Private education is guarded by an electric fence

Suzanne Moore in The Guardian


Employers are told to spot ‘potential not polish’, but polish is about the tiny, monstrous ways that class functions – deliberately baffling to outsiders

 

‘As a mechanism for maintaining privilege, private education, with its gated communities of the elite, simply works.’ Photograph: Peter Titmuss/Alamy


Everyone stop being horrible to posh people! It’s not their fault they have everything. It’s the fault of the schools they went to. I blame the parents. They refuel the class system by sending their offspring to private schools because they are not entirely daft. As a mechanism for maintaining privilege, private education, with its gated communities of the elite, simply works. It has worked through thick and thin. Its pupils may be both.

That 7% figure of people who are privately educated, and who run just about everything, has stalled. Sometimes, people like me squawk about it but, as I have never learned to talk proper, it’s dismissed as “the politics of envy”, an idiotic phrase that reduces justified politics to a personal grudge. Occasionally, though, one of the gilded boys has a go at levelling the playing field. They do love a playing field.

So here we have cabinet minister Matt Hancock (King’s) suggesting that employers check the socio-economic backgrounds of applicants to stop the 93% of us who did not go to private school being discriminated against. Don’t people put their schools down on their CVs anyway? Wouldn’t it be easier to ask applicants if they knew much about skiing and refuse to interview anyone who did?

Still, Hancock’s vapid suggestion was enough to cause Lord Waldegrave, provost of Eton, to have a meltdown and complain that the privately educated could be discriminated against. The poor babies. How they bawl, not when the playing field is level but when anyone ventures near its electric fence.

All this came about as part of Cameron’s “life chances” agenda, some sort of baleful drivel about enhancing social mobility. It is patently obvious that social mobility does not start at a job interview but long before it. When employers are told to spot “potential not polish”, we may ask where on the periodic table this mysterious element “polish” appears.

I have never been able to locate it, that’s for sure. The idea that the existing system can be levelled out by allowing a few escapees from the lower orders into the public school milieu of law, politics, media, academia, judiciary and the City is somewhat cack-handed. For polish is surely about the tiny, monstrous ways that class functions, a series of codes and signals that enable small gangs of people to recognise each other as clubbable, employable, breedable.

It is deliberately baffling to outsiders. When I first started working in the media I was astonished at how everyone seemed to know each other from college. Then I began to realise they had been in schools with “houses”, small class sizes and peculiar sports, and shared the assumption that everything that came out of their mouths was innately fascinating.

On a Radio 4 show, I heard a producer bemoan my “polytechnic accent”. At every meeting I would feel unwashed and somewhat dazed, however long I had spent getting ready. Class manifests as acute discomfort. It’s not about thinking a Findus Crispy Pancake is a nice dinner, it is shared assumptions about what matters.

Lynsey Hanley’s book Respectable charts extremely well her journey into the middle class and all the anxiety it produces. But it bears little relationship to my journey, because there are many different working-class cultures.

What is shared, though, is that to be working class in a middle-class environment requires you to learn certain codes, and once you learn a code you can deconstruct it. The condescending nature of all the guff on private school education is part of this code. This system produces the brightest and the best, if the brightest and the best means booming confidence, inflexible thinking and the regurgitation of specific histories. Thus we have a chancellor who, without studying economics, believes himself an expert on it, whatever the figures say, whatever renowned economists say. Private schools sell self-belief.

In working-class culture, self-belief is played out as bravado and different kinds of knowledge are valued. I don’t romanticise it, as it’s stultifying. Everything is about what can be shown: practical skills, big tellies, getting really dressed up. What can’t be shown, that which is abstract, is not to be dwelt on, so I am forever glad I got away.

Social mobility, though, involves living with restraint. One must bite one’s tongue in order not to bite the hand that feeds you. Do not be prejudiced against your superiors. Just accept they got into Oxbridge by dint of their brainiac qualities. It was simply handy that, while you spent your teenage years sitting on a wall, they were competing in debating societies, editing their own magazine or playing the harp.

