World news and comment from the Guardian | guardian.co.uk

Why so many find the Mark Duggan verdict hard to accept | Matthew Ryder
Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem – review
British man killed and wife injured in St Lucia boat attack
Film ratings: a little advice for the BBFC | Victoria Coren Mitchell
Big Day Out hits Australia's Gold Coast with Snoop Dogg and Arcade Fire
So Frenchy, So Chic: sunshine, great food, and rap from the banlieues
Sydney Festival: So Frenchy, So Chic – in pictures
Black Diggers – review
Syrian National Coalition agrees to join peace talks despite grave misgivings
Mitt: Sundance 2014 - first look review
Gender inequality: the unjust gulf between men and women | Observer editorial
Gudirr Gudirr, Marrugeku – review
Slavery: this shameful history has beeen ignored for too long | the big issue
'Monsieur Jacques' reveals role in release of Nelson Mandela
Mentoring scheme gives women keys to gates of power
George Clooney film on hunt for Nazi art thefts attacked for ignoring real-life British war hero
Wrong 'Un – review
What is privacy? Ask Hollywood, not François Hollande
Against Me!: Transgender Dysphoria Blues – review
The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness
For the record
New to Nature No 117: Timorus sarcophagoides
Birds' migration secrets to be revealed by space tracker
Alan Jones backs convicted child killer Kathleen Folbigg, reports say
Bushfire concern shifts to NSW, as South Australia conditions ease

Why so many find the Mark Duggan verdict hard to accept | Matthew Ryder

Posted: 19 Jan 2014 01:00 AM PST

The 'lawful killing' verdict at Mark Duggan's inquest raises worrying questions about how black men are perceived, writes a leading barrister

You learn as a barrister that it is usually very unwise to second-guess a jury. However unpalatable or surprising a verdict might be, you respect a jury's conclusions and you move on. But, in the days following the verdict of lawful killing in the Mark Duggan inquest, two people have explained to me in compelling terms why they find that so difficult in this case.

The first was a community activist who grew up in Tottenham in the 1970s and 80s: Stafford Scott. The second was a Jamaican woman who came to this country in the 1960s and, with her English husband, brought up two mixed-race sons in London: my mother. Their concerns were slightly different. Scott set out why he believed the jury got it wrong. In contrast, my mother helped me understand why, for people like her, it is equally worrying if the jury got it right.

The jury concluded that Duggan did not have a gun by the time he stood on the pavement before officers, but also decided that the killing was lawful. How could it have been lawful to shoot a man who was not in possession of a gun and therefore could not have posed a deadly threat? One view is that the jury must have decided that the officer who fired the fatal shots got it wrong. In other words, he had an "honest but mistaken belief" that Duggan was more dangerous than he actually was. And Duggan paid for that mistake with his life.

Less than a week after the verdict, I saw Stafford Scott speak at a packed meeting convened in the House of Commons by Hackney MP Diane Abbott. He set out with forensic detail that would have made most lawyers proud why it was so hard for him to make sense of the verdict based on an "honest but mistaken belief".

The officer who fired the fatal shots, known as V53, gave evidence that at the critical moment he had been staring directly at a gun in Duggan's hand. He even described the gun in detail. He remembered it so clearly that he talked of a "freeze-frame moment" as Duggan turned towards him holding the handgun with his forearm parallel to the ground. "I am 100% sure he was in possession of a gun," V53 told the jury. The problem was that, on the jury's findings, Duggan was not – could not – have been holding a gun at that time, let alone pointing it at anyone. The scene that V53 was "100% sure" he saw simply could not have taken place.

"I don't understand how there could have been an honest but mistaken belief about seeing the gun," Scott said. "And that is why the verdict is – in legal language – 'perverse'." He added wryly: "Perverse is not a word you hear a lot on the streets of Tottenham. If something is this badly wrong, we tend to use more colourful language to express our surprise. But it's a word you're going to start hearing in our community. This is a perverse verdict."

Even if, like me, you balk at any attempt to go behind a jury's conclusion, Scott's analysis is exceptionally powerful. You can understand why the family are considering judicial review. And, before dismissing what he says as merely the disappointment of those supporting the Duggan family, it is worth bearing in mind that on Scott's analysis the verdict should also cause the police very real concern.

If the police are to respect the jury's verdict, they must move forward on the basis that V53's description of events is not what happened. And the very precise detail with which he said he saw those impossible events makes his account even more disturbing.

V53 may have given an entirely honest description of what he now thinks he saw, but his perception appears to have been far removed from reality. The Metropolitan police will need to consider very carefully whether an officer who made such a serious mistake – and who still seems convinced that he saw something he could not have seen – should be placed back on frontline duty with a gun in his hand.

But it was my mother trying to make sense of the verdict, rather than criticise it, that brought home the wider impact of the case. When I explained to her that Mark Duggan's killing may have been lawful because of the officer's "honest but mistaken belief that he was more dangerous than he actually was", she was not satisfied or reassured. She was deeply troubled.

The stereotype of the "threatening", "frightening", "dangerous" black man is so well established in popular culture that it almost requires no introduction. It is something that every black boy is painfully aware of as soon as he leaves home each day. So it is all the more frightening to discover that a misconceived, inflated view of a black man's dangerousness could itself be part of a legal justification for the force used against him. That is why the Duggan case, even for those trying to accept the jury's verdict, strikes at the deepest and most powerful fears about how black men are misperceived.

In 2002, following police shootings of unarmed black men in New York, the US Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a seminal paper entitled "The Police Officer's Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals". It described a study that monitored people playing a special video game based on decisions to shoot suspects who appeared to hold guns or other objects. The study found that they were far quicker to decide to shoot an African-American suspect than a white one in similar circumstances, because the black suspects were perceived as more dangerous.

The disparity did not necessarily correspond with the person having racist or hostile view towards black people. It simply arose out of an association – at some level – of the two concepts of "African-American" and "violent".

This perception runs deep. If there is one thing that unites the young black guy facing armed police with the one looking to make a sale to a customer or about to address a business meeting, it is that each of them is acutely aware that he has to make an effort to be that little bit less intimidating or frightening. If he lets his emotions show, he runs a greater risk of an "honest but mistaken belief" that he is being threatening or aggressive. In an extreme situation, that error may cost him his life.

But, in other contexts, he may miss out on that promotion, or simply not get hired in the first place: no one wants the "angry" black guy around. It is perhaps for this reason that so many of us, with lifestyles very different from that of Mark Duggan, can nevertheless imagine ourselves in his shoes.

Of course, we do not know what was going through V53's head at that fatal moment. Neither do we know how or why he made the decision that he did, particularly if what he says he saw could not actually have taken place.

For all the concerns that my mother and many others may have, Duggan's ethnicity may have had nothing at all to do with V53's perception of his dangerousness. But, if you are attempting to understand the wider impact of the case and why "lawful killing" is so difficult for many people to accept, it is important to address the real fears over the stereotyping of black men and how dangerous they are.

Whether or not the verdict is successfully challenged by judicial review, there remains unfinished business in the Duggan case. First, if the shooting is justified only because of a terrible mistake by V53, the Duggan family needs sympathy, not scorn. They are tragic victims, and their loved one was killed when he should not have been. Respecting the jury's verdict means acknowledging that.

Second, we need a rigorous investigation to discover why this tragic mistake happened. Neither the inquest verdict nor V53's evidence explains it. Was it an understandable mistake or an irrational one? Was it based on an unreasonable, inflated, inaccurate fear of how dangerous Duggan was? If so, why? Did flawed information given to the officer contribute to that perception of dangerousness, or was it something else?

Third, and most importantly, the Metropolitan police need to explain what steps are being taken to ensure – so far as is possible – that such serious errors will not happen again.

Unless that work is done, even those with faith in the legal system will remain shaken by the verdict. And thousands of people, like my mother years ago, will watch their sons, fathers, brothers and husbands leave the house each day with the fear that the law will sanction the "honest but mistaken belief" that they are dangerous, when they are not.

Matthew Ryder

Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem – review

Posted: 19 Jan 2014 01:00 AM PST

Jonathan Lethem recreates America through voices from the left – but forgets the proletariat

One disappointment of John Lanchester's otherwise highly engaging Capital was the rather half-hearted whodunnit that knits together the inhabitants of the London road upon which the novel is set. A more ambitious (and more risky) approach would have done away with the demands of traditional narrative structure, allowing the geography of the road to dictate the plot of the novel much as Georges Perec used the architecture of a Parisian apartment block to shape his masterpiece, Life: A User's Manual. In Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens any nods to traditional modes of plotting feel accidental. Instead, we have a series of loosely linked stories whose organising principle is a conception of history, a Weltanschauung.

Last year, I gave lecture at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's former estate near Moscow. My speech was about politics and literature: novels, I argued, ought to rise above the grubby concerns of their day and rather find their political stance within the uniquely democratic act that is the writing of fiction. Lethem clearly wasn't listening. Dissident Gardens is stridently, unapologetically political. Over a span of almost a century and with a cast of richly drawn eccentrics, the novel's overlapping stories give us an alternative history of America, seen through the eyes of the radical left. Lethem's viewpoint is necessarily partisan, his position clear: in an era when the victory of selfish capitalism in the US is near-absolute, America is losing the ability to conceive of other modes of existence. In a world where history is written by the victors, this is an attempt to recuperate a lost narrative: the possibility of American communism.

