Do stay-at-home mothers upset you? You may be a motherist

Women who choose to remain at home to look after their children face a torrent of prejudice. Here are four of the worst examples

 

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • theguardian.com, Monday 21 October 2013 13.15 BST

'If you were pushing anyone who couldn’t walk but wasn’t a baby, people would happily put themselves out a bit.' Photograph: Rex Features/J.Norden/IBL

Dr Aric Sigman, at a conference convened by Mothers At Home Matter (if you want a clue, as to its agenda, I refer you to the name), warned of the rise of "motherism"; a prejudice against stay-at-home mothers. Sigman is well known for his re-traditionalising intentions, to which end he has been accused of misrepresenting behavioural and neurological evidence, a charge he has denied. So, he says "motherism" is dangerous because it puts women off being stay-at-home mothers, which is the developmental ideal. I'd reject the second part of the argument, but not the first – there is a prejudice against stay-at-home mothers. There is a presentation of women who look after their own children full time as air-headed, spoilt and dowdy. However, there is also a prejudice against women who look after their children but aren't dowdy (yummy mummies); women who go back to work after having had children; women who stay out of work but also employ nannies; women who work part-time and look after their children the rest of the time.

I think the only way you could gain approval for your time-management, as a mother, would be to look after your children all the time as well as working full-time but for some socially useful enterprise (ideally voluntary work), while never relying on a man for money, yet never claiming benefits either, but God forbid that you should have a private income. Mothers in society act as whipping boys for almost all other social fissures; oh, the irony of there being no female equivalent for the phrase "whipping boy", when it is almost always a female. Oh the side-spitting irony. Here are four examples of "motherisms" at work:

1) What they say: "I don't see why mothers need these enormous buggies"

If you were pushing anyone who couldn't walk but wasn't a baby, people would happily put themselves out a bit. The act of pushing a baby, however, confers an aura of smugness about you ("look at you, so in love, with your baby") that makes it unthinkable to just help you out. There's an element of sense in this; mothers are in love with their babies, for the most part. And they would see you step into a puddle just to avoid the smallest jolt to their airsprung sleeping chariot. But it's not the end of the sodding world, is it, mothers temporarily losing their social etiquette while they fall in love with their babies?

2. What they say (at the school gates, whispered): "You never see the mother"

Even if the child is dropped off by the father, there is very little quarter given to the mother who isn't visible to the child's social circle, and not much consideration of the possibility that maybe her work starts at 9am precisely so she can get home by 6pm. I personally think this is a Freudian throwback, the resentment of children of the 70s and 80s, who were the first generation having to contend with bloody maternal no-shows at the harvest festival. It's the only rationale I can think of for why a person would think it was any of their business how a mother organised her time.

3. What they say (going in to a cafe, during the hours of standard economic activity): 'Look at all these women who don't work. I wish I could afford not to work'

I personally think the greatest misconception around childcare, shared by a huge proportion of the adult population, the people who've never done it, plus people who've done it but can't remember it, is that it is easy. It is by far the most demanding job conceived by society, wringing you out like a blood-drenched bedsheet, each day leaving you physically drained and mentally poleaxed, without even the energy to close your own mouth or hold your head upright, often making an involuntary gargling noise. Some of it's quite fun. But anyway, that's an aside. There's no economic sense to this question; if the women drinking coffee weren't looking after their children, someone else would have to, which would in most cases cost as much as their wages. So what people are really objecting to is not that mothers can afford not to work, but that they can still afford coffee.

4. What they say: 'I never have anything to say to these yummy mummies'

Dressed up as a deficiency of the speaker (I never have anything to say) it is actually a charge levelled at the mother, that she has no interests; why? Because, being "yummy", she is narcissistic and can't see beyond pilates and Brazilian hot waxing. The true resentment is of her wealth – that her life isn't one of drudgery and servitude, but spa treatments and interiors. Well, that's fine – it's possible to make a good case for objecting to wealth, since so much of it is unjustly come by. But at least object to the people unjustly coming by it. It seems a little tangential to make the wife the object of the opprobrium. All she's done is have a kid and fancy up her pubic area.

My best citizenship lesson: faking news and sparking riots for digital natives

Teacher Emma Chandler shares her tips on how to make reactionary students question what they read in the media

Using a fabricated news story based on the 2011 London riots sparked debate and action among Emma Chandler's citizenship pupils. Photograph: William Bloomfield/Rex Feature

Branding our young people as "digital natives" is as dangerous a label as any other in the classroom. Not only can it lead to assumptions that they have a natural talent to extract and interpret information simply because it arrives in a format they find engaging, but it can also foster a general acceptance of the idea that we need not plan as rigorously, that the students will teach us. This is just one argument for digital citizenship being the next priority in curriculum development.

