Humanity's 'inexorable' population growth is so rapid that even a global catastrophe wouldn't stop it

Steve Conor in The Independent

The global human population is “locked in” to an inexorable rise this century and will not be easily shifted, even by apocalyptic events such as a third world war or lethal pandemic, a study has found.

There is no “quick fix” to the population time-bomb, because there are now so many people even unimaginable global disasters won't stop growth, scientists have concluded.

Although measures designed to reduce human fertility in the parts of the world where the population growth is fastest will eventually have a long-term impact on numbers, this has to go hand-in-hand with policies aimed at reducing the consumption of natural resources, they said.

Two prominent ecologists, who normally study animal populations in the wild, have concluded that the number of people in the world today will present one of the most daunting problems for sustainable living on the planet in the coming century – even if every country adopts a draconian “one child” policy.

“The inexorable demographic momentum of the global human population is rapidly eroding Earth’s life-support system,” say Professor Corey Bradshaw of the University of Adelaide and Professor Barry Brook of the University of Tasmania in their study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Assuming a continuation of current trends in mortality reduction, even a rapid transition to a worldwide one-child policy leads to a population similar to today’s by 2100,” they say.

“Even a catastrophic mass mortality event of 2bn deaths over a hypothetical window in the mid-21st century would still yield around 8.5bn people by 2100,” they add.

There are currently about 7.1bn people on Earth, and demographers estimate that this number could rise to about 9bn by 2050 - and as many as 25bn by 2100, although this is based on current fertility rates, which are expected to fall over the coming decades.

The number of people in the world today will present one of the most daunting problems for sustainable living on the planet in the coming century (Getty)

Professor Bradshaw told The Independent that the study was designed to look at human numbers with the insight of an ecologist studying natural impacts on animals to determine whether factors such pandemics and world wars could dramatically influence the population projections.

“We basically found that the human population size is so large that it has its own momentum. It’s like a speeding car travelling at 150mph. You can slam on the brakes but it still takes time to stop,” Professor Bradshaw said.

“Global population has risen so fast over the past century that roughly 14 per cent of all the human beings that have ever lived are still alive today – that’s a sobering statistic,” he said.

“We examined various scenarios for global human population change to the year 2100 by adjusting fertility and mortality rates to determine the plausible range of population sizes at the end of the century.

“Even a worldwide one-child policy like China’s, implemented over the coming century, or catastrophic mortality events like global conflict or a disease pandemic, would still likely result in 5bn to 10bn people in 2100,” he added.

The researchers devised nine different scenarios that could influence human numbers this century, ranging from “business as usual” with existing fertility rates, to an unlikely one-child-per-family policy throughout the world, to broad-scale global catastrophes in which billions die.

“We were surprised that a five-year WWIII scenario mimicking the same proportion of people killed in the First World War and Second World War combined, barely registered a blip on the human population trajectory this century,” said Professor Brook.

Measures to control fertility through family planning policies will eventually have an impact on reducing the pressure on limited resources, but not immediately, he said.

“Our great-great-great-great-grandchildren might ultimately benefit from such planning, but people alive today will not,” Professor Brook said.

Simon Ross, the chief executive of the charity Population Matters, said that introducing modern family planning to the developing world would cost less than $4bn – about one third of the UK’s annual aid budget.

“So, while fertility reduction is not a quick fix, it is relatively cheap, reliable, and popular with most, with generally positive side effects. We welcome the recognition of the potential of family planning and reproductive education to alleviate resource availability in the longer term,” Mr Ross said.

My parents helped me to lose my virginity

When he was 16, Boris Fishman and his girlfriend felt ready to have sex but he wanted the setting to be right and there was nowhere to go. Then he had an idea ...

• Boris Fishman
• The Guardian, Friday 12 September 2014 14.30 BST

Boris Fishman … 'I wanted it to resemble the epic lovelorn couplings in Marquez's books.'

We were each other’s firsts. I was 16, a stressed-out immigrant kid, she was the daughter of Colombian Catholics who were quite fond of the church’s policy on pre-marital sex. So it took us quite a while to awkwardly, semi-defeatedly concede to each other that we had run out of excuses to avoid sex. “This weekend?” I said grimly.

“Your house?” she said.

On Saturday morning, when the springtime sun finally made a strong showing outside after a dreary, wet winter, I came downstairs, where my parents and maternal grandmother were gathered around breakfast, and asked, as casually as I could: “Are you guys doing anything tonight?”

My father, not one for socialising or reading between the lines, wrinkled his forehead and said: “No?”

But my mother, who reads between the lines, needed only one look at me to say: “Of course!” She didn’t know why she was being asked, but she knew she was being asked.

“Why not go out for dinner?” I said, feeling guilty. “My treat.” Since arriving from the Soviet Union a decade before in 1988, none of our immigrant habits had eased; we almost never ate out – too expensive.

But I had been hoarding dollars from my summer jobs landscaping and lifeguarding. My offer must have indicated to my mother how badly I wished for the thing I was asking.