At the novel's heart sits the matriarch Rose Angrush Zimmer, a "consummate enraged flaneur" and resident of a planned community in Queens, New York, called Sunnyside Gardens (Lethem has left his beloved Brooklyn, but he has not gone far). With Rose, her vampish daughter Miriam, and a host of other near and not-so-near friends and relatives, we step through the history of radical America. The novel opens in 1955, as Rose is expelled from the American Communist party, purportedly as a result of her affair with a black policeman. She meets her fall with bitter humour: "The true communist," she says, "always ends up alone." Through the 60s and 70s Miriam (a less angry version of Swede Levov from Philip Roth's American Pastoral) adopts her mother's mantle, although, as Cousin Lenny says to Rose: "You tried to change conditions for the working class and alter the doomed trajectory of civilisation. Your daughter just wants to put LSD in the water supply." The novel ends in the contemporary moment with the Occupy movement as the last bastion of a proud, doomed tradition.

Dissident Gardens has some obvious literary forebears – the now near-forgotten voices of early American socialism: Nelson Algren, Upton Sinclair and Michael Harrington's epic The Other America. Although here we find one of the problems in Lethem's project. The writers of the American left have historically concerned themselves with the lot of the working classes; of the many voices that Lethem uses to tell Dissident Gardens, all are educated, middle-class and knowing. We have Rose, the fiery autodidact; Miriam, a brainbox who skips ahead in school; Cicero Lookins, who is taken under Rose's wing and becomes a cynical professor at a New England college; Sergius Gogan, Miriam's son, a songwriter. It seems strange that a history of a movement that sought the emancipation of the proletariat should feature no proletarian voices. But this, perhaps, is Lethem's point: it was because socialism remained the preserve of the urban intelligentsia that it never gained a foothold in the States.

Another precursor is Roth's I Married a Communist. Both novels attempt to establish a counter-history of the American left, both novels see in Abraham Lincoln an early fellow traveller, or rather the kind of leader the left needed in the 20th century, but never had. The comparison again initially tells against Lethem. Roth's book is angry, bitter, brilliantly haunted by Senator McCarthy. It is contained and forceful in a way that Dissident Gardens, because of its massive scope, cannot be. There are some powerful episodes in Lethem's novel – Miriam's trip to Nicaragua, the letters between Miriam and her father, the strikingly effective ending – but others fall flat, stuffed as they are with dogma, speechifying and political niceties.

Lethem is to be applauded for the spirit behind this novel. It feels like an urgent and necessary message at a time when Wall Street is once again poised with its heel on the face of the 99% and even the young view Occupy, as one character notes of his students, "with the agnosticism they'd feel toward a social media site from which no peer had yet sent them an invite". In the end, though, politics trumps plot, and those who are looking for a madcap romp like Motherless Brooklyn or a heartwarming Bildungsroman like The Fortress of Solitude will be left educated, certainly, rather less entertained.

Alex Preston

British man killed and wife injured in St Lucia boat attack

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 11:16 PM PST

Caribbean authorities name Roger Pratt as victim in attack that took place on a boat moored off the Vieux Fort coast

At least two people are being held by police in the Caribbean after a Briton was killed apparently while defending his wife.

Police in St Lucia said investigations were continuing after 62-year-old Roger Pratt from Warwickshire died when he was attacked on his boat on Friday - just hours after the couple's plan to leave was thwarted by officials.

Pratt's wife Margaret was treated in hospital after the attack.

A spokesman for St Lucia police said Pratt died trying to defend his wife from attackers, but said there was no evidence the man was shot.

He said: "Nobody has been arrested yet but there are some guys in custody.

"The investigators are very busy looking at what happened."

The couple's boat was moored off the Vieux Fort coast where they had been staying as part of the round-the-world voyage, celebrating Mrs Pratt's 60th birthday.

The couple left Lowestoft in June, navigating the English coastline before heading to the Algarve and on to the Caribbean.

Writing on her LinkedIn profile before she left, Mrs Pratt said: "Off travelling! The plan is to be in the Caribbean for my 60th birthday in January 2014... all a bit of a leap into the unknown."

The couple lived in the village of Moreton Morrell.

Writing on her blog in the hours before the attack, Mrs Pratt spoke of how bureaucracy thwarted their attempts to leave that part of the Caribbean.

She said: "On Thursday morning the plan was to clear out from Soufriere, then to travel south and use up the 72 hours before we had to be away.

"But bureaucracy intervened. HM Customs and Excise in Soufriere told us that exit had to happen within 24 hours of clearing out; and that anyway, we couldn't clear out of Soufriere that day because the Immigration Officer hadn't come to work(!!)

"So here we are in Vieux Fort, the most southerly port of clearance in St Lucia. It's very different. There's a port; an airport and no tourists – and so it's a regular town."

The St Lucian tourism minister, Lorne Theophilus, said: "It is with much regret that I and other industry partners have learnt of the unfortunate incident which has resulted in the loss of life of a visitor to our shores.

"At this time we extend our sincerest condolences to the family of British national Roger Pratt. To his wife, who also sustained injuries as a result of the attack off the Vieux Fort coast, we extend our deepest sympathies. Our prayers are with her for a speedy recovery.

"This is an active investigation and law enforcement is leading the charge in an attempt to bring the perpetrator or perpetrators to justice speedily. Law enforcement officials have briefed myself and other senior tourism officials on aspects of the case although I am not at liberty to share some of those details with you at this time."

The couple celebrated Mrs Pratt's birthday earlier in month at Margiot Bay, on the west coast of St Lucia. She described it as "a delightful and memorable day".

Film ratings: a little advice for the BBFC | Victoria Coren Mitchell

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 10:50 PM PST

The censors have been rethinking their movie certificates. Well, I have some ideas of my own

Not having children, I can only imagine what they're like from what I read in the newspapers. It seems they're low-maintenance companions, these days: happy to amuse themselves by spending long hours on the internet, watching hardcore porn and cyber-bullying each other. This must be relaxing for parents, freeing up plenty of time for sleep and gardening.

With the joys of unlimited sex and violence available at the tap of a keyboard, I wonder if children still feel excited at seeing 18-certificate films underage? I suppose they don't.

It's a shame. One of my happiest memories is of being allowed by my parents, as a 15th birthday treat, to impress my visiting friends by hiring Dressed to Kill (18) from the video shop.

One of my least happy memories is actually watching it. The hiring part was the highlight. The film itself was horrific. I couldn't switch it off, as this would have revealed to my friends (and by "friends" I mean "people I feared") that I was uncomfortable with the orgy of sex and death unfolding before us. So: on it went, slashing and shagging and bleeding and screaming for 105 ghastly minutes.

I had nightmares for months. I restricted myself to PG films for… well, ever since, really. And at the risk of spoiling a surprise for anyone who's planning to watch Dressed to Kill this evening, I developed a lifelong fear of lifts.

Does that mean the British Board of Film Classification was correct in its 18 certification? In a way, yes: I was too young for that film. But, in a way, no: I think I still am. I'd be as disturbed by it today as I was then, and I've long said goodbye to 18. The problem was sensibility, not age.

This is why I think it's a red herring, despite the attendant press alarm, that the BBFC has announced a series of small rearrangements to its certificating rules.

For example: a 12A film has historically been allowed to include "infrequent" use of swearwords, but will now be allowed to use them frequently, if appropriate in context.

12A is a mealy-mouthed certificate anyway. It means that children of any age may see the film, but if they are under 12 then they must be accompanied by an adult. So it's up to the adult to decide.

It's as though the honourable members of the BBFC feel it's not for them to dictate what a seven-year-old should or shouldn't watch – not when there are perfectly good parents, older friends and siblings who could be making the ruling.

Fine; but if you feel that way, why become a film censor? The whole job is deciding what children should or shouldn't see! If you don't want to decide, do something else! Be a greengrocer! (I have recently noticed there aren't enough greengrocers in my area.)

If that lone certificate devolves the decision-making away from centralised control and into the hands of small local government, ie friends and relatives, then the difference between frequent and infrequent swearing is far too vague to be a helpful guideline.

Once changes are being made, there is an opportunity to be super-specific when it comes to obscenity content. For example, a certificate of "12F, 1C" would give us a pretty clear idea of what we're in for. (Or, in the case of the record-breaking Wolf of Wall Street, "506F, several C".)

Come to think of it, greater specificity could be the future of the whole certification system. The old principle, whereby BBFC representatives sit through hours of dross in order to create certificates that might protect children from filthy language or behaviour at the cinema, is redundant when kids can watch these films (or far worse) online anyway. What a waste of those poor, reluctant censors' time. Besides, as above, I think that shock, disgust, nightmares and emotional damage have always been more about sensibility than age anyway.

Once they're sitting through everything before we do, the BBFC representatives could use their time far better in coming up with creative new certificates that offer a wider range of notes about a film's prevailing spirit. Forget the lost battle of juvenile protection. This could help all potential viewers to know if a new movie is likely to be their cup of tea.