Digital citizenship should equip students with the skills to question what they read and hear across the media. They should be taught to make informed choices and take positive actions for themselves. At a time when trending can be conflated with truth, this is a role that citizenship education must fill.

This lesson, from a scheme of work that focuses on campaigns, aims to help students understand the role of the media in forming opinions both personally and across society. When I share this lesson with colleagues it starts with the sentence, "I once let a class start a riot".

The class in question was a year 9 tutor group who had two lessons a week – Thursday and Friday. It's important to point out that this was a very reactionary class: they used Twitter to keep up to date with events in the world but never questioned their sources, frequently believing one celebrity or another had died or that well-known brands that were currently free were soon to start charging. They were constantly in uproar about something. This went locally too; they would often come into class claiming that a teacher was leaving or that they were about to be put in shirts and ties. As their citizenship teacher, I was constantly at pains to make them question before leaping into action.

So this lesson began with a fabricated news story. In this instance, it was a post-riots moral panic article that suggested that Oyster cards were to blame for the London riots as they enabled rioters to mobilise so quickly.

The story can be anything – in the past I have used stories claiming to ban mobile phones or the introduction of a curfew. The main thing is that the idea behind the story stands up to some initial scrutiny – it needs to have some basis in reality otherwise students will see straight through it.

In this particular lesson, students arrived to see the news story on the interactive whiteboard (IWB) and were asked to respond in pairs with a simple agree or disagree statement. During this discussion, I gave some students a reaction quote from David Cameron. Most of these actually went unread for the first five minutes of discussion because the class were so outraged about the blaming of the free travel for the riots.

Views were collected on post-its and placed on the board, arranged in an order going from agree to disagree. The question at this stage was simply how much we agreed with the story. When students showed a deeper questioning, I gave them a different coloured post-it and asked them to write down their question and stick it on another board.

Once it was established that very few students agreed with what they were seeing, I asked them to gather into groups to ask the 5 Ws:

• Who does this effect?
• What do we want to do next?
• Why is this important?
• Where can we find more information?
• When did the event occur?

During this phase, I put the reaction quote and a picture of David Cameron on the IWB. The quote outlined that the prime minister would be keen to restrict the use of the free Oyster cards to only during school hours as a way to reduce anti-social behaviour in our capital city.

The 5 Ws were revisited very quickly but this time they didn't get past the 'what'. What did they want to do about it? They were incensed at the idea that they would feel the effects of a policy designed to stop a problem that, for them, had long since ceased to be an issue. They wanted to take action and they wanted to do it now. We had previously used Twitter to share our work and they demanded now that we tell the prime minister they would riot if he tried to take their travel away – they would take him to theEuropean Court of Human Rights.

They very quickly made links to the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child and demanded I enable them. It was my responsibility they said: "You're our wellbeing teacher, how can you let them do this?" So I asked them, "what next?" "We want to riot," they said.

Every citizenship teacher knows the feeling of dread when informed and responsible action disappears from the minds of their students only to be replaced with words taken from the Human Rights Act. For this reason I always have a very large poster of Spider-man reminding us what comes with great power.

So there we were. In the middle of democracy in action. The class had voted on what they wanted to do next and they wanted to riot. They designed banners and logos, wrote chants and stood up for what they believed in. Except no one had asked that question "are we sure?" yet.

I took the different coloured post-its that students had stuck on the separate whiteboard and gently suggested to those who had come up with the idea that they might want to bring these up with their group. The results were mixed: one group listened but quickly realised that they wouldn't be able to take action or get angry if things weren't as they seemed; other groups just shouted down the idea or ignored it.

I was very careful to ensure that these students were aware I was listening and thought their questions valid and interesting. In a rights-respecting classroom it is vital that every child is heard, but this is even more important when you take a risk such as this. It would be very easy for students to learn the lesson of not speaking out again. When the lesson was over those pupils who had questioned the others were rewarded for their bravery as the single voice of reason or opposition with extra positive points for the whole class.

I find a positive to negative points recorder works really well in lessons like these to signpost what I think is working and what I think could be improved on. For this lesson, the mood was very positive – even when students weren't being listened to they were being heard and respected so it was easy to award positive points. I recall only having to record two negatives, both relating to running out of time.

