On this week's podcast Rafael Behr, Helen Lewis and George Eaton consider the significance of the Wythenshawe and Shale East by-election, and consider the future leadership prospects for both Labour and Conservative parties, Ian Steadman asks why nobody is stating the obvious on climate change, and Laurie Penny describes her experience at Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre.

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This is Part 1 of Ryan Gilbey’s report from the Berlin Film Festival – Click here to read Part 2.

As the youngest in the triumvirate of European film festivals, the Berlinale, which has been running since 1951, is easily overshadowed by its elder siblings, Venice and Cannes. We all know how difficult it can be for stragglers to make their mark when the trailblazers have achieved so much. (I’m the eldest of three children. Why do you ask?) So it was a coup for the festival to secure as its opening film the world premiere of Wes Anderson’s candy-coloured caper The Grand Budapest Hotel, which has a delicious turn from Ralph Fiennes as a dandyish concierge embroiled in wartime intrigue. And the first half of Lars von Trier’s sexually explicit odyssey Nymphomaniac was shown in a slightly extended director’s cut – another premiere.

Having seen the two-part, four-hour-plus theatrical version (which I’ll be reviewing next week), I skipped this. Colleagues could be heard puzzling over what precisely had been added. The consensus seemed to be that there was a touch more chat and a few more of what Teri Garr in Young Frankenstein calls Schwanzstückers.

Talking of Schwanzstückers, one of the film’s stars, the volatile 27-year-old Shia LaBeouf, stopped by at the Nymphomaniac press conference briefly to repeat Eric Cantona’s gnomic quote about seagulls and sardines. He also appeared on the red carpet outside the Berlinale Palast with his face obscured by a paper bag on which was written the words: “I am not famous any more.” I was reminded of Peter Cook as Greta Garbo being driven through the streets proclaiming through a loudhailer: “I vant to be alone.”

Celebrity meltdowns aside, Berlin does not always sport the most tantalising line-up. “We complain about Cannes because it always has the same old names,” a friend observed, “then we moan about Berlin because it never has anyone we’ve heard of.” The upside is that any pleasures are all the richer for being unheralded. Remember, the likes of Gloria and A Separation made their initial splashes here.

Five days in and nothing yet has been quite that revelatory. I enjoyed La Marche à suivre, a documentary about a provincial Canadian school. The film places equal emphasis on discord and fun, dropping in on tense teacher-student powwows but also incorporating stylishly shot sequences of teenagers at play. Think of it as Être et avoir: the High School Years.

The tender comedy-drama Love Is Strange features heartfelt performances from John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a Manhattan couple who get hitched almost 40 years into their relationship, only to find themselves forced to lodge separately after they become unexpectedly homeless. While the lead actors are together, the film feels alive and vital; these characters deserve their own miniseries or chat show. Their rejuvenating reunion in a bar near the end of the movie is bliss for them and us alike.

The most encouraging hit of the festival so far is ’71, which played in the main competition. Yann Demange (whose TV credits include Top Boy and Criminal Justice) directs this sinewy thriller about Gary (Jack O’Connell), a squaddie separated from his unit in 1971 Belfast. The plot could be engraved on the nose of a bullet – hunted by foes and supposed friends alike, Gary must stay alive – but the film is lucid about the tribal complexities of the Troubles. The pace is expertly calibrated, too. There is a terrifying riot sequence and a brilliant breather in which Gary is “adopted” by a 12-year-old Protestant urchin who’s cock-a-hoop at finding a soldier. Genre pictures rarely bag festival prizes but at the time of writing, ’71 is the most complete and well-crafted film I’ve seen here.

Also gripping is History of Fear, Benjamin Naishtat’s elliptical portrait of Argentinean society in which the poor are feral and oppressed, the wealthy contemptuous and paranoid. A string of disorienting vignettes and tableaux amplify the sense of dread, Michael Haneke-style. Alarms howl, children vanish, military choppers loom sinisterly over a shanty town grid. The tension was weakened slightly by the suspicion that the scenes could have been arranged in any old order to little detrimental effect.

Thrillers in general are making a good showing. Lee Yong-seung’s Ship Bun (“Ten Minutes”) concerns a hard-working intern who goes from rising star to scapegoat, outcast and bullying victim after he is passed over for a staff position. Less convincing but similarly occupied with claustrophobic economic pressures is Things People Do, in which Wes Bentley (the kid from American Beauty with the cliff-ledge brow) becomes a moralistic, Robin Hood-style criminal. The New Mexico locations remind you that, while it’s not exactly bad, it isn’t Breaking Bad, either. One of the stars of that series, Aaron Paul, turns up in an inept adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel A Long Way Down. He plays one of a quartet of wacky misfits (Pierce Brosnan, Toni Collette and Imogen Poots are the others) who arrive coincidentally on the same rooftop to commit suicide. Friendships are forged, tears shed. My body ached by the end. Not through laughing or crying but because I was rigid from cringing at each ingratiatingly zany line, flat joke and misjudged appeal to our sympathies.

Hossein Amini, the Iranian-British writer of Drive, makes his directorial debut with a fat-free film adapting Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Two Faces of January, about a US tour guide (Oscar Isaac minus his Inside Llewyn Davis beard) working in 1960s Athens. There, he is drawn to a con man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young wife (Kirsten Dunst). It’s as elegant and creepy as a Highsmith adaptation should be. And all those sun-dappled ruins and linen suits were bound to have a replenishing effect on those of us barricaded behind scarves and bobble hats around the concrete plains of Potsdamer Platz.
 

Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and their student William Beveridge, laid the ideological foundations for the modern welfare state and the post-war economic consensus in the United Kingdom. As both social reformers and economists, they made the important link between the provision of gainful employment and the eradication of poverty. Almost 100 years later, and following an economic crash caused by a profligate and poorly regulated financial sector, it is important to re-assess their theory that achieving “full employment” is a prerequisite to eliminating poverty. A necessary part of this analysis is the question of how “full employment” could actually be achieved, and how policymakers could overcome the political challenges it would inevitably face today.

It is important to define the terms “full employment” and “poverty”. Most economists do not use the former term to refer to a situation where every available worker in an economy has a job. Such a situation would be difficult to achieve, due to unemployment which occurs when workers are between jobs (transitional or frictional unemployment), and unemployment caused by skills gaps and subsequent periods of re-training (structural unemployment). Instead, I will use the term “full employment” to refer to the elimination of cyclical or demand-deficient unemployment, as William Beveridge did in his 1944 report Full Employment in a Free Society. According to this definition, a state of ‘full employment’ exists where the number of jobs available in any given economy does not depend on the ‘boom and bust’ of the business cycle. In Full Employment in a Free Society, Beveridge suggested that ‘full employment’ could be said to exist when overall unemployment was at a level of approximately 3%.

‘Poverty’ is also a term that is open to a number of different definitions. I will adopt the definition used by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation: ‘poverty’ is a situation where an individual or family’s resources are “so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities.” Importantly, this definition includes not only those who suffer from malnutrition and live in abject squalor (absolute poverty), but also those people whose income is significantly below the national average, to the extent that they are marginalised from the rest of society (relative poverty).

Poverty and Unemployment

According to Beveridge’s 1944 report, only a state policy of full employment could free Britain from what he termed the ‘giant evils’ of Want, Disease, Ignorance and Squalor. The fight against unemployment and the fight against poverty were one and the same, according to Beveridge: “If we attack with determination, unity and clear aim the four giant evils . . . we shall destroy in the process their confederate –the fifth giant of Idleness enforced by mass unemployment.”

The importance of this intrinsic link cannot be overstated. If poverty can be characterised as social exclusion, leading to depression, ill health and criminal activity, then gainful employment can be characterised as social inclusion, leading to a sense of purpose, belonging and engagement with the local community. Even if the welfare state we enjoy today was able to provide an adequate level of support to the unemployed (to the extent that they were brought out of poverty in financial terms), the problem of social exclusion, associated with both unemployment and poverty, would still remain. Eradicating poverty is not merely a case of increasing state benefits.

Because of this, even though we enjoy a developed welfare state today, the idea that full employment is necessary to eradicate poverty is no less true than it was in 1944. As Beveridge pointed out, it is as much an issue of self-actualisation as it is of finance: “The central problem of the lives of most of these [unemployed] young men is one of maintenance of self-respect. Rightly, they feel a need to take their places in society, achieving in their own right the means of living.”

However, if full employment is a prerequisite to eradicating poverty, achieving full employment is no guarantee of eradicating poverty. In the 1909 Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, Beatrice Webb argued that there were many structural causes of poverty or “able-bodied destitution.” These causes included not only cyclical unemployment but poor education, debt and “under-payment.” Even if the state guarantees employment to every person capable of working, poverty will still exist if the other structural causes identified by the Webbs are not addressed. In Industrial Democracy (1897), the Webbs argued for a “national minimum” of working conditions and wages: “including not merely definite precautions of sanitation and safety, and maximum hours of toil, but also a minimum of weekly earnings.”

These concerns, and their proposed solutions, are just as relevant today as they were at the start of the 20th century. Temporary and zero-hours contracts leave many modern workers in a state of relative poverty, notwithstanding their employment status. They face the same “under-payment” and lack of “minimum of weekly earnings” that workers did in 1897. Full employment is therefore an important but insufficient step towards eradicating poverty. A policy aimed at eradicating poverty would be far more ambitious than a policy of full employment: in addition to creating enough jobs for those able to work, such a policy would have to enforce a living wage, working time restrictions and guaranteed weekly hours.

With this caveat in mind, I will now turn to how a policy of full employment could be achieved in the United Kingdom.

Full employment through demand management

Low unemployment can always be achieved during an economic ‘boom’. This is because during a boom the overall demand for goods and services (aggregate demand) is high. The demand for labour is a derived demand, meaning that when aggregate demand is high, businesses and government demand more labour to help them increase the quantity of goods and services they can supply, in order to meet the higher level of demand for those goods and services. Therefore, unemployment is generally very low in boom years, and figures close to full employment (3% unemployment) are fairly easy to achieve at the height of the boom. For example, during the Clinton years, American unemployment was as low as 4%. Likewise, under New Labour in 2001, UK unemployment reached a low of 4.2%.

However, these figures are not examples of genuine full employment, because they can only exist during boom years. Unemployment usually follows situations of high employment when the bust arrives. Recalling our definition, ‘true’ full employment must exist independently of the fluctuations of the business cycle. In other words, it must be sustainable during an economic recession. Consequently, the challenge of any policy aimed at achieving full employment is to either prevent recessions from occurring or guarantee jobs during a recession.

Preventing recession is not something that can easily be achieved by domestic policy, especially when the cause is related to world financial markets. Policies do exist that shield economies from global market fluctuations, reducing the initial effects of global recession on a domestic economy rather than merely compensating for those effects. These policies include diversifying the major industries contributing to GDP (for example, a strong focus on manufacturing, construction and technology as well as financial services) and robust financial regulation. A stronger regulatory regime in 2008 would have prevented UK banks from taking out dubious mortgage-backed securities without the protection of sufficiently large catastrophe funds. This would have softened the impact of the 2008 crash on the UK economy and consequently the UK labour market.

Diverse exports and robust banking regulation do not rule out the need for a Keynsian stimulus to maintain full employment, however. Keynes will always be relevant because no economy is recession-proof. As Nassim Taleb notes in ‘The Black Swan’, it is impossible to know when and how the next economic catastrophe will occur, and so it is very difficult for businesses and governments to insure against it. This uncertainty means that any statement to the effect that we are somehow beyond the days of boom and bust is truly misguided, both today and fifty years in the future.

We cannot, therefore, pursue a light-touch full employment policy on the assumption of permanent and stable growth. Measures need to be put in place that are capable of maintaining high employment when profits are down and businesses don’t want to hire, for the simple reason that we can never be sure that another recession is not waiting around the corner.

Keynes’ major contribution to economics was the theory that unemployment was created not by the inflexibility of wages, but by a lack of aggregate demand. According to Keynes, when private businesses did not demand enough goods and services to maintain high levels of employment, the government should use fiscal policy to maintain high levels of employment through a programme of ‘demand management’. This involves a high degree of public spending in the pursuit of public works programmes and an expansion of the public sector. Such investment has a ‘multiplier effect’ in terms of output and therefore employment: building a road pays not only the construction company but also the architects, subcontractors, road sweepers and the shopkeepers they all go to for lunch.

