I’d been endlessly geed up about the ‘other Belfast novelist’, as if we were obliged to be enemies. I wasn’t having it

One unfortunate side-effect of publishing a novel is you end up fielding some strange reactions. I have one out later this year and I’ve already noticed certain patterns. People (and I have to say this is usually men) will stand with their shoulders back and one thumb hooked through their front right belt loop and say: “Go on then, sell it to me. Give me the elevator pitch.”

Or they will say “which bits are based on you then?” about characters you spent an excruciating amount of time crafting precisely because they aren’t you. “If this book is to be read as my diary then I shouldn’t have made everyone in it so morally clapped,” you will think grimly to yourself, as you smile and say: “Oh, it’s all made up.”

Rachel Connolly is a London-based journalist from Belfast and the author of Lazy City

From doctors like me to nurses, cleaners and secretaries, we’re all active in unions and fighting to win back what we are owed

• Joanna Sutton-Klein is an emergency medicine doctor in Manchester and a member of the BMA council

As an A&E doctor, I start every consultation these days by apologising for the long wait. For some of my patients, it means a scramble to organise emergency childcare. Others miss the window to access the best treatments for strokes or heart attacks.

The waiting room is a hotbed of emotion. My patients are understandably furious that they’ve been left in a windowless waiting room for hours with limited food and water, inadequate pain relief and little information about when they might be seen (aside from the hourly PA announcement that the current wait time is 15 hoursand is expected to increase).

Joanna Sutton-Klein is an emergency medicine doctor in Manchester and a member of the BMA council

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The disdain shown to us by Queen Mary University of London inspired me to redouble my efforts on the picket lines. Staff and students have had enough

On 29 June 2022, all the staff at Queen Mary University of London, where I work, received an email from management. To our horror, they were threatening to withhold 100% of our pay for 21 days of both July and August, because we were participating in a marking boycott over pensions, pay, labour precarity, inequality and working conditions. Life in the higher education sector had been getting tougher ever since I started my career in 2017. But at that moment, I not only resolved to continue to strike, but redoubled my efforts to get as many colleagues as possible to join me on the picket lines. The condescension from my employers made me feel something stark and visceral.

I hadn’t always felt so jaded. I finished my PhD in lawin 2016 and was ready to begin a life of service in education and research, working in the subject I cared passionately about. But several things quickly became clear. There was the increasing precarity of university labour: one-third of academics are on fixed-term contracts, 41% are on hourly paid contracts and there are still 29 institutions employing at least five academic staff on zero-hours contract. In 2021, it was reported that pay had been cut by 20% in real-terms over the past 12 years, while changes to the pension scheme mean that we’ve taken a 35% cut to our guaranteed retirement income despite contributing more. Meanwhile, university and college staff are doing the equivalent of two days’ unpaid work every week on average. It’s an environment that leaves me feeling, like many others, disillusioned and questioning my future.

Dr Tanzil Chowdhury is a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.

The challenges are myriad, including raising a child and, yes, using the toilet. But we’ve gained so much more than we lost

When people find out that I live on a narrowboat, their eyes light up. They say things like “Gosh, I’d love to do that,” and “That’s so bohemian of you!,” and “It must be so peaceful”. It is peaceful, sometimes, but it’s easy to forget that when you’re struggling to push open a heavy lock gate in the pouring rain with a screaming baby strapped to your chest. Still, I love the way I live: I love being close to the water, and feeling more connected to nature and in sync with the changing seasons than I did living on land.

That isn’t to say boat life was always the plan. I used to imagine I’d end up in some rambling old farmhouse, with Farrow & Ball wallpaper, period features and an open fire. I still get pangs when I visit friends’ seemingly enormous and lavishly equipped houses – upstairs and downstairs! A freezer! Hot taps! But for my husband, Nigel, and I, with our ill-paid, bookish jobs (I’m a writer, he’s a librarian. OK fine, my ill-paid job) along with, you know, The Economy, buying a house just isn’t feasible, especially where we live in Oxford. But owning his own home has always been important to Nige, who grew up in council housing, so we began to explore alternative options. Once we let go of the impossible goal of a house and focused instead on what we could afford, everything changed.

With the SNP vulnerable and the union debate stalled, Labour could succeed in Scotland, but it must offer the change people crave

For the first time in a rather long time, the mood within Scottish Labour is buoyant. Under Anas Sarwar’s leadership, the party has gone from potential political extinction to consistently polling about 29%, which would result in around 15 seats in the general election – up from the current total of one.

There is no room for complacency, though. A likable leader in Scotland, and a UK leader who looks on track to be the next prime minister, mean that Scottish voters are considering Labour as a serious electoral force again, but there is still much work to be done.

Katherine Sangster is the national manager for Scottish Fabians

UK-German relations are long and complicated, and not all symbolism is empty

King Charles III will not only travel to Berlin during his state visit to Germany this week, but also Hamburg, the country’s second largest city and home to its biggest port. Hamburg is a trading hub known for its Anglophilia, with close connections to Great Britain that go back centuries that were revived during the British occupation of the city after the second world war, when the former enemy quickly turned into a close partner.