Here is the mystical polish. Sadly the self-improving element of the working class beloved by the likes of Raymond Williams, enacted though evening classes and further education, has been killed dead. So, instead we have the engineers of social class suggesting they pull a few of us on to the lifeboats. It is no real answer. What is it about private education that I would want for more children? It is confidence. The confidence to ask whether those in charge are actually so much cleverer than the rest of us, the confidence to insist that employing a normal person is not discrimination, and most of all the confidence to know that “power can be taken, but not given”.

No jokes please, we’re Indian

Editorial in The Hindu

Sometimes the reaction is the real joke. The police force in India’s financial capital have sought legal opinion to check if they have grounds to file an FIR against a comedian for a video he recently posted on the messaging application, Snapchat. The Mumbai police were following up on a complaint from the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, a political party with a remarkably low threshold for taking offence. And the MNS was not the only party outraged by the post by Tanmay Bhat, a comedian fairly well-known for his “roast videos”, or takedowns of celebrities. Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena, for instance, decided to make it clear that people like Mr. Bhat “should be whipped in public”. Using the “face swap” feature on Snapchat, Mr. Bhat had spoofed Sachin Tendulkar and Lata Mangeshkar, with jibes about his cricketing ability and her long singing career. It was certainly not polite. It could be argued that locker-room chatter goes with the roast territory, and that it is in the nature of the beast to push the boundary of how much political incorrectness can be deemed passable. The point here is not to applaud his sense of humour — or to condemn it. It is to spotlight the speed with which the system mobilises to shut any expression of mockery targeted at the well-known.

That the effect is to stifle freedom of expression, to force the next person to look over her shoulder before mocking the next public figure, is obvious and intended. To be mocked is the most trying way of being critiqued. One can ignore evenly stated takedowns — not spoofs that make folks laugh. To deal with mockery in a democratic society, one needs to be committed to a public culture of engagement, of openness to questioning. India’s public figures are clearly not. Politicians and celebrities (mainly film and cricket stars) have failed India not just by using the strongest arm of the law to curb expressions of humour aimed at them, thereby forcing self-censorship on what we may laugh about. They have failed it by not enabling sensitisation on what should pass as good humour and what may not. When jokiness is curbed so menacingly — and for all the brave front they may put up, cartoonists and comedians are lonely people against the might of the state — the only response is to rally to defend freedom of expression. In an environment where possibly personal jokes are seen to warrant scrutiny and police action, no space can be available for shared humour, for comedy to evolve sufficiently so that the larger community internalises what is truly, even rockingly, funny and what’s not so progressive.

Why the economic consensus on Brexit is flawed

Ashoka Mody in The Independent

Consensus amongst economists quickly unravels. In April 1999, “Britain’s top academic economists” voted strongly in favour of switching from the pound to the euro. Mercifully, the government had better sense.

In August 2008, Olivier Blanchard, then a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported that economists shared a common vision of macroeconomics “because”, he said, “facts do not go away.” But in 2014, reflecting on the failures of macroeconomics, Blanchard conceded that economists were “fooled” because they were not looking at the right facts.

In the past few weeks, virtually all official agencies have insisted that leaving the European Union — a British exit or “Brexit” — will impose enormous costs on the British. Indeed, these agencies have competed with each other in escalating the cost estimates.

Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), pithily summarised the consensus: the consequences of Brexit, she said, would be “pretty bad to very, very bad”.

The UK Treasury, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the IMF say it is a “fact” that Britain will be permanently poorer because it will trade less with the EU. In a terrifying warning, the Bank of England added that financial markets will panic and create senseless havoc.

Adding comic relief, George Osborne predicts that house prices will fall by 18 percent. Not to be outdone, G7 leaders say that the world economic system, as we now know it, will fall apart if Britain exits the EU.