To get to the final stage, I set them a research task. I gave the students one laptop per group to find out more about the story. Using the 5 Ws once again, each group set about exploring what others thought about the proposed ban of free travel for all under 18s in the UK.

It only took a few minutes for the story to unravel. They could only find the first story by using specific search terms and of course no one could find the quote from the David Cameron. A small but determined group kept digging but nothing came up. Eventually I had to reveal that tomorrow a Google search would only show everything that had happened in class today. And that's when the light bulb went off: it was a completely organic moment involving all 25 students who realised they had been duped.

The lesson was tailored for a class that I had teased and reprimanded in equal measure for months over their complete acceptance of everything they read online – and it worked. It makes it into my, albeit small, best lesson catalogue purely for the outcome alone – there are 25 students in south east London that now have a healthy distrust of all primary sources until they can be proven trustworthy. That's 25 young people that question and demand answers from anyone suggesting change that affects the way we live or, better yet, reporting that this is the case. They openly question those sources and share this knowledge with others.

As with all good lessons, they taught me something too. I hadn't planned the section with the different coloured post-its; I remember at the time wanting to tactically ignore the questions lest they bring down my house of cards. But I am glad I didn't. During my lesson reflection, many students expressed regret at not having listened to their group member who had written what we were calling the hang-on-a-minute questions. As far as unexpected outcomes go, increasing empathy and understanding for those with views different to your own is about as good as it gets.

Loneliness is an inevitable result of Britain's economic model

The health secretary wants adults to look after their elderly parents to combat loneliness, as Asian people do. But Jeremy Hunt is wrong on who loneliness affects, wrong on what causes it, and wrong on what's happening in Asia

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 21 October 2013 20.20 BST

Living alone: Britain has seen a big rise in solo living, from 17% of all households in 1971 to 31% now. Photograph: Zave Smith/Corbis

The officials who broke down Joyce Carol Vincent's door were meant to be serving an eviction notice. Instead they found her corpse slumped on the sofa, with the light from the TV still flickering over her. By 2006, she had lain there for almost three years. Rent demands and other letters flooded the hallway; the food in the fridge had long since expired and piled around her skeleton were the presents she had just wrapped, for Christmas 2003. How Joyce died remains a mystery: there was no evidence of violence and she wasn't into drink or drugs. But the bigger question – the one that catches in your throat – is how it took three years for anyone to discover her death.

An outgoing and pretty 38-year-old, she had sisters, mates, former colleagues and ex-boyfriends. Those social circles appear to have failed her. The bedsit was part of a housing estate above the huge shopping centre in Wood Green, north London, with thousands milling about. But no neighbours reported anything amiss. Joyce's body had rotted so far it could only be identified by comparing dental records with a holiday photo of her smiling. But the stench was put down to whiffy bins, and the flies and insects swarming on the windowsills were ignored.

Even such grotesque details would ordinarily have become mere local gossip – were it not for Carol Morley, who was so disturbed by the story that she made a film about her, with a tenacity of care Joyce didn't enjoy while she was alive. Morley's 2011 drama-documentary, Dreams of a Life, shows city living as a series of weak links, forgettable friendships and single people getting by in their single housing units. By the end of it, you not only understand how a person can disappear from view; you wonder how many others suffer the same fate.

Joyce's story exemplifies the social isolation decried last Friday by Jeremy Hunt as a "national shame". It's an apt subject for a health secretary to address. Studies show that chronic loneliness wrecks one's health: pushing up stress levels, increasing blood pressure, disrupting sleep, even bringing on dementia. And, yes, it kills. The Chicago neuroscientist John Cacioppo, who has researched social seclusion for decades, has tallied up the harm posed by common health hazards. Air pollution increases your chances of dying early by 5%; obesity by 20%. Excessive loneliness pushes up your odds of an early death by 45%.

Hunt doesn't dispute those findings. Indeed, last week he brought forth some shockers of his own. Such stats should make tackling isolation a public-health priority for any government. This one, however, seems to be doing its best to increase loneliness: its bedroom tax and housing-benefit cuts are wrenching families out of their communities and driving them into other neighbourhoods, even other cities.

No surprise that this didn't elicit even a sentence from Hunt. More troubling is to see a set-piece ministerial intervention – with lobby briefings, press releases, newspaper splashes, the lot – tackle an important subject in an utterly trivial fashion.

Loneliness, if we are to believe the health secretary, is a problem that afflicts only the elderly. And it can be solved by adult children looking after their parents, with "the reverence and respect" of their Asian counterparts (who also, handily enough, make do without all that welfare-state padding). In the east, you see, "residential care is a last rather than a first option"; while westerners presumably pack their folks off to homes as joyfully as if they were checking them into spas.