When you take the long view at UK-German relations, this part of the king’s trip is at least as important and meaningful as his appointments in the German capital. Those who criticise royal visits as constituting little more than expensive photo-ops fail to understand that not all symbolism is empty.

Lesser politicians try to emulate Thatcher’s clever, contrarian chancellor. That’s risky in these very different times

In death this week at the age of 91, Nigel Lawson has been saluted by all wings of the Conservative party as a prophetic thinker and Tory exemplar for our times. Rishi Sunak led the way in this response, posting a photograph of himself as chancellor that showed one of his own first actions in the Treasury was to hang a portrait of Lawson on his wall.

There can be no disputing that, between 1983 and 1989, Lawson was an immensely significant and consequential Tory chancellor. Nor that, at his peak, he was one of the most influential ministerial figures of the Margaret Thatcher decade. He then wrote the most important memoir by any senior figure of those years. But it is a big mistake, and a destructively common one in the modern Tory party, to see him as a changeless icon for today.

Lockdown accelerated an existing trend. We need to reconnect the use of these buildings to the communities around them

For Christian worship in England, the Covid-19 lockdowns were a disaster. All churches were forced to close by the government. Where office working and high-street shopping led, Christianity followed. It stayed at home. Recently published research suggests that fully a quarter of Anglican churches are no longer holding weekly services. Five, 10, even 20 parish churches are being grouped under one hard-pressed vicar, with worshippers racing round to find which one is open.

Hopes that attendance would recover in 2022 have proved vain, though online worship has seen a boost. A preliminary survey of five representative dioceses suggests weekly attendance may have fallen during lockdown by more than 20%. It is even possible that the final year’s figure may be below half a million. This follows a 15-20% fall in the decade from 2009. Less than 2% of the population are now believed to regard themselves as “practising” Christians. A 2005 study found there were more mosque-going British Muslims, about 930,000, than regular worshippers in the Church of England. The significance of this for the king’s ecclesiastical coronation next month grows ever more alarming. A secular ceremony of some sort would surely be more suitable.

With swaths of white collar jobs at risk, the clock is ticking on the development of policy to meet this huge societal challenge

Elon Musk is not most people’s idea of a classic technophobe, so when the owner of Twitter warns of the dangers of artificial intelligence, it is worth sitting up and taking notice. Fearful that a new generation of ever-smarter machines threatens life on Earth as we know it, Musk was one of many at the cutting edge of technological change calling for a six-month timeout in the training of new AI systems.

There is nothing new in the idea that the machines are coming, and they are out to get us. Techno-optimists are right to say that the same arguments were aired by Luddites in the early 19th century. By this token, the chatbot ChatGPT is to the fourth industrial revolution what the spinning jenny was to the first – a product that symbolises the dawning of a new era.

Larry Elliott is the Guardian’s economics editor

‘Civility in politics’? Starmer may have to stable that faithful nag after Labour’s awful ‘paedo protector’ attack ad on Rishi Sunak

Encouraging news for anyone who fears the next election might be some fight for the moral high ground, as Labour releases a new attack ad. Have you seen this one? If not, do try to catch it before they take it down and tacitly blame someone nameless. It depicts a smiling Rishi Sunak next to the inquiry: “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.” Oh dear. In case that grim message was too opaque for you, Sunak’s famous signature is added, above the explainer: “Under the Tories, 4,500 adults convicted of assaulting children under 16 served no prison time. Labour will lock up dangerous child abusers.”

Righto. Attempts to cast this ad as a “dog whistle” seem misplaced, affording its stunning crassness a kind of subtlety that it simply can’t carry off. I think that when everyone can hear the dog whistle, it’s just a whistle? If you can’t discern the shrill sound of something telling you Rishi Sunak doesn’t want nonces to go to prison, do consider booking a hearing test at your very earliest convenience.

As prime minister, she was trusted and liked by voters. Then came allegations that she was a ‘party girl’

Competent, reasonable, functioning government doesn’t get much spotlight on the world stage, particularly when there are wars and pandemics going on. So when Sanna Marin took office at the end of 2019, it was noted that, at 34, she was Finland’s youngest ever prime minister, and the fourth youngest state leader in the world. But beyond that, she was sorted into the category “progressive, well-intended, needn’t detain us further”. It is a problem for another day that the left is not really interested in its own side, and the right is only interested in the left when it’s in chaos.

Various elements of her tenure went mainly unremarked, therefore: her Covid response, her announcement that Finland would apply to join Nato in May 2022, her social and fiscal policies that we might broadly classify as “the business of government”. It was only in the summer of last year, when video footage leaked of her at a party, that she became a talking point. Knowing what we know now about the interplay between tabloid and social media – the way agendas are set by traditional news outlets, then amplified wildly by new media’s insatiable quest for outrage – it felt more like a witch-hunt. She took a drugs test in the middle of August, and tested negative. Obviously, the long game wasn’t to lock her up: it was merely to bring her down.