“But we’re not going anywhere tonight,” my father repeated, confused. My mother smacked his arm with the back of her hand: “Yes, we are.”

My grandmother only lolled her head, smiling. Whatever the adventure, she was in, as long as it included the family. (She had lost most of hers in the Holocaust.)

With curiosity, scepticism and goodwill, my parents and grandmother piled into the cramped, rusty Buick that was our first car in America and fumed off to whatever discount place they were going to for dinner. Newly permitted to drive, I jumped into our other car and sped off to a linen shop, in one of the nondescript shopping malls that surrounded our town like a blockading army.

I had been reading quite a bit of Gabriel García Márquez – my girlfriend’s compatriot – and I wanted her first time to resemble the epic, lovelorn couplings in his books. I wasn’t sure how things would hold up at my end, so at least everything else could be perfect.

After buying sheets (surely, I was the only unaccompanied 16-year-old male in the store), I stopped at the florist’s and asked for two dozen roses, rapidly depleting the funds I had set aside for my family’s dinner. I was so anxious that I gashed a finger trying to open the cellophane packaging in which the sheets were packed. I laid them down and wondered how tacky it was for the folding creases to show. Márquez had said nothing about folding creases. I tore the sheets back off the bed, yanked my mother’s ironing board from the hallway closet and got to work, the clock marching forward without mercy. My girlfriend was almost due and my family surely soon after that.

I gashed another finger plucking the petals off the thorn-riddled roses. (You thought I was going to give my girlfriend the flowers? No, like a maestro unveiling his circus, I would peel back the bedspread to reveal … fresh sheets covered in rose petals!)

Trying desperately not to bleed all over the enterprise, I stretched the ironed sheets over the mattress, scattered 300 rose petals on top and covered it all with the bedspread.

The main event was nothing like my literary hero had promised: primarily, we were relieved it was over. Now we could savour the falsely sweet memory of a milestone achieved. We turned on the television, called the diner and ordered a takeaway.

However, there was no sign of the adults. It was dark by now; I couldn’t imagine them choosing a restaurant that took serious time with its meals. There was no such place in our town, in any case.

They weren’t back when I drove my girlfriend home and they weren’t back by the time I returned. Eleven turned to midnight to 1am, and I turned from amusement to worry to terror at having consigned my family to catastrophe all because I wanted to lose my virginity.

I paced the living room and waited.

Boris Fishman’s parents, Anna and Yakov.

Though I would be unable to explain the feeling until many years later, the unease in my chest that evening had less to do with the awkwardness of a first coupling than the knowledge that it had been an obligation performed by two young people who felt a tremendous amount of affection for each other and desperately wished that could be enough.

I wrote my first poems for Gloria and she listened patiently to my complaints about the pressures of all that was expected from me at home. She came to my tennis matches and I wrote her term papers. But there were too many silent moments between us and the fact that our parents did not see us together – a Catholic and a Jew – only deepened the gloom. Our parents’ opinions mattered to us with all the weight they suspected was lacking.

Gloria and I would never regret that we had given ourselves to each other, but among the many other lessons with which adulthood awaited us was the news that for a life together it was not enough to love someone; you had to like them, too.

She was one year older than me and when she went off to college we unravelled. All the same, when I went to college, my mother demanded to know whether I had chosen it because it was only half an hour from where Gloria was studying.

“It’s Princeton, Ma,” I said. “Who cares why I chose it?” (I had selected Princeton because it offered the most financial assistance and because my parents would be footing the bill). But having spent their formative years in a country that lied to and abused its citizens, especially if they were Jewish, my parents were always alert to a con, even from their own flesh and blood.

As for Gloria, we reconnected several years ago after more than a decade. We have dinner every few months, each meeting as if no time has passed. The intense feelings that we experienced in those impressionable years have left us with a seemingly ineradicable tenderness available only to people like us. Sometimes I wonder: would we have stood a chance if we had ignored our parents about our relationship, too? There is no way to know.

So, this is adulthood: being old enough to have questions that will never be answered. Now, the parents listen only sometimes. Gloria and I laugh and commiserate about it when we meet at dinner. In those moments, our friendship feels like a secret and a gift.

But back to that spring night in 1996. When I heard the garage-door rumble open at 2am, I leapt off the couch where I was napping fitfully and burst through the connecting door in the front hallway.

“Where were you?!” I demanded like a parent sighting children who had violated their curfew. “It’s 2am!”

“We wanted to give you your time,” my mother said, taken aback.

“Where were you?” I demanded.

Recent immigrants don’t eat out, not if someone in the family is paying (my pocket was as good as their own, as far as they were concerned). They had spent seven hours parked in the lot outside Shop Rite down Hamburg Turnpike, next to the diner from which my girlfriend and I had ordered food. They had made sandwiches. They snacked on turkey slices with mayo and cucumber and talked about all the things they wished their only son to achieve. Seven hours they had talked and they could have gone on until dawn.