Keynes’ theory of demand management enjoyed cross-party support in the UK until the early 1970s, and was largely successful at maintaining full employment during this period: from 1946 onwards, UK unemployment did not cross Beveridge’s 3% threshold until 1972. However, Keynesianism fell out of favour during the 1970s with the onset of successive oil and currency crises, and the subsequent monetarist policies of the Thatcher government.

Objections to full employment via demand management

Perhaps surprisingly, both William Beveridge and the Webbs were highly sceptical of Keynesian demand management as a means of successfully achieving full employment. As José Harris notes in William Beveridge: A Biography, Beveridge differed from the Webbs in his belief that full employment could be achieved without high levels of political coercion. However, by the end of the war, Beveridge did agree with the Webbs’ major economic theories, including the belief that full employment could only be achieved through a planned economy. In the postscript to ‘Full Employment in a Free Society’, Beveridge argued that the 1944 Employment White Paper would be insufficient to offset the fluctuations of the business cycle: “The White Paper, when critically examined, is seen to propose no serious attack on the instability of private investment…The policy of the White Paper is a public works policy, not a policy of full employment.” According to both Beveridge and the Webbs, only highly centralised planning could achieve a consistent state of full employment. In Beveridge’s proposal, this degree of planning involved the creation of a National Investment Board to determine overall domestic investment, stabilising the prices of primary goods through long-term collective contracts, and strict controls on the location of new businesses.

Beveridge was sceptical about both the impact of government investment on overall demand, and interest rates as a means of stabilising private investment. This scepticism largely explains his endorsement of a more radical alternative. However, the fact that the policies within the White Paper achieved full employment for twenty five years suggests that his analysis was overly pessimistic. Successive post-war governments were able to successfully predict fluctuations in private investment, and achieve consistent levels of public investment through high taxation. Furthermore, interest rate controls are no longer viewed as a failed experiment, as they were in the 1940. Arguably, interest rates are now the primary method of government stimulus. And even if Beveridge’s analysis of the White Paper had proven to be correct, it would be unrealistic to suggest that a level of state planning deemed unacceptably radical by the government of 1944 could be implemented by a 21st century government. Therefore, a policy of Keynesian demand management remains the most proven and politically achievable route to full employment.

Political obstacles to achieving full employment?

However, a full employment policy based on government investment and major public works will still face major political challenges. In ‘Political Aspects of Full Employment’, the Marxist economist Michal Kalecki argued that business opposition to such a policy will  always be a powerful obstacle to achieving full employment in a democratic society. Kalecki argued that even though full employment would increase the profits of business through higher levels of production, the social function of periodic unemployment is to enable the capitalist class to exercise social power against individual workers and against the working class as a whole. In other words, business leaders will never favour the eradication of periods of unemployment, because that would end their leverage over the workers, which arises from fear of dismissal. Beveridge echoed this argument in his wartime speeches to the Nuffield College Conference series in the early 1940s, where he argued vehemently against allowing the “vested interests” to impede the adoption of policies that are beneficial from the “purely national point of view”.

Clearly, there will be strong political challenges to implementing a full employment policy. But these challenges are not insurmountable, especially now that the national political conversation is shifting from shallow discussions about character and competence to a more interesting, important debate about how we respond to the economic challenges our country faces. As Robert Skidelsky argues eloquently in ‘Return of the Master,’ it can no longer be said that Keynesian economists are excluded from that debate.

The fact that poverty is rising in the UK also suggests that there will be popular support for an interventionist employment policy. The use of food banks has increased dramatically over the last year, rail fares are rising above inflation annually, and energy bills have more than doubled over the past six years. It is clear that a manifesto policy of maintaining the economic status quo is not enough to secure an election victory in 2015. With this in mind, all parties now have the opportunity to place full employment at the top of their agenda, as Churchill did to his success in the 1950 Conservative election manifesto: “We regard the maintenance of full employment as the first aim of a Conservative Government.”

When full employment becomes the first aim of all political parties today, a significant first step will have been taken towards eradicating poverty in the United Kingdom. But it is important to remember that even when full employment has been achieved, the modern ‘giant evils’ of under-employment, low wages and insecure work will still have to be defeated. Those victories are equally important prerequisites to achieving a society free of poverty.

The curtain rises on Es Devlin’s clean, classical designs. But just as Mozart’s music sets aside solemnity for wriggling quavers, so this white facade starts to boil with life. Cleverly conjured by Luke Halls’s video projections, invisible quills scrawl graffiti, covering the blank walls with Leporello’s list of his master’s conquests. It’s the start of a long evening of visual trickery that makes singers disappear even as you watch them and transforms windows into whirling vortexes and an ordinary house into an Escher illusion.

Reality, it seems, is subjective. A telltale ink blot spreading outwards from the centre of Donna Anna’s dress and the delicate patterns on Donna Elvira’s robes reveal themselves as the quill-strokes of the opening scene – and it becomes clear that this is Don Giovanni rewritten by the Don. History may be written by the victors but Holten gives literature’s greatest loser, condemned again and again to hellfire, the opportunity to tell his tale – and what a tale it is.

Far from being a rapist and violator, Giovanni, here played by Mariusz Kwiecien, is the victim of hypocritical women, who lead him on even as they cry abuse. Donna Anna clings desperately to a departing Giovanni before launching into a version of “Fuggi, crudele, fuggi” that is more reproach than accusation. Later, she slips out, even as Ottavio sings of his love in “Dalla sua pace”, for another encounter with the Don. Zerlina, too, discovered in a compromising embrace on her wedding day, tears at her own clothes – creating the fiction of a violation where none occurred.

There has been much debate about rape recently. To give control of a rape narrative to a male aggressor risks making a mockery of the current artistic preoccupation with voicing the unvoiced. Does Giovanni’s side of the story need telling? Does he deserve his time in the operatic witness stand? Which side the production is on, morally, depends on the ending.

Fortunately, Holten triumphs here. In a sleight of hand more striking than the visual pyrotechnics, he suddenly banishes them all. Hell is not death, or a descent into baroque demons and flames, but simply the end of illusion. Thrust back into a solitary reality, with the house lights rising, Giovanni can only reach desperately out to the audience in the hope that they might indulge him in one final chapter. Purists will object to the musical cuts to this last scene but the truncated resolution is the only possible ending for an opera that is all about the Don, in which other characters are mere projections and fantasies.

Conceptually this is as interesting a Don Giovanni as we’ve seen in years. In execution, however, there are some issues. The visuals offer spectacle where psychological intimacy would be more appropriate. Even such powerful singing actors as Kwiecien and Véronique Gens, who plays Elvira, get lost among it all. Humour is drained from the drama by a quirky, strangely jazzy fortepiano continuo – a leaden musical gag that misses the punchline each time – while in scenes begging for laughter, Holten seems to have gone out of his way to avoid it.

The speed from Nicola Luisotti’s pit is uneven, too often rushing forwards and treading moments of delicacy and humour underfoot. Zerlina’s charmingly manipulative “Batti, batti” is a casualty, as is the Don’s serenade. The casting also yields problems, with Malin Byström struggling to contain her voice in the repressed frame of Donna Anna and the tenor Antonio Poli making heavy weather of her lover Don Ottavio. But through it all, Kwiecien’s charisma burns hell-hot. The Polish baritone carries a tricky concept by sheer force of personality, aided by the smoothest of vocal seductions.

After making his Royal Opera House debut with a staging of Eugene Onegin that took a beating from critics, Holten would have been forgiven for playing it safe with his second production. Yet Don Giovanni is a defiant, double-or-nothing bet: a flawed show but more interesting, thought-provoking and appealing than anything I have seen from this company in a long time.

“Don Giovanni” runs until 24 February

Civil service reform and the machinery of government may not be as immediately enticing as the progressive challenge of transforming Britain’s broken political economy, or revitalising the post-war welfare state. But the question of how to use governmental power effectively will be a vital issue for the next Labour government. Competent statecraft is about the capacity to generate sound policy and crucially, to implement and execute reforms in an ever more diverse and complex society. In his seminal treatise, The Prince, Machiavelli famously argued that well governed states, "are full of good institutions…conducive to the security of kind and the realm".

Good statecraft entails constructive relations between civil servants and politicians in which decisions are, wherever possible, informed by knowledge and evidence; it requires a modern notion of accountability where officials take operational responsibility where appropriate, but also contribute to greater openness in the policy-making process; efficiency and value for money are achieved through effective implementation based on decentralisation and an understanding that those who implement policy should have a voice in its formulation; and there is proper democratic oversight of government and policy-making, principally through the scrutiny function of parliament.  

More than ever, solving the major strategic challenges confronting the UK requires effective governance. Policy is increasingly about resolving trade-offs accentuated by financial constraints and fiscal austerity. These are likely to grow in future years given demographic pressures, new demands on state-funded services, and rising public expectations. What, for example, is the right balance between direct income redistribution and investment in early year’s provision to tackle child poverty? How should the state encourage employers to contribute more towards the costs of retraining and lifelong education? How should the National Health Service become more preventative and user-focused? These are all questions about the appropriate distribution and targeting of resources: how to harness all of the policy levers available to achieve strong outcomes strengthening economic efficiency and social justice.   

Throughout history, reform of the state has legitimately been a priority for progressives in British politics. Towards the end of the First World War, a coalition of liberals and Fabians established the Haldane Committee which developed the modern departmental system of government that still predominates today, driving the major social reform achievements of the inter-war years. After 1940, Labour’s contribution to the war effort was in part to open up Whitehall, bringing a legion of experts into the civil service to improve economic policy and industrial planning. This was the seed-bed for the 1942 Beveridge report which established a comprehensive welfare state and NHS. 

Post-1945, the Attlee administration sought to further update and modernise the central civil service. By the 1960s, in the face of relative economic decline and industrial stagnation, it was clear that the system of government needed further reform, a challenge seized by the Wilson government which established the Fulton Committee in 1968. Fulton’s proposed reforms sought to improve civil service training and capacity, strengthening departmental co-ordination and sharpening policy-making expertise. And after Tony Blair’s 1997 victory, Labour set about improving the capacity of Whitehall to carry out a new generation of social reforms – from the New Deal and Academy schools to Sure Start and a plethora of early years’ interventions to equalise life-chances.   

Despite these successes, however, there are practical lessons from the post-1997 governments which ought to be heeded. This is precisely what my new book on Governing Britain (IB Tauris, 2014) seeks to do. I argue that there are five key, stand-out governance reform messages that should be understood.

The first is that successful policies more often build on, but also adapt, what went before: don't rip up policies or institutions for the sake of it. Incremental reforms are often those most likely to succeed in the long-term. Labour chose to scrap Grant Maintained Schools after 1997, insisting they were divisive in promoting a two-tier education system. However, by the early 2000s, the government was developing its own model of "independent state schools". It would have been better from day one to place GM schools within a new framework of public accountability, local democratic oversight, and equity guarantees.    

A further lesson of the New Labour years is that Number Ten cannot circumvent departments and "front-line" public agencies. At times, the centre sought to directly control the levers of implementation, bypassing Whitehall departments altogether. Invariably, this led to less effective policy-making and execution. It is in departments where expertise, knowledge, policy memory, resources, and experience of front-line implementation are often greatest. Central government needs to work with agencies and people throughout the policy chain if it wants sustainable, long-term improvements in performance. Labour’s experience demonstrates that a "top-down" delivery regime will help to shift a public service from "incompetent" to "acceptable", but rarely "from good to great". 

The third lesson of the post-1997 period is that governments need to boost their strategy and delivery capacity. Governments should have the ability to foresee problems and understand policy challenges more forensically than is the case at present. They should learn from policy experiments tried and tested elsewhere, being open to ideas from around the world. There is no harm is absorbing lessons gleaned from other sectors in understanding how to address modern delivery challenges. The Internet is transforming the manner in which the retail sector operates in the UK, alongside customer experience: public services cannot be immune from such trends, even if they are also concerned with equity and accountability.

At the same time, the civil service badly needs more people and capabilities. Alistair Darling has referred in his memoir Beyond the Brink to how few officials there were in the Treasury after 2008 that had experience either of financial services or handling major economic crises. The slimming-down and "hollowing-out" of the British state to cut costs and promote efficiency may result in worse outcomes over time.

Fourthly, the New Labour years demonstrate conclusively that "joined-up government" is still a long way from reality in the British machinery of governance. Departments and agencies are still too inclined to engage in turf wars, passing the buck of resolving "wicked" policy problems onto one another. Much greater emphasis on genuine departmental co-ordination and inter-agency collaboration will be required.