The trouble with the monarchy is not that it is too powerful but that it is utterly useless, a worthless vacuum shrouded in ceremony

“Not My King,” say the yellow T-shirts of the anti-monarchists TV cameras may swerve around in the coronation crowds. But he is our king, willy-nilly, like it or not, as he and his family are our dependants. The Guardian’s deep dive into the royal family’s finances shows our monarchy costs a fortune, more than anyone else’s in Europe.

The Borbones of Spain cost a mere £7.4m a year, while we pay our Windsors a very pricey£86m. And that’s before we add in the roughly £40m a year in revenues from their Duchy estates– adding up to £1.2bn over the years. That’s not much really, monarchists may claim. Out of £1tn in annual government spending, the royals’ consumption of taxpayers money is a mere bagatelle, a fleabite.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

My new independence has been met with everything from curiosity to awkward laughter. But this is about me, not them

When Lost Migrations, an animated film series I’d been waiting to see for months, finally premiered in Karachi earlier this year, I immediately saved the date in my calendar. But instead of doing what I, or anyone around me, would usually do – coordinate with a group of friends – I decided to go alone.

A few years ago, the idea of doing anything alone, much less in Pakistan as a woman, would have seemed impossible. Women in Pakistan are generally expected to socialise inside, rather than in public (although there are growing attempts to challenge this by women’s movements), and many believe there can be safety risks to going out alone.

Anmol Irfan is a freelance journalist and founder of the Pakistani community magazine Perspective

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Despite the troubles facing the SNP, a revolution would be needed to remove it from power. Its core demand still stirs so many hearts

There is palpable glee in Westminster at the current predicament of the Scottish National party – with Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murrell, the party’s former chief executive, arrested last week, but released without charge pending further inquiries, as part of an investigation into SNP finances. But the unionist joy is misplaced.

Even without a resolution, and amid the party’s denial of any wrongdoing, the assumption is that independence is the cult of a political clique that has finally been rumbled.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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What do so many of the world’s most powerful men have in common? In lesser jobs they would have long been put out to pasture

“His holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way,” announces an apology from the office of the Dalai Lama, sounding for all the world like one of those statements issued in the first wave of #MeToo, as various older men made pained and absurd reference to “unwanted hugs” (Pixar’s John Lasseter) or a belief that they had been “pursuing shared feelings” (talkshow host Charlie Rose). Students of these mea-not-really-culpas were left with the impression that the victims’ misunderstanding was the real tragedy here, unless you counted the very belated losses of various glittering careers, which were obviously also desperately sad.

The specific “people” to which this current Dalai Lama apology refers are, in fact, one person – more accurately one young boy, who was invited to “suck my tongue” by the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, on stage at a temple in India. The event took place in February, but has only just gone viral, meaning an apology has only now been deemed necessary by his holiness, or rather by his holiness’s office.

Trivia, historical amnesia and dirty tricks have become the new norm. Neither party leader has the courage to buck that trend

When someone is said to look or sound like a politician it is never a compliment. That is unfortunate for Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Both were chosen to lead their respective parties because they offered a style of leadership that was more conventional, more typically political, than their predecessors.

Starmer’s pressed suits and lawyerly demeanour promised a new direction even before his disposal of Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto. Sunak’s brand as the diligent managerial type was cultivated by proximity to Boris Johnson, who embodied the opposite. It still took 40 days of Liz Truss for Tory MPs to grasp that seriousness is indispensable in a prime minister.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

The justice system in England and Wales is indeed on its knees. But aping rightwing rhetoric on crime is a high-risk strategy

We are squarely into the campaigning for May’s local elections across England, and the dominant feeling is of being part of a bizarre exercise in which you are constantly offered things you have not asked for. The disconnect between what Labour and the Conservatives are campaigning on and people’s real lives and needs – following an extended season of strikes and painful inflation – feels more pronounced than ever.

The Tories continue to bang on about small boats and transgender issues. It’s dispiriting, but expected. But what about Labour? If you are sick with anxiety about the rising cost of your essentials, your ability to pay bills at the end of the month, or a host of local concerns such as the closing of leisure facilities, declining town centres and public service infrastructure, most of what you have got so far from the official opposition is a blitz on restoring “law and order”.

Government ministers come a cropper in the Grand National credibility stakes

• You can order your own version of this cartoon

A Labour win still seems likely, but where’s the narrative? As the Tories shift further right, the stakes couldn’t be higher

Only six weeks ago, Keir Starmer’s Labour party seemed locked into the mood of optimism and quiet delight that had started to cohere over the previous autumn. Polls continued to show leads over the Tories of about 25 percentage points. Starmer was guardedly looking ahead to two terms in office and “a decade of national renewal”. Rishi Sunak and his allies, by contrast, were synonymous with disruption, impossible living costs and the state of constant internal chaos labelled “long Johnson”. We were still heading, it seemed, for one of those moments when a tired and divided ruling party simply collapses, and change becomes inevitable.

