On Europe, Labour was right to be cautious. No longer | Martin Kettle

January 11, 2018, 12:15 pm

≫ Next: A threatened species? No, but it’s true that men will lose out | Gaby Hinsliff

≪ Previous: The Guardian view on Germany’s coalition deal: Merkel in the balance | Editorial

Jeremy Corbyn’s dilemma is real, but it’s time for audacity, and to come out fighting for our ties to the EU

Labour’s dilemma about how to proceed in 2018’s Brexit endgame is genuine. It should be taken seriously and not dismissed. The underlying issue is easily stated. Two-thirds of Labour voters supported remaining in the EU in 2016. Nineteen of every 20 Labour MPs were themselves remainers. Yet two-thirds of Labour constituencies voted to leave.

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A threatened species? No, but it’s true that men will lose out | Gaby Hinsliff

January 11, 2018, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Mme Deneuve, whatever happened to female solidarity in France? | Kim Willsher

≪ Previous: On Europe, Labour was right to be cautious. No longer | Martin Kettle

It’s not possible to ditch a system that held women back without consequences for some men, especially mediocre ones

Sometimes it’s hard to be a man. No, honestly. Sometimes it really is, especially if you’re a certain sort of man; the sort for whom maleness would, a few decades ago, have been their biggest trump card.

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Mme Deneuve, whatever happened to female solidarity in France? | Kim Willsher

January 11, 2018, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Cameroon’s heartbreaking struggles are a relic of British colonialism | Eliza Anyangwe

≪ Previous: A threatened species? No, but it’s true that men will lose out | Gaby Hinsliff

The anti-#MeToo letter shows little has changed in French feminism since the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal

Feminism in France is as old as the revolution. It’s just not feminism as many of us know it. The anti-#MeToo letter signed by French national treasure Catherine Deneuve and 100 other well-known women has sparked an international furore that perfectly encapsulates the chasm between feminist ideologies.

In essence, it comes down to the question of whether women should be, or want to be, regarded as sex objects. French women including Deneuve, some of whom say they are feminists, view being desired as a sexual object as an intrinsic part of being female, as well as part-and-parcel of sexual freedom and the intricate pattern of human relationships. It’s part of what’s famously known as the “French cultural exception”.

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Cameroon’s heartbreaking struggles are a relic of British colonialism | Eliza Anyangwe

January 12, 2018, 2:25 am

≫ Next: Tech bosses limit their kids’ time on smartphones: why shouldn’t we? | Jean Twenge

≪ Previous: Mme Deneuve, whatever happened to female solidarity in France? | Kim Willsher

The southern Cameroonians’ right to self-determination was thwarted by British imperial arrogance. The violent, anti-democratic fallout continues today

Last Friday, a man named Julius Ayuk Tabe was arrested along with nine others in a hotel in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. Tabe and his companions were reportedly committing no crime, at least not one that has yet been disclosed.

There are inconsistencies in the reporting. Some accounts say 10 people were arrested, while others speak of seven. The BBC’s coverage eschews these details altogether. What remains consistent is that it is alleged that those detained were taken by Nigeria’s intelligence agency, though the Department of State Services denies having them in custody. And so there the story ends. No public outrage – in Nigeria or anywhere else. No international condemnation.

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Tech bosses limit their kids’ time on smartphones: why shouldn’t we? | Jean Twenge

January 11, 2018, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Philip Dunne, sacked after his NHS remarks, must now face his constituents | Tess Finch-Lees

≪ Previous: Cameroon’s heartbreaking struggles are a relic of British colonialism | Eliza Anyangwe

Parents fret about harmful content, but reducing device use to 90 minutes a day would be good for mental health

We’ve all seen it – teenagers glued to their phones, not even glancing up when their parents talk to them; kids immersed in tablets at airports; young friends around restaurant tables staring at their phones instead of each other.

As children and young people spend an increasing amount of time with screens – more than six hours a day according to one US survey– parents have begun to wonder if spending this much time with screens is safe.

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Philip Dunne, sacked after his NHS remarks, must now face his constituents | Tess Finch-Lees

January 12, 2018, 5:51 am

≫ Next: The fabulous new US embassy is best not tainted by a Trump visit | Oliver Wainwright

≪ Previous: Tech bosses limit their kids’ time on smartphones: why shouldn’t we? | Jean Twenge

I was not surprised by my MP’s callous comments about patients without beds using seats instead. Look at what has been happening in his own backyard

The sacked health minister Philip Dunne was booed and heckled at a local meeting recently, for hiding behind his ministerial role as a pretext for abandoning constituents (of whom I’m one) to the ravages of NHS cuts. His callous comments on Monday, undermining the NHS beds crisis by suggesting sick patients can sit on seats in A&E, came as no surprise to me.