You might say that is the job of a reviewer, but many people avoid reading reviews in advance, for fear of discovering too much about the plot. The following list of new certificates would be enormously helpful to audiences, without spoiling any twists at all.

15, no A

Teenagers may only see this film without an adult present, as it contains love scenes that would be far too embarrassing to view while sitting next to your parents.

12c

A kids' cartoon that adults would love – but may only watch at the cinema if accompanied by one of their own children, as if they go alone it will look weird.

12 Years a Slave

Refers to any gruelling historical film that you're tempted to see because everyone says it's brilliant, but is actually better avoided because you'll only come out depressed.

18é

Long, ambitious, foreign language film to which undergraduate students should invite girls in order to impress them. Good chance of snogging during the dull bits (all of it).

15 again

This film features Bruce Willis in a macho role for which he is now too old and wheezy, but will make you feel pleasantly nostalgic about his younger days and yours.

15% ABV

This film is funny if you're drunk.

Victoria Coren Mitchell

Big Day Out hits Australia's Gold Coast with Snoop Dogg and Arcade Fire

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 09:48 PM PST

Fans look forward to seeing heavyweight international acts like Pearl Jam, but would prefer to see more Australian bands higher on the bill

Paul Farrell

So Frenchy, So Chic: sunshine, great food, and rap from the banlieues

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 08:58 PM PST

It still slightly baffles me that French culture would be so romanticised it would give rise to a Sydney festival – but I can't say I mind

Jessica Reed

Sydney Festival: So Frenchy, So Chic – in pictures

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 08:19 PM PST

Anna Kucera spent a day in the sunshine, experiencing So Frenchy, so Chic at St John's in Camperdown. Sydneysiders unrolled their picnic blankets and enjoyed a day of French fun and food – with Fefe, Lillywood and the Prick and Babylon Circus playing at the festival, and lots of elaborate food being consumed

Black Diggers – review

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 06:25 PM PST

Not just one of the highlights of this year’s festival, but a new high point in telling a national narrative on the stage.

Larissa Behrendt

Syrian National Coalition agrees to join peace talks despite grave misgivings

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 05:55 PM PST

SNC bows to western pressure to join talks that include Assad regime, opening the way to first direct talks since civil war began

Mitt: Sundance 2014 - first look review

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 05:27 PM PST

A campaign trail documentary about Romney's defeat to Barack Obama paints the former candidate as a more likeable guy than we saw on the stump, says Xan Brooks

Ahead of the Sundance screening of Mitt, a festival organiser takes to the stage to explain that Greg Whiteley's documentary on the 2012 presidential nominee is officially incomplete. There are some typos in the credits, she says, and the print still needs to be properly colour-coded. In hindsight this last piece of information makes a whole lot of sense. We came expecting to see Mitt Romney in monochrome. But the man on the screen appears positively radiant.

How ironic to realise that the greatest Mitt Romney campaign ad should arrive too late to save him, blowing in to Park City, Utah, a full 14 months after he slumped to defeat against Barack Obama. Whiteley shows us a side of the candidate we never knew existed. He comes across smart, relaxed and witty, at least among his family and friends. It's hard not to warm to someone who potters about collecting litter, or who beds down on the floor of the campaign plane with his long legs sticking out in the aisle. He rates O Brother Where Art Thou? as his favourite movie and quotes Pappy O'Daniel with glee ("Just go and write my concession speech now!"). Time and again I found myself struggling to square Whiteley's amiable fellow with the other Mitt Romney: the stiff, stentorian corporate raider who wants to slash welfare, cut taxes, and who blithely writes off 47% of the electorate as "victims".

Mitt follows Romney and his handsome, hearty family from his first, faltering White House run of 2008 (when he was bested in the primaries by grinning John McCain) through to his Waterloo in November 2012. It takes us backstage as he huddles with his loved ones and ruefully acknowledges his dwindling chances.

Naturally the film is a piece of embedded journalism, with all that this entails. Mitt is utterly uncritical, ignores the policies altogether and, as such, could reasonably be labelled as just another brand of snake oil; a Hello! magazine cover story masquerading as a documentary.

The truth, however, may be a shade more complex than that. Is Romney entirely playing to the cameras here? If so, he's a much better performer than the stuffed-shirt Herman Munster who we saw on the stump. Whether intentionally or not, Whiteley's softly-softly approach proves weirdly illuminating. It paints the campaign process as reductive and constraining, so remorselessly stage-managed that it reduces the contenders to a bunch of bad actors. In the end, the public Romney was always going to be less convincing than the private one.

On election night, Ohio goes Democrat and the Republican nominee is staring defeat in the face. "My time on the stage is over," he shrugs and this is surely as it should be. But time will tell. Romney, it turns out, has a house near Park City and attended the Sundance screening with his family in tow. What must he have thought, sitting in the dark and watching himself on the screen - so loose and limber and resolutely un-colour-coded? If Whiteley's film didn't make him want to run again in 2016 then I'm guessing nothing will.

- More from the Sundance film festival

Rating: 3/5

Xan Brooks

Gender inequality: the unjust gulf between men and women | Observer editorial

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:20 PM PST

Women still lag far behind in terms of pay and job opportunities to the detriment of us all

The 18th-century bestseller An Enquiry Into the Duties of the Female Sex, by clergyman Thomas Gisborne, advocated a belief, still popular, that the brains of men and women are hard-wired to occupy different but complementary roles, with little overlap. Gisborne acknowledged: "The superiority of the female mind is unrivalled." Unrivalled, that is, in duties that "… refresh the over-laboured faculties of the wise – and, diffuse, throughout the family circle, the enlivening and endearing smile of cheerfulness."

In her 2010 book, Delusions of Gender, psychologist Cordelia Fine points out we conform to whatever are the prevailing social expectations of what it means to "man up" or act as a "real woman". In the 18th century, that meant many girls abided by notions of excessive femininity. But now? As the last several days have amply demonstrated, when male and female roles are under constant redefinition, dictated not least by the market and the need to earn a family wage, while a certain class of men, accustomed to generations in power, see both their influence and "their" institutions challenged, it can become a bruising and, at times, ugly, contradictory and profoundly socially unjust battle. But first, we have the good news.

On Friday, the London Stock Exchange appointed two women directors, Sherry Coutu and Joanna Shields. The proportion of women on FTSE 100 boards has topped 20% for the first time, raising hopes that the UK government's weedy target of 25% of female representation by 2015 is reached without mandatory quotas. According to Jane Scott, the UK director of Professional Boards Forum, only 13 FTSE 100 companies have 30% or more female representation on the board. "There is no shortage of candidates," Scott says. "And there is no compromise on the experience or skills required." The economic argument has been repeatedly proved. In a 2012 report, for example, the Credit Suisse Research Institute said that organisations with one woman or more on the board outperformed those with none by 26% over a six-year period. In that context, shareholders should be appalled at the poor commercial judgment on display, if not the sexism.

Change in the boardroom is under way but it is hardly a female revolution. Greater participation in public and political life is vital to such an endeavour. However, only one in four MPs is female; women are a tiny minority at the cabinet table and in the Lords, in senior financial committees, at the higher echelons of the judiciary and on public boards. Innovatory schemes such as the Fabian Women's network programme are essential to challenge the old boys' alliances whose roots are centuries old. However, until a critical mass is achieved, women in parliament and public office will continue to feel guests in a predominantly hostile house.

A battle that resumes tomorrow at Westminster yet again reveals the size of the gulf between the Lords and the ladies. Or, more precisely, in this case, the 10 women who have alleged that the Liberal Democrat Lord Rennard behaved "inappropriately". The women have been judged "credible" witnesses yet, surreally, the rules of the Liberal Democrat party do not permit disciplinary action. Rennard has refused Clegg's request to apologise. Undoubtedly, the electorate will take heed that in 2014 a major political party has no suitable procedure for dealing with serious sexual allegations. In contrast, the law courts are, belatedly, proving more active. Tomorrow, supported by more than 100 peers, Lord Rennard intends to resume his seat. As we report today, Bridget Harris, one of his accusers, has quit the party in disgust. "Nick Clegg had a duty to show moral leadership. He hasn't", she says. "I don't believe that parliament is the place for change anymore."

It is precisely this lack of representation that means women, unjustly, have become the shock absorbers of austerity. They are paying a far higher price proportionately than men, finding themselves cemented into a lifetime of low earnings and under-utilised qualifications. George Osborne, has announced a further £12bn in public spending cuts. As feminist economists on the Women's Budget Group repeatedly point out, 65% of jobs in the public sector are held by women; 310,000 public sector jobs will be axed in five years until 2015. Eighty per cent of the "new" jobs are in the private sector, according to the TUC. They are low skill, low paid. A far higher proportion of female income therefore also comes from benefits so, again, women are hit hardest by benefit cuts.

Paradoxically, at school, girls outperform boys. However, they are scarce, for instance, in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). In 2012, 12 times more boys than girls took computer studies at A-level. In Shanghai and Singapore, there is no gender division in the subject. Here, segregation by occupation continues. Women are steered into the arts and "care", grossly undervalued. Even when they enter the professions, progress halts when they have children. Part-time means a career is sabotaged. Childcare costs cripple. According to the Fawcett Society, twice as many women as men are economically inactive; three times more women are in part-time work; and 28% of women are low paid compared with 17% of men.