Maybe we still are. Whenever the next election arrives, Conservative defeat is still the most likely outcome. But as MPs prepare to return after the Easter recess, the battle between the two big Westminster parties has subtly shifted. Labour’s average poll lead is now in the teens rather than 20s, Starmer and Sunak’s personal ratings are almost even, and gurus of political gambling have been heard advising against any bets on an outright Labour win. The key reasons why are not hard to work out: notwithstanding such grinding problems as the ongoing strikes in the NHS, Sunak is just about managing to look like an efficient, stable, confident kind of leader, while Starmer seems stuck – ahead, but coasting.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

Charles Harris,David Silverman and Howard Temperly detect a whiff of ageism in the columnist’s criticisms of the Dalai Lama, Rupert Murdoch and other older men

So ageism lives in the Guardian (Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, the Dalai Lama: living proof that no one is too big for retirement, 11 April). Marina Hyde, whom I normally hold in high esteem (whatever her age), would presumably hesitate before putting the boot into any other minority than old men.

The Dalai Lama’s offence had nothing to do with his age. Rupert Murdoch’s media companies were just as unpleasant when he was a young man. And Joe Biden has been arguably more effective a president than the younger Barack Obama. A bit less of the ancient in her “ancient wisdom” would be appreciated.
Charles Harris (age 70 and eleven-twelfths)
London

The government’s plans for a net zero aviation sector will have little impact, says Nick Hodgkinson of the Group for action on Leeds Bradford airport

“Will flying ever be green?” asks your long read (6 April). The more urgent question is: will flying be green in the next seven years? The answer is no. As the article outlined, there are potential alternative fuels and new technologies that could, one day, make flying zero emission. But we must halve all greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 to retain a realistic hope of keeping the global temperature rise to 1.5C or as close as possible. That’s simply not going to happen in the aviation industry. And that’s why the Group for action on Leeds Bradford airport (Galba) is taking the government to court.

Both Galba and the climate charity Possible have been given permission for judicial review challenges against the government’s reckless and irresponsible jet zero strategy. This strategy is nominally intended to cut aviation emissions, but all independent analysis, such as the recent Royal Society and Imperial College reports, concludes that jet zero’s “techno-fix” proposals will not work within a climate-relevant timescale.

From aircraft to selfish neighbours, noise pollution seems unavoidable even in the countryside, and the government is moving at a glacial pace to tackle it, say our readers

As the coordinator of Hacan (Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise), I applaud Coco Khan’s article for recognising noise as a serious health issue (Shout it from the rooftops: the noise pollution in towns and cities is killing us, 10 April). This is one that continues to fly beneath the radar and requires serious action from the government at all levels.

According to the European Environment Agency, noise pollution is the second largest environmental threat to health, causing 12,000 premature deaths a year. Indeed, at Heathrow, at least 725,000 people are currently exposed to aircraft noise, with that figure expected to more than double should a third runway ever be built.

Populism and nationalism create their own version of the past, and Russia is harking back to the glory days of WWII

• Georgi Gospodinov is the author of Time Shelter, which has been longlisted for the 2023 Booker International prize

Four years ago, I wrote a novel in which the feeling that there was a “deficit of future” was so acute that every nation in Europe wanted to hold its own referendum on the past. Until then, referendums had always been about the future. But the moment arrived when the horizon closed, and we started to only look back towards the past. A referendum on the past would involve choosing to return to the happiest decade or year from the 20th century in each nation’s history. A deficit of future always unlocks huge reserves of nostalgia for the past: which decade would nations choose? Germany picks the very end of the 80s, a perpetuum mobile of 1989 in which the wall is constantly falling. Italy goes back to the 60s. It’s as if the map of Europe shifts from territorial to temporal, and nations close themselves up – for a very short while – inside their own happy past.

We are seeing this model – this strong pull backwards – being played out now. In short, time has replaced space. The world has been parcelled out, more or less explored and familiar. We are left with an immense ocean of time, which is really an ocean of the past.

As publishing looks to cash in on the BookTok revolution, it would do well to remember an earlier innovator, Peter Usborne

For three days this week, the world of books will descend on Kensington’s Olympia exhibition centre for the London book fair, one of the biggest set pieces of the international publishing year. After being cancelled in 2020, forced online in 2021 and losing a hefty proportion of its delegates last year to lingering Covid anxiety, it is hoped to be a return to form.

To those on the outside, the annual gathering might resemble an update of a Lowry painting of besuited figures hurrying towards a football stadium, only with fewer hats and bigger bags. Inside, however, it is more like a cerebral version of London fashion week, with cubicles instead of catwalks, where the business brains of the books world vie to identify, sell and take ownership of next season’s fashions.

France’s constitutional court has approved the president’s plans to raise the retirement age. That will not stop the protests

As France’s constitutional council debated the legality of Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reform last week, massed ranks of riot police stood by in central Paris. It was an unsettling sign of the times. Mr Macron’s reckless decision to use executive powers to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 – avoiding a parliamentary vote he thought he might lose – has turned a highly charged national debate into a wider crisis of democratic legitimacy. On Friday, the nine members of the great and the good who make up the council found themselves at the eye of the storm.