The irony is that, while Dunne boasted about the abundance of seats (beds are so 1970s) in his own constituency, on Christmas Eve, there weren’t even any seats available in A&E. Patients waiting had to sit on the floor and staff had to step over them.

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The fabulous new US embassy is best not tainted by a Trump visit | Oliver Wainwright

January 12, 2018, 3:49 am

≫ Next: Abuse isn't romantic. So why the panic that feminists are killing eros? | Jessica Valenti

≪ Previous: Philip Dunne, sacked after his NHS remarks, must now face his constituents | Tess Finch-Lees

The president has cancelled his visit, blaming the Obama administration for a ‘bad deal’ – but actually the new building is a progressive beacon

Raised on a hill, surrounded by a moat and bristling with all the anti-terrorist measures known to man, the new US embassy in Nine Elms, south-west London, should be exactly the kind of building that Donald Trump would be only too keen to open. Covered in a prickly translucent plastic skin, which looks cheap, foggy and is already stained, the $1bn cube is in many ways the perfect metaphor for his administration. So why has he cancelled the ribbon-cutting ceremony, planned for later this month?

“Reason I canceled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for ‘peanuts,’” he tweeted, “only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!”

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Abuse isn't romantic. So why the panic that feminists are killing eros? | Jessica Valenti

January 12, 2018, 3:22 am

≫ Next: With sexual abuse rife in my industry, how can I vote in the Baftas? | Bridget Lawless

≪ Previous: The fabulous new US embassy is best not tainted by a Trump visit | Oliver Wainwright

Catherine Deneuve and others have publicly worried that the campaign to end sexual harassment has gone too far but the truth is there is no war on romance

The #MeToo backlash is here, and it’s very worried about your love life.

Iconic French actress Catherine Deneuve says the movement is puritanical and men should be able to “hit on women”. New York Times writer Daphne Merkin wants to know “whatever happened to flirting?” The Hollywood Reporter bemoans that #MeToo could “kill sexy Hollywood movies” while Cathy Young at the Los Angeles Times believes it will end office romance. Ross Douthat is even worried that the push to end sexual harassment could stunt population growth.

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With sexual abuse rife in my industry, how can I vote in the Baftas? | Bridget Lawless

January 12, 2018, 4:31 am

≫ Next: The company that runs Britain is near to collapse. Watch and worry | Aditya Chakrabortty

≪ Previous: Abuse isn't romantic. So why the panic that feminists are killing eros? | Jessica Valenti

Until films can guarantee that nobody was harmed in their making, I do not want to risk allowing even one casting couch perpetrator to bask in momentary glory

The film business is in an almighty mess – caught between a past it was shimmeringly proud of, a present where everyone in it is affected by its crimes, and a future of camera-shaking uncertainty. The fact that issues of harassment and sexual assault have started to hit the industry’s bottom line can only be a good thing. But so far we’re only watching the opening scenes – when it comes to revelations of sexual misconduct, it’s still early days.

So far we’re only watching the opening scenes – when it comes to revelations of sexual misconduct, it’s still early days

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The company that runs Britain is near to collapse. Watch and worry | Aditya Chakrabortty

January 12, 2018, 7:16 am

≫ Next: ‘Shithole countries’? Words worthy of a racist-in-chief | Richard Wolffe

≪ Previous: With sexual abuse rife in my industry, how can I vote in the Baftas? | Bridget Lawless

Carillion builds schools, roads, hospitals – and it’s meant to be a big part of HS2. What’s more, if it goes bust, the bill will be picked up by taxpayers

You may never have heard of Carillion. There’s no reason you should have. Its lack of glamour is neatly summed up by the name it sported in the 90s: Tarmac. But since then it has grown and grown to become the UK’s second-largest building firm – and one of the biggest contractors to the British government. Name an infrastructure pie in the UK and the chances are Carillion has its fingers in it: the HS2 rail link, broadband rollout, the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, the Library of Birmingham. It maintains army barracks, builds PFI schools, lays down roads in Aberdeen. The lot.

There’s just one snag. For over a year now, Carillion has been in meltdown. Its shares have dropped 90%, it’s issued profit warnings, and it’s on to its third chief executive within six months. And this week, the government moved into emergency mode. A group of ministers held a crisis meeting on Thursday to discuss the firm. Around the table, reports the FT, were business secretary Greg Clark, as well as ministers from the Cabinet Office, health, transport, justice, education and local government. Even the Foreign Office sent a representative.