One in 10 do not have a close friend and even more feel unloved, survey finds

Study by relationship counsellor Relate finds a divided nation with many left without vital support of friends and family

• Alexandra Topping
• The Guardian, Tuesday 12 August 2014

Millions of people in the UK do not have a single friend and fewer still feel loved. Photograph: keith morris / Alamy/Alamy

Millions of people in the UK do not have a single friend and one in five feel unloved, according to a survey published on Tuesday by the relationship charity Relate.

One in 10 people questioned said they did not have a close friend, amounting to an estimated 4.7 million people in the UK may be leading a very lonely existence.

Ruth Sutherland, the chief executive of Relate, said the survey revealed a divided nation with many people left without the vital support of friends or partners.

While the survey found 85% of individuals questioned felt they had a good relationship with their partners, 19% had never or rarely felt loved in the two weeks before the survey.

"Whilst there is much to celebrate, the results around how close we feel to others are very concerning. There is a significant minority of people who claim to have no close friends, or who never or rarely feel loved – something which is unimaginable to many of us," said Sutherland.

"Relationships are the asset which can get us through good times and bad, and it is worrying to think that there are people who feel they have no one they can turn to during life's challenges. We know that strong relationships are vital for both individuals and society as a whole, so investing in them is crucial."

The study looked at 5,778 people aged 16 and over across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and asked about people's contentment with all aspects of their relationships, including their partners, friends, workmates and bosses. It found that people who said that they had good relationships had higher levels of wellbeing, while poor relationships were detrimental to health, wellbeing and self-confidence.

The study found that 81% of people who were married or cohabiting felt good about themselves, compared with 69% who were single.

The quality of relationship counts for a lot, according to the survey: 83% of those who described their relationship as good or very good reported feeling good about themselves while only 62% of those who described their relationship as average, bad or very bad reported the same level of personal wellbeing.

The survey, The Way We Are Now 2014, showed that while four out of five people said they had a good relationship with their partner, far fewer were happy with their sex lives. One in four people admitted to being dissatisfied with their sex life, and one in four also admitted to having an affair.

There was also evidence of the changing nature of family life – and increasing divorce rates – in the survey, which found that almost one in four of the people questioned had experienced the breakdown of their parents' relationship.

When it comes to the biggest strains put on relationships, a significant majority (62%) cited money troubles as the most stressful factor.

The survey also found that older people are more worried about money, with 69% of those aged 65 and over saying money worries were a major strain, compared with only 37% of 16 to 24-year-olds.

When it comes to employment, many of those questioned had a positive relationship with their bosses, but felt putting work before family was highly valued in the workplace.

Just under 60% of people said they had a good relationship with their boss, but more than one in three thought their bosses believed the most productive employees put work before family. It also appears that work can be quite a lonely place too: 42% of people said they had no friends at work.

Nine out of 10 people, however, said they had a least one close friend, with 81% of women describing their friendships as good or very good compared with 73% of men.

Loneliness is one thing. A happy loner quite another

Britain may well be 'Europe's loneliness capital', but being happily alone by choice is quite another matter

• 
• • Barbara Ellen
  • The Observer, Sunday 22 June 2014

Isolated… or just enjoying her own company? Photograph: Pierre Desrosiers/Getty Images

There used to be a fashion for scaremongering surveys about single women, saying things like: "Eight out of 10 women are going to die alone, surrounded by 17 cats." But to that I would mentally add: "Or it could all go horribly wrong." To my mind, aloneness never necessarily equated with loneliness. It wasn't a negative, something to be avoided, feared or endured.

Now a survey from the Office for National Statistics says that "Britain is the loneliness capital of Europe". Overall, Britons are less likely to have people they can turn to in a crisis or to feel close to neighbours. On this last point, we came 26th out of 28 European countries – beating Denmark and France (but they scored higher in other areas).

However, Britain was better than average in areas such as feeling that life was generally worthwhile. And though we did come near bottom on having people to turn to in a crisis, there were still 88.7% who could turn to someone. Slovakia's score was nearly 100%, but that's just showing off. Joking apart, if the truly lonely in Britain are to be identified and helped, then the first step would be to stop lazily lumping them in with the contented-alone.

I sometimes think of myself as a natural loner, though, in my case, this could just be a cover for being a sullen, unsociable, misanthropic cow who was warped by reading too much as a child. The upshot is that "alone" doesn't bother me much. But, then, there are two types of solitude – voluntary and enforced, the latter being a killer.

Past studies have reported the debilitating impact of loneliness, one stating that, for older people, it could be more deadly a factor than obesity. Such loneliness is caused by myriad factors – disability, unemployment, economic stress, mental illness, family breakdown, relocation and so on. Few would want to suffer it.

Then there is the other type of "alone". This study could just as well be interpreted as saying that many Britons are self-reliant problem-solvers, respectful of others people's privacy – and what's wrong with that? Isn't this the modern British definition of neighbourliness: not over-chummy and intrusive, but friendly, considerate and, most importantly, happy to sign for your Amazon parcels?

Now I'm being flippant. Of course you'd hope that people would help each other out in a crisis. However, generally, things such as "neighbourliness" seem defined by personality types. That's why some people go to London, are shocked by its standoffish ways and leave, while others like myself (escapees from villages) relish the freeing anonymity.

Likewise, while these days social media et al provides a sense of ersatz "community" without human interaction for those who want it (the equivalent of the television left on "for company"?), some people don't even want or need this.

Odd, then, that it's usually loners who are viewed with pity, condescension or suspicion. But why? Britain is an overstuffed, teeming little rock. It makes sense that, just as some people will be sociable, others will adopt the "island mentality" of standing alone and neither is right or wrong.

Still, the feeling persists that sociability is a skill, while the opposite casts a person as a loser or a weirdo – someone who's going to end up walking down a high street wearing a bandana, firing guns at those who've "wronged" them.

Personally, I'd be more likely to distrust people who can't bear time with themselves. What's wrong with them that they can't abide their own company – what are they trying to hide in the crowd?

This is what I take from these kinds of surveys – that there are the lonely, and there are the alone. Seemingly the trick is to reach out to the group who truly need help, rather than getting them mixed up. 

Modern marriages aren’t made in heaven

Gurcharan Das in The Times of India

In the past few weeks, sexual tragedies have blighted some prominent and attractive lives. Sunanda Pushkar, wife of the writer and minister, Shashi Tharoor, died recently in Delhi. Around the same time, the French First Lady, Valerie Treirweiler, had to be hospitalized in Paris. Both events followed revelations of alleged sexual affairs. Sunanda Pushkar accused her husband of an intimate relationship with a Pakistani journalist. Ms Treirweiler was devastated by the French president, Francois Hollande’s liaison with an actress; France’s first family split a few days later. These are not only titillating sex scandals about glamorous celebrities — they reveal something deeper and infinitely sad about the melancholic human condition. 

The standard narrative in such cases is to blame the unfaithful man, calling him 'scumbag’ and 'cheat'. There is another narrative, however, which holds the institution of 'love marriage' equally guilty. Modern marriage combines three idealistic ideas — love, sex, and family — which make distinctive but unreasonable demands on a couple. To raise a family was, of course, the original idea behind marriage. To it has been added the second ideal of romantic love; and a third — that one's partner should also be a great performer in bed. 

We have a sensible institution in India called 'arranged marriage' which we contrast with 'love marriage'. Throughout human history arranged marriages were the norm in most societies. People got married to raise a family. In early 19th century, with the rise of the middle-classes, 'love marriage' emerged in Europe. It coincided with the Enlightenment, which incubated 'modern' ideas such as liberty, equality, individualism and secularism that quickly swept the world. These liberal ideas, along with 'love marriage', came to India on the coat tails of the British Raj. Initially it infected a tiny westernized minority but today it has permeated a larger middle-class. Most Indians received their ideal of 'love marriage' unreliably from Bollywood, which may explain why good old fashioned arranged marriage is still well and alive in India. 


In pre-modern times, men satisfied the three needs via three different individuals, according to the philosopher Alain de Botton's sensitively male perspective. A wife made a home and children; a lover fulfilled one's romantic needs clandestinely ; and an accomplished prostitute or courtesan was always there for great sex. This division of labour served men well. Given a chance, I expect, my grandfather would have lived thus. But today, we make impossible demands on a single person to meet romantic, sexual and familial needs. She feels huge pressure to fulfil all three roles plus make a career outside the home. What she mostly wants is a love marriage with good and faithful husband. 

The insane ambition of modern love marriage to satisfy so many needs places a huge burden and this might also help to explain the tragedies of Sunanda Pushkar and Valerie Treirweiler. It was certainly behind the tragedies that befell the heroines of two of my favourite novels, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. Both women had enviable financial security but also loveless marriages. But both had modern, romantic expectations from life, and dared to fulfil them outside marriage. Society did not forgive their illicit love affairs and their lives ended in tragic suicides. 

Human beings may have become modern and liberal but society remains conservative. Who has not been tempted by illicit love? An affair with a beautiful stranger is a thrilling prospect, especially after years of raising children. There is also fear of death if one is middle-aged — life is passing and when will another chance come? But these exhilarating thoughts have to be weighed against hurting another human being. One must always empathize with the victim of adultery. Even the Kamasutra admits that dharma trumps kama. 

Does one betray another human being or oneself ? Either way one loses. If one decides to have a fling, one betrays a spouse and puts one's love at risk. If one abstains from temptation, one risks becoming stale and repressed. If one keeps the affair secret, one becomes inauthentic. Confessing to it brings needless pain. If one places one's children's interest above one's own, one is disappointed when they leave. If one puts one's own interest above theirs, one earns their unending resentment. This, alas, is the unhappy, melancholic human condition.