Well, we shouldn't believe Jeremy Hunt, because he is wrong on all counts. Wrong on who loneliness affects, wrong on what causes it, and wrong even on what's happening in Asia.

First, surveys by the Mental Health Foundation suggest that young people are more likely to feel lonely than older people. That fits with the other evidence. Britain has seen a big rise in people living alone, from 17% of all households in 1971 to 31% now. But while the proportion of retirees living alone has hardly changed over the past four decades, it's Britons of working age who are increasingly on their own. This lifestyle isn't always a chosen one: think of how the divorce rate has nearly doubled since the 60s.

Solo living coupled with a culture that exalts individualism breeds isolation. Britain's economic model grants its winners all manner of economic freedoms, but it does so while weakening social bonds. Getting on your bike and looking for work, or moving abroad to get a job, means leaving your family and friends behind. Some of these gaps can be filled by consumer onanism and by psychic palliatives such as Facebook and Twitter. But not wholly, and not for long.

In his book, Loneliness, Cacioppo puts it thus: "A rising tide can lift a variety of boats, but in a culture of social isolates, atomised by social and economic upheaval and separated by vast inequalities, it can also cause millions to drown." He might have been thinking of Joyce Vincent.

The flipside of economic individualism is loneliness. And as that model has been exported around the world, even traditionally family-centred cultures have started to crumble. This summer, Beijing passed a law compelling adults to visit their parents, or face jail. And next time Hunt sounds off about eastern reverence for the elderly, he might remember this: the best adult care home in Beijing has a waiting list that is 100 years long.

Do team-mates have to get along?

October 27, 2013

Cricket players or comrades in arms?

Samir Chopra

 

Dressing room or office cubicles?  © Getty Images

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Jonathan Wilson's analysis, here on the Cordon, of cricket's workplace and the "unrealistic" expectations of player relationships it seems to generate among fans made for some very interesting reading.

Fans, of course, expect player relationships to be far more cordial and chummy than they actually are, or even could be, because - among other things - they view cricket through an imaginative and hopeful lens, one that refracts and distorts and magnifies and colours in all sorts of ways. We view cricket not as a series of prosaic encounters of bat and ball wielded by salaried men, but rather as the stage and setting for a variety of noble encounters that resolve archetypal conflicts. We populate this stage with a variety of stock characters: heroes (our side), villains (their side), damsels in distress (the nations the players represent, which need rescuing from all manner of insults), scapegoats (those on our side who fail us and must be blamed for the defeats that could not possibly be our just fate), traitors (see:scapegoat), village idiots (sometimes umpires, sometimes opponents, sometimes selectors, sometimes our own team), magicians, gnomes and wise men (the captains, and now increasingly the coaches, all capable of changing the fortunes of nations and groups of men with mysterious incantations and potions). And so on. 

The vision of cricket afforded by these lenses is one that cricket writers, going back to the game's earliest days, and television producers and commentators in more recent times, have drawn on and embellished. It is one whose moral universe is relatively unambiguous, whose human relationships follow smooth, predictable trajectories; its decision-makers experience little cognitive dissonance, whether ethical, strategic or tactical; where rough edges are miraculously smoothed out by good intentions and ceaseless striving. The only reward our heroes expect is adulation and fame and the gratitude of adoring nations.

I do not mean to suggest that such is the fan's consciously distorted view of a game; rather it is that every fan's experience and interpretation of the game is not without its component of unconscious or subconscious fantasy imposed on its visible proceedings.

One set of prominent stock characters that populate this stage for the fan are drawn from stories of adventure and war, where "bands of brothers" or "comrades in arms" face adversity and the enemy as a united front and ultimately emerge triumphant. A magical brew of togetherness is stewed, one made more potent by mutual respect and affection and something called "team spirit"; it overcomes all opponents. Among this band of brothers, there is fraternity and camaraderie; there is much backslapping and shoulder-to-shoulder support; there are handshakes and there is mateship; everyone has someone's back. This a bunch of soldiers, united together, perhaps like the "pal battalions" of Kitchener's Army, going off to fight the good battle.

The modern team knows of this image and it draws on it in its public-relations exercises and its team-building manoeuvres; there is talk of visiting war memorials and cemeteries; "boot camps" are conducted, sometimes in jungles, sometimes in mountains; team members speak glowingly of the dressing-room "atmosphere", one made especially salubrious for some by long hours of drinking together; players speak glowingly of their trench buddies and their "partnerships".