Following the court’s verdict that the reform is constitutionally sound, Mr Macron will hope to draw a line and move on. On Friday evening, his embattled prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, optimistically tweeted: “The law has reached the end of its democratic process.” That may technically be true, but the political reality is very different.

Smug detractors may roll their eyes, but this ancient art gave me a deep understanding of who I am – until it began to feel restrictive

In early 2017, I became completely fixated on the movements of Jupiter. The planet was hurtling towards my sign, Libra, which, in astrology terms, meant that I would feel the influence of the “luckiest” planet in the sky for as long as it remained in that position (a year). And I really did feel lucky that year. I found friends and lovers easily. I met the person I am now engaged to. Every day I woke up curious and excited, the bright, expansive presence of Jupiter floating right above me like a 61.42bn km² talisman. Thank you Jupiter, I remember thinking to myself. You are my favourite planet in space.

My astrology obsession may have reached new levels that year, but it’s always been there. The instant I was born, at 6.36am, my mum wrote down the time so that I’d have an accurate birth chart (an insight into my character based on the alignment of the planets at my time of birth). Growing up, my grandma often read our tarot, the cards spread out on her soft, flowery bed, a vehicle for an unspoken closeness. And I had my own private relationship with astrology, too. Potential relationships would be vetted via star signs(I date Sagittariuses, not Capricorns). Life choices would be explained by the planets (no one goes out during Cancer season). And my conception of myself became hugely shaped by my own astrological makeup (a double Libra: charming when necessary, persuasive, more than a little flaky). In later years, I’d find myself scanning horoscope websites and checking astrology apps such as Co-Star and The Pattern daily.

Daisy Jones is a writer and author of All the Things She Said

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We are diplomatic and military experts from across Europe. And we say give Ukrainians more arms, or risk a terrible stalemate

• Report: Former senior diplomats urge west to ‘go all in’ on military support for Ukraine

When Vladimir Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, he flagrantly violated international law and committed a breach of the UN charter. Denying Ukraine’s right to exist, he used massive force to try to erase it from the map of Europe, leaving an ever-increasing trail of gross human rights abuses and war crimes in the process. One year later, Putin has not given up his objective of taking over Ukraine; he believes he has more staying power than Ukraine and the international coalition that supports it.

If he succeeded, Putin would no doubt set his eyes on Moldova and possibly the Baltic states, increasing the risk of a direct confrontation between Russia and Nato. A Russian victory in Ukraine would undermine the rules-based international order and fundamental principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty, setting a dangerous precedent for territorial conquest elsewhere.

We cope with the micro slights and othering. But what are we to do when openly racist attitudes are exploited for political gain?

There is something particularly grotesque about a golliwog. It’s the smile, I think, its teeth frozen in a rictus grin behind the exaggerated redness of the lips. The golliwog seems to say that not only is it OK to “minstrelise” black people and display them as dolls, but that they should enjoy it.

That smile is the price of entry into white British society, of acceptance and integration into workplaces, social groups and our wider politics and culture. The golliwog, despite it being a relic of the past, is in fact a symbol of the present. You are only allowed visibility as a black figure if you’re grateful, permanently smiling in all circumstances. Your status, as someone who is part of Britain and therefore gets a say in how they experience it, is conditional on the fact that you must never suggest that the country is not quite so hospitable to you sometimes. Ideally, if you want social and professional mobility as a person of colour, if you want to be moved from the bottom shelf to a position of higher prominence, you must go further. You must grin harder and always maintain that Britain is, in fact, a race-relations utopia, even as things regularly happen that prove that we are far from that.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

No wonder type 2 diabetes is surging among young people – chicken nuggets and chips are cheaper than vegetables

• Dr Camilla Kingdon is president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health

Historically, seeing a child with type 2 diabetes would have been almost unheard of for a paediatrician like me. Data now shows that is no longer the case, with the number of children being treated at paediatric diabetes units in England and Wales jumping by more than 50% in the last five years.

As is too often the case, children living in the most deprived areas are most affected. It’s no coincidence that these areas also have the highest rates of food insecurity and childhood obesity. The rising numbers of obese children and young adults across the UK has resulted in a rise in type 2 diabetes cases among those aged 18 to 39.

The obsession with a subject most people don’t need to study until they are 18 is typical of a system that fails to equip pupils for modern life

Rishi Sunak is clearly gripped by maths. Today’s attack on what he sees as Britain’s “anti-maths mindset” is his second this year. The prime minister wants to embarrass all innumerates and make not being good at maths socially unacceptable. Lack of maths, he says, is costing the country “tens of billions a year”. So he wants students in England to study maths in some form until they are 18, with a review forthcoming.

Ever since Margaret Thatcher, certain politicians have been obsessed by maths – and for one reason. Its results are quantifiable, measurable and susceptible to central control. Yet two of the most successful countries in the supposed endgame of maths – the science industries – are the US and Britain, and they rank 17th and 38th in the Pisa international rankings for maths. In other words, for the minority of pupils whose careers require maths – and who keep Britain in the top leagues for Nobel prizes – the nation’s maths seems good enough. It is fine too for those for whom the subject is both fascinating and even beautiful, which includes me.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

I thought the party couldn’t sink lower than Boris Johnson, but the awful rhetoric now must make it intolerable for people of colour

I have been a politics junkie since 1960. Accordingly, I remember the Labour party introducing the Race Relations Act 1965, while Conservatives regularly made and defended racist remarks, the worst being Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in 1968. My future wife’s Pakistani origin family in Romford experienced racist attacks for the first time after that speech.

Despite this, in 1983, as a new convert to free-market capitalism, I joined the Conservative party because I considered that Margaret Thatcher was transforming Britain for the better. I still do.

Mohammed Amin is a former chair of the Conservative Muslim Forum

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Champagne celebration | Meaty matters | Problem potholes | Silencing Alexa | Bags of confusion

Just like Tim Dowling’s wife (Tim Dowling: my wife is alone while I’m on tour. Will she cope?, 15 April), I had the house to myself while my other half went off on a jolly with old uni chums. To treat myself, I bought a small bottle of champagne. I was looking forward to this mini celebration, but when the moment came, I couldn’t open it. C’est la vie.
Christine Hayes
Wokingham, Berkshire

• Re your article on plastic packaging in supermarkets (‘Change is always difficult’: from no lids to vac-packs, the war on plastic packaging divides opinion, 14 April), one customer complained that a pack of vacuum-packed meat “resembled a body part”. Er ... what part of minced beef is not a body part?
David Gordon
Manchester

Paul Brannen makes the case for using natural materials for home insulation

Your report (UK insulation scheme would take 300 years to meet government targets, say critics, 9 April) is bad climate news, but the situation is actually worse. Even if we did speed up insulating our leaky homes, we would simply be robbing Peter to pay Paul. Because more than 95% of our insulation materials have manufacturing processes that involve the burning of fossil fuels, resulting in high levels of embodied energy in the insulation. Actual figures are elusive as it’s not in the interests of the manufacturers of insulation made from polystyrene, polyurethane, glass wool or stone wool to make them public.

We need to switch to nature-based materials such as wood fibre, which can both substitute for the majority of carbon-intensive insulations and store carbon removed from the atmosphere when the tree was growing. Sequestration, substitution and storage are low‑hanging fruit when it comes to tackling the built environment’s huge CO₂ emissions. It’s high time we picked it.
Paul Brannen
Former MEP, 2014-19, agriculture and environment committees

Rev Dr Ian Paul says Church of England bishops are proposing a blessing be offered to people, not a relationship

The Church of England does not “plan to offer to bless the civil marriages of same-sex couples” (Anglican groups revolt against same-sex blessing plan, 10 April). The proposal from the bishops, as yet incomplete, is that a blessing will be offered to people, not a relationship. Also, reaction against this plan is not by a “small but vocal” group. In the General Synod, the voting of laity was only 52% to 48% in favour; nearly half did not agree with what was being proposed.

Those opposed are not “conservative” or “traditionalist”, but simply Anglicans. It is not they, but the Church of England itself, which believes that marriage is a lifelong and exclusive union of one man and one woman “according to the teaching of our Lord” (Canon B30) – and this teaching was specifically reaffirmed by Synod. This is canon law and, the church being established, is also the law of the land, assented to by parliament.

Dr David Griffith points out that the lack of symptoms for type 2 diabetes makes it a particularly pernicious condition

Your article on diabetes provided much useful information (Inaction on diabetes has plunged the UK into a wholly avoidable crisis, 13 April), but it is important to clarify one point. The symptoms mentioned (thirst, passing a lot of urine, unintentional weight loss) are particularly features of type 1 diabetes, which, as the article states, only accounts for about 8% of cases. The far commoner type 2 diabetes, linked to obesity, is frequently symptomless and may only be detected by chance during screening or on testing before operations, for example.

This lack of symptoms makes it a particularly pernicious condition as the body may be undergoing insidious damage over years without the person realising they have diabetes. This leads to the other major way in which the condition is detected, namely with problems with already damaged tissues such as eyes, nerves, kidneys or vascular systems. These changes may by then be irreversible. Absence of symptoms unfortunately does not rule out the possibility of diabetes.
Dr David Griffith
Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire

Readers on the poor pay and working conditions that have led junior doctors down the path of strikes

The government needs to be more proactive in relation to the crisis happening in our healthcare system (NHS bosses urge Steve Barclay to accept Acas role in dispute with junior doctors, 12 April). Junior doctors are instrumental to fixing the crisis. They progress to being the leaders of services and systems in the future, and at present recognise the disparity between themselves and other equivalent professional salaries and work-life experiences. They carry much debt (funding five or six university years), and there is no doubt that pay has been eroded. The job is also harder, carries more risk and is often less professionally satisfying than 10 years ago. Is this reflective of current government ideology, or poor central decision-making?

I suggest that consultants are adequately remunerated, but the junior tiers are not, and the current situation is highly detrimental to the future of healthcare.
Dr Sara Motion
NHS paediatric consultant

When it comes to Irish politics, the US president has baggage. But the DUP’s attempts to cast him as a meddling nationalist won’t wash

Normally it is difficult for a visitor to arrive in Ireland without seeing large signs proclaiming how welcome they are. The fusillade of unionist hostility that marked Joe Biden’s visit to Belfast suggests a very different message. You would almost think that everything in Northern Ireland would have been sweetness and light if only the US president had had the decency to have stayed away.

Unionist politics deployed big guns against Biden’s visit. The former Democratic Unionist party leader Arlene Foster can be quite pragmatic; on Wednesday, even she declared that he “hates the United Kingdom”. Her former deputy, Nigel Dodds, dismissed the president as “transparently pro-nationalist”. Predictably, the DUP MP for East Antrim, Sammy Wilson, suggested an even darker purpose, charging Biden not just with the crimes of being “anti-British” and “pro-republican” but of “trying to force the UK to fit into the EU mould”.

Something was amiss but I couldn’t say why. I was a sixth-form student and talking to a girl who told me with utter confidence that “white people can’t be victims of racism”. Racism is about power and privilege. White people have power and privilege. Black people and Asians don’t. This means that only the latter group can be victims of racism; racism is the exercise of power and privilege against people of colour.

I nodded at the time – she almost convinced me. Almost. I admired her clarity but felt her account was too neat. I liked her passion but thought it was painfully misguided.

The omnipresence of consultancies is harming public services, while creating lucrative opportunities for private profit

Shortly after Margaret Thatcher took power, her environment secretary, Michael Heseltine, wrote: “The management ethos must run right through our national life – private and public companies, civil service, nationalised industries, local government, the National Health Service.” Since 1980, ministers have stayed true to his word. Britain is the outsourcing capital of Europe. No other country on the continent relies so heavily on the consulting industry to do the work of the state. Earlier this year, ministers quietly dropped restrictions on spending controls, allowing Whitehall departments to potentially spend even more on external consultants.

Those controls were the product of David Cameron’s 2008 pledge to end what he called the reign of “policy by PowerPoint”. Mr Cameron correctly argued that the use of consultancies had exploded under New Labour, whose faith in the credo of New Public Management, an agenda that sought to make the public sector function more like a business, produced lucrative opportunities for consultancies. Yet the story was hardly different under the Conservatives. While spending on consultants initially decreased under Mr Cameron’s government, economists Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington note that consultancy firms bid for contracts at cut-price rates in an attempt to gain a foothold in government. When the time came for the state to spend big, the consultants would be ready.

Rishi Sunak doesn’t merely look aloof – he appears to think the rules don’t apply to him

Polling companies often ask voters to pick a description from a list of phrases that they most associate with political leaders. When YouGov did this for Rishi Sunak in late March, the words people thought best characterised the prime minister was “out of touch”. This is hardly surprising. The family fortune is so big that he and his wife, Akshata Murty, appear on the Sunday Times rich list. He can not only afford a private swimming pool but also to pay to upgrade the local electricity grid to heat it. But the news that the prime minister is being investigated by the Commons standards watchdog over a failure to declare his wife’s interest in a childcare business that may benefit from his government’s budget is about more than mere wealth. It suggests that Mr Sunak is not just aloof but he thinks that the rules don’t apply to him.

Mr Sunak knows how toxic that charge can be – as it helped end Boris Johnson’s stint in Downing Street. The prime minister might dismiss the comparison. He says he did register his wife’s shares in Koru Kids, a private childminding agency that is taking part in a government pilot, with the Cabinet Office. The trouble is a statement of ministers’ interests has yet to be published. There are thus no public records available that Mr Sunak has registered his wife’s commercial interests.

This latest cache of secret documents is yet another own goal by a pathologically confused security service

So far this century, there have been three major public “compromises” of US intelligence material. The first – the WikiLeaks series initiated by Chelsea Manning – revealed the mayhem at the heart of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Edward Snowden’s vast cache uncovered the US state’s campaign of unlawful surveillance against its own people. Over the past week, we have seen yet another collection of secret documents ruffle the feathers of US intelligence.

Of the three sets of leaks, the most recent is, in itself, the least politically damaging. But what they demonstrate again is the dangerous self-created and continuing rot at the heart of the US intelligence system: the combination of over-classification and the widespread availability of access to secret material.

I spend a lot of time helping troubled organisations, and the recurring problem is bosses prioritising targets over clear and decent values

The Metropolitan police has clear values on its website and a detailed ethics code. The fire service has a similarly robust code of ethics. Tony Danker, then director general of the Confederation of British Industry, gave a speech to a Future of Work conference about the importance of values in the workplace and how they matter now more than ever. Yet in all three organisations, toxic cultures have come to light in recent weeks. Days after his speech, Danker was sacked.

We know now that there is a big gap between what these organisations and their leaders say is important and what actually happens within them. Noticing and learning about that gap is what understanding culture is all about. It should be the number one priority for senior leaders. But ask them what’s on their priority list, and they’re likely to talk about quarterly results, growth or hitting targets.

A new report says the UK’s compensation scheme is ‘hostile’. When will ministers live up to their responsibilities?