Our workplaces are about as family-friendly as a 19th-century mill

Maternity leave, sick pay, the minimum wage – the ability to claim these vital rights has been torched by our zero-hours economy

 

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 29 January 2014

'The idea that you can plan high-quality childcare or a work-life balance in zero-hours conditions is laughable.' Illustration by Belle Mellor

Crack open a conversation about the family in political circles, and it's like Christmas Day in the trenches. Agreement breaks out: there's nothing more important than security, happiness and high-quality childcare in the early years; every child matters; women deserve their place in the workforce, men deserve their time in the homestead; both genders are desperately welcome – invaluable, irreplaceable! – in all settings; and (altogether now) we all want to be more like Scandinavia.

Delving a little deeper, there are some disagreements between the parties, or – for brevity – between Liz Truss, the childcare minister, and everybody else. Labour and the Lib Dems think the answer to universal, high-quality childcare is to find some equitable way for the government to fund it. Truss still thinks that the market would work on its own, if only big government would step out of the way. Her plan is for childcare workers to be better trained, and therefore allowed to manage more children. It is a stupid plan. No amount of GCSEs will increase your number of arms, hands and eyes. Yet she is to be admired for breaking ranks and allowing her neoliberalism free expression. Nobody else will mention market forces devant les enfants; it's almost as if the market were some kind of swearword.

And yet, despite every advance, every warm progressive statement, every assurance of "family-friendliness", conditions for parents at work worsen; discrimination against pregnant women intensifies . The rather nugatory fortnight of paternity leave goes largely unclaimed among low-income workers, while 80% of those on middle to high incomes take it. Most low-waged mothers go back to work after fewer than the 26 weeks of "ordinary maternity leave", most mothers on medium to high incomes take more than six months.

There is a gulf between the promises made to families by politicians, and the life that is delivered. There is also a gulf between rich and poor, which is then biologised by the likes of Iain Duncan Smith and his Centre for Social Justice, who blame "bad parenting" on poor people who don't love their babies enough to want to spend their first year with them. But we're just going to have to do that another day.

I believe the work situation is substantially down to the way we talk about life in gender silos, where "children", "maternity leave", "pregnancy" and "families" are filed under "women", while "industrial relations", "tribunals", "contracts" and "workplace" go under "men". This has blinded us to the fact that many statutory entitlements can never be upheld. Maybe you have the wrong kind of job or the wrong kind of (zero hours) contract; some rights build up over time and you can't prove unbroken service if you've never had a proper contract. Even if you could, your position is too precarious to insist on the rights you do have; and if it all turns sour you can't take anybody to a tribunal because since last July you've had to pay to do so.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development recently released research on the reality of zero-hours work: 75% of workers didn't know how much money they'd have at the end of the week, and 42% were given less than 12 hours' notice about shifts. The idea that you can plan "high-quality childcare" in these conditions, or a favourable work-life balance, is laughable.

By way of illustration, I saw this advert in Costa Coffee (Eastleigh, Hampshire) the other day: "Staff wanted … 20 hours a week. MUST BE FREE 6AM TO 9PM, SEVEN DAYS A WEEK". Never mind, says the Office for National Statistics – only 0.7% of people are on zero hours; but this amounts to 250,000 workers. Norman Lamb, the care minister, has admitted to 300,000 zero-hours workers in social care. A Working Families report this week finds 7% of women and over 2% of men on zero hours.

The CIPD put the number of zero-hours workers at about a million. But try to stay cheerful – they still have rights: sick pay; minimum wage; holiday pay; maternity leave. Sure, it doesn't stretch to the right to request flexible working, which could explain why requests from fathers on low incomes are so often refused. Nevertheless, it's not like working in a mill in the 19th century.

Except that, often, it is. This employment feels too precarious for people to insist on the rights they do have, and anyway those rights are sidestepped by a week-long break in the job (easily within the employer's command). And let's say your employer reneges on your maternity package: well, it will cost you £1,200 to bring that to a tribunal. The drop in sex discrimination claims has been stark: there were 129 in September – the average for the six months before the charge was brought in was 2,055 . "We have to be careful we're not just talking about paper rights," said Sally Brett from the TUC

Back in 2011, Steve Hilton floated the idea across his blue sky that maybe maternity leave should be abolished, just while we were in recession, so business could get back on its feet, without having to worry about a load of uteruses? And we all (well, I) went nuts, saying: "This recasts women as burdens to work instead of assets, and remakes babies as costs for the tidy, solitary little household to bear, rather than a future for us all to invest in." Well, they goddam did it anyway, and you have to admire their cunning: they didn't torch the right; they torched the ability to claim the right. It became a paper right, and now we watch as it goes up in smoke.

The challenge of leaving a faith - From Islam to Atheism

Sarah Morrison in The Independent

Amal Farah, a 32-year-old banking executive, is laughing about a contestant singing off-key in the last series of The X Factor. For a woman who was not allowed to listen to music when she was growing up, this is a delight. After years of turmoil, she is in control of her own life.