In this understanding of the game, the workplace picture of men and their trades, engaged in work for wages, possibly drawn into all manners of conflict, on or off the field, with their co-workers or "management", is a jarring disruption. It is not one that sits comfortably with our imagined conceptions of what takes place on a cricket field. It is not how we "enjoy" the game. It is not how the game functions for us, or how we make sense of, and ascribe meaning to, the "hallowed 22 yards" far away, dimly glimpsed, out there in the middle.

-------OCTOBER 21, 2013
Do team-mates have to get along?

Jonathan Wilson in Cricinfo

Not quite Michael Clarke's scene, if Ricky Ponting's book is to be believed  © Getty Images

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There is often an assumption among fans that team-mates are all great friends. After all, whenever we see them, they are forever hugging each other or high-fiving, and most of them are incapable of getting through a post-match interview without talking collectively of "the lads" or "the boys", and insisting that "the spirit" has never been better.

Our own experience of sport, whether it's a frenetic five-a-side on a Thursday night or a leisurely 35-over game on a Sunday, tells us that the people you play with, while there might be the odd niggle - "Why will Mike not stop hitting it long?", "When did Tom last buy a round?", "Will Steve ever stop banging on about that trial he had with Leicestershire in 1972?" - are essentially people you quite enjoy having a drink with afterwards. 

Ricky Ponting's comments in his autobiography on Michael Clarke come as a reminder that among professionals those niggles are often far more serious. "Away from cricket, he moved in a different world to the rest of us," Ponting wrote. "It never worried me if a bloke didn't want a drink in the dressing-room, but I did wonder about blokes who didn't see the value in sticking around for a chat and a laugh and a post-mortem on the day's play. This was the time when we could revel in our success, pick up the blokes who were struggling, and acknowledge the guys who were at the peak of their powers. Pup hardly bought into this tradition for a couple of years and the team noticed."

The tone is reasonably diplomatic, and Ponting goes out of his way to stress that Clarke wasn't ever "disruptive" and that there was no suggestion he was slacking or not putting in the effort in training, but the episodes with Simon Katich and Mike Hussey suggest just how deep that frustration ran. Clarke was not, for want of a better term, one of them, and reading between the lines, the more traditional players wondered whether he felt himself better than them.

Jarrod Kimber wrote in the first issue of the Nightwatchman about how Clarke is representative of a shift in Australian masculinity from hairy-chested beer-swilling to manicured cocktail-sipping, and that probably didn't help, but the truth is that in any team there's a player or two who has to shoot off immediately after play, whether because they are too busy or because they have promised their wife or just because they don't much like sitting around having a beer. When things are going well, that's not a problem; when things are going badly, you can guarantee they are the ones who'll be slagged off in the clubhouse afterwards.

The issue then is chicken-and-egg: do they not hang around because they are self-centred in how they approach the game, or do they become self-centred because the rest of the team regards them with suspicion?

Of course, in this regard the major difference between professionals and happy weekend amateurs is the stakes. We grumble about a team-mate who never passes or scores too slowly because it might cost us the game and because we want to be involved as much as possible. A Test cricketer fumes about it because he is playing for his nation in front of an audience of millions and because defeats can cost contracts.

Yet does it really matter if team-mates get on? The great Dutch football coach Rinus Michels, architect of Total Football, pioneers what he termed the Conflict Principle: he felt if his players became too comfortable they would lose their edge. Look at most workplaces. While you will get groups of friends, most people just rub along and wouldn't dream of socialising with their workmates once they had moved on to a different job.

Dressing rooms, it's easy for fans and amateurs to forget, are just workplaces. Everybody is fighting under one banner, and yet at the same time they are fighting for preferment with each other. If you do lose the game and the pressure comes for changes, you don't want to be the one whose match figures were 0 for 185, just as when cutbacks come in an office, you don't want to be the one whose sales figures dropped by 10% over the previous year. Football club dressing rooms are probably even worse, given the frequency with which players move on: why stick up for the idiot winger who never tracks back when the chances are you'll be playing for different teams next year anyway? It comes as no great surprise when the combative Roy Keane says he made no friends in football, but it's rather more startling when the genial Niall Quinn, seemingly the epitome of the tough but easy-going, hard-drinking Irishman, admits he didn't either.

