to punish the Syrian regime for using chemical weapons, it was Russia that stepped forward in a bold move to extricate these weapons from an already savage war in Syria. The US had little choice but to accept a Russian diplomatic initiative.

Now, for a second time, Russian diplomacy has shown itself far more agile than that of the west by inviting Jarba to Moscow. The presence of the Syrian rebel leader sends strong messages to the west as well as Damascus. Russia has managed to maintain support for Assad but at the same time opened a “second front” through the invitation to Jarba. It will undoubtedly have caused shock waves in the Syrian capital. As well as demonstrating Russia’s diplomatic prowess, it shows that Moscow is now the only capital entertaining relations with both sides in the Syrian civil war.

Jarba arrived in Moscow on 4 February. His visit was well timed, coming just before the next round of talks, due in Geneva on 10 February. There is little doubt that the regime in Damascus will feel profound disquiet at the move, but it knows it will need the Russians’ protective cover at the UN Security Council.

Yet peace can come to Syria only with the inclusion, rather than exclusion, of all parties. The ghost of Banquo in Geneva was Iran, the principal external supporter of Syria and its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah. Without Iran’s presence, the war could easily continue another three years. To prevent that happening, the west will have to accelerate its search, together with Russia and China, for a permanent nuclear agreement with Iran. Only then will the prospect of peace be real.

Michael C Williams is a distinguished visiting fellow at Chatham House, London, and served as a UN diplomat in Cambodia, the Balkans and the Middle East

Banged up in a cell for up to 23 hours a day, the jailbird ex-MP Denis MacShane scribbled notes. Lots of notes. He walked through the gates with 400 handwritten pages on his release six weeks in to a six-month sentence for expenses fraud. The inevitable book will follow. Incarcerating MacShane in the high-security Belmarsh suggests the authorities misinterpreted his “Denis the Menace” monicker, earned for his ability to cause and fall into political trouble, rather than breaking the bones of rivals. During his spell inside, he encountered the Soho nail bomber (“really weird”) and armed robbers. “How much have you got stashed away for when you get out?” MacShameless asked a hardened bank raider. I’m told the old lag replied: “A lot of people ask that, Denis. The answer is £2m, although Securicor don’t know that yet.”

Fur flew in a “Purr Minister” Westminster pussy contest when the Labour MP Andrew Gwynne claimed that vote-rigging was fixing the result for Bosun, the Tory MP Sheryll Murray’s cat. Grumbling Gwynne smelled an automated voting rat after Bosun clawed in 30,000 votes overnight at the rate of 50 per second. He withdrew Jude the moggy in protest and the organiser, Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, launched an inquiry which, at the time of writing, was ongoing. Your correspondent’s eye was caught by the feline entry of the Labour MP Bill Esterson: Kevin. A cat called Kevin? Whatever next?

The prominent Lib Dem Danny Alexander hopes to get inside Ed Miliband’s head as the ConDem coalition disintegrates. The Treasury bean-counter is reading What Money Can’t Buy: the Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel. The Harvard professor was dubbed a Miliband guru after tutoring the party’s 2012 conference. Alexander, pretending he doesn’t know his good friend George Osborne and suddenly praising Ed Balls, may be disappointed by Sandel’s observation: “If you don’t have as many friends as you would like it might occur to you to try to buy some. But you would quickly realise it might not work.”

Fat fingers resulted in your correspondent understating by a factor of ten the £473.75 municipal monthly stipend of the Eastleigh councillor-cum-MP Mike “Two Jobs” Thornton on top of his £66,396 parliamentary salary. The borough payment, shouted a colleague of his, is donated to charity. He didn’t say if Thornton polishes his halo every night before bed.

Polly Toynbee, spied canvassing in Camden for the Labour Party, sparked speculation she may wish to become an MP. My £1.60 says that’s nonsense, but I’ve held the Guardianista in high regard since Toynbee joined the pantheon of lefties who rejected honours, declining an invitation to become Dame Polly.

Kevin Maguire is the associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror