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Liberal-left coalitions are the only way to overturn the right’s unfair electoral advantage
Bravo for the Labour party and a new cadre of trade union leaders who this week showed unequivocal support for overhauling our archaic voting system. Labour conference delegates overwhelmingly backed a motion calling on the party to embrace proportional representation. How could it be otherwise when a fanatical cult of free-marketeers has seized power and crashed the economy?
Progressives almost always outvote the right, according to the Electoral Reform Society. But the right nearly always wins under the current first-past-the-post system because the centre and centre-left vote has been fatally split ever since the rising Labour party failed to kill off the remnant of the old Liberals. At the last local elections, in 85% of seats just one rightist – a single Tory – confronted an anti-Tory vote split between two or three Labour, Lib Dem and Green candidates. Readers of these pages know the well-rehearsed reasons why the Guardian backs electoral reform. The political scientist Sir John Curtice says the system is now more biased towards the Conservatives than at any time since the 1950s, when Labour on its own outpolled them but lost.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Wolfson says currency crisis means inflation, which has soared from energy prices, may be worse next year
Next has warned the UK could be heading for a second cost of living crisis next year as the slump in the value of the pound drives further price rises.
The fashion and homewares retailer on Thursday cut sales and profit expectations for the year after a disappointing August and on fears that inflationary pressures would put a squeeze on shoppers’ spare cash.
Continue reading...The temperatures fall, and the kids and I – as if hypnotised – find ourselves driving out of town for some ritual apple-picking
It was a long weekend in New York last week, where the schools closed for the Jewish New Year and New Yorkers reckoned with an annual tradition. “Let’s go apple-picking,” someone says, and every year you insist you’ll resist. The 80F (27C) heat; the dust; the bumper to bumper New York plates; and the task itself – picking sodding apples you will never, ever make into a pie (when, in your entire life, have you ever made a pie?) – none of that matters. Like a trigger from a hypnotist, hear those words and you, a city person, are compelled by some law of physics to rent a car, identify a farm and drive out to fulfil your autumn quest in a jacket too warm for the day.
This year, we tried to at least use our years in the trenches to make the experience less onerous. Drive 45 minutes out of town to a field in New Jersey and you’ll find yourself less in a farm than a giant car park. (This is the same, semi-metropolitan zone that three months hence will offer ski slopes with 3cm of snow, warmed by the heat of 8 million New Yorkers). This year, we would do it properly and drive two and a half hours north west into rural Pennsylvania. We would stay with friends who knew what they were doing. We would find the one apple-picking experience that, unlike that of all the other cosplaying city folk, would bring us convincing insights into rural life.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...The US songwriter guides us through a few days in sounds, from his son’s love of the Hamster Dance to Texas’s local Mexican radio stations and Traxman
7.13am I listened to Alfalfa sing You Are So Beautiful to Me to Darla from the Little Rascals on YouTube. I was double-checking that the little girl’s name was Darla because I was writing a text to my sister that referenced Darla being on the shortlist for my daughter’s name. My shortlist, not my wife’s! That song popped up and I couldn’t resist. I watched the original show when I was a kid and it’s a pretty great show. I think my wife was into the remake movie, but I was too old when it came out.
Continue reading...With ingredients such as chilli, clay and dried fish, Tapi Tapi’s frozen desserts are inspired by Africa’s dishes and food cultures
Caterpillars, dried fish and clay are not what you would expect to find in ice-cream, but one Cape Town cafe with a mission to celebrate African foods and culture has used all three as ingredients in its frozen desserts.
“Handcrafted, authentic African ice-cream,” reads a sign at the entrance to Tapi Tapi. Inside, the counter is filled with ice-creams in various shades of beige and brown. They look underwhelming, but the blackboard listing the flavours suggests differently.
Continue reading...National Gallery, London
From the monarch to the naked performance artist who was living with Aids, Freud paints life lived in the face of death, with an unsentimental eye for human tenderness
Even the Queen of England, said Andy Warhol, can’t buy a better hot dog than the bum on the sidewalk. Another thing the Queen of England couldn’t buy was a flattering portrait by Lucian Freud. When he painted Elizabeth II at the start of this millennium, he treated her face with the same harsh objectivity as any other face, a closeup of wrinkles and sags, tight mouth and unhappy eyes, under coils of grey hair, with the absurd addition of a crown. Was Freud a republican? He certainly wasn’t a sentimental royalist.
This royal head rests uneasy on a wall of equally unvarnished portraits of famous and unfamous faces in the National Gallery’s addictive centenary blockbuster Freud show. It is a key to his art, for it is so movingly unpretentious – in an almost adolescent way – in its declaration of the artist’s moral mission. A portrait, says this portrait, must be brutally true. Face to face with a monarch, an artist has only two options: be a courtier or a truth-teller. Freud takes the path he always does, warts and all. His genius is his innocent simplicity. Just look and be honest about what you see. It was the clearest, most humble of creeds, yet it meant ignoring a truckload of philosophical and artistic distractions, over a long working lifetime.
Continue reading...As most of the media, beholden to those who would uphold the status quo, downplay the most critical issue of all, our mission is to put the environment front and centre
What is salient is not important. What is important is not salient. Most of the time, most of the media obsess over issues of mind-numbing triviality. Much of the world’s political journalism is little more than court gossip: who’s in, who’s out, who said what to whom. At the same time, issues of immense, even existential importance are largely or entirely ignored.
With the exception of all-out nuclear war, all the most important problems that confront us are environmental. None of our hopes, none of our dreams, none of our plans and expectations can survive the loss of a habitable planet. And there is scarcely an Earth system that is not now threatened with collapse.
Continue reading...I tried to fit in with my white friends by smothering my hair with painful chemicals – until I decided to have the Big Chop
It was a hot, humid day when I decided it was time for the Big Chop. My body wanted to go home, but my heart guided me to the Dominican barbershop in my neighbourhood in New York instead. The man sitting in a blue folding chair out front eyed me curiously as I approached.
I’d walked by the man countless times before, but we’d never spoken. Not until now, as I asked if he would cut off my hair. He frowned, unsure of what I was asking. But when I pointed at my relaxed, or chemically straightened, hair and made sweeping snip-snips with my fingers, he gestured for me to follow him. Little did he know that his agreement would change my entire life.
Zakiya Dalila Harris is an American writer based in New York and the author of the novel The Other Black Girl
Continue reading...At first, the killing of Mahsa Amini by the morality police triggered protests only among a minority – but anger with the regime soon spread
When a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, died in regime custody 10 days ago, Kurdish corners of Iran were the first to erupt; their anger at leaders they say have long oppressed them had an incendiary effect in their towns and cities.
The death of the 22-year-old, who refused to wear a hijab on a visit to Tehran, quickly became a potent symbol of defiance for a minority group that had long harboured nationalistic ambitions, which rarely stayed hidden, and often eschewed the values of the country’s hardline leaders.
Continue reading...The UK economy needs the rest of the country to help reverse decades of decline – even Boris Johnson knew that
Traders in the City of London were punching the air at Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget last week. It was small wonder. He had granted some of them hundreds of thousands of pounds. By way of contrast, “red wall” Tory MPs’ hearts were sinking. Kwarteng’s new tax measures might have had one aim in view: to benefit London’s economy at the expense of the rest of the country. His former boss Boris Johnson’s one sensible policy ambition, to reduce the income gap between the capital and the north, lay in ruins. London was exulting.
The surge in bankers’ bonuses and the slashed rate for the richest 5% in the UK will go overwhelmingly to residents of the capital and its environs. The £45bn package is aimed at the wealthy, at corporate profits and at boosting the price of land and the private housing market. Of the 48 English enterprise zones to enjoy Treasury largesse, just 16 are in the north.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...In private, many physicists admit they do not believe the particles they are paid to search for exist – they do it because their colleagues are doing it
Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission should be sent off to search the Arctic for spiders.
The second speaker has a model for a flying earthworm, but it flies only in caves. There’s no evidence for that either, but he petitions to search the world’s caves. The third one has a model for octopuses on Mars. It’s testable, he stresses.
Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany. She is author of Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions and creator of the YouTube Channel Science Without the Gobbledygook.
Continue reading...Cakes, kofte, couscous and roast chicken are among our favourite dishes from the revered food writer
A celebration of perhaps our finest food writer. But how to pick just 20 recipes from a stellar career of more than 50 years. Some choose themselves: definitive chicken soup from The Book of Jewish Food; essential orange and almond cake from A New Book of Middle Eastern Food. But here, too, are apple latkes, tarte pissaladière, roast chicken with couscous, raisin and almonds. There’s white haricot beans with clams from Spain, fish soup with saffron from the south of France, kofte kebab from Turkey. Even a perfect lemon tart from her latest book, Med. Just a taster from the wondrous world of Claudia Roden.
Continue reading...Dutch cyclist retires early from Wollongong race following alleged night-time altercation with teenagers at hotel
Dutch cyclist Mathieu van der Poel, who was the favourite going into the UCI Road World Championships elite men’s road race in Wollongong, was arrested and charged with common assault on Saturday night following an incident at his hotel.
He started the race on Sunday morning but retired after less than an hour of racing.
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Continue reading...Andrew Dominik’s gothic portrait of the inner life of Marilyn Monroe – an extraordinary Ana de Armas – is a fever dream of childhood trauma haunting adult life
How should we assess writer-director Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s historical fiction novel about the inner life of Marilyn Monroe? Some have viewed it as a biopic and judged it accordingly, worrying about its (lack of) fidelity to the known details of Monroe’s life, and attempting to evaluate how accurately or (un)fairly it presents her strengths and weaknesses, on and off screen. Others have interpreted it as a more expressionist portrayal of the gap between private and public personae – a generic peep at the tears behind the smiling mask of celebrity. Yet at its heart this is a gothic melodrama, a fever dream of childhood trauma haunting adult life, replete with skin-crawlingly cruel visions of inquisitorial torture, brutal ordeals and hellish infernos – more Nightmare on Elm Street than My Week With Marilyn.
Cuban actor Ana de Armas, who proved a scene-stealing presence in films such as Knives Out and No Time to Die, is simply extraordinary as Norma Jeane Baker, an aspiring performer for whom the spectre of Marilyn Monroe is an assumed identity – a portal to stardom. Her past is full of monsters: a mother (a mesmerising Julianne Nicholson) who drives her into raging fires and attempts to drown her in a scalding bath; and an unknown father from whom she receives creepily controlling ghostly missives. Juggling past and present, Dominik intercuts childhood fears with grownup tears as she encounters monstrous studio heads (an early “audition” leads to rape), violent husbands (Bobby Cannavale’s Joe DiMaggio beats her when pin-up photos fire his jealousy) and loveless lovers (an assignation with JFK will make you gag). Worse still are the grotesque intra-uterine visions of doctors that owe a debt to the demonic delirium of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski’s Repulsion also casts a long shadow) or to the abortive abortion scene from David Cronenberg’s The Fly crossed with the imagined unborn-baby-talk of Alice Lowe’s antenatal slasher Prevenge.
In cinemas now and on Netflix from Wednesday
Continue reading...The former Leeds manager is enjoying a good start to the season with Stevenage and says he is mellower now
‘Alexa, stop,” Steve Evans says, sitting at his kitchen table, shutting off the Motown playlist as he reflects on Stevenage’s superb start to the season, hours after victory preserved their perfect home record. It is a summer’s day in Rutland, the sun blasting in from the garden that doubles up as a football pitch for him and Joseph, his eldest grandson. Evans spent the morning strimming the hedges and mowing the lawn and is at ease as he looks back on a colourful career in the dugout. It all began in the 90s, a few minutes down the road at Stamford AFC where he won two of his eight promotions and the management bug gripped him, but much has changed since then.
The rhino skin remains – it is a necessity to last this long in the game – but Evans insists the caricature of the uncensored character who would overheat and berate officials on the touchline is out of date. So does he feel he has mellowed? “Without a shadow of a doubt,” says Evans, 60 next month. “I’ve think if you’ve seen me 10-15 years ago, it could be the most blatant goal-kick and I’m appealing for a corner, and if we lose it’s not my fault because I got the team or the shape wrong, it’s the referee’s fault because he didn’t give us the right throw-in on 74 minutes. I had to change, for health, and because we’re getting to the stage where grandsons are coming to the games. Joseph comes and he’s like: ‘Pops, pops!’ You have to be a bit careful, do you know what I mean?
Continue reading...A neglected child, Miki found her family in 80s indie – then watched as Britpop turned it into a caricature. After losing her post-band job in lockdown, she decided to look back in a memoir
• Read an extract from Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me from Success
When Miki Berenyi thinks of Britpop, certain memories stand out – such as the night at Soho House in London when Alex James from Blur sank his teeth into her bum. “I object to this idea that Britpop was fucking amazing,” says the lead singer of Lush, dragging on her vape at her kitchen table in Willesden, north London. “Don’t get me wrong. I’d been there, jumping up and down to Girls and Boys. Some of the music was great. But Britpop was a monoculture. Every scene has an underbelly, but there was no room for any other story. Of course, you can’t say that, because people will go: stop being such a killjoy, you’re only saying that just because Lush weren’t popular – which I have conceded!”
Berenyi, 55, has a disarming self-possession with a fizzing energy just below the surface. She fronted Lush with Emma Anderson – they had bonded at school over the Thompson Twins and a shared filthy sense of humour – and they wrote their own songs, contrary to the assumptions of many journalists at the time. They emerged from the shoegaze scene in the late 80s and were signed to 4AD. Their lyrics were smart: Ladykillers was a kiss-off to Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis, who Berenyi says tried to take her to a strip club (“He didn’t do anything terrible – he was just a bit of a twat”). But then they were swept up in ladette culture. One day in 1996, Berenyi found herself being photographed bent over a toilet, legs splayed, being told to look seductively back at the camera.
Continue reading...Ahead of party conference, the talk is of singing the national anthem. But that’s Labour, always fighting yesterday’s battles
There’s no through line to this era of Conservatism. It unfolds randomly like prog rock, ear-bleeding thrash straight after a flute solo. First, their only agenda was to reduce the deficit, then they were all about levelling up, now they want to increase the deficit and stop levelling up, and what they say doesn’t really matter, because it doesn’t happen anyway. Very often they deliver the exact opposite, and you have to conclude that the real agenda was to sever the links between language and meaning, cause and effect, promise and outcome.
What they cannot escape, however, is the passage of time. Twelve years have now gone by, and it would be time-consuming and complicatedly disrespectful to recap how much hardship, how much lasting damage they have caused. They can and will start culture wars to plug the rhetorical gaps, but on the material realities facing most Britons, they have only one option: a narrative of impotence. The UK is poorer because the good times couldn’t last for ever; energy is more expensive because of unavoidable exogenous shocks; inflation is high because of energy; interest rates are high because of inflation; look over there, Germany is having a right time of it too. We’re in decline because so is the world. Any line other than this would require them to take some responsibility, which would interrupt their messaging that they “got the big calls right”.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...His release from prison has not proved his innocence or guilt – but it has highlighted how we are all guilty of pretending we know more than we do
I know for certain whether Adnan Syed was guilty. Syed, who has just had his conviction overturned after serving almost 23 years for the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, once said that only he and her murderer could be 100% certain whether Syed was innocent – but nope, sorry, I know. I’ve listened to Serial – the 2014 podcast that popularised Syed’s case – twice. I’ve spent countless hours on Reddit forums dedicated to everything the podcast missed. I’ve spotted telling remarks made in telling tones. I have read the doodled diary extracts of a strangled teenage girl. I know whether Syed is a murderer. Get rid of judges, juries and executioners: replace them with me.
I’m being facetious, obviously – there’s a reason I haven’t told you whether I’m so sure of Syed’s innocence or of his guilt. This is because I know, logically, that the certainty that surges in my chest is no such thing at all. Obviously I don’t know whether Syed committed murder more than two decades ago; obviously I don’t know whether he was framed by corrupt detectives at the Baltimore Police Department. I am just one of 340 million listeners, and about as geographically and temporally removed from the case as it’s possible to be. But still, I am certain – and I’m troubled by that, and troubled by other people’s certainty too.
Amelia Tait is a freelance features writer
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