Skills-appropriate jobs for women could boost GDP by 10% by 2030. Everyone benefits. Instead, currently for women, the ladders are rapidly disappearing as the snakes on the board multiply. A general election may help. In 2015, politicians will temporarily scramble to find their inner woman as they go in search of the crucial female vote. Manifestos should signal that investment in social infrastructure matters. Universal free childcare ought to carry as much clout as rail expansion and HS2. Women need flexible working that strongly supports part-time careers. Reskilling is a priority; child benefit should be restored and anomalies in tax credits addressed. More than 900,000 working families will not qualify because one or both parents earn too little to pay income tax.

Among other demands should be added equal pay and positive action in public life, quotas even. What this agenda costs in the short term will be more than matched by what is unleashed in talent and capabilities, improved tax revenues and reduced benefits. Ideally, a flourishing society allows everyone, male and female, to fulfil their potential. Instead, gender, class and ethnicity all carry heavy and unnecessary penalties. That is socially unjust, economically unsound, globally uncompetitive and politically naive. Not even the men in charge can affordthis to continue.

Observer editorial

Gudirr Gudirr, Marrugeku – review

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:14 PM PST

Physical and visual imagery combine with spoken word in this moving, astonishing exploration of performer Dalisa Pigram's identity

Van Badham

Slavery: this shameful history has beeen ignored for too long | the big issue

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:07 PM PST

Britain tends to focus only on its role in abolishing the slave trade

It wasn't only the gracious mansions that were built on the profits of slavery ("How gracious mansions hide a dark history of Britain's links to slavery", In Focus).

In 1984, Peter Fryer published Staying Power, a ground-breaking history of the black presence in Britain. This book analysed the way in which those with interests in slavery contributed to the developments of banking and to the demands out of which the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century grew. Ships needed financing. The British leg of the trade to Africa carried textiles, iron rings, chains, muskets, tobacco, beer. And this was not a shrinking market.

Judy Palfreman

Coventry

In Bristol, the defeat of the reform bill in 1831 led to riots in Queen Square. The square is not far from Welsh Back, where slate and coal was unloaded.

Shareholders in these industries would have followed the example of the plantation owners and bought an elegant Georgian house in Queen Square.

The fusion of income streams from exploitation at home and abroad kept the capitalist show on the road.

Ivor Morgan

Lincoln

Jamie Doward's excellent article on slavery's absence in the public understanding of the history of Britain called to mind a visit some 20 years ago to the University of Louisiana.

A large exhibition on the subject of Louisiana's economic development featured a section devoted to agriculture, including the extensive cotton crop, which it managed to cover without any reference to the fact that the workers were slaves.

There was, as I recollect, no reference to slavery at all in the exhibition. It had been airbrushed out.

If it was possible to do that in the US, in a former slave state, how much easier has it been here where slaves existed only in faraway colonies?

My education in the 50s, both at school and at home, told me much about the empire and its glories. It told me nothing of the shameful trade upon which it was built.

Dick Russell

Beenham

Berkshire

As Jamie Doward notes, Britain is self-servingly one-eyed in focusing largely on its role in the abolition of the slave trade. Our country's long history of profiting from it is conveniently swept under the carpet.

A key objective of the 2007 bicentenary should have been the erection of prominent monuments to the Unknown Slave, at least in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, which all made enormous profits from slavery.

It was an opportunity missed. Perhaps the education secretary, Michael Gove, could take the initiative to help remedy the omission.

Graham Thomas

St Albans

Hertfordshire

Being from Bristol and maybe being presumptuous enough to speak for fellow Bristolians, I think most are acutely aware of the city's link to the slave trade. It is not a proud history, clearly.

I do however resent the implication that the subject is actively avoided or that people are apathetic to it. The choice to focus on slavery in the US is one of mass appeal, required to make a Hollywood movie.

M Konig

Posted online

'Monsieur Jacques' reveals role in release of Nelson Mandela

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:06 PM PST

Working in the shadows between the Marxist and apartheid regimes of Angola and South Africa, businessman Jean-Yves Ollivier helped broker changes that shook a nation

The extraordinary part played by a French businessman in hastening the collapse of apartheid and Nelson Mandela's release from prison after 26 years is revealed in a documentary to be shown in British cinemas.

In the 1980s Jean-Yves Ollivier was a commodities trader who used business connections and private funds to negotiate an African maze. Under the codename Monsieur Jacques, he acted as an unofficial diplomat, influencing the course of talks between African and western political leaders.

At a time when all southern Africa was at war, he acted as an intermediary for secret, high-level contacts within the "frontline states" and South Africa. He negotiated prisoner exchanges, including that of two anti-apartheid militants held in South Africa and a South African, Wynand Du Toit, captured in Angola while attempting to sabotage oil installations.

When official talks between Angolans and South Africans were impossible, Ollivier convinced the Angolan president that by releasing Du Toit he could contribute to Mandela's liberation.

He recalls: "I discovered an Africa where mistrust prevailed. No one else was able to open up a channel of communication ... I managed my negotiation like a circle of dominos. I pushed one, causing the next to fall, and so on."

The documentary, Plot for Peace, www.plotforpeace.com is "one man's untold story of apartheid … omitted from history", its co-director Mandy Jacobson said. It was only after she was struck by frequent mentions of a mysterious Monsieur Jacques in conversations with key players that she realised the part he had played, "working in the shadows in several seemingly unrelated events". She tracked him down and persuaded him to be interviewed.

The film details official and secret dealings between apartheid and Marxist regimes along South Africa's borders. It shows that the end of apartheid and Mandela's release were intrinsically linked to the end of the Cold War – that, without the fall of the Berlin Wall and Cuban and South African troop withdrawals from Angola, Mandela would have remained in prison.

Ollivier's behind-the-scenes bargaining ensured the withdrawal of some 50,000 Cuban soldiers stationed in Angola and the withdrawal of South African soldiers to within their own borders, paving the way for independence for Namibia, which had been occupied by South Africa up to then and used as a base to attack Angola.

The documentary was funded by Ivor Ichikowitz, a South African whose family's foundation established the African Oral History Archive, a non-profit initiative preserving African history. www.africanoralhistory.com Like Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, recording the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, AOHA collates those of hundreds who experienced South Africa's dramatic changes.

Appreciation of Ollivier's contribution came from high levels, bestowed by the last apartheid hardliner, PW Botha, and Mandela himself. Plot for Peace draws on previously unseen archival material and interviews with key figures, including apartheid's longest-serving minister of foreign affairs, Roelof "Pik" Botha, and Mandela's former wife, Winnie.

Plot for Peace, which has won awards at film festivals, will be released on 14 March.

Dalya Alberge

Mentoring scheme gives women keys to gates of power

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:06 PM PST

Fabian Women's Network wins praise for programme that has produced parliamentary candidates, charity trustees and company directors

When Douglas Hurd, a former government minister and unelected member of the upper chamber of parliament, said last week that there was a "ludicrous" obsession with ensuring equal representation of men and women in public life, observers felt he was overstating his case: the "obsession" appears to have little concrete effect, since only one in five MPs is female and women make up just one in three appointees to public boards.

But now these ratios are being challenged by a scheme that has helped to propel women of all ages, backgrounds and ethnicities into public life.

The Fabian Women's Network programme has won praise for its mix of mentoring, confidence-building, media training, political education, debating skills and visits to sites of power such as Strasbourg and Westminster, as the number who have taken part has risen from 25 to 75 over three years. A fourth intake is now being recruited.

"The women call themselves space invaders," said Dr Rosie Campbell, who has evaluated the scheme. "They have been given access to political spaces traditionally occupied by men and have begun to realise that this is somewhere that they too are entitled to be."

So far, recruits – who have to show an appetite for public life – have included teachers, businesswomen, charity workers, union organisers and management consultants. "No matter what their age, they all come with skills to offer each other and that has become a major strength of the scheme," said Campbell.

At the outset of the nine-month programme, the 2011-12 cohort rated itself on a range of skills. The average score was 54. That had risen to 74 by the end.

Suzy Stride, 33, an "East End girl", has worked with young people not in employment, education or training for 10 years. As a result of the scheme, she said, she was now prospective parliamentary Labour candidate for Harlow. "I realised that if I want life to change for the young people that I know, I have to go where the decisions are made – and that's Westminster. The privately educated white middle-class males have had bridges to power built for hundreds of years. It's time for women and ethnic minorities to build their own bridges."

The Lib Dems and Conservatives also have mentoring programmes to try to address the shortage of women as parliamentary candidates but a crucial difference in the Fabian scheme is the support the alumni continue to give each other.

"This is not about an isolated relationship with a mentor, as many institutions have developed, " said Christine Megsson, the scheme's co-ordinator. "Our aim is to bring women of different ages, at different stages in their lives and careers, to learn from each other and build their collective confidence. That's been the key to the scheme's success."

So far, from the original group of 75, 30 have put themselves up for public selection at local, national or European level; three have been selected as Labour parliamentary candidates; a number have become trustees of charities; two have become board directors; others have established a public speaking club at the Commons and organised FabNW, a network for women in the north-west.