The final lesson of the post-1997 era is that governance reforms are harder as the UK has remained a highly centralised state with few checks and balances on central executive power, stemming from the nature of the British political tradition. Devolution has redistributed some power from central government, but Whitehall remains firmly in control. The default governing code is one of hierarchy, centralisation, command and control – an ethos of "central government knows best". This too needs to be urgently reformed – part of a long-term process of political decentralisation. 

Britain has to learn from the experience of other countries in reforming its governance arrangements, as well as reflecting on previous historical experience. "Power is harder to use and easier to lose," argues the political scientist Moses Naim, as every government is discovering across the developed world. A reforming, centre-left government must fashion a credible and robust statecraft, revitalising the civil service and our machinery of government for the challenges of the contemporary age. 

Patrick Diamond is vice-chair of Policy Network and lecturer in Public Policy at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Governing Britain: Power, Politics and the Prime Minister, published today by IB. Tauris  

It is a mark of UKIP's recent success that the party's second-place finish in the Wythenshawe and Sale East by-election has been greeted with a collective shrug by most of the political media. Back in 2010, when it was struggling under Lord Pearson, anyone who suggested that it would go on to finish second in six by-elections, from Eastleigh to South Shields, would have been laughed out of the room. Now David Cameron is deriding the party for failing to achieve "a breakthrough" on the basis that it didn't win the seat (is his new line really "it's ok if they beat us because they still can't beat Labour"?)

UKIP will still be lucky to win a seat in 2015, but it is now certain to improve significantly on the 3.1 per cent of the vote it scored in 2010. With this in mind, it's worth asking whether the rise of Farage could revive the dormant debate over electoral reform. The party supports the introduction of proportional representation and campaigned in favour of AV in the 2011 referendum. 

One can already picture the headlines should UKIP end up with nothing to show for its increased support: "Democratic outrage as UKIP wins 8% but no seats". A renewed push to change our outdated and unfair voting system could be one unlikely byproduct of the UKIP surge.

Incidentally, while neither Labour nor the Tories are likely to consent to another referendum on electoral reform in the next parliament, several Labour sources have told me that the party is considering the likely Lib Dem demand of PR for local government in any coalition negotiations. 

Warning: this blog contains spoilers for the first series of House of Cards

The first series of Netflix’s House of Cards is full of motifs, of threads that run through the thirteen episodes if you care to look for them. For instance, Kevin Spacey’s character, the calculating and Machiavellian politician Frank Underwood, has a habit of rapping twice on a table top or car door when he’s come to a decision, which acts as a kind of aural punctuation echoing through the series. More obvious, perhaps, is Underwood’s habit of turning his head to speak directly to the viewer, usually with a pithy aside or epigram (a trick borrowed straight from the original 1990 UK series). But my favourite recurring scene is also where you find some of the drama’s most genuinely intimate moments – when Frank and his wife Claire share a cigarette by the window of their immaculate DC townhouse. The smoking itself is important, as it signals transgression and trust. Their conversation as they pass the cigarette to each other is even more important, though. This is when they plot.

The Underwoods’ marriage is a rare thing in a political drama: it is an equal partnership, even if it doesn’t seem so on first glance. On the surface, it looks as if his is the career that matters: he is the Democratic Majority Whip in the House of Representatives, a power broker who has the ear of the President. Yet Claire is a professional success in her own right, the founder of an NGO who raises millions of dollars and writes bills for Congress. The way the show is structured reflects this – unlike in the original UK series, where Elizabeth Uruquart had a lot of the ideas and very little of the agency, Claire Underwood has her own storylines. She isn’t just Lady Macbeth, pacing the floor while her husband does the deed. She gets in her own tangles with lobbyists, has her own extra-marital affair, and formulates her own strategies for seizing power.

Above all, though, the Underwoods are a team. The success of their quest for power and revenge relies on them both, in keeping everything in balance. As Nancy Dewolf Smith puts it in the Wall Street Journal: “This is a power couple with the same malignant chemistry as pairs of serial killers, where each needs the other in order to become lethal.” Even the way Claire addresses her husband is calculated to demonstrate how closely entwined they are: she’s the only one who calls him by his full name, Francis. At first this sounds stilted and strange when everyone else calls him Frank, but then you realise why she does it. It’s a kind of possession, a reminder that he isn’t acting for himself alone. Their relationship may be twisted and dark – Frank declares early on that he loves his wife “more than sharks love blood” – but it is essential to what they achieve.

United we stand: Frank and Claire Underwood are
literally partners in crime

It’s a symbiotic relationship. Robin Wright, who plays Claire in the series, told the Radio Times: “I feel like [Claire] has the levers, the sound board in the music room. She’s operating the operational modes and in contrast, Frank is very impulsive.” Claire needs her husband’s contacts and position to raise money for her NGO and to curry favour with the Washington elite. Frank needs Claire’s professional independence from partisan politics as a way of introducing controversial ideas at arm’s length and safely securing favours from lobbyists and industry. Above all, with her cool charm and elegance, she makes him seem more rounded, less monomaniacal. Their policy of ruthless honesty with each other preserves their unity, and it is only when they start concealing things from each other that their pursuit of power is thrown off course.

Since this relationship is the driving force behind the drama, it is fundamental to the success of House of Cards. Both in real life and in other shows (like The West Wing, say, or Scandal) politicians’ wives are tools to be deployed on the campaign trail, or else end up beating their fists fruitlessly against the closed door of power. It’s no accident that Robin Wright’s portrayal of Claire won the show’s only Golden Globe this year (also the first major acting award for an online-only series). Her incredible poise rivals Kevin Spacey’s intoxicating southern drawl for the prime spot in my affections. It’s brilliantly refreshing to see her make such a success of the role – these days, it’s becoming less and less plausible that any woman would aspire to a full-time job that consists almost entirely of standing next to her husband and waving graciously. House of Cards is a far better drama because it has independent female characters and an equal partnership at its heart. As we watch the Underwoods’ inexorable rise continue into the second series (which is released on Netflix today) it’s difficult not to wonder – if politics is more interesting on television when women can occupy positions of power and influence, how much longer can we ignore that fact in real life?

“Yes, it’s Cameron. Like the idiot in charge of the country.” Rebekah Cameron is sheltering from the rain in her car to make time for us. She’s on a job. In fact, she’s always on a job. This woman is in high demand.

Rebekah is a 46-year-old trans woman working in one of the most male-dominated environments known to woman – construction. Raised in south London, Rebekah became aware that she was the wrong gender at age four. Her stepfather, a naval man, sent her to the London Nautical School from where she was destined for Dartmouth. But the bullying was so bad that she left at 16 and worked a variety of odd jobs until she found a talent for construction and achieved her City and Guilds qualification.

At 35 Rebekah was outed by a girlfriend who had guessed her long-witheld secret and was initially supportive, but within 24 hours had told everyone in Rebekah's social, professional and family circles, without her consent. While her family surprised her with acceptance, it was her friends and colleagues who abandoned her and made her work life so unpleasant that she was forced to quit. “There was this animosity. People would walk off site or just glare at me. At least if they yell you know where you stand. I had an apprentice and I said to him, ‘all my tools are yours, do with them as you will’ and I just walked off.”

While undergoing the compulsory psychiatric treatment that still accompanies gender reassignment surgery Rebekah found herself unable to work. “I ended up on the dole for a year. I just didn’t know what to do with myself.” Her psychiatrist finally recommended her for surgery and Rebekah emerged from treatment to the happy life she’d hoped for.

She began working in construction again via MyBuilder.com, which purposefully makes no reference to the gender of its users unless they choose to, and where women in the trade are beginning to flourish. However, along with all the advantages that having her gender corrected has brought, Rebekah – who describes herself as “a bit of a feminist” – is also experiencing some of the disadvantages of being a woman. “The worst thing is not being taken seriously. I quite often work with my brother-in-law. He’s my labourer and I’ll have people discussing the job with him as if I don’t know what I’m talking about, so I have to take charge of the conversation all the time. It’s assumed that the role is the other way around: He’s the builder and I don’t know what I’m doing.”

And the proof is in the proverbial pudding when it comes to compensation for labour. “I certainly earned more [as a man]. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a woman or a trans woman that I get paid less. I give prices to people and they look at me as if to say, ‘really, you’re charging that much?’ Like they’re expecting me to do it for nothing because of who and what I am, when I know I’ve priced a lot lower than other guys.”

Women’s apologetic habit of under-valuing themselves is well documented, but why, in 2013, with an Equal Pay Act in existence (if not always enforced), do we feel that we are not worth that extra 15 per cent? “I price lower because I want to encourage people to use me because I’m good and I’m cheap and not be discouraged because I’m female or transgendered.” This is one of the keenest changes Rebekah has felt since transitioning. “I didn’t feel the need to price lower before – I was a lot more bolshie then.”

Rebekah, who teaches kick-boxing as self-defence to women, explains how she’s found herself frequently noticing some of the ever-present challenges that women face: “There’s this attitude that men know better. No matter what the field. When I’m talking to married clients and the guy's there they just always assume that they know better even when they know nothing about DIY.”

The fearful assumption women are making can only be that given a choice between a man and a woman, or a man and a trans woman, priced equally, the client will chose the man, and in practice there’s little the Equal Pay Act can do about it. But pitching it as a female assumption that we compensate for in advance is firmly shouldering women with the responsibility for their own downfall and leaves prejudice utterly deniable. The returning question that Rebekah’s story throws into sharp focus, and which still urgently needs answering is this: how can we legitimately test for gender prejudice within the workplace?

This duel perspective on gender equality is valuable because it highlights the work we still have to do before we can claim equality within our society. But for Rebekah the hard part is done, her contribution now is to share her unique story, and then get back to the life she’s built and can finally enjoy. “I’d rather have less pay. It shouldn’t be like that, but I’m just happy to be working.”

This is Part 2 of Ryan Gilbey’s report from the Berlin Film Festival – Click here to read Part 1.

In Berlin for this year’s film festival, it was easy to marvel at the city’s architecture, its myriad bars and clubs apparently secreted in the brickwork and accessible by password, its diverse restaurant culture where you might at any moment happen upon serious contenders for the juiciest burgers or most succulent sushi you’ve ever tasted. As for the films that played in the Berlinale ... Well, did I mention the bars and clubs and restaurants?

Not that I didn’t see some fine work ranging across the different strands, from the Official Competition to the Panorama, Forum and youth-oriented Generation 14plus. Some of these I have written about in this week’s NS, in a round-up surveying my first five days at the festival. As for the final three days I spent there, this had a sprinkling of gems too, including my two favourite films from this year’s line-up: Boyhood and The Second Game. The former was more than a decade in production. While its writer-director Richard Linklater has been simultaneously adhering to a more orthodox filmmaking schedule—he shot other films in the interim including A Scanner Darkly, Me and Orson Welles and Before Midnight—he has also devoted time over the last 11 years to shooting pieces of Boyhood along the way. The result is the nearest that fiction cinema has ever come to the scope of Michael Apted’s ongoing Up television series (which began in 1964 with 7 Up.) This is what gives the film its intrinsic richness: when it starts, Mason (Ellar Coltrane) is seven years old, but through the course of the movie we see him—and his family, including his divorced parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke)—age before our eyes. When the movie ends almost three hours later, he is 18 and we have witnessed the complete span of his childhood and adolescence.

This device alone is enough to provide Boyhood with a surfeit of poignancy and resonance, but Linklater doesn’t get complacent. Sculpting the picture as he went, he fused developments in his young actor’s life with scripted material; the result feels entirely organic, with the exception of the occasional bum note from peripheral characters. There is a layered richness to each scene that could not have been achieved with ageing make-up or flash-forwards. The musical cues are also expertly chosen. You might groan at the opening use of Coldplay’s “Yellow” or the appearance in the final scenes of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”, but it would be hard to argue that they didn’t carbon-date the picture for now and all time every bit as effectively as the on-screen progression from Bush to Obama, Gameboys to smartphones. Sharpest of all was Linklater’s choice of lead performer. Intuition must have told him that Coltrane would continue to be as bewitching a presence once beer and dope and girls enter Mason’s life as he was at 7, when all he wanted to do was sharpen rocks into arrowheads or play on the trampoline. But Linklater’s judgement was sound. So too is the film. The temporal experiments he carried out in his Before trilogy, which returned to the same characters at nine-year intervals, have been taken a step further with the triumphant and uniquely attentive achievement of Boyhood.

The Second Game, which was in the Forum section, is also concerned with the tension between past, present and future, though even this fan of the picture would have to concede that ambition and scope are not high on its list of defining characteristics. The Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu (who made 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police, Adjective) is the son of the soccer referee Adrian Porumboiu. The conceit of the film is that they settle down to watch a videotape of a match that Porumboiu Snr refereed in 1988 between Dinamo and Steaua on an increasingly snowy pitch that turns the colour of dirty tennis socks as the match progresses. All we see throughout is the original 1988 TV broadcast in its grainy, pre-digital splendour; at times it’s hard to tell whether the fuzzy visuals are down to the falling snow or the imperfect technology. With the sound turned down, father and son muse over the game as we watch it in real time, with no breaks, no edits, no camera movement: just the match. This sounds deathly dull, and it is only fair to say that some colleagues were of that opinion. But this viewer, no lover of either football or directors’ commentaries, was drawn in by the droll father-son banter, the glimpses of social history (the composition of the football teams at the time effectively meant that the police were playing against the army) and the underlying self-deprecation of the whole affair. “This match is like one of my films,” Porumboiu says during one lull. “It’s long and nothing happens.”

Those highlights aside, there were times when I sat in the Palast watching pictures competing for the Golden Bear and thought: This simply isn’t good enough for an international film festival. One of those, Jack, was a sketchy social-realist tale about a young German boy who escapes from care to try to find the mother whose caricatured fecklessness landed him there in the first place. Given the proper love and attention, Jack might have grown up to be a Dardenne brothers film. Under-powered and inchoate, and making unreasonable demands on a young cast unable to convey the necessary intensity, it would have felt mediocre even if this were not the year that the festival was screening a Ken Loach retrospective and awarding that director an honorary Golden Bear.

Praia do Futuro, a German-Brazilian co-production, also reached for a weight and significance that it hadn’t earned. It’s the story of a gay lifeguard falling into a relationship with a soldier whose partner he failed to save from drowning; when that affair ends, the lifeguard moves to Berlin to be with a new lover but discovers that—what do you know?—the past catches up with him. Praia do Futuro found greater favour with critics than Jack, but I didn’t spot much in it that wasn’t bogus; the groundwork hadn’t been laid to prepare us for its emotional crescendos. (A film also has to earn the right to use David Bowie’s “Heroes” over its end credits. This hadn’t.) Divided into three chapters, it featured a motorcycle motif and a character who appears as a child in the first third before reappearing as an adolescent in the last part: call it The Praia Beyond the Pines.

A pick-me-up arrived in the form of God Help the Girl, a bittersweet musical which marks the directing debut of Belle & Sebastian’s frontman Stuart Murdoch. Surprisingly, the songs were the weakest part of the film. More doodles than actual numbers, they felt too ethereal to have sprung from the lips and instruments of such forceful characters: a chirpy anorexic girl (Emily Browning), a buoyant but shambolic musician (Olly Alexander) and a piano student (Hannah Murray) whom they enlist for their band. For all its abundant charm and delicacy, the film could have withstood a touch more grit—if you’re giving one of your characters an eating disorder so advanced that it has put them in hospital, it’s a good idea not to pretend it can be waved away by pop songs, boating and snogs. But for the most part, I found God Help the Girl polished, poised and endearingly confident, driven by editing and performances every bit as precise as the wordplay in Murdoch’s lyrics. I wouldn’t advise him to give up the day job, but on this evidence moonlighting is to be recommended.

The Berlin film festival ends on Sunday.

I’m feeling a little unloved. Many regular commentators on my posts here at The Staggers will be completely unsurprised by this revelation and will no doubt be having a quick snigger at my expense, but let me clarify what I mean. Because it’s not just me. The Lib Dems as a party seem to have dropped off the news media’s radar altogether.

The floods seem to be hung on the Tories, with special guest appearances by ex-Labour ministers, while UKIP keep their hand in by pinning the blame for the whole thing on the advent of gay marriage. Nary a mention of the Lib Dems. The news that the Scots may have to look elsewhere for their currency if they vote for independence also seems to be owned by a combination of George Osborne and Alistair Darling.

The good folk of Wythenshawe and Sale East may have doomed us to our eighth lost deposit in 15 by-elections (sooner or later someone in HQ is going to start noticing that trend and maybe worry about it a bit) but we still came fourth – not quite bad enough to make us interesting and certainly not enough to stop UKIP being the main story (although there seems a bit of a debate about whether coming second in a by-election once again is a good or bad result for them).

Even The Staggers seems to have forgotten us, with just two of the last 30 stories from the UK’s foremost political publication focusing on one of the two parties in government (no doubt my editor is thinking 'yes, well, if you pulled your finger out a bit more...'  but you get my drift).

So why is this? After all, it’s almost making me hanker after the days when a good non-sex scandal meant we dominated the front pages. Well, can I suggest it may be something to do with the differentiation strategy – you know, the one where whenever the Tories do something, almost anything, we give a sharp intake of breath and say "I don’t think that seems terribly sensible."

Don’t get me wrong, I like it when we do that. But the press are only going to write "another coalition row" so many times before they get bored with it. And I think that time has come. So we need to start following up that sharp intake of breath with an alternative plan, an explanation of what we would rather do instead. And when we do – for example, the raising of the tax threshold – then suddenly the headlines start appearing once again.

It may be chucking it down outside, but Spring Conference is just around the corner, and I hope some of the manifesto raw meat is going to presented and debated. It’s time we started telling people a little more of what we’ll be fighting for in 2015 – both in the election, and, if needs be, in the coalition negotiations.

Richard Morris blogs at A View From Ham Common, which was named Best New Blog at the 2011 Lib Dem Conference

Actress Ellen Page has come out as gay. In a speech to a human rights conference, she said "I am here today because I am gay, and maybe I can make a difference, and help others have an easier and more hopeful time. I feel a personal obligation and a social responsibility."

She went on: "I also do it selfishly. I am tired of hiding and I'm tired of lying by omission."

Watch her full speech:

In recent times, our political leaders have given the impression that they regard climate change as a matter of marginal importance. When David Cameron was first elected as leader of the Conservative Party, he used to claim that to “vote blue” was to “go green”. He now reportedly vows to “get rid of all the green crap”. Nearly four years after entering Downing Street, the Prime Minister has yet to make a major speech about climate change or attend a UN environmental summit.

Emboldened by his silence, Conservative climate-change deniers have rushed to fill the void. The energy minister Michael Fallon has compared global warming to “theology” and the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, has declared: “People get very emotional about this subject and I think we should just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries.” (Nine of the ten warmest years have occurred since 1998.)

For his part, the Chancellor, George Osborne, encouraged by his intellectual mentor Nigel Lawson, has repeatedly posited a false choice between growth and green investment, clumsily arguing that saving the planet “shouldn’t cost the earth”. Even Ed Miliband, a former climate change secretary and a committed environmentalist, now rarely mentions the subject in his speeches and interventions. The common view in Westminster is that it is not a priority in an era of squeezed living standards.

Yet, as the Met Office’s chief scientist, Julia Slingo, said of the extreme weather that has caused the floods in the south of England, “All the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change. There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.”

Politicians cannot control the weather but this banality should not obscure the fundamental truth that the decisions they have taken have left Britain less prepared than it should be. Against the advice of scientists, who warned of the increased risk of flooding because of climate change, the government has cut real-terms spending on flood defences every year since 2010. This year, it will reduce the budget for the Environment Agency by 15 per cent and remove 550 staff working on flooding. Over the same period, it has ended the obligation for local authorities to prepare climate adaptation plans and has cut the number of officials responsible for the issue in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from 38 to just six. All of these decisions were justified under the government’s deficit-reduction plan, but as Mr Cameron’s surprise declaration that “money is no object” (isn’t Britain “bankrupt”?) demonstrates, they have proved to be a false economy.

In the short term, ministers will rightly focus on addressing the immediate threat to homes and lives. Once this danger has passed, we all have a duty to ensure that the UK is better able to live with and withstand the consequences of climate change. Within the next decade, the UK faces the prospect of food shortages, more floods, extreme heatwaves and mass refugee flows. As the events of recent days show, a strategy for managing climate change is also a strategy for defending living standards.
 

1. America risks becoming a Downton Abbey economy (Financial Times)

Inequality must be addressed, with free markets playing a pivotal role, writes Larry Summers.

2. The Tories can be the new workers’ party (Daily Telegraph)

After decades of decline in the north, there is a chance of renewal for Disraeli’s successors, says David Skelton. 

3. The world cannot turn a blind eye to America’s drone attacks in Pakistan (Independent)

Why was Karim Khan prevented from speaking out against drone warfare, asks Robert Fisk. 

4. The sceptics are right. Don’t scapegoat them (Times)

There is no evidence, Mr Miliband, Lord Stern and others, that our floods and storms are related to climate change, says Matt Ridley.

5. To Russia with love: Obama’s energy lever (Financial Times)

The US energy windfall will enable Washington to loosen Moscow’s grip on its neighbours, writes Edward Luce.

6. Flood defences: George Osborne tackled yesterday's crisis at the cost of today's (Guardian)

The chancellor's flood defence cuts were driven by deficit reduction, writes Chris Huhne. But we can't continue learning by drowning.

7. Syria talks still offer reasons for hope, despite the breakdown (Guardian)

The Geneva negotiations failed, but at least both sides have agreed there are two main issues to tackle, writes Jonathan Steele.

8. After the flood: Animals and plants also need our support (Independent)

A vital ecosystem is essential to the health of the lands so many depend on, says an Independent editorial. 

9. Today's teenagers have the makings of model citizens (Guardian)

Contrary to the negative media portrayals, a new study shows young people are part of a caring-sharing generation, writes Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. 

10. Riding my broken bike is like working with the Lib Dems (Daily Telegraph)

Mistaking a pothole for a puddle put paid to an old friend, but there is an upside to my mishap, says Boris Johnson.

Given how much Nick Clegg has staked on the Lib Dems remaining in government after the next election, and Labour's stubborn poll lead, it is unsurprising to find him warming to the prospect of a coalition with Ed Miliband's party. He tells a Radio 4 documentary to be broadcast tonight: "I think they've [Labour] changed. I think there's nothing like the prospect of reality in an election to get politicians to think again and the Labour Party, which is a party unused to sharing power with others is realising that it might have to."

By contrast, he says of the Tories: "I think the Conservative Party has changed quite dramatically since we entered into coalition with them. They've become much more ideological, they've returned much more to a lot of their familiar theme tunes. I think it would be best for everybody if the Conservative Party were to rediscover a talent for actually talking to mainstream voters about mainstream concerns."

It seems Ed Balls's recent overtures in the New Statesman have not gone to waste. 

Clegg does, however, qualify his remarks by warning that "if there were a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition, we the Liberal Democrats would absolutely insist that government would not break the bank."

The Deputy PM's choice of words ("break the bank") will likely perpetuate the false belief that the last government "bankrupted" Britain, but more significant is what they imply about the future. In his recent speech to the Fabian Society, Balls committed a Labour government to balancing the current budget and to reducing the national debt as a share of GDP by the end of the next parliament. While he left open the option of borrowing to invest, his chosen fiscal rules make large public spending cuts unavoidable. 

For Clegg, however, this may not be enough. In his speech on the economy at Mansion House last week, he backed George Osborne's more aggressive post-2015 deficit reduction plan and vowed to pursue it if the Lib Dems were in government after the next election. "In the autumn statement we set out a plan to get debt falling as a proportion of GDP by 2016-17 and to get the current structural deficit in balance a year later. That is the right timescale and the one to which the Liberal Democrats remain absolutely committed. If I am in government again, this is the plan I want us to stick to."

Osborne's plan differs from Balls's in three important respects: it is based on a commitment to reduce the national debt by 2016-17 (rather than by the end of the parliament), and to achieve an absolute budget surplus by 2020 (rather than merely a current surplus), and, therefore, would not allow the government to borrow to invest in infrastructure. 

But while Clegg has made it clear that he favours Osborne's timetable, others in his party, most notably Vince Cable, are fighting for an alternative approach. In his own recent address on the economy, the Business Secretary said: "There are different ways of finishing the job … not all require the pace and scale of cuts set out by the chancellor. And they could allow public spending to stabilise or grow in the next parliament, whilst still getting the debt burden down." Based on that, it seems that Cable would prefer to adopt the approach taken by Balls, leaving room to borrow to invest depending on the state of the economy, rather than Osborne's ideological fixation with a budget surplus. 

The key question, in the event of another hung parliament, will be how far Clegg is prepared to go to bind Labour to a plan that he deems fiscally responsible. Given the emphasis he has put on the issue ("we the Liberal Democrats would absolutely insist that government would not break the bank"), it's possible that he would veto any agreeement that did not include Osborne-style cuts.

Alternatively, given Labour's superior bargaining power, it's possible, or even likely, that Miliband and Balls would get their way. In a reverse of 2010, when he signed up to early spending cuts, despite having consistently opposed them throughout the election campaign ("merrily slashing now is an act of economic masochism," he warned, adding that "If anyone had to rely on our support, and we were involved in government, of course we would say no."), he could move from backing Conservative cuts to backing a more balanced plan. 

Whatever happens, now Clegg has named his terms, the debate over post-2015 cuts will move up a gear. 

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

On 16 June, 2012, a collection of videos from Syria were posted to YouTube. In them, a shaky cell phone camera pans across the inside of a bakery in Farhaniyeh, a village in the province of Homs. Plump white rolls of risen dough seem to glow in the dim interior. More dough sits in a mixer. Birds chirp outside.

The camera moves out the door and into the sunlit street. Burned and mangled bodies lay on the ground. The villagers have covered some of them with pine boughs, but they cannot hide the missing arms, legs, and heads. “Look at the bakery, look at the bakery!” cries a man in the next video. The words tumble out high and sharp, in the hysterical falsetto of shock. “They were at the bakery getting bread for their families.”

For Syrians, the war on bread began a long time ago. Long before the siege of Yarmouk, before last week’s abortive evacuation of Homs, before the war even began, the regime’s neoliberal economic “reforms” left thousands of Syrians living on nothing but bread and tea. But if you want to pinpoint the moment when President Bashar al-Assad began to use food to kill people, the summer of 2012 is as good a place to start as any.

Bakeries are the centre of city and village life in the Arab Mediterranean; they symbolize cooperation, the social contract. Bread is synonymous with food, as in the Biblical daily bread, and even with life itself. Because of these dual roles – of symbol and sustenance, body and spirit – bread is also an excellent tool for controlling a hungry and impoverished population.

The airstrike on the Farhaniyeh bakery was only the bloodiest part of Assad’s war on bread. For over two years now, the Syrian regime has been laying siege to a number of neighborhoods and towns, cutting off food and medical care from fighters and civilians alike. And now we have evidence, thanks to the Syrian military police photographer code-named Caesar, who defected with a cache of his photographs of corpses, that the regime has been using starvation as a gruesome and no doubt cost-effective method of torturing prisoners.

Starving people to death seems barbaric, medieval, the kind of baroque theater you might see on "Game of Thrones." It’s also a war crime: in 1977, the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions prohibited the starvation of civilian populations as a method of warfare. Yet when Assad’s regime uses food as a weapon, no world leaders talk of “credibility.” No government threatens to send cruise missiles (nor should they, but that’s another story). The entire world has been studiously ignoring this war crime for over two years. Why?

One possible answer is that Assad’s brutal siege tactics have not killed as many people – yet – as his use of chemical weapons. But Assad used chemical weapons quietly at first too. And that argument fails to account for the snowballing nature of famines, or the long-term effects of siege warfare. If you include the bakery bombings, and the starved prisoners, the body count from Assad’s food policy begins to look rather high.

Another reason we’ve ignored this war crime could be that it’s difficult to prove. Starvation thrives on the confusion and social disruption of war; famines and food shortages tend to have multiple factors. This makes it easy to portray them as unfortunate but inevitable, the outcome of tragic circumstance (potato blight in Ireland) rather than deliberate manipulation (British exports of Irish grain). The hunger in Syria is creating a new class of warlords among rebel commanders – a perfect excuse for the regime to employ its usual passive-aggressive politics of shifting the blame, by promoting the fiction that “both sides” are using siege tactics (a claim that sources inside Syria call ridiculous).

We think of war, especially in the Middle East, in terms of combat: soldiers, insurgents, Kalashnikovs, bombs. Despite a long tradition of famines created by war and politics – Stalin’s holodomor, Churchill’s Bengal famine, Mao’s Great Chinese famine, Hitler’s siege of Leningrad, to name just a few of the 20th century’s greatest hits – historians tell the story of war through battles and back-room negotiations, while relegating food, hunger, and disease to the supposedly secondary realm of domestic life. The mass media frames food as something that brings the Middle East together during conflict, not something that tears it apart. Which is why, when leaders use food as a weapon, we often fail to recognize this hideous war crime until it’s too late.

But food has always been one of war’s deadliest weapons, especially in the Middle East. For Syrians, the fear that their children will starve, and the world will do nothing, is very much alive: It already happened to them once, at the birth of the so-called “modern” age.

“D

id you ever see a starving person? I hope you never may,” wrote an American college professor, almost a hundred years ago, in the country then known as Greater Syria. “No matter how emaciated a person may be from disease he never looks exactly like the person suffering from pangs of hunger. It is indefinable but when you have once seen it you can never mistake it, nor ever forget it.”

When the Great War began, the Entente Powers – England, France, and Russia – imposed a naval blockade on Greater Syria (then a huge territory that spanned present-day Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Israel) that cut off the entire Eastern Mediterranean coast from food shipments. Ottoman conscription, grain requisitions, and a plague of locusts made food even scarcer. By the winter of 1917, people all over Greater Syria were starving to death. Grain was more precious than gold. In Damascus, bakeries had to post armed guards. In Mount Lebanon, villagers accused two women of kidnapping children to butcher and eat.

In New York City, a poet named Kahlil Gibran, who was not yet famous, founded the Syrian-Mount Lebanon Relief Committee with a handful of other émigrés. But the funds they raised were useless: Britain and France were blocking all ships from entering the Eastern Mediterranean, even those carrying humanitarian aid. The rationale was a viciously efficient wager that starvation would turn the Syrian people against their Ottoman rulers.

By the time the war ended, one in eight Syrians would be dead – an equal toll, proportionally, to that of Ireland’s Great Hunger. In some parts of Greater Syria, a third of the population died. (England and France, by comparison, lost less than five per cent.) “They died while their hands stretched toward the East and West,” Gibran wrote in “Dead Are My People,” a furious requiem for the half million people who starved as the world sat on its hands. “They died silently, for humanity had closed its ears to their cry.”

During World War I, the starving Syrians were mostly invisible to the outside world. But we do not have that excuse today: Assad’s war on bread has been documented, from the beginning, in videos that are as excruciating to watch as they are easy to find. They paint a graphic portrait of how Assad manipulated the fear of hunger in order to kill hundreds of civilians.

The Farhaniyeh bakery attack followed the same logic as the Entente blockade: to erode support for the enemy by attacking civilians. It was part of a larger offensive by the Syrian military to push fighters out of rebel-held areas. But the bakery-bombing strategy worked so well that the military made it standard operating procedure, even in places where no fighting was taking place. It exploits the basic principle of starvation warfare: People will do anything to feed their children – even stand in line at a bakery, knowing they could be bombed.

In August 2012, Human Rights Watch documented the scale and frequency of the bakery bombings over the course of one three-week period. Ten attacks in Aleppo province alone killed at least 95 people (107, if you count the shelling on a street next to one of the bakeries, and probably meant for it). “I remember a little boy, maybe five years old, killed, his head split open,” said one of the eyewitnesses, “and there was still a piece of bread in his mouth.”

But bread does not bleed, or give soundbites, or hold rifles in photographs. A headline or two sank into the news graveyard of late August. And then the world moved on.

The regime, however, did not. By December 2012, bread was so scarce that the price had risen to almost 20 times what it cost before the uprising. The World Food Program had cut its daily rations of food from 1,300 calories a day, per person, to 1,000. When the Free Syrian Army took over Halfaya, in western Syria, people had not had bread for a week. The bakery reopened the day after aid groups delivered supplies – two days before Christmas, as it happens. When people began lining up for bread, government warplanes bombed it. The air strike killed scores of people, perhaps even close to a hundred.

After the Halfaya massacre, McClatchy’s Roy Gutman did an investigation into the regime’s attacks on bakeries. Gutman, who won a Pulitzer prize for his exposé of Serb-run death camps in Bosnia, found independent confirmation for at least 80 out of 100 bakery bombings that Syrian opposition groups had described. His careful, prophetic analysis concluded that at least 200 civilians had been killed, probably more, and suggested the regime was systematically using food to target civilians. But it fell into the same memory hole as the Human Rights Watch report.

I called Gutman to ask if he had seen any response to his report. The International Committee of the Red Cross, he said, confronted the regime about the bakery bombings. But that was it.

In 1992, the infamous breadline massacre of Sarajevo, in which a mortar attack by Serbian forces killed 22 people, galvanized worldwide public support for economic sanctions against Serbia. “I thought, in reporting a story where there’s basically a hundred breadline massacres, that it might arouse a certain amount of concern, let’s say – anger, and statements, maybe even a response,” said Gutman. “And the silence was pretty deafening.”

In November 2012, the regime began to encircle Mouadhamiyet-al-Sham, a town in the vast ring of suburbs around Damascus, some of them semi-rural, collectively known as the Ghouta. The military had been trying to recapture Mouadhamiyah for months, and failing; the Free Syrian Army had control of the town, but most of the people there were civilians. The area’s strategic location – close to the Mazzeh military air base, the Republican Guard headquarters, and the regime’s elite 4th Armoured Division, made it a perfect target for Assad’s “kneel or starve” campaign.

The military has been restricting food and medical access to the town, according to sources inside Syria, since January of 2012. But in November, the government sealed off the town completely. Those who tried to leave risked getting shot by snipers, or captured, killed, and dumped in the street with a note about the inadvisability of trying to escape.

By this time last year, roughly three months after the siege became total, the town ran out of flour. “I started to realize what they were doing the minute we started to run out of bread,” said Qusai Zakarya, the nom de guerre of an opposition activist from Mouadhamiyah who launched a hunger strike last November in order to bring attention to the regime’s siege tactics. “Not just in the Arab world, all across the world, any meal in the day – especially when it comes to breakfast – there should be some bread in it.”

Three months after that, the rice and bulgur wheat ran out. People lived on whatever they could forage, including “a weird, disgusting kind of soup” made from grape leaves boiled with salt and spices – stuffed grape leaves minus the stuffing. “All of us started to realize that what’s going on is really dangerous, that sooner or later we will run out of everything, and pretty soon we will be starving,” said Zakarya. “That’s why we tried to tell the world what’s going on.”

In early October, my Syrian friends began to post disturbing pictures and videos from Mouadhamiyah. In one of them, a doctor examines a dying little girl named Rana Obaid, just a year and a half old, showing the unmistakable signs of severe malnutrition. She died shortly after the video was taken.

In late January, a team of forensics experts and war crimes prosecutors released a report on Caesar's cache of 55,000 photographs. His job, as a Syrian military police photographer, was to document the dead bodies of people who had been detained by the regime. He smuggled thousands of photographs out on a flash drive, and later defected.

The team, which was hired by a law firm funded by the Qatari government, examined 26,948 of the photographs. They found that “a very significant percentage” of the bodies – 62 per cent of the pictures they examined in depth – showed emaciation severe enough to meet the medical definition of cachexia, the kind of wasted flesh and razor-sharp ribs we associate with pictures of World War II. According to the investigators, this emaciation was something that Caesar “regularly encountered” while photographing dead prisoners. The photos suggest very strongly that the regime is routinely using starvation as a method of torturing detainees.

The photos are horrifying for many reasons, but most notable is their lack of ambiguity. There are no Jabhat al-Nusra fighters here. No rebels to shift blame onto. They were not taken by opposition activists, but by an employee of the regime itself. They are photographic evidence of the same cold calculation Gutman’s analysis found in the bakery bombings – the kind of planned, systematic brutality we would not hesitate to condemn if it involved chemicals instead of food.

Ninety-six years ago, torpedoes were the feared engines of death. But for Syrian civilians on the wrong side of the Entente blockade, starvation was by far the deadlier weapon. “One method of destroying life is more spectacular and sensational than another,” wrote the college professor, Edward Nickoley, during the dark winter of 1917. “It seems more horrifying to send several hundred persons to the bottom of the sea than to subject a community to starvation. It seems so, until you have seen actual starvation. Were I to take my choice between being speedily despatched by a torpedo and being starved – give me the torpedo every time and give it quickly.”

Assad is using starvation the same way he used chemical weapons – not just to kill, but also to spread fear, a psychological weapon that Assad is using to get people to surrender. The tactic is working: This week, as the peace talks in Geneva resumed, the regime began quietly using hunger to force civilians to exchange opposition activists like Zakarya for promises – often unfulfilled – of food deliveries.

On 2 February, nine days after I spoke with him over Skype, Zakarya gave himself up to the regime, which demanded that the people of Moadhamiyah surrender him and other activists as a condition for a truce that would allow food shipments. According to friends posting on Zakarya's Facebook page, the regime guaranteed their safety; but he is now, technically, in government custody.

“Believe me, take it from a man who has seen all the weapons the Assad regime has,” said Zakarya, when I spoke to him in late January. “Nothing can be compared with starving to death. Because starvation can eat your soul before it can destroy your body.”

This article first appeared on newrepublic.com

Let’s get Mumford & Sons out of the way, shall we? I’m chatting with Martin Simpson in advance of the 15th annual BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, which will be held for the first time at the Royal Albert Hall in London – the event’s largest-ever venue – on 19 February. Simpson, who turned 60 last year, is one of the stars of British music. He has been nominated almost 30 times since the awards were launched in 2000, more than any other performer, and for nine consecutive years he was a nominee for Musician of the Year (a prize he has won twice already and is now up for again).

Simpson has earned his stripes. Born and raised in Scunthorpe, he got his first guitar when he was 12 and had turned professional by the age of 17. His repertoire spans traditional ballads (such as “Sir Patrick Spens”), political broadsides and original compositions (including “Never Any Good”, a moving portrait of his wayward father), all accompanied by his fluid guitar finger-picking. He is now a lynchpin of what is being called the biggest folk revival since the 1960s: with the Folk Awards not only taking over the Royal Albert Hall but selling out, too, and with the Coen brothers’ folk scene homage Inside Llewyn Davis a critical hit, the genre is, Simpson says, “doing better than it ever has. It’s not just about music charting – there’s a lot of attention being paid. People are taking it very seriously and there’s a lot more reference to it in the media, without it getting silly.”

Yet it is an irony that some of the music that has brought the genre back into the limelight doesn’t make the cut for Simpson. Discussing the thriving scene, I say, “Think of Mumford & Sons …” and he laughs, a little ruefully, interjecting: “I try not to!”

“I don’t think that writing bad, semi-hysterical love songs and having a banjo qualifies you to be included in folk music,” he tells me. “It’s not ‘folk music’ whatsoever. In a sense, one of the strangest phenomenons in the success of folk music in the wider sense is the incredible success and acceptance of the Mumfords. Seeing Marcus Mumford playing with Paul Simon and Bob Dylan … You know? It just bemuses me. But I think that they are the commercial spike of it. Peter, Paul and Mary were the commercial spike in the Sixties. That’s what happens when a genre does this thing, rises to the surface. People jump on it and try to exploit it. That’s not necessarily the best thing that can happen to any kind of music.”

If there was a polar opposite to that “commercial spike”, it was Pete Seeger, who died on 27 January at the age of 94. It was a great loss. Simpson says that he was “massively affected” by Seeger’s work. It isn’t just his musicianship that he admires: “Pete Seeger fought against all the things that needed to be fought against. He fought for conservation, for clean water, long before those things were fashionable. He fought against big business. He retired from [his group] the Weavers after they did a cigarette ad. He fought against racism, against greed. And music should be political … That’s not at all in vogue on the folk scene right now and I think that’s very disappointing. Folk music isn’t cosy and friendly – it’s very powerful. And that power is there on the scene” – here he mentions artists such as Dick Gaughan, Billy Bragg, Grace Petrie and his father-in-law, Roy Bailey – “but it isn’t sufficiently recognised and celebrated.”

Mumford & Sons, with their polished, stadium-filling, apolitical music, seems to have become a trope for what folk shouldn’t be. Mark Radcliffe took over the BBC Radio 2 Folk Show from Mike Harding, its presenter of 15 years, just before last year’s awards. It was a controversial move. Radcliffe says that he was aware when he started that: “People were worried, because I was very much associated with pop music, it would become all Mumford & Sons – but we are all very genuinely committed to the music of these islands.”

That an artist such as the US singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega – whose latest album, Tales from the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles, is her first studio recording in seven years – will be performing at the Folk Awards shows that the scene is a broad church.

Simpson is wary of having a stern definition of folk. He spent 15 years in the US and it has affected his music. “I’ve been asked many times, why do I try to play American music? How do I think I can get away with American music? So I say to people that when I was growing up, American music was all there was. That’s what I heard, after I heard Gilbert and Sullivan – I listened to blues, to rock’n’roll, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis – how could I not be influenced by that? Yes, I was also listening to Scottish music, Irish music, English music and jazz … [Folk music] is not about purity, it’s not about being ‘English’ – I detest nationalism. It’s just being part of this living, growing scene.”

One of the things that distinguishes folk music as a genre is the quality of the vocals, Radcliffe says, and he notes that quality is very much on show in the awards’ Folk Singer of the Year category. This year, four women are up for the prize: Bella Hardy, Fay Hield, Lisa Knapp and Lucy Ward. And it’s a category, Radcliffe argues, that refutes the charge that, by honouring artists such as Simpson again and again, the awards don’t reward new talent (fans and musicians have complained in the past that they are a “closed shop” run by a “folk mafia”).

Simpson has done so well this year that he’s up against himself: his latest release, Vagrant Stanzas, is nominated for Best Album – and so is The Full English, the result of an initiative that began, thanks to a Heritage Lottery Fund grant, as an attempt to create the largest searchable digital archive of 20th-century folk manuscripts. The project spawned a tour and then an album that gathered many of the stars of the genre – Simpson, Seth Lakeman, Fay Hield and Nancy Kerr among them.

“I think it’s hilarious,” he says of having to compete with himself, adding that he hasn’t got “a cat in hell’s chance” of winning, given the competition. Simpson is full of admiration not only for the archive project but for a musical landscape that’s stronger, in his view, than at any time in living memory. “It’s like the snowball rolling down a hill. For years, the interest in this music has been growing. The access to the material gets ever easier and it’s a bit like Olympic sports – records get broken; you think it can’t get better but the more it gets done, the faster, the better people get.”

The BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2014 will be broadcast live at 8pm on 19 February

You can’t help but feel optimistic when you step out of Vauxhall station, that some small modicum of the gushing Nine Elms slogan – “the greatest transformational story in the world’s greatest city” – might actually be true. Not because the blueprints for London’s biggest urban redevelopment inspire any great confidence – but because it doesn’t look like it can get much worse.

Immediately opposite the station, across Vauxhall’s maligned gyratory, is St George Wharf, a hideously oppressive waterside development and a deserved nominee for British architecture’s first annual carbuncle cup back in 2006.

To its left is another legacy of architectural silliness – the incongruously conspicuous MI6 building – known not so fondly as Legoland for its unmistakable resemblance to an ancient Babylonian ziggurat.

The Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea Opportunity Area (VNEB), as it’s plainly known, is the latest, most dramatic addition to this clumsy urban legacy; an attempt to rescue a vast sweep of London’s industrial past from years of neglect and decline.

The plans certainly look bold. 18,000 new homes have been promised with up to 25,000 new jobs. There’s an extension to the Northern Line, a new sugar-cubed embassy for America’s diplomats and a long, linear park in the style of the New York High Line to stitch the area together.

***

But what about the past? The Nine Elms PR team has been quick to use the idea of heritage – something lost on most journalists that have described the area as a blank canvas – but it’s hard to find much concrete appreciation for the residues of London’s industrial history in any of the developer’s plans. 

This may sound unconstructive. Fetishising the memories of old London can be deeply reactionary when it works at the expense of anything new. But the approach from the developers and architects involved in Nine Elms has been clumsy at best.

Nowhere is this more evident than the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station, one of few buildings along the Thames that had, until now, managed to resist the recent influx of luxury flats.

The building’s current owners have positioned the development as the commercial heart of the entire Nine Elms project, with a kitsch marketing campaign focused on the importance of “renovation”. But this seems suspect. Not only do the core plans feature a shopping mall and luxury pent-houses – but last year the World Monument Fund listed the building as “at risk” despite reassurances from the developers.

It seems somehow fitting that a building described by historian Gavin Stamp as “one of the supreme monuments of twentieth century Britain” should find its “saviour” in an obscure consortium of investors - one of whom, Sime Darby, has faced accusations of illegal logging in Indonesia and land grabs in Liberia. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t feature in any of the project’s cutesy PR campaigns, or on the company’s website – which pitches the Station as “a real estate investment opportunity of a lifetime”.

Of course nobody wants the station to remain as it currently is – a disused and decaying asset for speculative real estate. But both the plans and the owners represent the Nine Elms development at its most disappointing and decontextualised; an era of London’s past reduced to a pitch in a glossy brochure, its insides stuffed with overpriced, luxury flats and a giant shopping mall. When I spoke to Keith Garner, an architect and activist, with the Battersea Power Station Community Group, this sense of loss and anger was palpable.                                                   

“The problem is that nothing that makes the power station special – its architecture, its engineering and its land-mark status will survive,” he told me. “It could have been bought for the people of London, transferred to a trust to be repaired using funds from the Heritage Lottery Fund.”

Part of the building’s monumentality comes from the emptiness around it, the stark juxtaposition of a low-lying townscape with a gigantic art-deco hulk. But this isn’t something the developers are particularly interested in recognising – not wanting to miss out on the value of building flats on the land around it.                            

“It’s a sensational urban landmark but monumentality is relative to particular settings.” Garner says. “By surrounding the building with 18 storey blocks the dramatic experience of seeing the Power Station from the road, rail and from gaps in the landscape is gone. Its presence in the landscape of London is taken away.”

It seems rather fitting that Frank Ghery, an architect of international fame has been chosen to build some of the surrounding flats. Known for his deconstructivist icons in Bilbao, Los Angeles, and Prague, a Ghery building is, by design, rarely upstaged. Of course the 79 year old is unlikely to be too moved by this critique. When objections to his icons were raised in Hove – the response was pretty resounding. “People can fuck off," he said.

As well as being disconnected from Nine Elms’ industrial heritage, the smokestacks that give the building the unique appearance of an inverted table are also set to go. The previous developer, Parkview, had claimed the chimneys were beyond repair back in 2005. But an engineering report by the Battersea Power Station Community Group suggests the opposite.

The chimneys, they argued, could be repaired more cheaply and much quicker than the cost of installing new ones. I put this to Fiona Fletcher Smith, executive director of development at the Greater London Authority but she seemed strangely nonplussed. “We’re happy that this represents excellent conservation,” she said. “Why would we preserve? Life has to move on.”

The owners of Battersea Power Station have also received planning permission to destroy a grade II listed Victorian Pump House built in 1850. And according to another report by the Battersea Power Station Community Group the famous cranes, once used to unload coal from the river, are also likely to be removed.

Even more demolitions are set for the National Grid site where four gas holders currently stand. This is, as Garner points out, a massive shame. In Oberhausen, a town in West Germany, an historically valuable gasometer has been successfully converted into a locally-owned exhibition space.

These examples may be specific to London but they point to a much wider problem in the way cities are managed and planned. Councils seem perfectly happy to see private interests direct the course of historically interesting places – despite the obvious contradictions that arise between maximising value and conserving heritage.

In the end much of the physicality and history of the region will be left to a series of empty architectural gestures. When I spoke to John Letherland, a partner at Farell’s who masterplanned the entire area, the best I got in terms of conservation was the recycling of old street signs.

“There were things in the landscape that we were making references to, he said. “For example there were huge railway sidings in the area which we were recording in the landscape. And we were re-using some of the former street names in the layout of the new ones.”

***

None of this would be so objectionable if it wasn’t for the inevitable exclusivity of the new Nine Elms “community”. London is, like many places, a city with a chronic housing crisis: rising private sector rents, huge council waiting lists and a government determined to make things worse through a combination of welfare cuts and right to buy.

In Wandsworth over 23,000 people are on the council’s social housing waiting list with many in the private rented sector depend on housing benefit to keep up rent. In Lambeth, things are even worse. Over 41,000 people are currently sitting on the waiting list.

Mass, genuinely affordable council housing is needed to solve this and yet with Nine Elms – as with all recent regeneration schemes – “affordability” is offered only as an afterthought. In Wandsworth Council – where most of the development is going ahead - only 15 per cent of the new houses will be “affordable” – far less than was originally promised.

Nor will rising land values on the back of the development make things any better. Estate Agent Knight Frank have estimated that property prices in the area will rise by 140 per cent between 2011 and 2016 – the highest of anywhere in the UK.                

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise. Both Lambeth and Wandsworth Council have gained a reputation for kicking out their constituents. Lambeth, the so-called cooperative council, has been busy evicting short-life tenants from houses they’d occupied for decades. Earlier on in 2013 the council made 75 people homeless by evicting squatters from Rushcroft Road and denying them recourse to legal aid.

The issue of social cleansing may not be as critical at Nine Elms as other parts of London. But in the context of recent regeneration, the plans remain entirely typical; lots of tall buildings with luxury housing, lots of ground level shops and active frontages, all justified by a dubious discourse of “inclusion”, “affordability” and “diversity”. 

But for all the social democratic bluster this remains yet another example of urban regeneration in the neoliberal city; exclusive, insensitive and architecturally uninspiring. James Meek recently asked in the London Review of Books– Where Will We Live? I think most Londoners can safely cross Nine Elms off the list.

Philip Kleinfeld is a writer based in London. He is on Twitter @PKleinfeld.

Andrew Adonis's recent comments on a mansion tax, reported in today's FT, have attracted much attention this morning. The Labour peer and shadow infrastructure minister told an IPPR/Policy Network event: "The single policy that Labour has which is most unpopular – that every time I meet anybody who is at all well off I get it in the neck with clockwork regularity – is the mansion tax." 

The Tories, who have long opposed the policy ("our donors will never put up with it," said David Cameron) have pounced on his words as evidence of a Labour split. Grant Shapps said: "Lord Adonis is right. Labour's demand for a new tax on the family home would be economic vandalism. It would hurt poorer pensioners the most.

"It would also be the thin end of the wedge. It would quickly become a tax on ordinary homes, hitting families in their pay-packets each month. It would clobber renters too, as the costs would simply be passed on to them."

But when I spoke to Adonis, who has just begun his week-long tour of London's bus routes (riding 50 in total), he was keen to rebut Shapps's claims. He told me: 

I support the mansion tax, it's socially just. The very well off don't support it, as I said, but that's not a surprise since they'd pay it. 

Adonis also emphasised, however, that it was important that the policy, which would take the form of a 1 per cent levy on property values above £2m, was introduced "in a fair way", "particularly in respect of existing homeowners whose houses have appreciated dramatically in value." 

Several of Labour's potential London mayoral candidates, of whom Adonis is one, have recently come out against the policy. Diane Abbott and David Lammy both criticised it as "a tax on London", while Tessa Jowell said she favoured higher council tax bands instead. But Adonis made it clear that he won't be joining them. As he noted, "I was the only person at the Progress event [on London after Boris Johnson] to support it." 

The perception of football supporters primarily as a problem to be dealt with is now a thing of the past, we are told. And it’s comforting to believe that is true.

Unfortunately, while organised supporters have been able to articulate and embed some better practices, there is still plenty of evidence of football fans being treated primarily as a problem. This matters. It matters because singling out and demonising a particular set of people – prejudice in everyday parlance – is just plain wrong. But it also matters because of the impact on the rest of society. Those of us who grew up in the 1980s and who went to the football but were also politically active soon understood how techniques honed against football supporters were also used on organised labour.

A number of legal experts dealing with the area have spoken of the emergence of a two-tier legal system in which football fans are treated as a class apart from everyone else. Key to this is the ability to demonise football fans, something that has been done by mobilising the traditional fear of the “hooligan” that has run through the establishment and been used as an excuse for social control for centuries. The prejudice that still exists was characterised neatly by barrister Alison Gurden, who wrote on her blog:

When I explain to people that I represent football fans the usual reply is ‘oh, what, football hooligans?’. My reply to this is usually: ‘No, men, women, teenagers, students, doctors, police officers, architects, chefs, builders and baristas – all of whom are also football fans!’.

This year, with a World Cup coming up in the summer in Brazil, there will be a flurry of stories in the national press about “risk groups” of fans, of banning orders and restrictions on travel and all the measures being taken to prevent the carnage that, no doubt, a few wannabe hooligan generals will be more than happy to talk up the prospect of. With a moral panic duly created, and accepted without challenge or question by much of the media, it will be so much easier to justify the use of repressive measures which, once established, can be expanded. So it’s important to attempt to provide some context, to ask questions about the assertions being made, and to consider if the control being talked about moves beyond the relatively simple concept of public order. Especially important at a time when we have a government committed to pushing the Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill through Parliament, a bill described by George Monbiot in the Guardian as “the most oppressive bill pushed through any recent Parliament”.

Living in a bubble

In August 2011, Cardiff City played West Ham United at the London side’s Boleyn Ground. The police designated the game a partial “bubble match”. This meant travelling Cardiff fans had to catch a designated coach from Cardiff at 5am and rendezvous with the Metropolitan Police at South Mimms service station. There, their coaches would be searched, vouchers exchanged for match tickets, and the coaches then escorted to the ground. Cardiff fans received half their full allocation, and no fan was allowed to travel independently to the game. Some groups of Cardiff and West Ham fans have a history of organised violent behaviour although, over the last couple of decades, the kind of disturbances that fuelled their reputations have been few and far between. But for many, Cardiff versus West Ham means potential trouble, and so arguments against the “bubble” restrictions are easily dismissed as being soft on hooliganism.

Fans of Huddersfield Town and Hull City have no history of animosity. But in March 2013, West Yorkshire Police designated the match between the two clubs a bubble match under the C+IR security categorisation – the highest possible. Hull City fans, whose travel to the game was to be restricted, have no record of involvement in fan trouble. The decision provoked outrage. John Prescott, former MP for Hull and deputy prime minister, branded the arrangements “the most draconian travel restrictions since miners’ strike pickets were targeted”. The club itself took the unusual step of issuing a public statement protesting at the “effective criminalisation of our supporters” and “the implications for away fans in general”. Supporters groups from both clubs opposed the restrictions, and protested on the day of the game. One 15-year-old Hull City fan, Louis Cooper, took the police to court, arguing the restrictions had no lawful basis.

The police responded by saying that they had “listened carefully to the concerns of fans” and by easing the restrictions. But that easing still did not allow independent travel to the match. Hull City FC offered to make whatever arrangements were necessary for Cooper to attend the game, but this meant that – as he was no longer restricted by the conditions of the bubble match – he could not continue to challenge them. Cooper refused to attend the match, saying he did not want special treatment.

When police tried to make this year’s Newcastle v Sunderland derby a bubble match, and then claimed they had no power to restrict travel by fans or influence kick-off times, the clubs themselves were so outraged they jointly rejected the move. The police claim is even stranger in light of the fact that Northumbria police had carried out the review of the West Yorkshire force’s handling of the Huddersfield/Hull bubble.

According to research by the libertarian-leaning Manifesto Club, at least 48 matches in the last 10 years have been designated bubble games. Those matches involve 14 major clubs in England and Wales, and have occurred in six police authority areas. As the Manifesto Club points out, these figures are likely to be conservative. The information was compiled from Freedom of Information requests, and “a handful of police authorities have either delayed production of the information, or pointed to the exemption under Part II Section 31 (law Enforcement) of the Freedom of Information Act”.

Amanda Jacks, the caseworker at the Football Supporters’ Federation who deals with bubble matches, says: “The FSF is opposed to bubble matches for the simple reason they curtail the movement of ordinary, decent fans and that they do not necessarily prevent disorder. Further, they do little to dilute matchday tensions and arguably may even enhance them.” But, she says, bubble match designations are “difficult to challenge via the courts. You do not have a human right to travel unimpeded to a football match and it is important to consider that the judiciary will take into account that, effectively, you are buying a ticket for such a game on a voluntary basis”.

Rather worryingly for those who recognise the civil liberties implications of bubble matches, seeking a system of accountability for their implementation is also fraught with difficulty. As the Manifesto Club says: “It is often difficult to know who is responsible for the decision to instigate a bubble match.” Every professional game in England and Wales is partly governed by a Safety Advisory Group, comprised of members from the emergency services, the licensing body the Sports Ground Safety Authority, local council representatives and officials from the clubs concerned. (Note, there are no fan organisations involveddespite both the Association of Chief Police Officers and the FA recommending dialogue with supporters). As the Manifesto Club points out, this means “no individual party necessarily takes responsibility for the decisions being made” which means “it is easier for the buck to be passed”.

In 2010/11, 37 million people attended professional football matches in England and Wales. Total arrests were 3,089, 0.01 per cent of all spectators. Bubble match designations criminalise and punish all away fans in the hope that a tiny, violent minority will be deterred. As the Manifesto Club points out: “Under Britain’s common law, people are treated as innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. People are held to account for their own actions, not punished for the actions of others.”

It is one thing to criminalise groups of football fans. What of the treatment of individual fans? Again, there is a body of evidence that raises questions about the kind of decisions being taken, and the accountability of those who take them – all underlying a worrying assault on individual freedom and a tendency to let prejudice play a part in the legal approach.

Serving the public

When Liverpool visited Old Trafford to play Manchester United this year, Liverpool fan Kieth Culvin was among the travelling supporters. Kieth is a 53-year-old father of three who runs his own plumbing business. He’s also a member of Liverpool’s Spirit of Shankley supporter’s union committee, and in that role meets regularly with the police at their request to help improve the way fans are policed.

Games between the two clubs are often volatile affairs, with the fierce rivalry between the two cities providing an edge that has been known to spill over. As a result, Greater Manchester Police hold back away fans after the game in order to reduce the risk of confrontation between rival sets of supporters. In recent years, fans have complained that, while they are held back in the stadium, they have been denied access to the toilets. During the meetings between SOS and GMP, the police recognised the issue and it was agreed that police would be briefed to allow use of the toilets during the hold back, while the SOS website carried a press release outlining the arrangements.

Some five minutes after the game ended, Culvin noticed there was a problem developing at the stairs by one of the exits. He could hear fans asking to use the toilets and see a crowd beginning to mass at the top of the stairwell. “Amongst these fans,” remembers Culvin,  “were women, children and older fans who were clearly getting distressed because they couldn't use the toilets after thinking that this had all been agreed, and they were telling the police that.” Culvin decided to try to resolve the situation.

After about five minutes, he says, it became clear that the two officers at the top of the stairs “were listening to no one”. They were also “becoming aggressive towards me and the fans around me which in turn was starting to cause a problem”. Culvin phoned the officer whose number he had been given as a contact. The officer was outside the stadium but said he would try to get someone to sort the problem out. The situation was getting worse by the minute. Culvin spotted a senior officer at the bottom of the stairs and asked the officers at the top if he could get past to speak to him. His request was aggressively rebuffed – an incident that suggests that, while a lot of senior officers ‘get it’, the message has clearly not filtered down to the officers on the ground.

By now, Culvin could see there was a high level of distress and anger among the fans. He asked again to be allowed down the stairs to speak to the senior officer, and was again refused. He managed to walk down a few steps, keeping his arms carefully by his side and noticed a yellow-clad figure falling into the seats by his left. “The next thing I know I'm getting dragged out down the stairs by the two officers who I was trying to talk to at the top of the exit,” says Culvin. “They dragged me down onto the concourse below into the toilets where they pushed me against the wall face first and started to punch me in the back and legs. They then handcuffed me.”

Culvin was taken to a holding cell, then to a police station to be formally charged with assaulting a police officer. He was read a statement from the officer he was accused of assaulting. Culvin was said to have put his arm against the officer’s chest, which made the officer lose his footing.

The case went to court, but was thrown out. It was thrown out because Culvin, an experienced hand at dealing with these situations, had asked a fellow fan to film his encounter with the police on his phone before he approached them. And that film showed that Culvin categorically did not assault the police officer. Solicitor Melanie Cooke, who represented Culvin, says: “Once the CPS had reviewed the case in light of the defence representations and after viewing a DVD of the camera phone footage, the criminal proceedings were immediately discontinued”.

“Without that video,” says Culvin, “there is no doubt I would have been found guilty of something I hadn’t done. I find it totally disgusting that this could have happened to me and that even now, after the charges have been dropped, that the CPS can still think it’s OK for them to keep on record that I had been charged and by doing so can keep on their records my DNA, fingerprints and photograph.” Culvin is currently pursuing a complaint against Greater Manchester Police.

In the summer of 2010 Tony McManus was on his way to the World Cup in South Africa.  He had been saving up for ages and had booked a month off work. McManus is a builder in his early forties, who lives in Middlesbrough. He travels all over the UK and abroad supporting Middlesbrough FC and England. 

Like a lot of men, McManus got into a bit of trouble when he was young; nothing too serious. He grew up, settled down, and hasn’t been in trouble for a long, long time.

