The Friendship Bridge reaches across the Yalu River from Dandong in China to Sinuiju in North Korea. It’s an unremarkable construction, worthy of note only because the Chinese have festooned their end with multicoloured neon lights and lasers in a soaring display of civic one-upmanship. At night, from the North Korean side of the river, it’s like looking at Las Vegas. Peering in from China, it’s a bridge into the black.

The Chinese have always made the crossing: historically for trade, more recently for tourism. Friends tell me Sinuiju reminds them of an old China: before Deng Xiaoping’s reforms cleared the hutongs to make way for branches of Gucci. In May 2013, the city opened up to westerners for the first time.

It was an interesting time to visit. The very public purging in December of Chang Song-thaek, the uncle of North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, was still headline news, as was the unlikely alliance between the “Dear Leader” and the retired US basketball player Dennis Rodman.

Meanwhile, there were signs that Kim’s promises to raise North Korean living standards might be paying off. At the border, a line of brand new Hyundai taxis bound for Pyongyang suggested a growing middle class. North Korea is now manufacturing a tablet computer for its domestic market, the Android-powered Samjiyon, which comes with Angry Birds pre-installed.

My guide, Ms Lee, meets me on the North Korean side of the Friendship Bridge. She found work at the state-owned KITC tourism company after learning English at university in Pyongyang. She chaperones me quickly through border control, a scruffy one-room building, stamping her feet to keep warm. Outside, it is beginning to snow.

At first glance, Sinuiju looks like Pyongyang’s unkempt little brother. It’s more industrial and less grand, with Soviet-style housing blocks daubed in various shades of pastel, but it shares the capital’s wide boulevards and large public spaces. We stop at a giant bronze statue of a youthful Kim Il-sung, grandfather of the current leader, where formality dictates that I place flowers before the Eternal Leader and bow, while young boys in old clothes clear the snowfall.

Then we head to the city’s Revolutionary Museum, where our breath forms clouds in the corridors and dim bulbs flicker into life as we move from room to room. At Sinuiju Folk Park, which Ms Lee tells me was built entirely by women, we kick ice from our boots as, in the distance, thousands of people stream home from a mass rally. Coats pulled tight, leaning into the wind, they look like matchstick figures departing an L S Lowry painting.

Questions can be problematic. For journalists, who occasionally sneak into the DPRK on guided tours and who are obliged to ask questions the guides cannot answer, this is especially true. But keep away from the difficult subjects and you’re more likely to build some trust and learn more.

Lunch, which takes place in a private, windowless room in a restaurant next to the Yalu, is delicious: kimchi accompanied by spiced squid, sliced duck, chips and – most unexpectedly – fat chunks of Swiss roll dipped in mayonnaise. The waitresses take turns to sing romantic and patriotic songs, a mixture of backing music and howling feedback streaming from the karaoke machine. We dance and they ask me to sing. There’s no western music on offer, so I try “Yesterday” by the Beatles. Unaccompanied, my amplified voice echoing uncomfortably round the room, it’s obvious they’ve never heard of it, or them.

The highlight is a visit to Ponbu Kindergarten, home to the city’s most extravagantly talented six-year-olds. Two boys in sequined shirts and bow ties perform a complicated duet for drums and xylophone. In the playroom, two more take potshots at tiny American helicopters on a miniature diorama with toy guns while a third, dressed in small military greatcoat, pushes model tanks and fighter jets around a table. The visit finishes with a live show, tiny girls with fixed gymnast smiles juggling, unicycling and hula-hooping. Later, in China, my contact shakes his head when I tell the story: only North Korean children can do that.

As we wait for my bus at the border, Ms Lee complains about the cold and offers me her hands, which I rub. It feels like a touching end to a fascinating, bewildering day.

As North Korea’s slow embrace of western tourism grinds along, these brief glimpses of life beyond the hermit kingdom clichés are becoming a little less unusual. We say goodbye and I cross the bridge out of North Korea and back into the neon. I’m going to send Ms Lee some gloves.
 

Thank God it’s February. For those of you who gave something up for January, it was a long month; for those of us who had to listen to you go on about it, it was even worse. As many have pointed out, the idea of giving up alcohol for 31 days and then expecting people to sponsor you for your trouble is laughable, however worthy the cause.

But booze wasn’t the end of it. There were the usual ridiculous juice cleanses and soup diets – and the backlash against sugar put it firmly back on the naughty list this year, along with peanuts for the Paleoistas, devotees of a regime also known as the “caveman” diet. Loosely based on the meagre larder of our Stone Age ancestors, it’s the hip new thing to bore other people about over your herbal tea. (If Tom Jones is doing it, it must be cool, right?)

This was also the first year that Veganuary made it on to my radar – largely, I must admit, because of the recent 22-day “spiritual cleanse” undertaken by the bootylicious singer Beyoncé and her rather less comely husband, Jay-Z, in which the couple embraced a vegan diet: “Or, as I prefer to call it, plant-based!!” the rapper wrote on his blog.

“I don’t know what happens after[wards],” he admitted. “A semi-vegan, a full plant-based diet? Or just a spiritual and physical challenge?”

I know what happened afterwards. The pair were seen (as the Daily Mail puts it) “indulging in gourmet non-vegan treats” at a seafood restaurant in Miami: “pappardelle, lobster risotto and seafood casserole”, according to the paper.

There’s been no word so far on the effect that the cleanse has had on their spiritual well-being, however (though many column inches have been devoted to the effects on Beyoncé’s bottom), or indeed their long-term eating habits. But I note that her Instagram feed features considerably more po’ boy sandwiches than portobello mushrooms, these days.

And therein lies the fundamental problem with temporary abstinence: if you stick to it, you may lose weight. You’ll probably, after a few days of grumpiness, even feel better and you’ll almost certainly learn how to do things with tofu or tonic water that you had never even dreamed of and possibly never wanted to. Then the month’s up and suddenly you’re back on the Chardonnay and cheeseburgers as if nothing had happened – and this time, the attraction is twice as strong. It takes an awful lot of lager to plug the hole left by all that smug self-denial.

Jay-Z chose to go vegan for 22 days on the basis that: “Psychologists have said it takes 21 days to make or break a habit. On the 22nd day, you’ve found the way.” I don’t want to be the one to break it to him but according to research by University College London, it actually takes about three times that long, which means that all those January abstainers will have to keep denying themselves until 8 March in order to see any lasting effects.

As someone who’s tried a good few diets over the years (it’s practically a professional necessity), my heart always sinks on hearing the inevitable words: “This isn’t a diet. It’s a lifestyle change.”

How many of the people who forsook carbs back in the early 2000s still diligently avoid the evil starch? Giving up something for a month holds within it the promise that, in four weeks, you’re going to take it up again – and take it up with a vengeance. It’s bingeing on self-denial instead of booze and I know which option sounds more fun to me.

Here’s a novel idea. If you want to eat fewer animal products, how about cutting down on meat and dairy? If you think you should probably drink less, do. But for everyone’s sake, please keep quiet about it.

Eurosceptic sentiment has risen sharply in the UK, in common with pan-European trends. The proximate cause has been immigration. Membership of the EU is blamed for the unexpectedly large wave of inward migration that followed the opening up of UK labour markets to citizens of those former communist countries in eastern Europe that have joined the union since 2004.

But the British have always been ambivalent at best about the European project, a tepid attitude that is not satisfactorily explained by recourse to the legacies of the British Empire and the UK's Atlanticism. These traditional accounts of the country’s European exceptionalism ignore more important post-war political and economic factors.

The first of these has to do with sovereign power. For most of the twentieth century, the United Kingdom was an unambiguously unitary state in which executive power was strong and relatively untrammelled. It has never had a written constitution and a constitutional court with codified powers of judicial review. Multi-party government is also rare. Unlike many of its continental partners, therefore, the state has not historically been structured as a series of constraints, checks and balances.

It has prized parliamentary sovereignty over the construction of a Rechtsstaat. Critically, it did not share in the post-war endeavour to promote European cooperation on the basis of what the political theorist Jan-Wener Muller describes as "delegated powers to unelected democratic institutions and to supra-national bodies in order to lock-in liberal democratic arrangements and prevent any backsliding towards authoritarianism."

Where the founder of the European Union consciously sought to tie down the nation state in an interlocking series of internal and external constraints, in the UK, the primacy of parliament and concomitantly powerful executive government remained the lodestar of political identity. In consequence, the pooling of sovereignty in the European Union since the 1970s has been experienced as a process of loss and subjection, particularly amongst sections of the political elite.

Britain’s post-war economic history also does much to explain its Euroscepticism. The decision to join the Common Market in 1973 was a product of declinist sentiment as much as anything else: a view that Britain’s endemic economic weaknesses could only be reversed if it embraced the European social market model. Pro-Europeans in both of the major political parties saw Europe as a means of overcoming Britain’s persistent failure to secure stable class compromise and to coordinate relations between labour and capital in the national economic interest. The collapse of this project in the 1970s amid the turmoil of stagflation and class conflict, and the subsequent neo-liberal reshaping of Britain’s political economy by the Thatcher government, dealt a fatal blow to Europeanism on the right of British politics.

Today, the few remaining pro-Europeans in the Conservative Party are all grandees, slowly shuffling off the stage of history, having long since given way to the Eurosceptics who now dominate their party. Mainstream conservatives are either now dismissive and disdainful of Europe, or actively hostile to it. They are flanked by an increasingly popular, populist and bellicose Ukip, whose name belies the English nationalism at the core of its identity, fed by discontent at the state of England’s two unions, Europe and the United Kingdom.

For its part, the Labour Party followed the reverse trajectory after the 1970s, abandoning its "socialism in one nation" stance to embrace Jacques Delors’s social union in the late 1980s. New Labour then governed in a pragmatic pro-European register after 1997, but maintained a largely liberal market economy and did not need the EU to prosecute its egalitarianism, which rested on the tax and spend apparatus of the national state.

Hence it left Britain after its period of government without deeply embedded structural and political interests in the European project beyond those of the single market, and few anchors for pro-European sentiment.

Consequently, there are limited political and economic resources in contemporary Britain available to those who wish to deepen its European ties. Foreign-owned companies exporting to the single market are a major source of pro-European commitment, as are most large corporates, the trade unions and significant sections of the City. But they are likely to do no more than defend the existing settlement between the UK and Europe, not advance it.

The same is true of the Labour Party, whose space for political manoeuvre is constrained by public opinion and institutionalised Eurosceptisicm in the conservative press. The only way out of this impasse is for Britain to hold a referendum on its membership of the union. That is a matter of regret to many pro-Europeans, as it will bring uncertainty and may deter investment in the UK. But some sort of referendum now appears inevitable, whether triggered by treaty change or because of manifesto commitments entered into by the political parties ahead of the general election in 2015. A referendum will not forever settle Britain’s role in Europe, but it offers the best prospect of responding to democratic alienation from the union, and establishing a secure platform for the UK's engagement in its future.

A full version of this essay appears in Shaping a Different Europe edited by Ernst Hillebrand & Anne Maria Kellner

Someone comes round to look at the Hovel with a view to moving into the newly vacated room for six months. I am not wild about this, for it means more sharing of space, but it has to be done.

I reflect that I think about people in the same way I think about dogs: I despise them in theory and consider them, as the Semitic religions do, basically unclean; but once I meet them and I look into their large, liquid eyes, I cannot help but want to scratch them behind the ears and give them treats. They might make me come out in a rash and sneeze – and heaven help me if I stroke them and then rub my eyes – but damn it, there’s something adorable about them.

Is this a sound basis for my socialism, I wonder? I think it could be and it’s all the more sincere for being hard-won, against my ungenerous inclinations. I am reminded, by a roundabout process of association, of the response that Evelyn Waugh gave to Nancy Mitford (I think), who asked what the hell he was doing being a Catholic, as he was such a shit. His rather convincing reply went: you wouldn’t believe how much more of a shit I’d be if I wasn’t a Catholic.

Anyway, this person declined to take the room, giving the reason that the communal living areas were too messy. Considering that these communal areas comprise 1) a bathroom with lots of books in the bidet and bath, neither of which work; 2) a living room filled with books; 3) a kitchen, with lots of jars and bottles of stuff about the place, admittedly, but with only a well-mannered shelf of cookbooks (which, as a confident, self-sufficient cook, I never have to use); and 4) a terrace, an entirely book-free zone but, what with the weather and all that, not somewhere you’d want to hang out on right now, I only dimly understand the nature of the objection.

So I have been placed under orders, politely, to do something about this. Fair enough. All things considered, it could have been a lot worse. That I have lived pretty much entirely self-sufficiently for six and a half years without drowning in a sea of my own detritus and indolence, both physical and psychical, is a matter of some astonishment to people who have known me for a while and something of an astonishment to me, now that I come to think of it.

I think about this after coming back from a dinner with a friend who pities me from time to time and takes me to the restaurant Mon Plaisir in Covent Garden. I first met her not long after being kicked out by the wife and thought, when I clapped eyes on her, “Golly” – but our friendship has, thank goodness, proceeded along entirely platonic lines.

She’s also married and I realised pretty quickly that, even though I was by no means a choirboy when I was married, I have no desire at all to screw up anyone else’s arrangements. The discovery of a latent sense of morality in the autumn of one’s life was something I was unprepared for. I had assumed that leopards did not change their spots, after enduring many long and bitter lectures to this effect. Perhaps I’m not a leopard. Who knew?

My friend mentions that she knows many women roughly my age who are divorced and, to use a rather less weighted adjective than she does, keen to enter another relationship. I head her off at the pass before she can proceed. Even if I were on the market, I say (and I am most definitely not), the idea of entering a relationship with a divorcee would not appeal, on the grounds that such women are at least as set in their ways as I am – and my ways, laissez-faire in the extreme on the personal level, do not appeal to many these days.

I have learned that everyone, after a point, only likes things when they are done just so and any deviation is intolerable. I wonder how many marriages break up because one partner has decided that the other simply isn’t “doing things right”.

Also, there is that inbuilt dissatisfaction so many people cultivate. Marx’s prediction that one of the bad things about late capitalism would be “a contriving and ever calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites” suggests, to me, not only pointlessly craving the latest iPhone but being the kind of person who feels the need to redecorate a room whether it needs it or not. Why, in the end, bother?

It is straightforward to provide medical care to a child of, say, four. You seek consent from a parent and usually they grant it; then, you roll up your sleeves and do what is necessary, insulating yourself the best you can from any howls of protest from the patient. Yet fast-forward ten years to when your patient has reached the foothills of adulthood and things are more complex.

It was only in 1985 that the right of a child under 16 to consent to medical treatment was legally established. Victoria Gillick, a mother of five girls, sought to prohibit doctors from providing contraception without her knowledge to any of her daughters while they were under 16. The case went to the House of Lords, where Lord Fraser ruled that, providing that a child had sufficient maturity and understanding, they could consent to medical treatment irrespective of age.

Doctors now regularly gauge this understanding and maturity – the so-called Fraser competence of a minor – and, where established, involve them in decisions about their care. While doctors are expected to encourage parental involvement, it need not be insisted on if the child does not wish their parents to be informed.

Parents cannot overrule consent given by a Fraser-competent child. Paradoxically, if a competent minor withholds consent for care that is felt to be in their best interests, a parent or a court can override their decision. Such cases are rare but they illustrate an important point: we are prepared to grant autonomy when our children agree with the prevailing orthodoxy but we are reluctant to allow them the freedom to make perverse decisions. This must have its roots in an appreciation that medical procedures are often scary and, no matter how competent our children appear to be, they may still be too influenced by fear to be allowed free rein.

No such protection applies beyond the age of 18. Once we reach adulthood, we can decide whatever we like, even if refusing consent to treatment will result in our death. Perhaps the most difficult challenge comes when dealing with patients who are 16 or 17. These adolescents are legally presumed, by virtue of their age, to have the capacity to consent. Yet, unlike over-18s, they can still have a refusal to consent overridden by someone with parental authority or by a court. This 16-to-17 age band can pose the most acute dilemmas, as a case in my area illustrated all too starkly.

The patient was a youth we’ll call Ross, whose mood had been low for some time, probably as a result of bullying. Eventually, his parents persuaded him to see his GP and accompanied him to the surgery. However, Ross wanted to consult with the doctor by himself and his parents, respecting his nascent autonomy, stayed in the waiting room.

During the consultation, it became clear that Ross was severely depressed and he confessed to the doctor something that no one, not even his parents, knew: he had recently tried to commit suicide. The GP recognised that the attempt had been no mere “cry for help” and made an urgent referral to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS).

Contact should have been made the following day but because of a transcription error, the wrong mobile number was given and Ross never received the promised call. Instead, a computer-generated letter giving details of an appointment was sent out, which Ross subsequently opened. He never attended. Before the appointment date, his body was found hanging in his bedroom by his mother.

One focus at the inquest was the GP’s decision not to breach Ross’s confidentiality and inform his parents of the depth of his depression and his suicide risk. Had they been made aware, his parents said, they would have ensured that someone was with him constantly. They were also ignorant of the details of the proposed CAMHS involvement, so they had no idea that an attempt to reach him by a phone had failed. When Ross’s appointment letter was looked at after his death, it was found to be formal and stark – a style that parents would be familiar with but was inappropriate for an emotionally vulnerable youth.

Lessons have been learned about reducing the potential for errors in the urgent referral process and about having more adolescent-friendly stationery and letter content. Many people will also have sympathy for Ross’s parents’ impassioned plea that it should be made mandatory for a 16- or 17-year-old’s parents to be informed in these cases, irrespective of the child’s wish for confidentiality. They believe an adolescent with significant depression is a special case in which only qualified autonomy is appropriate.

Set against this is the reality that mental health issues affect around 15 per cent of children and adolescents and, in many cases (though not in Ross’s), family dysfunction, sometimes even abuse, is the underlying problem – a problem that might only become apparent with time and trust. To force doctors to breach confidentiality in those circumstances could have its own equally disastrous consequences.

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

The contraceptive pill. It changed views on male and female relationships, which are more complex now – there is more variation than in my mother’s day, when on the whole women gave up work and had children. The Pill introduced more options and, as is the case when you get more options, there are upsides and downsides.

And scientific discovery?

The quantum theory that was introduced at the beginning of the century. It seemed obscure at the time but it helped us to understand the nature of the chemical bond and the structure of DNA. It also gave rise to our understanding of transition theory and modern computing.

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

Margaret Thatcher. She offended the toffs because they thought she was petit bourgeois and that she should have known her place. They liked things the way they were. She also alienated the left wing by introducing capitalism for the working classes.

And she was a woman. I know there are many who say she was unkind to women but that is not the issue. I, too, come from a modest social background; as a female, I have taken flak. I admire anyone who has strong convictions – even if I don’t agree with them.

Earlier generations lived in a very unexciting environment with limited opportunities. Margaret Thatcher instilled the attitude that if you work hard, you can own your house, you can own shares and you can start a business.

And playwright?

Probably one of the “angry young men” from the 1950s. I was born around then and was very aware at the time of the winds of change. If you look at any of [those plays] – The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe, John Braine’s Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger by John Osborne – you’ll see they upped the trend and forced people to get away from the “Anyone for tennis?” kind of thinking. They were very exciting. It’s just a shame there weren’t any angry young women.

What is your favourite quotation?

I don’t know who it’s by: “I wish long life to my enemies, so they live to see all my successes.” Why have I chosen this one? Perhaps because it kept me going.

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

I’ve written a novel called 2121 [published in July 2013]. It’s set just over 100 years from now. The majority of people have come so far into the cyber-world that they don’t need to reproduce: they have IVF, so they don’t touch each other. They are healthy and beautiful but have no past or future. They don’t need to have an identity or a purpose for life.

Then there are the neopures: they are grey and cerebral. They put a premium on consequences and abstract thought.

The hero of the book is a brain scientist called Fred. He’s sent by them to find how the brains of others are working. He has various relationships along the way. It takes to the extreme the way our cultures are going – this purity of the abstract idea, neither religious nor political, but about the promotion of the brain above the mind. The most significant thing is not GM food or climate change but how we think and feel differently.

What is your greatest concern about the future?

That we won’t make the most of it. One of the biggest challenges is not just having a long life but a healthy one. If we do crack it, what then? No one is addressing what to do with the second 50 years of your life. Why can’t we all be like Warren Buffett, Desmond Tutu or the Queen, leading active lives?

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

If I knew the answer to that, it would be here already. I would like to think we will have a better understanding of targeted treatment for Alzheimer’s disease – although there may not be a cure.

The other exciting area is the neuroscience of consciousness. The ultimate question is how the brain generates consciousness.

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

I am torn. On the one hand, curing dementia. On the other, I worry about our next generation and giving them the best possible life in terms of their brains. I have concerns about the young. Some are spending five hours a day or more in front of a screen. That’s time when they are not giving someone a hug or walking along a beach. I worry we are becoming a dysfunctional society.
 

So that’s it for Irrational Games. The plug is being pulled less than a year after releasing what for a lot of people was the best game of 2013, Bioshock: Infinite. Can’t lie, didn’t like it personally, but it was critical catnip and sold well. By any measure a successful game, but not enough to save the jobs of 485 of the people who made it; people who now face the search for new employment while Ken Levine plans his next project with a much smaller team of 15. So it goes.

Plenty will be said about Ken Levine, what he’s going to do next and so on and so forth. All I know is that if he was a character in one of his recent games and had chucked that many people under the bus because he thought they were getting in the way you’d probably get an achievement for ripping his face off with a set of steam-powered nose-hair clippers. On the plus side of course it is not like any of the rank and file who worked on Bioshock: Infinitecame out of the project badly. By assuming the mantle of Big Kahuna for the game Levine has, to his credit, essentially exonerated the staff for the game's flaws.

However I come here today not to bury Ken Levine but to praise Irrational Games. When they were good they were very, very good, and when they were bad they made Bioshock: Infinite. And I mean that as a compliment: if the worst game you’re ever going to make is Bioshock: Infinite you are in a much better place than most other developers.

Irrational Games made seven games between 1999 and 2013. The first and arguably the best of all of these was System Shock 2. This was an unapologetically grown up first person action RPG set on a space ship undergoing a period of technical difficulties. The game is not easy to play by modern standards, nor have the visuals aged particularly well, but it remains an absolute classic. As with other classics of the era, for example Vampire: Bloodlines or Deus Ex, the limitations of the PC as a gaming platform at the time forced the developers to be more creative, to squeeze more from systems that these days would be considered unfit to control a toaster. This manifests itself in great writing and in complex yet thoughtful mechanics; as such System Shock 2 has a detailed character building system allowing for many different ways to approach the game. It is nerdy, of course, and daunting to the uninitiated, but it is better for it. I could say more about System Shock 2, but I won’t. You should play it and find out for yourself.

Freedom Force followed System Shock 2 and this would be followed by Freedom Force vs The Third Reich. With reference to my earlier statement about Bioshock: Infinite being the weakest game in the Irrational Games locker, it would be these two which provide the competition. With the Freedom Force games Irrational made a pair of very solid squad based RPGs, based around a cast of comic book superheroes, not actual comic book heroes, but a convincingly cheesy cast of characters with a golden age of comics feel. The games feel a little stodgy, but for what they are they are great, it’s just that isometric strategy games about superheroes aren’t the sort of thing that get pulses racing like cities in the sky and beating people with wrenches. Despite this however like all of Irrational Games better efforts the Freedom Force games were both accomplished and original.

Sandwiched between the Freedom Force games is a return to the first person shooter genre, Tribes: Vengeance. This was a game which made up for what it lacked in originality, being part of an existing franchise, with speed and the addition of a grappling hook. You really can’t go wrong with a game that lets you fling yourself around a huge map like a human missile, occasionally swinging by to snatch at a flag or optimistically spray a few shots at your enemies. The pace of the Tribes series coupled to the size of the maps has always been such that you are not so much shooting at people as hoping to leave a projectile in their path at just the right instant for them to fly into it.

This brings us to the jewel in the crown of Irrational Games. Perhaps it is not as good as System Shock 2 or as popular as the Bioshock games, but SWAT 4 demands respect as being perhaps the only ever significant attempt to do for police officers what everything from Call of Duty to Arma has been doing for soldiers for years. It’s a first person shooter about being on a SWAT team and to this day it remains one of the best games in that entire genre. A few mods here and there to keep it current and it doesn’t even look too shabby. What SWAT 4 managed that no other game has been able to is achieve balance between intense action and also intense uncertainty. In most games, even fairly unforgiving tactical shooters like the original Rainbow Six, you would still be expected to kill everybody except hostages. Such games can become almost perfunctory, see a thing, does it move? If so click on its face until it stops. Repeat.

In SWAT 4 you could shout at the enemies to freeze and drop their weapons and maybe they would. You could hit them with beanbag rounds and Tasers, you could shoot the guns out of their hands if you were that good. Maybe if they were obliging enough to try to shoot you once you’d identified yourself as an officer you could kill them. Plenty of times I can remember hammering the key to shout freeze at a suspect, watching the bad guy slowly start to put his gun down, waiting for what felt like an age for him to either drop the gun or make a play as the AI weighed up his options. Every enemy taken alive felt like a hard won victory, every kill felt like a failure, because it was. Just like that, SWAT 4 changed the mind-set of its players. It sounds like a small thing but the capacity to do that, to completely change the way that a player has to approach an otherwise familiar situation through the use of mechanics, that’s great game design.

The last two games that Irrational Games produced, Bioshock and Bioshock: Infinite are without doubt their highest profile titles and most broadly popular, if their least exciting to actually play. Bioshock delivered as a rudimentary first person shooter with enough style and flair to make it stand out from the crowd, but where SWAT 4 put weight into every life or death moment, Bioshock would serve up the moral decisions in a more simplistic sense, by allowing you to kill children for a power boost, or not, for a power boost. Despite the simplistic morality the world and the characters were the real triumph of Bioshock. Where Call of Duty had shown us that the video game could be a theme park ride, Bioshock showed that it could be a theme park ride that wasn’t designed by a masturbating baboon in a combat jacket.

Bioshock: Infinite however was a mess. All manner of problems cling to it, with the story, the pacing and the way it plays. The setting just feels like more of the same but less good, the mechanics are more of the same but don’t fit into the new setting. The production values are incredible, and the game works as a corridor shooter so it’s no surprise that it was a success but from a developer that had delivered so much for so long it feels like a disappointing, though somewhat appropriate, end.

It can be said that it is better to go out with a bang than a whimper, although under the circumstances perhaps it would be better still to not go out at all when you’ve got the livelihoods of 500 employees at stake. It begs the question: just what is it going to take before games developers form a union?

Lost keys run riot between desk and pocket
leave me for dead at the door.
I won’t be sweet: there’s a hairline crack
in this sun-baked shell that’s lost all faith in the sea.
Black Dog Whelk listens through itself
and every move I fail to make,
aches and drills and knows it’s only time
before it thins the dark, a stony light
about to break between table, cup and tap.
I can’t say my name and begin and begin.
He’s in my throat, his toothed tongue
whispering down long corridors of bone
but no one’s here to answer
or speak the crackling emptiness of this room.

*

A former actor, painter and university lecturer, John Wedgwood Clarke is currently Leverhulme Poet in Residence at the University of Hull’s Centre for Environmental and Marine Sciences. His latest book, Ghost Pot (Valley Press), takes inspiration from the coastal life of north-east England. The title refers to lobster pots which, having broken from their moorings, trawl the ocean floor, “crammed to the throat with bony shields”.

It’s no secret that, as far as the housing market goes, the millennial generation have been (and this is the technical term) royally screwed over. While members of previous generations appear to have bought houses for the current price of a packet of crisps, lounged around inside them for a couple of decades and then sold them for around a 500 per cent profit, we now wring our hands at the news that not a single area in the country has seen wages and house price inflation remain aligned. In the London borough of Hackney, the average salary should be £131,924 if it was to match up with property pricing, according to Shelter (Spoiler: it isn't). Needless to say, very few of the twentysomething interns working their bollocks off for free lunches that we know are expecting to make that sort of money any time soon.

Amelia Gentleman's dispiriting Guardian piece on the Hackney house price bubble gave a snapshot of how galling it is to search for a house in the borough even when you have large cash reserves thanks to the bank of mum and dad. For those of us without that privilege, our hopes of owning our own homes, especially in London but also in many other areas of the country, have gone from measly to non-existent. As the newspapers have been doggedly making us aware for the past five years or so, we really are becoming 'generation rent'. Not that rent is particularly affordable for young people either, you understand. That would just be silly.

Skyrocketing rents and housing ladders with the first rung sawn off have led to what we might euphemistically term ‘innovative living’. Innovative living - especially in London, where the cost of living as a student now outstrips the cost of living like a king in our respective hometowns - takes the form of situations like couch-surfing, room-sharing and cupboard-inhabiting. One of us genuinely lived in the other’s airing cupboard for a month when awaiting enough salary to accrue from her full-time job to pay a rental deposit, and that was the best option of three. Mere months before, we had lived together in what could kindly be described as a Kentish Town hovel, complete with mouse infestation, missing windows, peeling salmon-coloured wallpaper and a bathroom shared with the flat below which sometimes contained dog poo. This was hardly unusual by the standards of our friends at the time. More than a handful genuinely described the place as ‘charming’.

Yesterday, we were on Twitter moaning about a mould problem that one of us is currently experiencing due to poor outside guttering and porous brick walls. It has taken the landlord three months and counting to respond to the problem, but the overwhelming response online was that three months is nothing. We spent all day being regaled with tales of unsympathetic landlords who told tenants to open their windows, buy a dehumidifier, or simply stop "breathing too much".

@VagendaMagazine More mould for collection! My bedroom in last place. Landlord did nothing. Health risk right? pic.twitter.com/f1iaplBuMw

— frankie mullin (@frankiemullin) February 18, 2014

We were inundated with horror stories and photographs of people's damp and mould problems (one wall even had an actual live mushroom in it), all of which were occurring in rented accommodation and which their landlords were failing to sort out. Then an irate landlord chipped in to tell us to open our windows and that 'you are the sort of crap tenant that every landlord dreads'. If pointing out poor living conditions doesn't make you a crap tenant, then telling your landlord that they're everything that wrong with this country certainly does, but it was difficult after that not conversation not to consider buy-to-let landlords the scum of the earth. Such was this particular one's lack of concern at our breathing problems.

@VagendaMagazine I slept with a ring of salt around my bed at uni as our house was infested with damp loving slugs

— emma (@me_emma_t) February 18, 2014

In describing such living standards, we don’t intend to beg for sympathy. Instead, we hope to illuminate how dangerously normalised this sort of situation has become. One London renter said that she hadn't lived in a single flat that hadn't had significant mould issues, despite having moved seven times. Space-wise, living rooms have become a rarity in the capital, where they are now routinely converted by money-grabbing landlords into extra bedrooms, sometimes with the use of paper-thin plywood partitions. Young people - and that includes people in their thirties - are shoved into these overpopulated, under-maintained enclosures like so many sardines in tin cans. Often the landlords know they don’t have to clear those growing patches of damp, mend that cracked piece of glass, fix the dodgy electrics or install proper fire alarms. There will always be another desperate tenant willing to fill the previous one’s place. In fact, the owners of these buy-to-let places can afford to be choosy: just cast your eye over the number of rooms going on Gumtree that specifically stipulate ‘NO DSS’.

@VagendaMagazine@ElleEmmie@toni_oni My 10 yo son has lived in 7 diff houses because landlords keep selling from under us.

— Aoife Walsh (@AoifeMPWalsh) February 18, 2014

It’s difficult to believe that this state of affairs won’t go on for ever, but clearly something has to give. We are in the midst of a housing crisis and yet little is being done to help those trapped in rented accommodation with no hope of becoming first time buyers. All that Help to Buy - a scheme overseen by a parliament of which a third are buy-to-let landlords - seems to be doing is creating a housing boom. Meanwhile, we are forced to look at broadsheet lifestyle articles in which minted property developers show us the design potential that exists in former social housing. 

As even the right-wing media begins to highlight empty properties left to rot throughout the UK - either abandoned by ridiculously wealthy owners or deliberately kept unoccupied to drive up rent prices nearby - it’s clear that the tide is turning, however slowly. These were of course the same newspapers that campaigned against squatting, but even they seem to be finding the horrific waste of valuable housing space distasteful. Meanwhile, among the younger generation, the anger is building and festering, the dry rot is setting in, and eventually it's going to burst through the wall. 

"I've never had somewhere that was 'home'", said one twentysomething, and God do we empathise. But we all need to remember that the sadness at not having somewhere to really call home, that tight little knot of anxiety about the future that resides in our stomachs, can be incredibly powerful when effectively channelled. We need to stop behaving as though we're resigned to living in mouldy shitholes, and get angry and stay angry, because, in their big houses with their buy-to-let incomes, the people in power realise how angry we are. 

PS. Here's the mushroom:

@VagendaMagazine surely this HAS to be the winner? Fully formed mushroom.. pic.twitter.com/SmAiLjsejc

— Ellen (@EllenRhian) February 18, 2014

Aside from his false claim that the number of workless families doubled under Labour (which I've fisked here), the most notable thing about David Cameron's piece on welfare reform in today's Telegraph is what he doesn't mention: Universal Credit. The programme, which aims to replace six of the main benefits and tax credits with a single payment, has long been touted as the means by which the coalition will transform the benefits system and "make work pay", but Cameron doesn't even reference it in passing in his article. 

Given the chaos surrounding the scheme, that's perhaps not surprising. To date, the DWP has written off £40.1m of assets developed for the programme and expects to write down a further £91m by March 2018, prompting the National Audit Office to warn that it has has "not achieved value for money". 

This waste has come in spite of, not because of, the number of people using the new system. As recently as March 2013, it was forecast that 1.7 million people would be claiming Universal Credit by 2015 but as the OBR table below shows, that figure has now been rounded down to zero. According to the DWP, there were just 3,200 people on the benefit at the end of November, 996,800 short of Duncan Smith's original April 2014 target of one million, with only the simplest cases (such as single people claiming Jobseeker's Allowance) taken on. As Labour MP Glenda Jackson noted at a recent work and pensions select committee hearing, "The people you are actually testing are a small number, the simplest of cases. How an earth are you going to achieve the evidence that you keep telling us you are going to learn from when the cohort is so narrow and so simple?"

By 2015-16, the OBR expects 400,000 people to be claiming Universal Credit, less than 10 per cent of the original target of 4.5 million. Nearly three million (2.9 million) are forecast to be on the system by 2017 but the OBR warns that "given the delays to date, and the scale of migration required in 2016 and 2017, there is clearly a risk that the eventual profile differs significantly from this new assumption". It notes that the government's new migration timetable "has yet to be subjected to full business case approval". 

So great are the obstacles now faced by Universal Credit that many in Whitehall believe it will be put out of its misery after May 2015. As today's FT reports, officials believe that it "must start delivering results by the next election or risk being drastically scaled back or even abandoned". 

Back in May 2010, many on the right claimed that Universal Credit would become one of the government's success stories and a defining part of Cameron's legacy. But nearly four years later, the PM can't even bring himself to mention it. 

It was recently reported that poor mental health costs the UK economy £70bn a year, a sum equivalent to 4.5 per cent of our GDP. This is nothing short of a national disaster, primarily in terms of ruined lives but also in terms of lost productivity and economic inefficiency. 

It is also, most infuriatingly, an avoidable disaster. We know that mental health correlates strongly with income inequality, and that a reduction in inequality could significantly reduce mental health problems across the UK. But as with many of the economic and social problems associated with our high level of inequality, we seem to prefer to spend money on expensive and complicated solutions, rather than cost-effectively addressing causes. The cost of inequality can be seen measured in the billions we spend on our welfare state: on the nurses, doctors, police, probation officers, prison staff, psychologists and psychiatrists and all the physical buildings and equipment that we provide for these professionals to do their work. Poor mental health drives up the demand for all of these services and the people and assets that deliver them.

This sticking-plaster-on-a-dam approach is also creeping into more and more areas of our economy, not just the public sector. At the lower end of the income spectrum, people are being crow-barred back into work that many are not fit to take on and, once in their new jobs, they are then struggling to stay in them. Further up the income ladder, more and more employees are being urged to be more resilient and a whole industry has now been spawned to help people cope with workplace stress and perform better. Some employers, in a quest to give their staff mental toughness and "edge" even seek to introduce the benefits of sports or military training into their workplaces, despite their businesses bearing no relation whatsoever to a sports arena or a battlefield.

The probable context for all this is the so-called "global race" in which many of our politicians seem to believe we are engaged. Even if we are tempted to accept this rather depressing rats-in-a-sack worldview, our chances of success will surely be far greater if we reduce inequality and thereby tackle the major cause of the various health and social ills that hold back our individual and collective economic performance. In our increasingly insecure, under-employed, low-paid and long-hours economy it would seem fanciful that success will be achieved by simply telling everyone to pull themselves together, "lean in" and work harder.  

Carrying on as we are clearly entails massive and sustained threats to our health and well-being. We have a choice: we will either succeed together as part of a fair, robust and supportive economy - or we will each strive individually to gain a short-lived and illusory edge in the unfair, jagged and rickety Heath Robinson-esque economic model we have now. Economics and compassion both strongly suggest that rather than forever patching people up when they fall, we should be doing more to prevent them falling in the first place.

Bill Kerry is a co-founder of The Equality Trust

21 - 27 February 2014

The Space Issue

Helen Lewis asks: Who would take a one-way trip to Mars?

Michael Brooks on the lunar land-grab

The planetary scientist Colin Pillinger considers what makes us human

Plus

Mark Leonard on the rise of the new Eurosceptics

Rowan Williams joins the NS as a lead book reviewer: Wilfred Owen and the boy soldiers of the First World War

Rafael Behr: why Westminster won’t tackle the problem of hereditary privilege

Will Self drifts upstream to Shepperton in the first column of his new psychogeography series, “on location”

Mehdi Hasan: forget Benefits Street– corporate welfare is the real scandal

The first Scandi drama: Ronald Hutton on the Vikings

THE SPACE ISSUE: MISSION TO MARS AND THE LUNAR LAND-GRAB

This week’s NS explores the 21^st-century space race, which has been reinvigorated ten years after the explosion of the Columbia space shuttle, a nadir in the US space programme. For the cover story, Helen Lewis reports on the “next big prize” in this race – the quest to colonise Mars:

“I want to die on Mars,” said Elon Musk last year. “Just not on impact.” The 42-year-old was not being flippant; he plans to use the $9bn he acquired through business ventures such as the online payment system PayPal to leave earth’s orbit for ever. He believes it is the only way for the human race to guard against the fragility of life on a single planet, at the mercy of a supervolcano, asteroid strike or nuclear war.

Musk’s enthusiasm has energised a new phase of the space race: the conquest of Mars . . . around the world, an unlikely alliance of tech billionaires, state agencies and private contractors is increasingly confident that, within 20 to 30 years, human beings will once again be striking out further than anyone has gone before.

Lewis meets some of the scientists tasked with making the mission to Mars possible, considers how it will be financed, and concludes that the race to the Red Planet is no longer the stuff of science fiction:

Whatever the challenges in getting to Mars, everyone I asked was confident that they were not insurmountable. “I’d say 2040 is a reasonable guess [for the first flight],” says [the astronaut Tom] Jones.

The pioneering spirit that took us to the top of Everest and the bottom of the sea, that drives people to spend the winter imprisoned on an Antarctic research base, will always win out. Despite the risks – perhaps because of the risks – there are people alive today who probably will die on another planet. They’ll look up at the pale blue dot in the sky and, unlike any generation before them, that planet won’t be their home.

Meanwhile the NS science columnist, Michael Brooks, reports on how the moon’s rich mineral resources and a series of legal loopholes around the “beyond-earth behaviour of nations and private companies” make a lunar land-grab inevitable:

The Chinese think the moon’s minerals might be worth extracting. “They are looking at feasibility for mining the moon, and they are likely to do it if there’s a strong business case,” says Richard Holdaway, director of the space division at the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which collaborates closely with China’s space programme.

There would be nothing illegal about such an operation because international laws covering the moon are “way, way behind”, as Holdaway puts it. In theory, anyone who could manage it (and afford it) could go to the moon tomorrow, dig out a huge chunk of lunar rock, bring it back to earth and sell it off to the highest bidder. The Chinese could take the moon apart and sell it bit by bit without breaking international law. The question we have to ask ourselves is simple: do we see a need to prevent that happening?

It’s not just the Chinese who have ambitions in this direction. Some private companies also have their eye on lunar rock as a source of riches. Most are based in the US, and they are actively working on lunar landers that will eventually be able to perform mineral extraction.

Colin Pillinger, a former planetary scientist at the Open University and principal investigator for the Beagle 2 Mars lander project, is the latest contributor to our “What Makes Us Human?” series, published in association with BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show. For Pillinger, the answer lies in our pioneering spirit, our curiosity and our essential nosiness:

What makes us human? In my case, “us” means scientists. Scientists, like all human beings, are curious: but we are real nosy parkers. And like the lady in the corner house on the street where I was a kid, who hid behind her aspidistra to watch the comings and goings of everyone in the neighbourhood, we like to tell people what we’ve found out . . . any typically nosy human being can become a scientist and share the fun I’ve had.

THE NS ESSAY: THE RISE OF THE NEW EUROSCEPTICS

For this week’s NS Essay, Mark Leonard, the founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think tank, explores how the UK Independence Party and its friends have succeeded in making Euroscepticism a popular cause:

The genius of the new Eurosceptics has been their ability to turn the arguments of pro-Europeans on their head, so that each triumph has become an argument against the EU. Old-fashioned sceptics such as John Redwood and Bill Cash used to accept that the EU was good for the British economy but baulked at the loss of sovereignty. The new Europhobes put things the other way round: in place of old arguments about European superstates destroying British sovereignty, Eurosceptics have a narrative about Britain “tethered to the corpse” of the eurozone (the evocative phrase of the fiercely independent Conservative MP Douglas Carswell).

Leonard identifies “technological utopianism” as an important Eurosceptic trend:

Douglas Carswell looks more like a cartoon villain than a romantic idealist, yet he is behind the most dramatic shift in Euroscepticism: its appeal to Britain’s younger pioneers. A libertarian, self-styled radical and advocate of localism, he first came to prominence when he pleaded with Westminster to clean up following the expenses scandal. Since then, however, he has brought a technological utopian bent to Europhobia, making it seem more modern in the process, and so potentially appealing to younger people who are not natural Tories . . . it is the Europhobic pioneers who have potentially the most disruptive arguments. By claiming that Europe is a bureaucratic monolith in an age of global networks, they have the greatest ability to transcend the older, more conservative ghetto of traditional Euroscepticism and create a wider coalition.

RAFAEL BEHR: WHY WESTMINSTER WON’T TACKLE HEREDITARY PRIVILEGE

In the Politics Column this week, the NS political editor, Rafael Behr, argues that although Westminster should be tackling the current upsurge in hereditary privilege, it is woefully ill-qualified to debate how wealth and power are stitched up in Britain.

There is a shortage of qualified agitators. The alarm is raised by people on the left who are mostly squeamish about their own privileges and are liable to be called hypocrites by those on the right who want to believe that skill, not luck, delivered them into lofty positions . . .

There is no guarantee that fair distribution of opportunity will even be a factor in the election. Ed Miliband will try to force it on to the agenda. The Conservatives will reject it as camouflage for the old class envy. Then the jury of generously remunerated opinion-mongers, cloistered in characterful London period properties, will ponder whether it is truly the case that all the advantages flow to the already advantaged, and declare, in tones most dispassionate, that it is not.

LINES OF DISSENT: MEHDI HASAN ON THE REAL WELFARE SCANDAL

In his Lines of Dissent column this week, Mehdi Hasan, exposes the real Benefits Street scandal – the corporate scroungers who are lapping up public subsidies and government contracts:

From The Big Benefits Row to Benefits Street, everyone in the media seems to want to talk about welfare these days. Or, more accurately, social security.

In an age of austerity, I won’t pretend to be surprised by the obsession with welfare and so-called “welfare dependency”, but there is a point worth making here: why do we obsess over handouts for the poor, rather than handouts for the rich? Why isn’t the scandal of corporate welfare the subject of fly-on-the-wall documentaries, too? When will my former colleagues at Channel 4 air a series called Bankers’ Street?

Ignore the media misinformation: spending on out-of-work benefits isn’t out of control, nor is the welfare state responsible for growing poverty . . . So let us turn instead to the real scandal, the issue that dare not speak its name: corporate welfare. Where is the ministerial or media anger over the activities of G4S and Serco, which are accused of ripping off the taxpayer but which make millions from lavish government contracts? Where are the howls of outrage over taxpayer-funded payouts to the fossil-fuel industry? The Met Office’s chief scientist may believe “there is a link” between the recent floods and climate change but the government continues to subsidise the coal, oil and gas industries to the tune of £2.6bn a year. Why are the rail company bosses not household names in the same way as White Dee or Smoggy from Benefits Street?

THE CRITICS: RONALD HUTTON THE VIKINGS

In this week’s Critics section, the historian Ronald Hutton reviews the British Museum’s exhibition “Vikings: Life and Legend” and concludes that these early-medieval Scandinavians were pioneers of globalisation, with many of the same preoccupations as we have:

The exhibition implicitly proclaims the importance of globalisation, the value of technology (in this case ships) in bringing peoples together, the power of fashion in forming identities and self-expression, the ability of consumer goods to unite people regardless of language or ethnicity, the benefits of keeping good relations with the new Russia and the need to respect Islam. It is a snapshot of the preoccupations of the intellectual British psyche in 2014.

PLUS

Rachel Cooke reviews Jonathan Meades’s BBC4 paean to concrete

The Man Booker Prize judge Erica Wagner on Gary Shteyngart’s new memoir

George Eaton asks what will become of Westminster’s Scottish MPs if Scotland votes Yes

Caroline Crampton meets Steve Nallon, aka Margaret Thatcher in Spitting Image

Commons Confidential: Kevin Maguire shares the latest Westminster gossip

Thomas Calvocoressi on Richard Hamilton at Tate Modern

Ed Smith: children of “pully” not pushy parents become great athletes

Lez Miserable: the NS’s Sapphic cynic Eleanor Margolis recommends the odd bout of aloneness

The phone-hacking trial has come to life with the revelation that Tony Blair offered extensive advice to Rebekah Brooks at the height of the scandal. According to an email sent by Brooks to James Murdoch (who had earlier replied to another message: "What are you doing on email?") on 11 July, the day after the News of the World was closed, she spent "an hour on the phone" to Blair, who advised her to launch a "Hutton style" inquiry. The former PM also allegedly offered to act as an "unofficial adviser" to her and the Murdochs on a "between us" basis. Here's her five-point summary of the conversation to James Murdoch: 

"1. Form an independent unit that has an outside junior counsel, Ken Macdonald, a great and good type, a serious forensic criminal barrister, internal counsel, proper fact checkers etc in it. Get them to investigate me and others and publish a Hutton style report," she said.

"2. Publish part one of the report at same time as the police closes its inquiry and clear you and accept short comings and new solutions and process and part two when any trials are over.

"3. Keep strong and definitely sleeping pills. Need to have clear heads and remember no rash short term solutions as they only give you long term headaches.

"4. It will pass. Tough up.

"5. He [Blair] is available for you, KRM [Rupert Murdoch] and me as an unofficial adviser but needs to be between us." 

So Blair was telling Brooks "it will pass. Tough up" as Ed Miliband was calling for her to resign and for a public inquiry into phone-hacking. Could there be a greater contrast? 

Update 1: Blair's office has just issued the statement below.

This was Mr Blair simply giving informal advice over the phone. He made it absolutely clear to Ms Brooks that, though he knew nothing personally about the facts of the case, in a situation as serious as this it was essential to have a fully transparent and independent process to get to the bottom of what had happened. That inquiry should be led by credible people, get all the facts out there and that if anything wrong were found there should be immediate action taken and the changes to the organisation made so that they could not happen again.

Mr Blair said that if what he was being told by her was correct, and there had been no wrongdoing, then a finding to that effect by a credible Inquiry would be far better than an internal and therefore less credible investigation.

Update 2: In an earlier email with the subject line "Plan B" to James Murdoch on 8 July, Brooks wrote of her hope that former News International chief executive Les Hinton and News of the World editor Colin Myler could be scapegoated for the scandal as she was vindicated. She wrote: 

A thought...and a Les [Hinton] situation could play well into this even if it was at a later date. Ie result of my report when published would slam Les [Hinton]. Colin [Myler]. Etc and it will vindicate my position (or not).

She added: "I am ring fenced clearly and properly. It will be written as a slippery slope for me but I hardly have a reputation left."

As this excellent tweet puts it, the Daily Express has filled its front page with celebrities who are themselves the product of immigration, while at the same time advocating a ban on "new migrants".

Dear Express: Helen Mirren's dad was a Russian immigrant, Cowell's grandmother was polish & Cliff was born in India pic.twitter.com/UmLhEjgpwe

— Marc Burrows (@20thcenturymarc) February 17, 2014

This mole wonders: if new migrants are banned, who will the Daily Express put on its splashes in the future?

Actually, we already know the answer to that question.

Flick through the business pages, and you will find countless news articles on the latest share price and quarterly results of the multimillion-pound FTSE-100 companies. It is easy to forget that these businesses account for a small minority of firms in the UK; Britain’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of our economy.

According to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, there were 4.9 million SMEs in the UK at the start of 2013, making up 99.9 per cent of the country’s private-sector businesses. Their combined revenue accounted for £1.6bn, or 48.1 per cent of total private-sector turnover, and they employ about 14.4 million people, corresponding to 59.3 per cent of the private-sector workforce. When SMEs grow, it’s the whole country that prospers, as usually they reinvest their profits, creating more jobs and boosting exports. So, is the government doing enough to support them?

There have been a few steps in the right direction. Business regulation has been reduced and simplified, and under the government’s Employment Allowance scheme, which will start in April this year, SMEs have been granted a £2,000 tax cut on their employer National Insurance contributions.

But still much needs to be done, especially when it comes to access to credit. “A third of our members are repeatedly saying in our quarterly surveys that they are having difficulties accessing adequate finance to grow their businesses,” says Mark Cherry, national policy chairman at the Federation of Small Businesses, the sector lobby group. This is especially worrying at a time when business optimism in the country has picked up – last month it reached its highest level in 22 years, according to research by the advisory firm BDO – because this shows that some of these small businesses will find themselves unable to grow even as the economic environment finally starts to improve.

Some government initiatives to increase lending to small businesses, including the Funding for Lending and Enterprise Finance Guarantee schemes, seem to be having only limited impact on the problem. Figures from the Bank of England show that net lending to businesses fell by £4.3bn in the three months to November 2013. The state-backed British Business Bank, which should become operational next year after it receives state aid approval from the EU, will also support lending to SMEs, but we’ll need to wait and see how big an effect it will have.

Increasing competition in the banking sector should be a priority, as SMEs at present are dependent on a small number of reluctant lenders. Equally important is that this support be sustained in the long term. “Short-term initiatives aren’t really taken up by small businesses because they have to adapt their plans to take advantage of some of these schemes,” Cherry says.

Other countries, notably Germany, Europe’s industrial powerhouse, have done a better job at strengthening their SME sector (what the Germans call their Mittelstand) by providing funding for firms that want to do research to help develop products. Through KfW – Germany’s business bank – the government also provides loans on favourable terms to SMEs that want to export to developing countries or invest in energy-saving programmes.

The British economy grew by 1.9 per cent in 2013, outperforming even Germany. Now just think what would happen if we championed our very own Mittelstand.

Is there a thread that links the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie to the pop impresario Simon Cowell, that binds the Formula 1 chief Bernie Ecclestone to the Labour MP and former New Statesman owner Geoffrey Robinson, and runs through the newspaper proprietors Conrad Black, Richard Desmond and Robert Maxwell, as well as the business tycoons Richard Branson and Mohamed Al Fayed?

Tom Bower, the investigative journalist who has written unflinching, unflattering biographies of all nine men, thinks so. His subjects – perhaps better thought of as his victims – share “an overriding ambition to succeed, a ruthlessness to prevent those who are stopping you get to your goal, and the most astonishing ego”, he tells me. “If they allow defeat to overwhelm them they’re lost, they are of absolutely no interest to me. I’m interested in people who overcome adversity, whose ego is so dominant that even when, like Maxwell and Black, they are actually convicted, they still say they are innocent.”

When Bower’s biography of Cowell was published in 2012, Cowell told guests at the launch party for the book that he had spent a week hiding under a pillow in his bedroom. This was an unusually mild reaction: as Bower observed at the time, none of the 20 other people he’d written about had ever turned up to celebrate publication. Maxwell took out a multimillion-pound libel suit against Bower (it lapsed). So did Black, Branson and Desmond, and all three lost – with the exception of Black, whose libel trial was put on hold when the media mogul was jailed for fraud in 2007. Another victim of Bower’s investigations said he wanted to break his fingers to stop him working. Writing in the New Statesman in 2001, Robinson described Bower as “messianic, almost to the extent of being unbalanced”.

I meet Bower at an Italian café in Hampstead, north London, close to the home he shares with his wife, Veronica Wadley, a former editor of the Evening Standard and close confidante of Boris Johnson (a man who is surely a worthy candidate for Bower’s cross hairs).

At 67, Bower is battle-hardened: he still has his trademark moustache but his hair has turned white-grey and wispy. He arrives looking distracted, and is wearing a slightly too large brown leather jacket, which he doesn’t take off. He sits down awkwardly in front of me, as if poised to leave at any moment. He may have made a living dredging the darkest depths of other people’s lives, but he doesn’t like to give interviews about his own. “I never talk about myself,” he says. “Part of the problem is that if the journalist is an ego-tripper himself he becomes a victim of the very thing he’s trying to criticise about others.” He speaks quietly, in a low drawl. Several times he asks me to check my dictaphone is definitely working. He knows that an unrecorded interview is a journalist’s nightmare.

Bower’s most recent book, Branson: Behind the Mask, is the latest front in a 15-year campaign to pierce the Virgin boss’s maverick persona and show that, beyond the PR, there is a calculating, manipulative businessman who (and this, Bower believes, is the most painful revelation) isn’t as rich or successful as he says he is. “Everyone has got to believe he’s a billionaire, but if he’s a billionaire why would he rent out his home on Necker? What other billionaire rents out their home? It’s like a bed and breakfast. It’s ridiculous.” This is Bower’s third Branson biography, and it focuses on the Virgin Galactic project: Branson keeps promising to fly people into space at some forever changing date in the near future but his rockets are unworkable and dangerous, as Bower reveals in quite overwhelming detail.

Behind the Mask had seemed a good place to start the interview, but halfway through my first question Bower interrupts. “Look, what actually is the purpose of the piece?” he asks. I explain I want to understand what motivates him, what drives his dogged pursuit of powerful, dangerous men despite the threats and lawsuits. “Right, let’s start there, then. I am fascinated by power, and the people who exercise power … What do they have, these people?”

Bower’s interest in politics began early. His parents were Jewish refugees who arrived in London from Prague in 1939, and so “politics and history was there with my mother’s milk”. From the 1950s, Bower travelled with his parents, driving past the minefields marking out the Iron Curtain, to Prague and East Germany. “As a child of refugees, I was an outsider,” he concludes, something that he believes helps him understand the men of influence who sought to break into, and control, the British establishment – men such as Maxwell, the Mirror Group chief, a Jewish Czechoslovakian who escaped from Nazi occupation and whose biography he entitled Maxwell: the Outsider.

Bower didn’t fit in at school. He went to the William Ellis comprehensive secondary school in Hampstead, where his classmates were the children of left-wing intellectuals, trade unionists and MPs. Bower was a Conservative. “When I told them [the other boys] that we had to queue for cabbages in East Berlin, they just laughed. They didn’t believe it.” It wasn’t until he went to university that he realised another way in which he would stand apart from many he met in his professional life: “I never understood the British establishment until much, much later. Because I was educated at state schools around here, that came as a bit of a shock. I didn’t realise until I got to the LSE what public school really meant.”

The London School of Economics, where Bower studied law in the late Sixties, was, in his view, “one of the best places to be educated in the world”. (But it’s gone downhill now, “thanks to the idiots that became its directors”, he mutters.) Inspired by the 1968 student revolt, and some of his teachers, Bower became a Marxist. His political views have changed since then, although he remains left-wing and says the Marxist analysis of the law – that it exists primarily to protect property, rather than individual rights – “influenced me for life”.

On leaving the LSE, he became a barrister working for the National Council for Civil Liberties, a forerunner of Shami Chakrabarti’s advocacy group, Liberty. It seemed to me an unlikely choice for an instinctive newshound, but then he mentions that his father had wanted him to become a solicitor. Was this why he joined the Bar? He says no, but he did leave shortly afterwards. “It was so class-ridden and depressing, and I realised what I really wanted to do was see things and travel and write about things.”

He joined the BBC in 1970 as a researcher on 24 Hours, a forerunner to Newsnight, and stayed at the corporation until 1995. The cut-throat, competitive atmosphere appealed to him. “They always used to say that at the BBC everyone was stabbed in the chest so you could see them squirm,” he says happily. While he worked on the flagship investigative programme Panorama, competing documentaries would be cut in adjacent rooms on Sunday nights and the editor would patrol the corridor until the early morning, before deciding which one should be broadcast on Monday. “It was tough, but we’re all good friends, most of us.” A friend of his told me that Bower was considered notoriously difficult to work with, but was a “brilliant journalist”.

He left the BBC disillusioned. John Birt, the director general from 1992 to 2000, “emasculated the BBC’s journalism and it never recovered”, he says. The last straw was when Bower was making a film about Maxwell and the lawyers softened his programme without his knowledge. Meanwhile, he says, the BBC had – again, without telling him – commissioned a more flattering programme on the Maxwell brothers, using some of his footage. “I’d made 200 films, some great, great documentaries, great investigative stuff, and I realised then that was impossible.”

He is scathing about the BBC today: its “obsession with process”, its shoddy camerawork and the likes of Newsnight– “the most dreadful programme, because it all the time has these films of people screaming at you”. He believes presenters such as Jeremy Paxman “ruin” their documentary series by spending too much time in front of the camera: “That’s why people are bored with television.”

Bower’s general view of journalism is no more favourable. The newspapers have lost their confidence since the hacking scandal, he says, and the UK’s strict libel laws need further reform. “The only reason we have any journalism at all in Britain is … Rupert Murdoch; he’s the only person who invests in journalism in Britain,” he says. The Mail originally agreed to serialise Bower’s Branson book but pulled out despite paying for it, so the Times bought it instead, he adds by way of evidence.

I get the impression that at times Bower feels he’s one man against the world. He vehemently criticises what he calls the trend for “spokesman broadcasting”: “They just look for someone who can say a preordained argument. They are not interested in looking for the person who doesn’t want to speak, and has to be persuaded to speak because it’s not in their interest – that’s my genre.” Bower can claim to have mastered the difficult interview. His trick to finding out uncomfortable truths about the rich and the powerful is to hunt down their victims – “because when they climb the greasy pole, they always hurt people” – and then persuade them to speak. Only Simon Cowell and Bernie Ecclestone co-operated with him on the writing of their biographies, but he won’t do another like that again. “I prefer looking from the outside,” he says.

Conrad Black once described Bower as “sadistic” (along with a string of other invectives) – and there is a sense that he derives a special pleasure when one of his books wounds its subject: when Branson lost the Lottery bid he so desired after Bower’s first biography, when Robinson was suspended from parliament, when David Cameron instructed the Tory party to read Bower’s character assassination of Gordon Brown. He often draws a distinction between his ego-tripping, power-hungry subjects and himself – but the line seems more blurred to me. Perhaps he feels motivated by a higher sense of purpose, the advancement of a truth bigger than himself. And yet, at one point, he says: “I’m always suspicious when people talk about morality. People in power talking about morality is the greatest giveaway of dishonesty and deceit.”

Bower thrives on risk. “Journalism depends on risk,” he says. In a 2009 diary for the Guardian on his court hearing for the Richard Desmond libel case, he described how “the daily commute on the London Underground to star in a libel trial was an unexpected relief from the customary ten hours in my study”.

Is he really so blasé, or is it a front? He says he has good lawyers and is always careful. “I’m never overconfident, but I get depressed if I don’t get the support. And in the end the support is that people buy the book and are interested.” His bestselling title was Maxwell: the Outsider, which sold over 150,000 copies.

Bower has been chased down the street by Nazi agents, and there was a “Mossad man who once tried … but he failed”, he recalls cheerfully. He says his emails are constantly being hacked, although he’s not sure by whom. Then I remind him of the time he was beaten up on camera by a sheep farmer he had exposed on Panorama for exporting live sheep – an investigation that earned him an RSPCA silver medal. He laughs heartily at the memory; it’s the happiest I have seen him.

His next project is a biography of Tony Blair: “he’s influenced all of our lives … With Thatcher, you knew much more; nothing has come out about her which remains an enigma any more. You got what you saw. With Blair, it’s not like that.”

He says one day he might write his autobiography – he has kept all his notebooks from a career spanning five decades. In most of Bower’s biographies, he homes in on a defining trait that he argues captures the essence of the character: Cowell is fundamentally motivated by “sweet revenge”, Maxwell is the “outsider”, Black is “dancing on the edge”, Branson is “99.9 per cent business”. So how, I ask, would Tom Bower characterise his own life?

“A friend of mine says I should write an autobiography called Dancing With Scoundrels,” he replies with a rare smile.
 

Abounaddara is a collective of filmmakers working towards providing an alternative image of Syrian society. It was founded in 2010 in opposition to the prevailing representations of Syria found in the Western media. Since April 2011, the Collective has produced one short film every week, using a very particular cinematographic language-a sort of “emergency cinema”.

Working in a state of emergency, the collective's members are subject to certain constraints: access to film sites, safety of those filmed, even the state of the internet connection. They present ordinary men and women, who are not heroes or victims, political opponents or loyalists. The films show the counter-shot to the armed conflicts that have been the media's main focal point thus far.

We will screen five short films from the Abounaddara Collective, which recently won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, and explore “emergency cinema” in the context of Syria and other countries in the region.

Panelists include:

• Tamara Alrifai, Advocacy and Communications director, Middle East and North Africa division, Human Rights Watch
• Rachel Beth Anderson, filmmaker of First to Fall
• Talal Derki, filmmaker of Return to Homs
• Charif Kiwan, spokesperson for the Abounaddara Collective
• Daniel Trilling, Editor of New Humanist and former Assistant Editor at the New Statesman

Visit ff.hrw.org/london for additional details.

Last week, an opinion poll by YouGov found that public concern for the environment had spiked to levels not seen in any national poll since the late 1980s. Twenty three per cent of people polled stated that "the environment" was the number one issue for the country currently. This is up dramatically from the six per cent who chose it the previous week and ahead of issues including health, crime and education.

Undoubtedly the devastating flooding still affecting Britain accounts for part of this sudden spike in concern. The UK has just experienced the wettest January in 250 years; the Thames Barrier has had to be closed a record number of times against high tides; thousands of people have had their homes flooded. Nor is this just a freak occurrence; it is clearly part of a rising trend of extreme weather. Four out of the five wettest years on record have been since the year 2000, and in a separate poll last year over 80 per cent of people said they had experienced more flooding in their lifetimes.

But something else appears to have happened within the last fortnight to have caused such a sudden jump in public concern. We have been experiencing record-breaking floods and storms across the UK since the start of December but only the previous week, concern stood at just 6 per cent. What has changed is that politicians have finally started talking again about climate change.

It is a tragedy that it has taken devastating flooding to make it happen, but over the past fortnight, the relentless weather has forced Westminster to break the climate silence that it has kept for far too long. David Cameron has stated that he thinks "climate change is a serious threat". Ed Miliband has warned that we risk "sleepwalking into a climate crisis" by failing to prepare for global warming, and called on politicians of all parties to rebuild a cross-party consensus on climate change. Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, said that climate change "is a national security issue, definitely." And an "anonymous cabinet minister" has inveighed against Owen Paterson, saying he’s "not climate sceptic, he’s climate stupid."

Other important voices, have weighed in too. Lord Stern, author of the seminal Stern Review on the economics of climate change, has said that climate change is here with us now and could lead to global conflict. Peter Kendall, outgoing President of the NFU, says "climate change does now really challenge mankind's ability to feed itself", and has attacked Owen Paterson for downplaying the risks. The Met Office has been unusually forthright in stating the links between climate change and extreme weather. And Matthew d’Ancona, foremost chronicler of coalition politics, has captured the dilemma facing Cameron perfectly: "if the PM truly believes that anthropogenic global warming is responsible for potentially catastrophic changes in the weather — then it ought, logically, to be his priority, more important even than economic recovery."

Taken together, these quotes tell us one thing overwhelmingly: climate change has returned as a mainstream political issue.

Let's be clear, while these levels of environmental concern have not been seen since the late 80s, polls have consistently showed huge support for green issues. Whether it's the majority of people who support renewables or the increasing numbers opposing fracking. But what we're looking at here is how much "the environment" is at the forefront of the public's mind as a pressing concern for the country. YouGov themselves don't have a dataset running back very far, but Ipsos MORI's long-term polling datashows that over the past thirty years, concern for the environment as "the number one issue facing the UK" rose dramatically in two periods. The first of these is from 1988 to 1992; the second is 2006-7.

Notably, these two moments of history saw leading politicians repeatedly make prominent speeches on environmental issues; fight for the title of the greenest party; and seek to actually lead public debate on the environmental challenges facing us. In 1988, for example, Margaret Thatcher made a celebrated speech to the Conservative Party conference in which she spoke of the threat of global warming and even claimed, "It's we Conservatives who are not merely friends of the Earth - we are its guardians and trustees for generations to come." Her ministers went on to produce the first ever Environment White Paper and drive negotiations for a climate change convention at the landmark Rio Earth Summit in 1992. In 2006-7, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown responded to David Cameron’s efforts to green the Conservative Party by commissioning the Stern Review and ultimately getting behind the world’s first Climate Change Act.

On each occasion, a vibrant movement made up of the public and pressure groups pushed politicians into articulating green concerns. But to really bring that concern to the fore, to elevate it to an issue of national importance, often requires leadership on the part of politicians.

The question is whether now, in the wake of the floods, we will see renewed leadership from politicians to redouble the UK’s efforts on tackling climate change. A half-billion pound gap has opened up between current flood defence spending and what’s required to keep pace with rising seas and worsening downpours: will politicians come together to tackle that challenge? With climate change loading the dice in favour of more extreme weather, will all the parties commit to properly assessing the risks climate change poses to our country and the world? And given that prevention is better than cure, will all parties see the sense in renewing our efforts to cut domestic emissions, press for a global climate treaty, and do more to tackle climate change in the first place?

One final thought. Clearly, warm words about climate change will come to nought if no one at Westminster backs it up with the necessary regulations and investments. But words, too, have power. When Clement Atlee was asked what he thought Churchill had contributed to the war effort, he replied: "He talked about it." The characteristically understated Atlee did not mean this sarcastically; rather, he meant that it was Churchill's ability to articulate the conflict in terms that summoned up the blood and stiffened the sinews that was itself vital to the prosecution of the war.

And so, David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg: you do now need to actually take action on climate change. But please don't stop talking about it, either.