Seema Malohtra, Labour MP and shadow whip, is one of the co-founders of the scheme. "Traditionally, many of the people in public life grew up learning about it at the kitchen table. Power is a family business", she says. "They have a sense of entitlement. I grew up, one of five in an immigrant family, living over a shop in Hounslow. Our FWN group builds confidence and knowledge but it also means women can at last look around and say, 'public life looks much more like people like me'. In terms of ethnicity and gender that matters." Katie Ghose, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society, warned: "We face a dire problem in public life. The electorate is turning away from party politics more than ever before. They look at parliament and say, 'It's not like me. It's not reflective of society.' The gender division in many walks of life damages the legitimacy of democracy."

Beth Knowles, 25, is now the Labour parliamentary candidate for Manchester City Central. Two years ago, her knowledge of parliamentary and public life, she says, amounted to "nothing". She said: "The scheme opens the closed doors of public life. It's told me, 'I have a right to be involved too'."

Now she has helped to set up a network in the north-west to encourage more women into public life – and has established her own charity.

"What matters about the group is that we are continuing support one another. That won't stop".

Yvonne Roberts

George Clooney film on hunt for Nazi art thefts attacked for ignoring real-life British war hero

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:05 PM PST

Relatives of Ronald Balfour are angry that The Monuments Men overlooks the British historian, one of only two members of the unit killed in the second world war

Nearly 70 years after his death on the battle front protecting works of art, the extraordinary and largely untold story of Ronald Balfour – a shy but extremely brave Cambridge academic who is honoured in Germany but forgotten in his own country – is beginning to emerge.

But with a major George Clooney film based on the work of a specialist unit devoted to saving art and heritage out next month, the few remaining people who have close links to one of Britain's least likely heroes fear that the true story of an unjustly overlooked champion of cultural history has been edited out in order to make good adventure cinema.

Ronald Edmund Balfour, a short-sighted, rake-thin medieval historian and fellow of King's College, Cambridge, was in his forties when he volunteered for a new unit comprising civilian art, museums and heritage experts set up to work alongside Allied forces after D-day. It was charged with saving paintings, statues, ancient buildings, historic documents and libraries from theft or destruction by the Nazis.

The unit, the monuments, fine arts and archives (MFAA) section of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, was dubbed "the Venus fixers" by battle-hardened troops bemused at being urged to respect cultural treasures.

The film The Monuments Men, directed and partly written by George Clooney, focuses on the adventures of a group of MFAA officers from after D-day until the end of the war. The film stars Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman and Cate Blanchett, is based on a book by US writer Robert Edsel and is due for UK release next month.

In it Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville, The Monuments Men's only British lead character, plays a fictional English academic called Donald Jeffries, part of the MFAA frontline team led by Clooney's character, George L Stout – a real MFAA officer and eminent American art conservator.

Ronald Balfour's life was complex and intriguing. His acquaintances probably included art historian Anthony Blunt, who spied for the Soviet Union, and other academics linked to the Cambridge Apostles group, EM Forster and perhaps Churchill's close friend and adviser, Brendan Bracken. But he has little to offer mainstream war film-makers. Unmarried and possibly gay, Eton-educated Balfour was devoted to academic study and tipped to be a future provost of King's. He amassed a library of more than 8,000 books, which he left to the college.

Though American-led, the MFAA was an international effort, with about 345 men and women from up to 17 nations. Britain provided the second-largest group of specialists. Volunteers for MFAA work in the war zone were given basic military training, a uniform and an officer rank – and a sector of Europe to look after.

The final months of the war in Europe brought its greatest loss of life – a mud-and-fire maelstrom in which armed gangs roamed at will.

Amid this chaos around a dozen frontline MFAA officers struggled to preserve Europe's cultural wealth. Balfour, who was given the rank of major and attached to the Canadian army, was entrusted with the sector that included northern France, Belgium and north-west Germany – hundreds of key sites, and thousands of works of art and historic architecture.

Often, Balfour had to hitchhike from one war-ravaged historic site to another, inspecting losses and damage. But his passion for art and heritage ended up by costing him his life. Early in 1945, Balfour was at Cleves, the bitterly contested ancient city in north-western Germany.

He had just saved an archive dating back to the 14th century, and persuaded Canadian troops not to dynamite the medieval Steintor city gate at nearby Goch.On 10 March Balfour ventured beyond allied lines with two German civilians to try to protect historic church artefacts and was killed by a shell burst while moving parts of a medieval altarpiece to safety. He was 41, one of two MFAA officers killed during the war. Walter Huchthausen, an American architect, was shot near Aachen in April 1945.

Balfour was buried in the Reichswald forest war cemetery, near Cleves, and an archive room at King's is named in his honour. The college is custodian of most of his papers.

In Germany, Balfour has not been forgotten. For decades, flowers were left on his grave by a Cleves woman whose brother had been killed in the war. A local archive, then a street, were named in his honour. In 1985 Balfour's family accepted the prestigious German bravery award, the Johanna Sebus Medaille, on his behalf.

Balfour's descendants are dismayed that the film, though based on a history of the MFAA officers and featuring an English historian serving with the MFAA with the rank of major who worked on the frontline – as only Balfour did – has ignored the real hero.

"We were astounded when we heard that Hugh Bonneville was going to play the character we thought might be Ronald," says Polly Hutchison, one of Balfour's nieces. "He is so different."

Billed as "based on the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history" – the search for art stolen by leading Nazis during the war, which is the film's central theme – the film's makers concede that they have "taken some liberties" with the characters for dramatic purposes. They say that there is no character in The Monuments Men called Ronald Balfour, and that the Bonneville character is entirely made up.

Last month, Clooney's film was criticised by an Austrian writer, Konrad Kramar, for crediting to MFAA officers the salvation of a vast horde of art stolen from across Europe. The art had been stored in Alpine salt mines at Altaussee in Austria and was targeted for destruction by Hitler in the last weeks of the war. In a new book, Kramar claims that it was the miners who removed explosive charges from the mines, with the Monuments Men arriving there nearly two weeks later.

"I feel that Ronald has now been twice unrecognised," said Hutchison. "First, that his own country has not recognised him, and then when there's a film, he's unrecognised again."

"There is a lot of family pride in what he did," said niece Virginia Cardwell Moore. "He was brilliant, and would have had a great future. But after 1945 Ronald was overlooked. But in the family we've talked about him all our lives."

"He's a family legend, if you like," said another niece, Delphie Stockwell. "Often it's hard to work out what he was doing, and who for, even before his monuments work started."

In 2007, the US Senate passed a resolution recognising the work of the officers of the MFAA, and last month their importance – and the looming film – led to the award of a Congressional gold medal.

Germans find it strange that Balfour's bravery and his achievements have not been recognised by a British government. "Here he saved the last great medieval building standing," said local resident Paul-Gerhard Küsters. "Cleves was 97% destroyed in the war, but Ronald Balfour saved archives and buildings here. It is a pity that the English do not know about him."

Robin Stummer

Wrong 'Un – review

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:05 PM PST

Lowry Studio, Salford; and touring
One woman's journey from Lancashire mill lass to brick-throwing suffragette makes for a sharp and intelligent musical

"Suddenly, something distantly historic became personal," writes playwright/composer/lyricist Boff Whalley, explaining the background to his new one-woman musical for Red Ladder Theatre Company about a Lancashire mill lass turned political agitator. A friend had discovered her grandmother's collection of suffragette memorabilia. Among the letters, photos and press clippings was a medal. This particular medal had been awarded to women who, in calling attention to their demands for the right to vote, had taken direct action (throwing bricks, setting fire to letter boxes), been sent to London's Holloway jail, gone on hunger strike and been force-fed.

Wrong 'Un is Whalley's fictionalised version of this life. It is 7 February 1918 (the day after the passing of the Representation of the People Bill). Alone in a simple room (desk, chair, carpet) Annie Wilde goes back through her experiences in the town of Nelson – at school ("Football's a game for boys!"), at the textile mill ("Wage parity! What's that?") – and her move to London to join the suffragettes (distinctions between the "ladies" and the "shawl and clogs brigade… with jobs and accents"). She talks directly to the audience, impersonates male authorities (all oppressive, all offering their own wives as positive examples of womanhood – the governor of Holloway's deploys the "crochet hook or tighter underwear" when she feels her passions rise) and sings music-hall style songs of commentary on the situations ("Some girls don't turn into ladies… they want more than bugger all"). Whalley's writing is witty and unsentimental; not all Annie's actions are praiseworthy. Issues of suffrage are neatly woven together with the political outfall of the first world war, and Justin Audibert's unfussy direction serves the text well. Potentially melodramatic subject matter is delivered with humour or restraint – Annie's description of force-feeding is, therefore, all the more shocking.

Inevitably there's a sugar-coated history lesson element to this political-biographical form, but Ella Harris's portrayal of Annie, with its complex mixture of sharpness, fun and intelligence, made this reviewer glad to have met her and the causes she cared about.