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‘Shithole countries’? Words worthy of a racist-in-chief | Richard Wolffe

January 12, 2018, 3:20 am

≫ Next: Sexual abuse in Westminster won’t be ended by the revamped ministerial code | Kate Maltby

≪ Previous: The company that runs Britain is near to collapse. Watch and worry | Aditya Chakrabortty

Donald Trump has made no secret of his bigotry. The sad truth is his comments about Haiti and Africa reflect the US’s historic racism

Donald Trump knows a thing or two about “shitholes” – the label he apparently bestowed on El Salvador, Haiti and various African nations during an Oval Office meeting about immigration. His own father was reportedly so ashamed of coming from Germany – widely considered to be a “shithole” by Americans fighting in two world wars – that he pretended for most of his life that he was Swedish.

These Aryan dreams glowed all blond and bright through Trump’s seminal book, The Art of the Deal, in which he claimed his father arrived as a child from Sweden like some kind of Nordic dreamer.

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Sexual abuse in Westminster won’t be ended by the revamped ministerial code | Kate Maltby

January 12, 2018, 11:53 am

≫ Next: Referendum II is coming. Farage just can’t bear being a Brexit misfit | Marina Hyde

≪ Previous: ‘Shithole countries’? Words worthy of a racist-in-chief | Richard Wolffe

My complaint against Damian Green was deemed ‘plausible’. Without an independent body to look at victims’ claims, others can’t hope for the same result

I have been trying not to think about sexual harassment in Westminster. In October, I publicly described an uncomfortable experience with Damian Green, then the de facto deputy prime minister. Although others have since minimised my story as a tale of a “touch on a knee”, I perceived that he was suggesting sex while offering me a job. I expected an apology – the headline of my piece acknowledged that men such as Green rarely realise they’re doing anything wrong. His actions – threatening to sue for libel, briefing the Daily Mail to destroy my reputation, which he has denied – turned it into all-out war. In December, he resigned. It wasn’t a victory. No woman wants to be defined as the complainant in a sexual harassment case. My voice, cultivated over years as a journalist, has been lost in noise.

Yet today I’ve returned to this depressing issue. I agreed to be interviewed by the Guardian to support Ava Etemadzadeh, whose case against Labour MP Kelvin Hopkins has been languishing in the long grass since October. She first made a complaint two years ago. We met this week with Bridget Harris, one of 10 women who brought complaints against Liberal Democrat peer Lord Rennard. With the Women’s Equality party, which has supported us where others have failed, we are calling for independent bodies to adjudicate harassment across political parties.

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Referendum II is coming. Farage just can’t bear being a Brexit misfit | Marina Hyde

January 12, 2018, 11:18 am

≫ Next: If Oprah took on Trump, he would be the ultimate winner | Jonathan Freedland

≪ Previous: Sexual abuse in Westminster won’t be ended by the revamped ministerial code | Kate Maltby

Nigel backed Steve Bannon, but that blew up. So he’s back for one last job, to settle this thing once and for all. And then perhaps do it again

“So maybe, just maybe,” declared Nigel Farage dramatically yesterday, “I’m reaching the point of thinking that we should have a second referendum on EU membership.” “We understand more than anything what [the Tories] plan to do,” added his Brexit backer Arron Banks, “unfortunately.”

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If Oprah took on Trump, he would be the ultimate winner | Jonathan Freedland

January 12, 2018, 10:30 am

≫ Next: My 2018 resolution? No more self-doubt

≪ Previous: Referendum II is coming. Farage just can’t bear being a Brexit misfit | Marina Hyde

She’s better than him in so many ways but, whoever the victor, such a contest would confirm his view of the presidency as a celebrity post

Donald Trump is a stone-cold racist. There was surely no doubt about that, not after he launched his presidential campaign by branding Mexican migrants as rapists and criminals. Or after he praised the white supremacists who marched under swastika banners in Charlottesville as “very fine people”.

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My 2018 resolution? No more self-doubt

January 13, 2018, 12:59 am

≫ Next: Fit in my 40s: who knew buying running shoes was this complicated?

≪ Previous: If Oprah took on Trump, he would be the ultimate winner | Jonathan Freedland

I’ve been working on a book for over a decade, but like Jack in the Shining I’ve found myself recording the same things again and again. What am I waiting for?

I don’t believe in New Year resolutions, but I do believe in becoming so fed up with doing – or not doing – something that you realise something has to give, whatever the date. It just so happened that this came to me on 2 January, when I realised I’d been researching a long-planned book for (the dates on the files do not lie, as much as I wish they did) 14 years. As a teenager, I dreamed of growing up to be like Dorothea from Middlemarch, all spark and goodness, but it turns out I am actually Casaubon, her creaky husband, who rots away as he spends decades researching his magnum opus, The Key To All Mythologies.