As we mark 75 years since the Empire Windrush anchored in Tilbury docks, heralding the arrival of many Commonwealth citizens to help rebuild the country after the second world war, the question must be asked: is there any further indignity the UK state can inflict on them?

Consider this week’s report from Human Rights Watch into the administration of the scheme. It confirms the worst fears of the Windrush scandal victims and survivors, many of whom predicted that the institutional prejudice, ignorance, carelessness and inhumanity that drove the scandal would resurface if the Home Office were allowed to manage the compensation scheme.

There has been too little publicity to help people comply. If ministers won’t spread the word, we should do so ourselves

When the polling card for this May’s local elections arrived, as usual I stuck it on the fridge absent-mindedly without looking. It was only when it fell off the fridge at the weekend that, in picking it up, I noticed the small print about bringing photo ID to vote for the first time this year.

Like countless other married women, I live a double life. I kept my maiden name for work and assorted official purposes, but use my married name for the personal stuff: school runs, doctor’s appointments, taking the dog to the vet. Having two identities feels like a useful marker of where “work me” clocks off and the private one takes over, but administratively speaking … well, let’s not mention the time my husband booked a surprise weekend abroad, and I unromantically pointed out en route to Heathrow that my ticket was in the wrong name.

The jury’s still out on whether vapes are better for us than smoking. So why is the UK government handing them out?

I am vaping right now. It’s a watermelon one, which I bought from Sainsbury’s rather than from the vape shop that, unfortunately, is the nearest shop of any kind to where I live. The ones I normally buy are Triple Mango. “Oh, is one mango not enough?” people reliably joke when I tell them what flavour it is. No amount of mango could apparently be enough. If they brought out Quadruple Mango I’d be there banging my debit card on the counter. Earlier this week, the man who runs the vape shop took me through the new flavours he’d just got in, like I am a connoisseur of fine whisky. I’m not that. I am a silly little girl who likes her dummy.

I have had my brain well and truly fried over the past nine months or so by vapes. Not the old-style vapes: unflavoured, nerdy-looking objects that were for a long time the preserve of morose ex-smokers. The dumb fruity ones you’ve seen everywhere, littering the pavements, clutched in the mitts of pub-goers and people waiting for the bus, called things like Blappleberry Blast or Dr Maniac’s Pinacoloco.

Growing up near the border there was no physical barrier. Now war has forced citizens of both sides to choose their identities

Where do you call home? I’ve travelled and lived in so many places that the question sometimes confused me. Being eastern Ukrainian doesn’t make it easy to look for your roots, either.

Two world wars, the Holodomor, Stalin’s red terror, the collapse of the USSR, decades of isolation from the outside world. But I know from tracing my family tree – as best I could – back to the 18th century that the place I was born into is my ancestral home. A small town called Dvorichna and the villages around it in Kharkiv Oblast, only 19 miles from the Russian border. Since the war, that home has become a frontline, my parents’ house has become a lair for the occupiers, my school has become a shooting range and my entire village has become a battlefield.

Artem Mazhulin is a Ukrainian journalist based in Kyiv

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Nothing says ‘monumental’ like commemorative mugs, a tarragon quiche and 4,000 articles about two California residents

In the week before Harry and Meghan’s wedding I watched a woman in the Kensington Palace shop buy a mug that featured the entwined initials of the couple and retailed at £39. “I love how down to earth they are,” she said. I wonder where that mug is now (the cup, not the woman). There will always be new mugs, of course, and the Royal Collection is currently selling a coronation tankard for £50, as well as such essentials as a £40 bone-china coronation pillbox finished in 22-carat gold, possibly in keeping with King Charles’s oft-stated mission to modernise the monarchy. If you are one of the lucky Brits selected by lottery to receive a GP appointment before the big day, do consider purchasing it and popping your medication in it.

In the meantime you have to ask: how confidence-inspiring, really, is any event that has thus far been defined by about 4,000 articles (and counting) about the attendance or non-attendance of a couple of guests? Nothing says “we’re bigger than that and have moved on” like obsessing over the social plans of two California residents. This event is so inspiring and generational and monumental that the sole thing people can get truly worked up about is how their worst person in the world isn’t coming to it. Surely the one interesting thing about King Charles isn’t his fractured relationship with his younger son? And yet, the tale of the column inches seems to suggest it might be. For a couple we keep hearing are no longer important, the Sussexes do still seem to be the only subject in town.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

Authenticity, not net worth, is the issue when a millionaire prime minister tries too hard to be normal

People don’t generally go into British politics for the money, although the money isn’t bad. The basic annual MPs’ salary of £84,144 is more than double the UK average. Ministers earn even more. But there are quicker ways to get rich.

There are careers where greed can go naked. In politics it has to skulk in itchy robes of public service. Bankers and hedge fund managers don’t need to explain what principle called them to global finance. When Rishi Sunak did those jobs, I doubt he was ever asked why. By the time he switched to politics, he had earned heaps of cash and married Akshata Murthy, the daughter of a billionaire. Cupidity was not the reason he sought office.