Rating: 4/5

Clare Brennan

What is privacy? Ask Hollywood, not François Hollande

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:05 PM PST

The French press's reticence over their president's affair would be unthinkable in the US – and, increasingly, anywhere else

Here is a notional, going on wholly ludicrous, scenario. The president of the United States has dumped his wife and family. He's taken up with a blonde newscaster from Fox and installed her in the White House, with a budget to fund her activities. But now his eyes are roaming again and the New York Post has caught him slithering round to see Kim Kardisomethingorother at her DC pad. Meanwhile, it's the day of the vital state of the union address and the president has a press conference scheduled. Hundreds of correspondents pour in. Hundreds of questions pour forth. But the chief pleads privacy as though it were the fifth amendment.

Well, I said it was a ludicrous plot. Perhaps 50 or so years ago, when JFK was pursuing Marilyn, Judith and every willing woman in sight, there was a certain silence-cum-reverence for the office. But today? After the Clinton years? Dozens of political sex scandals later? There is no privacy argument here, either in practice or – more importantly – in American law. If you're a public figure, a star golfer let alone a president, you effectively waive most of your privacy rights. Simply, what happened in France last week couldn't happen in Washington DC. It would, inescapably, be a global shocker.

And, European convention on human rights or not, that would surely be true of a British prime minister, too: hung by the tabloids, drawn by the internet, quartered by the posher end of the media market. He would be a figure of fun, or probably worse. He'd be finished.

Ah! but France is different, we're told. France builds a wall of discretion around its head of state. France has a corps of political reporters who know when to touch their forelocks. France won't let rowdy foreign correspondents near a microphone. France scorns Anglo-Saxon papers with their prurient obsessions. France leads on economic reforms and sticks sex on page three. France is different.

At which point, perhaps, it's time to take a deep breath. For the plain fact, the plainest fact of our digital world, is that there is no real privacy left for players on a global stage. America – from Golden Globes to White House cavortings – imposes a cultural context that can't be bucked. So Closer magazine might not have stalked and exposed François Hollande three decades ago? So Mitterrand, Chirac and Sarkozy had an easy ride, at least whilst they ruled from the Elysée? So what?

The question you'd like to have heard Hollande answer is straightforwardly covered by article 10 of the human rights convention, on the public's right to know. Sir, you're deeply unpopular on the polls with just 22% approval and have come here today to relaunch your entire economic policy? What on Earth are you doing, floating around town on a motorbike, betraying the mistress you had and taking a smiling actress instead? Don't the people who elected you, the people you promised "exemplary conduct to" after the Sarkozy era, have a right to something better than that?

The difficulty with the whole debate about the media and privacy (as the admirable Professor Ros Coward wrote in the Guardian the other day) is that it needs a new and more nuanced look. It doesn't work digitally when the heart of celebrity culture – Hollywood – works to totally different rules. Its judicial and political lurches in Britain are mostly driven by an old, post-social-media regime desperate to hang on to its traditional ways. The debate, such as it is, seems to depend on whether you hate or revere Rupert Murdoch. Yet, in reality, privacy and secrecy cohabit in the same dark corner. It's no surprise that French presidents tend to come up soiled once they're retired. Secrecy stains. And no country, least of all France, is an island. I bet Cheltenham knew Hollande's last romance was on the rocks way before the news came Closer.

■ Look at this high-level World Association of Newspapers delegation, in London last week to protest about shrinking freedoms for journalists here (especially for Guardian editors and reporters investigating intelligence surveillance, but never forgetting the 61 others much too insouciantly arrested since 2011). Where have such delegations voyaged before? Why, Ethiopia, South Africa, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia, Mexico, Honduras, Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Burma. It's interesting, very seriously, to see the company we keep.

Peter Preston

Against Me!: Transgender Dysphoria Blues – review

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:05 PM PST

(Total Treble)

Far from being a haven for outsiders, American punk has become a highly normative genre, where difference is easily punished. Enter Against Me!, melodic, political Florida punks of some years' standing. Roughly a year and a half ago, their singer announced she wanted to live as a woman. Laura Jane Grace's voice remains unchanged but this refreshing concept album now explores the complexities of double lives, love and loyalty (the shout-along Unconditional Love, the title track), while remaining as accessible and pogo-friendly as Green Day. It's not all about transitioning – power ballad Black Me Out is very cross at some fat-fingered industry type – but Transgender Dysphoria Blues lives up to its title with candour and tunes.

Rating: 3/5

Kitty Empire

The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:05 PM PST

The astonishing story of Nick Brown, the British man who began a part-time psychology course in his 50s – and ended up taking on America's academic establishment

Nick Brown does not look like your average student. He's 53 for a start and at 6ft 4in with a bushy moustache and an expression that jackknifes between sceptical and alarmed, he is reminiscent of a mid-period John Cleese. He can even sound a bit like the great comedian when he embarks on an extended sardonic riff, which he is prone to do if the subject rouses his intellectual suspicion.

A couple of years ago that suspicion began to grow while he sat in a lecture at the University of East London, where he was taking a postgraduate course in applied positive psychology. There was a slide showing a butterfly graph – the branch of mathematical modelling most often associated with chaos theory. On the graph was a tipping point that claimed to identify the precise emotional co-ordinates that divide those people who "flourish" from those who "languish".

According to the graph, it all came down to a specific ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions. If your ratio was greater than 2.9013 positive emotions to 1 negative emotion you were flourishing in life. If your ratio was less than that number you were languishing.

It was as simple as that. The mysteries of love, happiness, fulfilment, success, disappointment, heartache, failure, experience, random luck, environment, culture, gender, genes, and all the other myriad ingredients that make up a human life could be reduced to the figure of 2.9013.

It seemed incredible to Brown, as though it had been made up. But the number was no invention. Instead it was the product of research that had been published, after peer review, in no less authoritative a journal than American Psychologist – the pre-eminent publication in the world of psychology that is delivered to every member of the American Psychological Association. Co-authored by Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada and entitled Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing, the paper was subsequently cited more than 350 times in other academic journals. And aside from one partially critical paper, no one had seriously questioned its validity.

Fredrickson is a distinguished psychologist, a professor at the University of North Carolina, a winner of several notable psychology awards and bestselling author of a number of psychology books, including Positivity, which took her and Losada's academic research and recast it for a mass audience – the subtitle ran "Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life".

"Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics," wrote Fredrickson in Positivity, "the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology."

Fredrickson is the object of widespread admiration in the field of psychology. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association and a bestselling author in his own right, went so far as to call her "the genius of the positive psychology movement". On top of which she is also an associate editor at American Psychologist.

By contrast, Brown was a first-term, first-year, part-time masters student who was about to take early retirement from what he calls a "large international organisation" in Strasbourg, where he had been head of IT network operations. Who was he to doubt the work of a leading professional which had been accepted by the psychological elite? What gave him the right to suggest that the emperor had gone naturist?

"The answer," says Brown when I meet him in a north London cafe, "is because that's how it always happens. Look at whistleblower culture. If you want to be a whistleblower you have to be prepared to lose your job. I'm able to do what I'm doing here because I'm nobody. I don't have to keep any academics happy. I don't have to think about the possible consequences of my actions for people I might admire personally who may have based their work on this and they end up looking silly. There are 160,000 psychologists in America and they've got mortgages. I've got the necessary degree of total independence."

Armed with that independence, he went away and looked at the maths that underpinned Fredrickson and Losada's ratio. Complex or non-linear dynamics are not easy for an untrained mathematician to understand, much less work out. Losada, who claimed expertise in non-linear dynamics, was working as a business consultant and making mathematical models of business team behaviour when he first met Fredrickson.

In Positivity, Fredrickson describes the moment when Losada explained how he could apply complex dynamics to her theories of positive psychology. "Hours into our lively discussion, he made a bold claim: based on his mathematical work, he could locate the exact positivity ratio that would distinguish those who flourished from those who didn't."

So impressed was she by this boast that Fredrickson arranged a sabbatical from her teaching duties "so I could immerse myself in the science of dynamic systems that Marcial had introduced me to".

There were several psychologists, versed in non-linear dynamics, who smelt something fishy about the maths in the published paper. Stephen Guastello, from Marquette University, wrote a note of mild complaint to American Psychologist, which it chose not to publish because "there wasn't enough interest in the article". Guastello feels now that he should have been more forceful in his opinions. "In retrospect," he says, "I see how I could have been more clearly negative and less supportive of what looked like an article that could move the field forward if someone would follow up with some strong empirical work."

John Gottman, a leading authority in the psychology of successful relationships, wrote to Losada because he couldn't follow the equations. "I thought it was something I didn't know about, because he's a smart guy, Losada. He never answered my email," he says. Gottman also wrote to Fredrickson. "She said she didn't understand the math either."

"Not many psychologists are very good at maths," says Brown. "Not many psychologists are even good at the maths and statistics you have to do as a psychologist. Typically you'll have a couple of people in the department who understand it. Most psychologists are not capable of organising a quantitative study. A lot of people can get a PhD in psychology without having those things at their fingertips. And that's the stuff you're meant to know. Losada's maths were of the kind you're not meant to encounter in psychology. The maths you need to understand the Losada system is hard but the maths you need to understand that this cannot possibly be true is relatively straightforward."

Brown had studied maths to A-level and then took a degree in engineering and computer science at Cambridge. "But I actually gave up the engineering because the maths was too hard," he says, laughing at the irony. "So I'm really not that good at maths. I can read simple calculus but I can't solve differential equations. But then neither could Losada!"