On the face of it, she is a product of modern Britain. Born in Somalia to Muslim parents, she grew up in Yemen and came to the UK in her late teens. After questioning her faith, she became an atheist and married a Jewish lawyer. But this has come at a cost. When she turned her back on her religion, she was disowned by her family and received death threats. She has not seen her mother or her siblings for eight years. None of them have met her husband or daughter.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done – telling my observant family that I was having doubts. My mum was shocked; she began to cry. It was very painful for her. When she realised I actually meant it, she cut communication with me,” said Ms Farah. “She was suspicious of me being in contact with my brothers and sisters. She didn’t want me to poison their heads in any way. I felt like a leper and I lived in fear. As long as they knew where I was, I wasn’t safe.”

This is the first time Ms Farah has spoken publicly about her experience of leaving her faith, after realising that she did not want to keep a low profile for ever. She is an extreme case – her mother, now back in Somalia, has become increasingly radical in her religious views. But Ms Farah is not alone in wanting to speak out.

It can be difficult to leave any religion, and those that do can face stigma and even threats of violence. But there is a growing movement, led by former Muslims, to recognise their existence. Last week, an Afghan man is believed to have become the first atheist to have received asylum in Britain on religious grounds. He was brought up as a Muslim but became an atheist, according to his lawyers, who said he would face persecution and possibly death if he returned to Afghanistan.

In more than a dozen countries people who espouse atheism or reject the official state religion of Islam can be executed under the law, according to a recent report by the International Humanist and Ethical Union. But there is an ongoing debate about the “Islamic” way to deal with apostates. Broadcaster Mohammed Ansar says the idea that apostates should be put to death is “not applicable” in Islam today because the act was traditionally conflated with state treason.

Some scholars point out that it is against the teachings of Islam to force anyone to stay within the faith. “The position of many a scholar I have discussed the issue with is if people want to leave, they can leave,” said Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, the assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain. “I don’t believe they should be discriminated against or harmed in any way whatsoever. There is no compulsion in religion.”

Baroness Warsi, the Minister of State for Faith and Communities, agreed. “One of the things I’ve done is put freedom of religion and belief as top priority at the Foreign Office,” she said. “I’ve been vocal that it’s about the freedom to manifest your faith, practise your faith and change your faith. We couldn’t be any clearer. Mutual respect and tolerance are what is required for people to live alongside each other.”

Yet, even in Britain, where the freedom to change faiths is recognised, there is a growing number of people who choose to define themselves by the religion they left behind. The Ex-Muslim Forum, a group of former Muslims, was set up seven years ago. Then, about 15 people were involved; now they have more than 3,000 members around the world. Membership has reportedly doubled in the past two years. Another branch, the Ex-Muslims of North America, was launched last year.

Their increasing visibility is controversial. There are those who question why anyone needs to define themselves as an “ex-Muslim”; others accuse the group of having an  anti-Muslim agenda (a claim that the group denies).

Maryam Namazie, a spokeswoman for the forum – which is affiliated with the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) – said: “The idea behind coming out in public is to show we exist and that we’re not going anywhere. A lot of people feel crazy [when they leave their faith]; they think they’re not normal. The forum is a place to meet like-minded people; to feel safe and secure.”

Sulaiman (who does not want to reveal his surname), a Kenyan-born 32-year-old software engineer living in East Northamptonshire, lost his faith six years ago. His family disowned him. “I knew they would have to shun me,” he said. “They are a religious family from a [close] community in Leicester. If anyone [finds out] their son is not a Muslim, it looks bad for them.” He added that people “find it strange” that he meets up with ex-Muslims, but he said it is important to know “there is a community out there who care about you and understand your issues”.

Another former Muslim in her late twenties, who does not want to be named, said the “ex-Muslim” identity was particularly important to her. “Within Islam, leaving [the religion] is inconceivable. [The term] atheist doesn’t capture my struggle,” she said, adding that her family does not know the truth about how she feels.

Pakistani-born Sayed (not his real name), 51, who lives in Leeds, lost his faith decades ago. He left home at 23 and moved between bedsits to avoid family members who were looking for him. He told his family about his atheism only two years ago. “I was brought up a strict Muslim, but one day, I realised there was no God,” he said. He told his mother and sister by letter that he was an atheist but they found it difficult to comprehend.

“Whenever I tell my sister or my mum that I am depressed, stressed or paranoid, they say it’s because I don’t pray or read the Koran enough,” he said, adding that he will not go to his mother’s funeral when she dies. “I won’t be able to cope with the stress or the religious prayers. There’s quite a lot of stigma around.”

Iranian-born Maryam Namazie, 47, said that it does not have to be this way. Her religious parents supported her decision to leave their faith in her late teens. “After I left, they still used to whisper verses in my ear for safety, but then I asked them not to. There was no pressure involved and they never threatened me,” she said. “If we want to belong to a political party, or religious group, we should be able to make such choices.”