When McManus and his friend turned up at the airport early that summer morning to get their flight, they were stopped by the police. There was apparently intelligence that they were “risk” supporters. In police speak, that means nothing more than that the police believed they might get involved in football violence. Not that they have a violent record or even that there is a suspicion that they been violent – just a vague belief that it was possible they might be violent in the future.

McManus and his friend were stopped from boarding the plane, their passports were confiscated and they were held in police custody for nearly seven hours. They were then told that the police would be applying for an order banning them from attending football matches and that they had to go to Court that day. The police suggested they should just agree to the order as it would cost a lot of money to fight it. McManus said no and got a lawyer.

The evidence from the police turned out, as it emerged, to be quite revealing. There was CCTV of McManus coming out of a pub in Tottenham in 2002 when Middlesbrough played there. Apparently the pub was known to be frequented by Middlesbrough hooligans, so anyone using it was deemed to be guilty by association. McManus had also once been seen in a minibus at Stoke with someone who looked like he had been injured in a fight. The police did not see the fight and there was no suggestion McManus had been involved in a fight.

McManus found that, when the police applied for his banning order, they described him as one of the leaders of a group of 750 Middlesbrough hooligans. How they gathered that from evidence that showed, at the very most, that he has a few people amongst his acquaintances who are less than angelic, was not explained. What it does show is the carelessness with which the police throw around allegations when it comes to the policing of football.

McManus says: “It seems all you have to do is speak to someone who is a ‘risk’ supporter or go to the same pub as them and you become a ‘risk’ supporter yourself. That must mean every Boro fan who has ever spoken to me is now a ‘risk’ supporter.”

Perhaps more sinister is the fact that the police are quite clearly keeping detailed records of the apparently innocent activities of those attending football matches which they can then summon up at will – even eight years later.

The police got the case adjourned repeatedly (until long after the World Cup had finished) and then decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to get a banning order against the two men and dropped the case. So McManus had lost his holiday and his chance to see England’s football team humiliated for no reason.

Take a moment to think about this. A man was stopped from going abroad and locked up not because he had been violent or committed any sort of crime but because he was seen associating with people the police thought to be dodgy characters. It might sound hyperbolic, but that’s the sort of policing usually associated with, well, police states. But the police thought he might just possibly be a football hooligan, so that was OK.

McManus brought a legal action against the police. It came to court last week. Cases against the police are usually decided by a jury and McManus and his lawyers were confident that a jury would see the injustice of the case and find in his favour. However, the police argued that the case was just about a technical legal argument as to whether the police had acted “reasonably” – and that was for a judge to decide. The judge agreed and said he would try the case without a jury. He dropped strong hints that he thought that what the police did was “reasonable” as defined by the relevant law. McManus and his lawyers felt it very likely the judge would find against them and that their chances of success before a judge were low.

The case was backed by an insurance company and when they were told it looked like McManus would lose, they pulled the plug. McManus could obviously not carry on without insurance, so he was forced to drop the case. What is perhaps most startling here is that it can appear to a judge to be entirely reasonable and in accordance with the law for the police to suspect someone of being a hooligan and prevent them travelling abroad, just because of the company they keep. The judge may well be right, which says something startling about the law in this area.

Then there is John (not his real name). John is 15 and a fanatical Portsmouth fan. He lives with his mum and dad and has never been in any sort of trouble. At the end of last season Portsmouth had been relegated to the fourth tier before their last game at Shrewsbury. However, the club had been taken over by a fans trust and there was expected to be a big presence of Portsmouth fans at Shrewsbury to celebrate the new start.

John travelled up to Shrewsbury on a train with his friend and his friend’s dad. He was 14 at the time. When they got to the station his friend and his dad went to the toilet. John mooched around outside the station with other Portsmouth fans, waiting for them to rejoin him.

Without warning, a large number of police formed up in two lines and told the fans they had to go with them. John tried to explain that he had been parted from the adult he had come with, but was ignored. The fans were marched to an empty nightclub and were told they had to go inside. They were searched by someone who appeared to be a bouncer before going into the club and then locked in for some two hours. There was no access to food or drink in the club. John was, however, allowed out to purchase some fried chicken, but given the danger he obviously posed, only when accompanied by a police officer and on the basis that he went straight back to the club! At no point was John given any explanation as to what was going on.

After two hours, the fans were released and allowed to proceed to the ground and John was eventually re-united with his friend and his dad.

When he got home, John told his parents what had happened. They got in touch with the FSF who put them in touch with a lawyer. The local police were contacted and told that they had no right to treat a child in the way they had. The police said that the operation was justified as the train that John came on had some “risk” (that word again) supporters on it. However, they accepted that they should have paid more attention to the fact that John was a minor and have agreed to pay him a four-figure compensation sum.

In John’s case, it’s guilt by association again. The police had concerns about some of the people on the train, so it was OK to lock up lots of innocent people – including children – as well.

A robust policy

In the last 12 months alone, the FSF estimates it has dealt with a number of cases which seem to indicate there is a two-tier legal system that separates football fans from other members of society. Their caseworker, Amanda Jacks, has been told by fans that the police themselves have admitted that if this wasn’t football they’d be on their way. There’s the case of the 17-year-old arrested in handcuffs for taking a match ball home as a souvenir, the fan banned by his club after the police failed to secure a conviction relating to an incident entirely separate from football, groups of young men being stopped and made to provide personal details on camera, fans detained on civil matters who have their details sent on to the police and kept on file. And, says Jacks: “In every single case that we can assist with, if a fan is put before the courts a banning order will be applied for regardless of the offence or the offender’s history”.

In guidelines issued in August 2013, the Crown Prosecution Service says it will “continue to operate a robust prosecution policy for football related offences” and that “This means there will be a presumption of prosecution whenever there is sufficient evidence to bring offenders before a court”. This issue of presumption of prosecution is an important one. It means that other methods of disposal, such as fixed penalties or cautions, are rejected in favour of the significant step of prosecution. As the Heresy Corner blog pointed out at the time of the Twitter joke trial, guidance on the presumption of prosecution does not “consider the proportionality of subjecting someone of previous good character to the full rigor of the legal process, which can be shattering even if they are ultimately acquitted.” And legal bloggers have expressed concern about the CPS’s decision making on prosecutions, and the implications of taking such a significant step.

We are not arguing that football fans are the only section of society to be singled out or stereotyped. What we are saying is that each time this happens, each time authority or mainstream opinion excuses the relaxation of the normal standards of justice and fairness by claiming it is done to make us all safer, we all in fact become that little bit less safe. The boundaries of acceptable judgement are pushed back, and we stumble towards demonisation and dehumanisation.

Coda

We completed this article a few days after the Merseyside derby at Anfield. Everton fans claim there was “pandemonium” outside the away end as they tried to enter the ground. Only four turnstiles were open as a crowd of about a thousand built up. A crush developed, with fans pinned against walls. A 13-year-old boy had the skin taken off his toes when a police horse stepped on his foot. Video footage on the Liverpool Echo website shows the scenes.

The police have responded by saying fans were advised to arrive in good time, and pointing out that: “At 7.45pm, less than half the 2,700 fans in the away section had entered the stadium.” They point out that extensive publicity had been given before the match to appeals to arrive early because Liverpool FC had “a stricter than usual searching policy in place to identify anyone carrying flares or other forms of pyrotechnics”. The threat of pyrotechnics is one of the latest ways in which the inherent threat of football supporters is being talked up, witness this sensationalist report on the BBC website.

The response to fan’s complaints about safety is to infer that the fans themselves are to blame. If this was any other set of customers, questions might be asked about why the authorities had no plan to deal with an entirely predictable build-up of numbers outside the gates, or whether priority was given to searches or safety. But these were football fans. They arrived late. They were a potential threat.

The perception of football supporters primarily as a problem to be dealt with, we are told, is now a thing of the past.

Darren White is a solicitor with Deighton Pierce Glynn. He acts for a number of football supporters mistreated by the authorities

A fifteenth-century illustration of the legend of Tristan and Isolde.
Image: Hulton Archive/Getty

First published in Italy in 1966, it has only been in the last decade that digital technology has made it possible for Tristano to be printed as its author Nanni Balestrini intended. Each of its ten chapters has fifteen pairs of paragraphs, arranged differently by an algorithm in each published copy. These are numbered on their covers by Verso Books, who have issued four thousand of its possible 109,027,350,432,000 variations in English for the first time.

In his foreword, Umberto Eco – a member of Italy’s Neoavanguardia movement with Balestrini and others, founded in 1963 – suggests that “originality and creativity are nothing more than the chance handling of a combination”. Eco provides a potted history of the literary idea of infinite possibilities of letters and words, particularly fashionable during the seventeenth century. Eco suggests several ways to approach Tristano: by reading a single copy and treating it as “unique, unrepeatable and unchangeable”; or “considering it to be the best … possible” version; or by reading several and comparing the outcomes.

Eco doesn’t discuss post-war attempts to use modern printing techniques to allow readers to create their own variations of texts. B S Johnson’s famous “book in a box”, The Unfortunates, where the loose chapters (besides the first and last) could be read in any order, remains best known in Britain, but it was preceded by Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1(1962), with its 150 unbound pages aiming to demonstrate that what matters most in life stories is not the events themselves but their order. Saporta’s book recently became available as an app, which sends readers a page on demand; the appearance of Tristano in its intended form adds to the sense, explored in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing (2011), that digital technology could radically change the way that authors construct texts and how readers receive them, and the relationship between the two.

Balestrini’s note explains that he first experimented with the “combining possibilities of an IBM calculator” in 1961 for Tape Mark I, where fragments of poetry were sequenced according to primitive computer algorithms. His use of the same method for Tristano has already generated considerable controversy– but it would be facile to judge it purely by the means of its construction. What of the text itself?

The story is very simple – it is based on the medieval tragedy of adulterous lovers Tristan and Isolde, rewritten numerous times since the twelfth century with differing details but the same structure, its familiarity giving Balestrini more licence to play with its formation. The opening chapters develop the central characters – confusingly, both called C – and their relationship, but important details will emerge at different times for each reader: in my copy, edition 10625, the man’s inability to handle money was revealed at the very end of chapter one, and my conception of his character and its likely development would almost certainly have been different if I’d learned this within the first few paragraphs.

The disjointed narrative puts greater focus on Balestrini’s poetic prose, which feels very much of its time: the detached observation of the nameless central characters and the uncertainty about who is narrating owes a considerable debt to nouveau roman pioneer Alain Robbe-Grillet, particularly his Jealousy (1957). There are many subtle nods to Jacques Prévert’s quietly heart-breaking poem Dejeuner du matin, and if I had not known that Balestrini was Italian, I would have assumed he was French: intertwining the failing relationship and the collapse of Resistance and revolutionary ideals, his style and tone frequently recall the ecstatic monologue used as a voiceover in French artist Gil J Wolman’s film L’Anti-concept (1952).

At points, Balestrini makes his disdain for story-telling conventions explicit, with mixed results – one paragraph in chapter five offers a forensic, Robbe-Grillet-style description of the surroundings, closing amusingly with “All this does not have very much to do with our story but it doesn’t matter”. Sometimes, this is overly didactic: we already know from Balestrini’s composition that “We are not obliged to read everything that it is possible to read. A book is endless books and each of them is a slightly different version of you.” At times, the text feels like it was not just arranged but written by a computer. Lines such as “Autism that is the conviction of being a superman who is not subject to the laws of society” could easily have come from RACTER, the English prose generator program that produced The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed in 1984, with empty aphorisms such as “My desire to incite myself in my dreaming is also a reflection of ambiguity”.

These are only occasional, and the emotional highs and lows of the story are all the more touching for being framed within Balestrini’s subtle, understated language. It’s sad that Tristano’s central device may lead critics to judge it by unfair standards, making the perfect the enemy of the interesting, or exploratory, as if any experiment that does not induce a total revolution of the form is worthless. Endless novels present fixed versions of events, and it’s baffling that those few to challenge this should attract opprobrium, as did Johnson in particular, purely for doing so – Tristano is particularly successful in raising the idea that the structures that authors choose are not always necessarily the best possible.

Although I’m not sure that Tristano makes its reader “the co-author” – surely that’s the algorithm – but it provokes plenty of thought about how to read, obliging people to form opinions after covering each chapter, rather than as they go along, and to think about the nature of the novel’s conclusion. I always linger over a final paragraph, re-reading it several times, feeling that it will cement a book’s meaning in my mind, but here, as throughout, Tristano raises more questions than it answers. Should an ending always be definitive? Why? And what does it mean if it isn’t?