So long as players aren't wilfully undermining each other - as the crowd favourite Len Shackleton did when Sunderland broke the world transfer record to sign Trevor Ford and, fearing for his status, began delivering crosses so loaded with spin they were impossible to control, before turning to the fans and shrugging - it doesn't seem much to matter. If you don't deliberately run them out or start texting details of technical flaws to the opposition, it doesn't much matter whether you'd go to their wedding - so long as things are going well. Under stress, fault lines will always be exposed.

So what is team spirit? Does it exist and is it important? It's clearly true that certain players for certain countries - and particularly nations that are in the process of rebuilding after revolution or war: Croatia in 1996 and 1998 or Bosnia today in football - do at times seem inspired by notions of patriotic duty, but for the most part team spirit seems something of a myth, a nebulous togetherness generated when things are going well. As the former Tottenham and Barcelona striker Steve Archibald once noted in a moment of unusual eloquence, perhaps aided by a wistful translation into Spanish and out again, "Team spirit is a chimera glimpsed in the moment of victory."

Robert Fisk: It took decades for truth to be revealed in Algeria. How long will it take Syria?

ROBERT FISK in The Independent

Sunday 20 October 2013

Algeria’s ‘timid’ historians shy away from revealing the ugly truths about war

Major General Jamaa Jamaa was not a popular man in Beirut. One of Syria’s most senior intelligence officers in Lebanon until the withdrawal of Bashar al-Assad’s troops in 2005, he was headquartered in the run-down Beau Rivage Hotel in west Beirut and also in the Bekaa town of Anjaar, where Lebanese men would be taken for interrogation and later emerge – or not emerge at all – sans teeth or nails.  He was a loyal, ruthless apparatchik for Bashar’s father Hafez, and his mysterious killing last week in the Syrian war provoked no tears in Beirut.  The UN had interviewed Jamaa about the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri whose 2005 assassination brought about the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon.  But how did Jamaa die?  Syrian state television would say only that he was “martyred while carrying out his national duties to defend Syria and its people and pursuing terrorists (sic) in Deir el-Zour”.

All kinds of rebel groups – including, of course, the equally ruthless al-Qa’ida affiliates – wanted to add his name to their “kills”.  He was shot in the head by a sniper in the eastern Syrian oil town.  Jamaa was also killed, we were informed, by a booby-trap, and blown up by a suicide bomber.  All that we can be sure of is that his remains, such as they were, were taken for burial in the village hills above Lattakia where he was born.  How long before we know the truth?

I am brought to this question by the secrecy which still smothers the 1954-62 Algerian-French war of independence where a cruel French regime of occupation fought a war against an equally cruel and determined Algerian resistance, primarily led by the National Liberation Front, the FLN. French officers indulged in an orgy of torture while their Algerian opposite numbers slaughtered each other – as well as the French – in a Stalinist purge of thousands of their own followers suspected of collaborating with the French occupation. For decades, the French refused to discuss this most dishonourable of wars – censoring their own television programmes if they dared talk of torture – while the subsequent FLN dictatorship only published infantile accounts of the heroism of their “martyr” cadres. The French, you see, were fighting “terrorism”.  The FLN were fighting a brutal, Gaullist regime.

The parallels are, of course, not exact. But over the past months, a remarkable phenomenon has made its appearance in Algeria.  Dozens of elderly Algerian maquisards from the conflict that ended just over half a century ago, have turned up at small publishing houses in Algiers and Oran with  private manuscripts, containing frightening accounts of the savage war in which they fought and in which their officers tortured and massacred and assassinated their own comrades. Rival Algerian resistance groups – not unlike the “Free Syrian Army” and their Islamist rebel enemies in northern Syria today – also slaughtered each other.

Take, for example, the death of Abane Ramdane. The “architect” of the Algerian revolution, a friend of the French philosopher and revolutionary Franz Fanon, organizer of the Soummam congress which created the first independent Algerian leadership in 1956, Ramdane – a man almost as keen on his own personality as he was on the classless revolution he helped initiate – was assassinated in Morocco the following year, allegedly by the French.  For decades, he was extolled as a martyr who had “died under French bullets”.  But now a former member of the FLN has dared to suggest the names of his real killers:  Krim Belkacem, head of the FLN’s third wilaya (district) and later a minister of defence and foreign affairs in the newly independent government of Algeria;  Abdelhafid Boussouf, the vicious “father of intelligence” in all the Algerian wilayas, who condemned many of his own comrades to death;  and Lakhdar Ben Tobbal, a guerrilla leader who later negotiated with the French at Evian.