He went back over Losada's equations and he noticed that if he put in the numbers Fredrickson and Losada had then you could arrive at the appropriate figures. But he realised that it only worked on its own terms. "When you look at the equation, it doesn't contain any data. It's completely self-referential."

Unfortunately, while his grasp of maths was strong enough to see the problem, it wasn't sufficiently firm to be able to mount an academic takedown of Fredrickson's and Losada's work. Yet that was what he wanted to do. Once he knew to his own satisfaction that their research was fundamentally flawed, he was not going to be content to let things pass. So he decided to seek the help of an academic mathematician. Not just any academic mathematician either, but one who had made a name for himself by puncturing the bogus use of maths and science in another discipline.

Back in 1996, Alan Sokal wrote a paper called Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity and submitted it to an academic cultural studies journal called Social Text, which promptly published the article. As the title suggested, the paper was dense with impenetrable theory. Among other things, it disparaged the scientific method and western intellectual hegemony and claimed that quantum gravity could only be understood through its political context.

The paper, as Sokal quickly admitted, was a hoax, a deliberate pastiche of the sorts of nonsensical postmodern appropriations of maths and physics at which French critical theorists particularly excelled – among them Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva. A major intellectual controversy ensued in which postmodernists stood accused of pseudo-science, absurd cultural relativism and the concealing of ignorance and innumeracy behind obscurantist prose. In response Sokal was derided as a pedant, a literalist and a cultural imperialist.

Despite the counterattacks, Sokal gained a reputation as a formidable enemy of bad science. As such he was regularly approached by people who believed they had uncovered an intellectual imposture, be it in architecture, history or musicology.

"I don't think I'm a crank," Brown had said in his email to Sokal. "I am just this grad student with no qualifications or credentials, starting out in the field. I don't know how to express this kind of idea especially coherently in academic written form, and I suspect that even if I did, it would be unlikely to be published."

But like many such requests, it began to disappear beneath a pile of other emails. It was only several weeks later that Sokal came across it again and realised that on this occasion he could help because it was in a field he knew something about: mathematics and physics.

Losada had derived his mathematical model from a system of differential equations known as the Lorenz equations, after Edward Lorenz, a pioneer of chaos theory.

"The Lorenz equation Losada used was from fluid dynamics," says Sokal, "which is not the field that I'm specialised in, but it's elementary enough that any mathematician or physicist knows enough. In 10 seconds I could see it was total bullshit. Nick had written a very long critique and basically it was absolutely right. There were some points where he didn't quite get the math right but essentially Nick had seen everything that was wrong with the Losada and Fredrickson paper."

Sokal did a little research and was amazed at the standing the Fredrickson and Losada paper enjoyed. "I don't know what the figures are in psychology but I know that in physics having 350 citations is a big deal," he says. "Look on Google you get something like 27,000 hits. This theory is not just big in academia, there's a whole industry of coaching and it intersects with business and business schools. There's a lot of money in it."

The concept of positive thinking dates back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Throughout written history, metaphysicians have grappled with questions of happiness and free will. The second-century Stoic sage Epictetus argued that "Your will needn't be affected by an incident unless you let it". In other words, we can be masters and not victims of fate because what we believe our capability to be determines the strength of that capability.

In one way or another, positive thinking has always been concerned with optimising human potential, which is a key component of psychology. But in the 20th century, confronting the great traumas of two annihilating wars, the psychology profession became increasingly focused on the dysfunctional and pathological aspects of the human mind. The emphasis was on healing the ill rather than improving the well.

So it was left to popular or amateur psychology, and in particular that sector specialising in business success, to accentuate the positive. Books such as Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, published in 1952, became huge bestsellers. By the 1970s and 1980s, self-help had mushroomed into a vast literary genre that encompassed everything from the secrets of material achievement to the new age promises of chakras, reiki and self-realisation.

On becoming president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, Martin Seligman set out to bring scientific rigour to the issue of self-improvement. In his inaugural speech, he announced a shift in psychology towards a "new science of human strengths".

"It's my belief," said Seligman, "that since the end of the second world war, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness."

He called for "a reoriented science that emphasises the understanding and building of the most positive qualities of an individual". It was an optimistic period in American history. The economy was buoyant, US geopolitical power was unchallenged and no major conflicts were raging. As a result, there was almost a messianic note of global ambition in Seligman's address. "We can show the world what actions lead to wellbeing, to positive individuals, to flourishing communities, and to a just society," he declared.

Suddenly a plethora of positive psychology books began to appear, written by eminent psychologists. There was Flow: The Psychology of Happiness by Mihaly Csizkszentmihalyi, who with Seligman is seen as the co-founder of the modern positive psychology movement; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realise Your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment by Seligman himself. And of course Fredrickson's Positivity, approved by both Seligman and Csizkszentmihalyi. Each of them appeared to quote and promote one another, creating a virtuous circle of recommendation.

And these books were not only marketed like a previous generation of self-help manuals, they often shared the same style of cod-sagacious prose. "Positivity opens your mind naturally, like the water lily that opens with sunlight," writes Fredrickson in Positivity.

Then there was the lucrative lecture circuit. Both Seligman and Fredrickson are hired speakers. One website lists Seligman's booking fee at between $30,000 and $50,000 an engagement. In this new science of happiness, it seemed that all the leading proponents were happy.

But then Nick Brown started to ask questions.

Around the time Brown first came across Fredrickson's work, a case came to light in Holland in which a psychologist called Diederick Stapel, who was dean of faculty at Tilburg University, was caught by his graduate students making up data. It turned out he'd been falsifying his research for the previous 15 years. Brown, who is currently translating Stapel's autobiography, got in touch with him and asked him why he did it.

"The way he describes it," says Brown, "is that the environment was conducive to it. He said, 'I could either do the hard work or put my hand in the jar and take out a biscuit'." It does a massive amount of harm to science when this sort of thing happens. Nobody's accusing Fredrickson of making anything up. She just basically invented her own method. Is that worse than inventing your own data?"

After he had established contact with Sokal, Brown sent him a 15,000-word draft, which was much too long for publication. At first the professor agreed to give Brown advice on cleaning up the draft. He also told him that he should go to American Psychologist, and he contributed a pedagogic section, explaining the maths.

"I still wasn't thinking that I was going to be a co-author but Nick sent me drafts and I just liked his writing style," recalls Sokal. "It made me laugh. He had this gift for English understatement."

Getting their critique of Fredrickson into the publication of which she was an associate editor was a tall order. To help him get across the line, Brown had already recruited Harris Friedman, a sympathetic psychologist who had doubts about Fredrickson's claims but was not sufficiently versed in maths to make a case on his own.

Sending revised versions back and forth among themselves, the three men gradually composed what they considered to be a watertight argument. The initial title they submitted to American Psychologist was The Complex Dynamics of an Intellectual Imposture – an ironic play on Fredrickson and Losada's original piece. That was rejected by the editor because he argued that the word "imposture" implied a deliberate fraud on the part of Fredrickson and Losada.

Sokal insists that this was never their intention. As Brown puts it in characteristic manner. "This particular paper wasn't an act of fraud and it wasn't about statistics. It's that someone had a brain-fart one day."

Following much negotiation, Brown, Sokal and Friedman had their paper accepted by American Psychologist and it was published online last July under the only slightly less provocative title of The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking. Referring to the bizarrely precise tipping point ratio of 2.9013 that Fredrickson and Losada trumpeted applied to all humans regardless of age, gender, race or culture, the authors – in fact Brown, in this sentence – wrote: "The idea that any aspect of human behaviour or experience should be universally and reproducibly constant to five significant digits would, if proven, constitute a unique moment in the history of the social sciences."

The paper mounted a devastating case against the maths employed by Fredrickson and Losada, who were offered the chance to respond in the same online issue of American Psychologist. Losada declined and has thus far failed to defend his input in any public forum. But Fredrickson did write a reply, which, putting a positive spin on things, she titled Updated Thinking on Positivity Ratios.

She effectively accepted that Losada's maths was wrong and admitted that she never really understood it anyway. But she refused to accept that the rest of the research was flawed. Indeed she claimed that, if anything, the empirical evidence was even stronger in support of her case. Fredrickson subsequently removed the critical chapter that outlines Losada's input from further editions of Positivity. She has avoided speaking to much of the press but in an email exchange with me, she maintained that "on empirical grounds, yes, tipping points are highly probable" in relation to positive emotions and flourishing.

"She's kind of hoping the Cheshire cat has disappeared but the grin is still there," says Brown, who is dismissive of Fredrickson's efforts at damage limitation. "She's trying to throw Losada over the side without admitting that she got conned. All she can really show is that higher numbers are better than lower ones. What you do in science is you make a statement of what you think will happen and then run the experiment and see if it matches it. What you don't do is pick up a bunch of data and start reading tea leaves. Because you can always find something. If you don't have much data you shouldn't go round theorising. Something orange is going to happen to you today, says the astrology chart. Sure enough, you'll notice if an orange bicycle goes by you."

But social psychology is full of theorising and much of it goes unquestioned. This is particularly the case when the research involves, as it does with Fredrickson, self-report, where the subjects assess themselves.