I have spent a frankly bizarre portion of my life researching early 20th-century Poland and France (hey, we all get our kicks somewhere). But when I went through my crate of notes last week, I discovered something rather unsettling. I hadn’t just been researching for 14 years, I’d been researching the same things for 14 years. Like an archaeologist digging through strata, I went through my files going back over a decade, and the same information kept recurring: this fact, that figure, these statistics. I wasn’t Casaubon, after all; I was Jack in The Shining, allegedly writing a book, but actually just recording the same things again and again.

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Fit in my 40s: who knew buying running shoes was this complicated?

January 12, 2018, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Even in the age of Trump, Europe still takes its cues from America | Natalie Nougayrède

≪ Previous: My 2018 resolution? No more self-doubt

I feel a complete fraud: I have been running four times and pretended to go running a further three

A good way not to go running when you hate running is to decide that you can’t really start until you have the perfect shoe. It wasn’t even as simple as wandering round the shops: I had to get my gait analysed, which can happen one of two ways, on a running machine or, in one very special specialist shop in London, running down the road.

Dipika is the owner of Run And Become, which was established in the 1980s by her parents. She looks like an advert put out by an interwar government on the benefits of exercise, serene and zesty, deeply plausible. We walk out to a side street and I run 50 yards while she watches: at that moment, still in my regular shoes, which we’ve established are a size too small but otherwise functional. If you are familiar with the oeuvre of Noel Streatfeild, imagine a ballet mistress observing a new pupil for the first time: keen-eyed, warm, yet dispassionate.

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Even in the age of Trump, Europe still takes its cues from America | Natalie Nougayrède

January 12, 2018, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: I dreaded burying my mother. But it taught me about loss | Christina Patterson

≪ Previous: Fit in my 40s: who knew buying running shoes was this complicated?

Yes, French and US feminists are different. But talk of a gulf between our continents is overdone

Europe’s Americanisation is ongoing. That may well sound paradoxical. So many transatlantic gaps have appeared in the age of Trump. This American president repels many Europeans, and in unprecedented ways. Many on the old continent seek solace in the contrast: perhaps Europe’s hour could be on the horizon? But it’s striking how European debates on issues such as racism and feminism are now so strongly influenced by movements across the Atlantic. In the realm of ideas and campaigning, Europe and the US are drawing closer, not sliding further apart.

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I dreaded burying my mother. But it taught me about loss | Christina Patterson

January 12, 2018, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: India has 600 million young people – and they’re set to change our world | Ian Jack

≪ Previous: Even in the age of Trump, Europe still takes its cues from America | Natalie Nougayrède

Facing up to death shows us that we’re far stronger than we think in dealing with tragedy

On Monday, I buried my mother. Or perhaps I should say that I watched as my brother put the casket of her ashes in the grave. At first, he told me later, the hole for her casket wasn’t big enough. It had cost £575 to dig, but it still wasn’t big enough.

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India has 600 million young people – and they’re set to change our world | Ian Jack

January 12, 2018, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Censorship wins no arguments and just helps the right | Nick Cohen

≪ Previous: I dreaded burying my mother. But it taught me about loss | Christina Patterson

This new generation is motivated: it combines the cultural values of the traditional Asian family with the life goals of the American teenager

An illuminating and sometimes alarming book, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World, is published this month. About 600 million people, more than half India’s population, are under 25 years old; no country has more young people.

“No matter how poorly placed they find themselves now,” writes the book’s author, Delhi journalist Snigdha Poonam, “they make up the world’s largest ever cohort of like-minded young people, and they see absolutely no reason why the world shouldn’t run by their rules.” The effect, Poonam says, will be to “change our world in ways we can’t yet imagine”.

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Censorship wins no arguments and just helps the right | Nick Cohen

January 13, 2018, 10:30 am

≫ Next: Churches work in harmony in rural communities | Letters

≪ Previous: India has 600 million young people – and they’re set to change our world | Ian Jack

Banning the Daily Mail from Virgin trains achieves nothing but giving it a dissident glamour it doesn’t deserve

How you think is as important as what you think. If you believe you can ban your way to victory by mounting heresy hunts against all who veer from the true faith, you will not only deserve to lose by some airy moral reckoning. You will lose whether you deserve to or not. As losing is no longer a trivial event in the age of Brexit and Trump, it is worth understanding the consequences of going beyond the old liberal principle that only demagogues who incite violence should be banned.

The moral arguments against censorship are so old I can recite them in my sleep. The practical case against a “liberal” movement that reaches for the censor’s red pen like a drunk reaching for a bottle deserves more attention.

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