Zaheer Rayasat, 26, from London, has not yet told his parents that he is an atheist. Born into a traditional Pakistani family, he said he knew he didn’t believe in God from the age of 15.

“Most people transition out of faith, but I would say I crashed out. It was sudden and it left a big black hole. I found it hard to reconcile hell with the idea that God was beneficent and merciful.

“I’m sort of worried what will happen when [my parents] find out. For a lot of older Muslims, to be a Muslim is an identity, whereas, for me, it’s a theological, philosophical position. They might feel they have failed as parents; some malicious people might call them up, gloating about it. Some would see it as an act of betrayal. My hope is that they will eventually forgive me for it.”

The 'right school'? No, parents staying together is the best way to help children

Children with a stable home life do better at school. Focus less on catchment areas and more on relationship counselling

• 
• • Joanna Moorhead
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 18 December 2013 14.59 GMT

'The more stable a home life children have, the better they will be able to concentrate at school, and the better grades they will have.' Photograph: Eye Ubiquitous / Alamy/Alamy

Parents do anything they can to give their kids the best chance to succeed. According to a report published by the Sutton Trust, a third of "professional parents" with children aged between five and 16 have moved to an area because they think it has good schools, and 18% to a specific school's catchment area.

Some go further: 6% of the 1,000 parents surveyed admitted attending church services when they hadn't previously to help their children get a place at a church school; 3% admitted using a relative's address to get children into a particular school; and 2% said they had bought a second home and used that address to qualify for a place.

As well as a fair few white lies, it all adds up to a colossal amount of money spent on trying to improve your children's chances of doing better educationally – and the point the Sutton Trust wants to make is that the more money you have, the more you can do to "buy" an advantage. Its recommendation – that the government should step in and encourage ballots for school places, to make selection fairer – seems a good one. After all, the drive to make things as rosy as possible for your offspring is inherent in all us parents: it's what we're designed to do, to achieve the best possible life chances for our children. That doesn't, or shouldn't, amount to fraud – it's a braver person than me who would cast the first stone and condemn parents for trying to give their kids the best start.

So it seems strange that parents, while focusing so intently on school, seem often to ignore a much cheaper way of improving their children's educational lot. Because the more stable a home life children have, the better they will be able to concentrate at school, the better behaved they will be in school, and the better grades they will have on leaving school.

There's plenty of research to back all this up: a recent study by the Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre found that children aged seven and older tended to do more poorly in exams and to behave badly at school if their parents split up. Another report funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, released at the end of last year, found that a stable family life meant children were more likely to take in what's being offered in the classroom. According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, teenagers whose parents are fighting or separating may find it difficult to concentrate at school.

Of course, many marriages are completely on track, 100% hunky dory, and here the only thing worth stressing about is a school's Sats and GCSE results. But it may not be you, and I have to admit it's not me either: I've been married for more than a quarter of a century, and the one thing I'm sure of is that it's not a bed of roses. I've also got four children aged between 11 and 21; and while I'm truly grateful to the many teachers who have taught them, and the schools they've been pupils at, I've become more convinced as the years go by that a stable home is an absolutely vital ingredient in how they're getting on – and certainly much more crucial than where their school sits in the local league table.

So shelling out a few hundred quid for a course of Relate counselling sessions (and if you're on a low income, it can be a lot less, or even free) could be a much better use of the family's funds than spending thousands on moving house. Sure, your children might end up at a school whose exam results aren't quite so glowing – but that's more than offset by the fact that they are likely to do better for having happier parents (and moving house, after all, puts even more pressure on a relationship).

According to Relate, 80% of clients who went for adult relationship counselling said their partnership had been strengthened as a result. According to a whole pile of research stretching back across many decades, children tend to do best when they're raised in a stable family. I can't help wondering whether the only sure winners from the scramble to live by the best school gates are estate agents rather than the very children the move is designed to help.

How far can privatisation go? Perhaps government itself could be outsourced

The 'selling of the family silver' that began in earnest under Thatcher is still in train; sometimes I wonder if the entire political class should be put out to tender

• 
• • Ian Jack
  • The Guardian, Friday 6 December 2013 18.30 GMT

Widespread privatisation was a key pledge in Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 election manifesto. Photograph: Chris Capstick/Rex Features

The phrase "selling the family silver" became the most celebrated if not the deepest criticism of Mrs Thatcher's privatisation programme, though Harold Macmillan never used those exact words. At a dinner of the Tory Reform Group – wets, moderates, Europhiles, none of them "one of us" – the former prime minister devised a more extended metaphor that drew on an aristocratic lifestyle that had been failing since its heyday in his Edwardian childhood. When individuals or estates ran into financial trouble, he said, they would commonly sell a few of their assets. "First the Georgian silver goes [laughter, applause]. Then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go [laughter, applause]."