As John Gottman says: "Self-report data is easier to obtain, so a lot of social psychologists have formed an implicit society where they won't challenge one another. It's a collusion that makes it easier to publish research and not look at observational data or more objective data."

In general, says Gottman, the results of self-report have been quite reliable in the area of wellbeing. The problem is that when it comes down to distinguishing, say, those who "languish" from those who "flourish", there may be all manner of cultural and personal reasons why an individual or group might wish to deny negative feelings or even downplay positive ones.

"It's a lot more complicated than Fredrickson is suggesting," says Gottman.

After initially being turned down, Brown, Sokal and Friedman went through American Psychologist's lengthy appeals procedure and won the right to reply to Fredrickson's reply. They are currently working on what is certain to be a very carefully considered response. But it doesn't take a psychologist to work out that, given the nature of human behaviour, it's unlikely to be the last word.

Andrew Anthony

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For the record

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:04 PM PST

Some telescoped chronology in "How gracious mansions hide a dark history" (In Focus, last week, page 36) led us inadvertently to misrepresent Madge Dresser, associate professor in history at the University of the West of England. We said that by the Victorian era one in six of the richest Britons had derived some of their wealth from slavery and quoted Prof Dresser's claim that the Quakers were "up to their eyeballs in it". To clarify: Prof Dresser maintains that Quaker merchants were involved in slavery up until the 1760s but were instrumental in the campaign against slavery throughout the 19th century.

Naming names: Steve McQueen, not Alexander McQueen, directed 12 Years a Slave ("After Hollywood's vintage year", News, last week, page 10); early editions misnamed Marcia Rigg, sister of Sean Rigg, who died in police custody, as Martha ("We will not be swept under the carpet", News, page 5); and Joshua Reichert, not Reinhart, is a vice-president of the Pew charitable trusts ("Is this the year the world decides to save the shark?", News, page 18).

A typing error in a Comment subheading invented a new word last week: "obsesity". A reader suggests it could serve as a description of the media's current obsession with obesity.

Write to Stephen Pritchard, Readers' Editor, the Observer, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, tel 020 3353 4656 or email reader@observer.co.uk

Stephen Pritchard

New to Nature No 117: Timorus sarcophagoides

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:04 PM PST

South America's first fly-mimicking weevil convinces in both appearance and behaviour

A new species of weevil from Brazil is a pretty convincing mimic of a flesh fly of the family Sarcophagidae. Timorus sarcophagoides has large reddish spots on its thorax that look from a distance like the red eyes of a flesh fly and its body colouration rounds out the act. The alternating light and dark stripes of the thorax and elytra, or hardened forewings, of the weevil mirror precisely those of a sarcophagid. Were that not enough, the latter half of the elytra changes in texture to resemble the transparent wings of a fly and the weevil even behaves like a fly in its movements on exposed leaves and stems.

While it is the first fly-mimicking weevil from South America and a savanna habitat, it is not unique. Fly mimics of the weevil subfamily Conoderinae were first reported in the 1970s from tropical forests in Central America by biologist Henry Hespenheide. Since, he has reported scores of such species in this single subfamily alone. While many mimic red-eyed flies, not all mimic flesh flies. Other models include the families Tachinidae, Muscidae and Tabanidae. None of these flies is particularly dangerous or distasteful and it is likely their quick reflexes and agility that dissuade would-be predators from wasting time chasing them or, as it turns out, quite a few similarly day-active weevils.

The new species was described by Drs Sergio A Vanin of the Universidade de São Paulo and Tadeu J Guerra of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais from the vicinity of Serra do Cipó national park in south-eastern Brazil. Both adults and larvae are associated with the mistletoe Psittacanthus robustus in an areas of shallow, acidic and nutrient-poor soil marked by open fields, outcrops of rocks, bushes and a few small trees. Adults were observed feeding on soft tissues of flower buds and leaf axils. In January and February, females were seen laying eggs in the host's roots, where their rhizophagous larvae bore into the haustoria.

Quentin Wheeler

Birds' migration secrets to be revealed by space tracker

Posted: 18 Jan 2014 04:03 PM PST

Icarus, a wildlife receiver circling above Earth, will monitor the epic journeys of tiny birds and insects, helping to warn us of volcanic eruptions and to protect us from diseases

Small birds, butterflies, bees and fruitbats will be fitted with tiny radio transmitters and tracked throughout their lifetimes from space when a dedicated wildlife radio receiver is fitted to the International Space Station next year.

The ability to follow the movements of very small organisms hour by hour from space will revolutionise our understanding of long-distance bird migrations, and give advance warnings of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. And it should also help protect human populations from animal-borne diseases like Sars, bird flu and West Nile Virus, say conservationists.

Many animal species migrate continuously but biologists know the exact movements of only very few, mostly large ones. But the low-orbit Icarus wildlife receiver circling 200 miles (320km) above Earth should allow even butterflies to be followed, said Uschi Müller, co-ordinator of the €40m project, which is backed by the German and Russian space agencies and 12 scientific groups.

"To start with, Icarus scientists will use 5g transmitters but in the future we will use much smaller ones, under 1g, which will allow us to follow insects. It will be used for conservation, health and disaster forecasting", she said.

Because animals are known to sense imminent tectonic activity, she envisaged birds and other animals living near disaster-prone zones being fitted with the transmitters. "It could give people an extra five hours warning of a disaster," said Müller.

Rapidly developing miniature telemetry using satellites has already helped ornithologists understand the start of the British spring. Transmitters the size of a three-amp fuse have been fitted for three years to 13 British cuckoos. Last week scientists could see they were on their way back from the Congo rainforest.

The birds, given names like Whortle, Patch, Ken and David by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), which started to tag them in 2011, will not finish their 4,000-mile annual journey until mid-March at the earliest. But the tiny 5g transmitters show that one cuckoo called Skinner flew nearly 800 miles north last week, stopping briefly in Gabon, and is now in southern Cameroon. Others are on their way back from lakes and rivers in Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Equatorial Guinea.

The mystery of exactly where the world's 10-20 billion migratory birds go and how they navigate perilous journeys across continents and oceans without experience or guidance from parents has long puzzled people.

"All we knew until we attached the tracking devices to cuckoos was that British birds left in a south-easterly direction and that there was one record of a ringed bird found in Cameroon in 1938. It was a very big surprise when we found that nearly half were leaving in a south-westerly direction and migrating via Spain and west Africa," said Chris Hewsom, research ecologist at the BTO.

Moreover, Hewsom has found that Welsh, Scottish and English cuckoos all take different routes to and from Africa. Some make 1,850-mile detours, others zig-zag across the Sahara and some have found several ways to navigate the Mediterranean.

One Welsh cuckoo, David, reached Somerset last April but turned back possibly to wait until the weather warmed up or because he found his favourite caterpillars had not emerged from a particularly long winter.

"Every time we put a tracking unit on a bird we find something incredible. Our knowledge is exploding. We are getting answers to questions which have been around for years. We are now able to precisely identify the routes they take, where they stop to feed, even how high they fly," said Bryan Watts, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at William and Mary college in Virginia, US.

Watts, who tracks whimbrels, which breed in the high Arctic and winter in Venezuela, says satellite tracking has opened up a new world. "We were astonished to find the first bird that we tracked made a 3,500-mile nonstop flight from Virginia to Alaska, flying 35-40 mph for five solid days. We don't know how they're capable of these types of flights."

Others, he has found, take a massive detour towards Africa to avoid "hurricane alley", an area of warm water in the Atlantic stretching from the west coast of northern Africa to the US Gulf Coast where most hurricanes start. "They went right off the continent unexpectedly. It was amazing," he says.

Until 10 years ago, satellite tracking was used only on large animals which could be fitted with powerful transmitters with long lives, but the new solar-powered devices only switch on when a satellite passes overhead, and are getting smaller every year.

"By next year we hope to have devices that weigh just 2g, which will be small enough to place on songbirds like wood thrushes, warblers and finches," says Hewsom. "These will allow us to track birds like nightjars, too. We are getting to the stage we could do swifts, which would need devices that weighed no more than 1g."

"Icarus and the miniaturisation of telemetry means we are going to be able to monitor the natural world for the first time. We know hardly anything about bird migrations. We can now see that in evolutionary terms birds must know when it's a good time to migrate. We knew it was something like this but not at the individual level. This is answering questions and posing more," says Kasper Thorup, a bird migration researcher at Copenhagen university.

Being able to track birds, and eventually very small insects, is now seen as vital tool for conservation as well as a benefit for human health, which is increasingly linked to the movement of animals and people. About 70% of worldwide epidemics, like Sars, West Nile virus or bird flu, result from animal-human contact.

More knowledge about migrations is needed because populations of migratory birds like wood warblers, spotted fly-catchers and nightingales are declining fast, says the RSPB's Graham Madge. "Understanding the routes they take can help us preserve them and prevent higher than normal rates of infection among wildlife populations. We still don't know where they go and many are only here for a few months. Without knowing exactly where they go and when we can not understand how to conserve them."

"We are getting close to a full life cycle understanding of birds," says Watts. "We used to see birds at different places at different times, but we did not know they were the same ones. What we are seeing now for the first time is the way birds connect places. We are reducing the size of the world."

John Vidal