Then there’s the sinister figure of Si Salah, head of wilaya 4, who was persuaded – by French intelligence, although he did not know this – that hundreds of his own men were collaborators. On Si Salah’s personal instructions, almost 500 of his comrades were tortured to death or executed. But Si Salah, fearful that the FLN’s military wing might be defeated by the French, secretly opened negotiations with De Gaulle – and was then himself assassinated, supposedly by the French, but almost certainly by the FLN. The French investigative journalist, Pierre Daum, has spoken of the “extreme timidity of Algerian historians”, and recounted how one Algerian publisher said he lacked the courage to print a book on the infiltration of the FLN. 

“In 2005, this guy came to see me,” the publisher told Daum. “I refused his manuscript because it was filled with names, ‘X tortured Y’, and so on.  Imagine the children of a ‘martyr’ – who believe their father died under French gunfire – discovering that he perished under Algerian torture!”

The real story of the much more recent Algerian war – between the Islamists and the government in the 1990s (total deaths 250,000, a hundred thousand more than in Syria today) – still cannot be told by Algerian historians.  It has been left to today’s Algerian novelists to cloak facts in fiction in order to reveal the truths of this terrible conflict. One such tale – a real incident – is recalled in a novel. A junior officer in the Algerian army, it seems, was discovered to have betrayed his comrades to Islamist rebels. His wife and children were summoned from their village and taken by military helicopter to the barren hillside where the captured soldier was being held.  And there, in front of his family, the man was tied to a tree, doused with petrol, and burned alive.

How long must we wait, then, for the secrets buried beneath the rubble of the Syrian war?

Saving the planet from short-termism will take man-on-the-moon commitment

JFK's lunar vision is needed if business is to see the long-term benefits of greening the economy as well as the short-term costs

President John F Kennedy's moon speech was made in an age when both sides on Capitol Hill were prepared to invest in the future. Photograph: John Rous/AP

We choose to go to the moon. So said John F Kennedy in September 1962 as he pledged a manned lunar landing by the end of the decade.

The US president knew that his country's space programme would be expensive. He knew it would have its critics, but he took the long-term view. Warming to his theme in Houston that day, JFK went on: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others too."

That was the world's richest country at the apogee of its power in an age where both Democrats and Republicans were prepared to invest in the future. Kennedy's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, took a plan for a system of interstate highways and made sure it happened.

Contrast that with today's America, which looks less like the leader of the free world than a banana republic with a reserve currency. Planning for the long term now involves last-ditch deals on Capitol Hill to ensure the federal government can remain open until January and debts can be paid at least until February.

The US is not the only country with advanced short-termism. It merely provides the most egregious example of the disease. This is a world of fast food and short attention spans, of politicians so dominated by a 24/7 news agenda that they have lost the habit of planning for the long term.

Britain provides another example of the trend. Governments of both left and right have for years put energy policy in the "too hard to think about box". They have not been able to make up their minds whether to commit to renewables as Germany has done, or to nuclear as France has done. So, the nation of Rutherford is now prepared to have a totalitarian country take a majority stake in a new generation of nuclear power stations.

Politics, technology and human nature all militate in favour of kicking the can down the road. The most severe financial and economic crisis in more than half a century has further discouraged policymakers from raising their eyes from the present to the distant horizon.

Clearly, though, the world faces long-term challenges that will only become more acute through prevarication. These include coping with a bigger and ageing global population, ensuring growth is sustainable and equitable, providing resources to pay for modern transport and energy infrastructure, and reshaping international institutions so they represent the world as it is in the early 21st century rather than as it was in 1945.

Pascal Lamy had a stab at tackling some of these difficult issues last week when he presented the findings of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations, which the former World Trade Organisation chief has been chairing for the past year.

The commission's report, Now for the Long Term, looks at some "mega trends" that will shape the world in the decades to come, and lists the challenges under five headings: society, resources, health, geopolitics, governance.

Change will be difficult, the study suggests, because problems are complex, institutions are inadequate, faith in politicians is low and short-termism is well-entrenched.

It cites examples of collective success, such as the Montreal convention to prevent ozone depletion, the establishment of the Millennium Development Goals, and the G20 action to prevent the great recession of 2008-09 turning into a full-blown global slump. It also cites examples of collective failure – fish stocks depletion, the deadlocked Copenhagenclimate change summit of 2009.