He began to wander a bit. "And then the most tasty morsel, the most productive of all, they got rid of Cable and Wireless, and having got rid of the only part of the railways that paid, and a part of the steel industry that paid, and having sold this and that, the great thing of the monopoly telephone system came on the market. They [sic] were like the two Rembrandts that were still left [laughter] and they went, and now we're promised in the king's speech a further sale of anything that can be scraped up. You can't sell the coalmines, I'm afraid, because nobody will buy them [laughter, prolonged applause]."

When Macmillan made the speech, on 8 November 1985, he was 91 and had just over a year left to live. He still cut an attractive figure – the inverted V of his bow tie matched the weary droop of his moustache and eyebrows – though his reference to the king's speech suggested that a few marbles were coming unstuck in what was once one of the sharpest minds in British politics. The audience loved him. He was the last British prime minister to have served in the first world war, where he was badly wounded, and the last born during Victoria's reign; a "born actor", people said, because he was always so effortlessly droll. His references to oil paintings and precious tableware, his correct but vintage use of the word "saloon": this kind of thing endeared him to the public for much the same reasons as Downton Abbey did 25 years later – as an amusing and slightly camp version of a previous age.

He disavowed the speech only a few days afterwards, telling the House of Lords that he'd been misunderstood. All he was questioning was the government's wisdom in treating the capital raised by privatisation as income; as a Conservative he was "naturally in favour of returning into private ownership … all those means of production and distribution which are now controlled by state capitalism". But the metaphor had made its mark, and the fact is that Macmillan's "family silver" and British Gas's "Tell Sid" slogan are probably the most-remembered phrases from the early years of the war against public ownership. Oddly, given that privatisation was to have such profound effects on British life, both in their different ways raised a smile; did we know what was coming?

At the time of Macmillan's speech, privatisation had hardly begun. British Rail's ferries and hotels were the first to go (how strange it now seems that the best hotels in almost every city outside London were owned and run – usually well – by public servants in the most literal sense). But British Telecom, British Steel, British Airways, British Shipbuilders and Rolls-Royce – all of them listed as targets in the Tories' 1983 manifesto – had still to complete their journey from the public sector, and the big privatisations that that would affect every household had yet to come. Gas, water, electricity: people puzzled as to how the same stuff flowing through the same pipes and wires could be owned by different companies, and yet somehow it became so in the name of competition. Then came the British Airports Authority and British Rail and large chunks of the Ministry of Defence, while many public institutions such as local authorities and the NHS outsourced much of their activity and shrank sometimes to the role of regulator. Nigel Lawson triumphantly announced "the birth of people's capitalism", but many private companies sold out to foreign ownership; others were taken over by private equiteers; others again subsumed into octopus-like businesses such as Serco and G4S, which picked up the contracts for outsourced work ranging from Royal Navy tugboats to nursing assistants.

This landscape is familiar to us, but what would Macmillan have made of it? What kind of country-house metaphor would be equal to the modern situation where the electricity is owned in France, the football clubs by emirs and the publishing houses (including Macmillan's own) in Germany and the US? Or a state that has recently sold off the Royal Mail too cheaply (a habit that began with British Rail's hotels 30 years ago), that has privatised its blood plasma service and is about to sell its profitable stake in cross-Channel trains, and which has its eye on all kinds of small treasures (air traffic control, Ordnance Survey, the Royal Mint) that in future may raise a few bob and enable a tax cut? Comparisons with the sale of silver sugar tongs and Canalettos hardly seem adequate. Surely the crumbling house itself has a For Sale sign nailed to it at a crazy angle, with stickers attached to the inhabitants – the dowager, the servants, even the dogs – for they too have a value as the consumers of the stuff their new owner will sell them.

The words of the novelist and reporter James Meek ring ever truer. "The commodity that makes water and roads and airports valuable to an investor, foreign or otherwise, is the people who have no choice but to use them," Meek wrote last year in the London Review of Books. "We have no choice but to pay the price the toll keepers charge. We are a human revenue stream; we are being made tenants in our own land, defined by the string of private fees we pay to exist here."

But why not take it further and outsource the air force, the army and the navy? Mercenaries from poorer countries would be cheaper, accepting even worse rates of pay than the average British infantryman. Why not outsource the police, given that prison warders are already privatised? Why not outsource the government? It has cut so many parts from itself that it does no more than bleed on its stumps. Finally, why not outsource the political class that without interruption since 1979 has promoted the denigration of public service while upholding the idea of private profit, or at best done nothing to stop it. How interesting it would be to oversee the tendering process for the last – to weigh up the rival claims of political teams from, say, Finland, Germany and Iceland to transform the House of Commons into a more intelligent and courteous debating chamber that had outgrown the Oxford Union. How good it would be if the shouters and petty point-scorers could be replaced, on the male side at least, with grave pipe-smokers who spoke in charming English and wanted only the best for the country they had come to supervise – a colony almost, deserving enlightened rule.