The report suggests a range of long-term ideas worthy of serious consideration. It urges a coalition between the G20, 30 companies and 40 cities to lead the fight against climate change. It would like "sunset clauses" for all publicly funded international institutions to ensure they are fit for purpose; removal of perverse subsidies on hydrocarbons and agriculture with the money redirected to the poor; introduction of CyberEx, an early warning platform aimed at preventing cyber attacks; a Worldstat statistical agency to collect and ensure quality of data; and investment in the younger generation through conditional cash transfers and job guarantees.

Lamy expressed concern that the ability to address challenges was being undermined by the absence of a collective vision for society. The purpose of the report, he said, was to build "a chain from knowledge to awareness to mobilising political energy to action".

Full marks for trying, but this is easier said than done. Take trade, where Lamy has spent the past decade, first as Europe's trade commissioner then as head of the WTO, trying to piece together a new multilateral deal. This is an area in which all 150-plus WTO members agree in principle about the need for greater liberalisation but in which it has proved impossible to reach agreement in talks that started in 2001.

Nor will a shakeup of the international institutions be plain sailing. It is a given that developing countries, especially the bigger ones such as China, India and Brazil, should have a bigger say in the way the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are run. Yet it's proved hard to persuade developed world countries to cede some of their voting rights, and the deal is still being held up by US foot dragging. These, remember, are the low-hanging fruit.

Another conclave of the global great and good is looking at what should be done in the much trickier area of climate change. The premise of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate is that nothing will be done unless finance ministers are convinced of the need for action, especially given the damage caused by a deep recession and sluggish recovery.

Instead of preaching to the choir the plan is to show how to achieve key economic objectives – growth, investment, secure public finances, fairer distribution of income – while at the same time protecting the planet. The pitch to finance ministers will be that tackling climate change will require plenty of upfront investment that will boost growth rather than harm it.

Will this approach work? Well, maybe. But it will require business to see the long-term benefits of greening the economy as well as the short-term costs, because that would lead to the burst of technological innovation needed to accelerate progress. And it will require the same sort of commitment it took to win a world war or put a man on the moon.

Choice is simply code for class

Janet Street Porter in The Independent

Social mobility tsar Alan Milburn is concerned that the gap between rich and poor is increasing. But if we want equal opportunities for all, we need to stop introducing subtle forms of social demarcation in every walk of life.

It's a particularly British obsession, this determination to create mini-castes emphasising our differences rather than celebrating our strengths. The majority of us claim to be middle class, but offer us "finest" fare over "budget" and we're hooked.

Travel is another example. Budget airlines exploit our need for social demarcation, offering us the chance not to queue – at a price. The chance not to pay for our food – at a price. The chance to choose our seat – at a price. The chance to sit at the front of economy – at a price. All things that were free a decade ago. In fact, "low-cost" air travel is not egalitarian or cheap by any stretch of the imagination.

Rail travel is the same. There's talk of a new category of travel when the East Coast line franchise is offered to private investors: a class below first called "premium economy" – so standard travel will be third class, the rolling stock equivalent of below stairs. Quite soon train operators will ask us to pay to be allowed on the platform first.

I love the new high-speed train to Kent because it's all one class. Passengers are quiet; it's clean and efficient, but it's not cheap. Anyone on a budget opts to travel on the overcrowded and slow old line.

We should realise that, in modern Britain, offering us "choice" is code for implementing a class system based on ability to pay, and (by default) offering an inferior service to the poorest. Now this trend looks likely to afflict our health service.

Michael Dixon, president of the NHS Clinical Commission and chair of the NHS Alliance, says patients could soon be charged for "extras" like comfortable beds and better food. As the NHS faces a funding gap of £30bn by the end of the decade and has to deal with an ageing population, Dr Dixon thinks users should contribute more. Hospitals raise millions through the controversial practice of charging for parking (some extort £3 an hour from visitors) and making us cough up for televisions.

Dr Dixon sees nothing wrong in a two-tier system for inpatients, claiming the wealthy already use the NHS when it suits them and pay for private treatment when they have to, and the principle should be expanded. The NHS is hopelessly overburdened with administrators and this proposal would make it worse. The quality of food varies wildly from one area to another, some trusts spending just £4.15 a day per patient, others up to £15, when the average is about £9.80.

The same differences crop up in ordering supplies: money is wasted through piecemeal and uninformed purchasing. We should all get uniformity of service throughout the NHS, no matter where we fall sick. The NHS is not a bunch of Premier League football clubs, all in competition, nor is it a gang of department stores offering rival services. NHS chief executives earn large salaries and get gold-plated pensions, but the amount they are paid varies wildly, too.

Why has the NHS become like an airline or a train operator, when it should be providing a uniform top service for a classless Britain?