Michael Mussa, my first boss at the IMF, used to say that a number must pass the “smell test” if it is to be used for making decisions. Conducting a “smell test” requires going back to core principles. When we do that, we reach a humbler conclusion: economics is neutral on whether to leave or remain. The battle for Brexit must be fought on other grounds.

All economists – not just the current protagonists – agree that a country gains by increasing its overall international trade. Greater trade makes it possible to produce more of and export what the country does best (its comparative advantage) and import what it does less well. Everyone gains.

But there is no gain in exporting to Germany, Spain and Poland rather than to the United States, Korea and China. In fact, if preferential access diverts trade away from the United States to Germany, then departure from the country’s comparative advantage hurts rather than helps, as Columbia University’s trade theorist Jagdish Bhagwati has long argued.

So the claim that Brexit will impose a huge cost rests on the twin beliefs that British trade with Germany will go down sharply and trade with the United States will not increase. Is that reasonable?

First, British trade with Germany will not decline significantly. As economists have long known, trade is embedded in business and social networks into which partners invest enormous social capital. Studies repeatedly show that businesses make accommodations in profit margins to retain the benefits of trust and reliability.

For this reason, all productive trading relationships will remain intact. For this reason too, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble’s threat that renegotiation of Britain’s trade arrangements with the EU would be “most difficult” and “poisonous” is bluster. Germans run a trade surplus with Britain. Mr Schaeuble can humiliate the IMF, but he dare not hurt the interests of his exporters (or his importers).

And even if British trade with the EU falls, trade with other regions will undoubtedly increase. Because Europe has been growing at a slower pace than the rest of the world, trade has been shifting away from Europe for years.

With Europe rapidly aging and struggling to revive productivity growth, the shift to non-European markets is bound to continue. Most firms already sell to multiple markets and Brexit will prompt them to strengthen their non-European networks.

What about costs of transition? Britain exports 13 percent of its GDP to the EU. Say about a quarter of those export products – about 3 percent of GDP – have to eventually be sold either in Britain or outside Europe.

If the adjustment each year costs somewhere between one-tenth and one-fifth of 3 percent of GDP, it is possible that GDP will be lower by about half-a-percent in the peak transition year. Thus the costs will be modest and short-lived.

So how do the Treasury, OECD and the IMF conclude that Brexit could reduce GDP by between 6 and 10 percent forever? The vast bulk of those large estimates come from the further assumption that reduced trade will shrink British productivity growth. This is disingenuous. There is simply no evidence that less trade lowers productivity growth – and there is not even a logical connection between productivity growth and a shift in trade from Germany to the United States.

More trade has been associated with higher productivity growth when countries have emerged from economic isolation. But for the sophisticated British economy, this possibility should be completely dismissed.

The Bank of England’s claims are the most outrageous of all. The Bank says that fear of Brexit is holding investment back and, thus, causing growth to slow down in anticipation. How can it know that? British GDP is slowing for so many reasons.

The economy has moved faithfully with the magnitude of fiscal austerity: gratuitous austerity delayed recovery from the Great Recession, brief fiscal easing in 2014 helped achieve a short-lived rebound, and now the IMF projects more austerity in the pipeline and slower growth. Meanwhile, the world economy is slowing: the United States had a weak first quarter, China is struggling and world trade is barely crawling forward. The Bank of England is cynically exploiting its authority by claiming to detect Brexit-induced anxiety in the cloud of short-term data.

But more outrageous is the Bank’s warning of mayhem if Britain votes to leave. Nobel Laureates George Akerlof and Robert Shiller have explained that people act in accordance with the narratives they live. The Bank is, in effect, building a narrative of panic, which could become self-fulfilling. The central bank’s proper role is to reassure and stand-by to stem panic.

Since 2010, official agencies have repeatedly promised global recovery. The forecasts fail because they all disregard inconvenient evidence. Now, the official consensus on the economic costs of Brexit has crossed the line into groupthink. A numerical illusion is masquerading as a “fact.” And when those in authority distort facts, they also subvert the cause of democracy.

Abolish personal laws: Patriarchy remains deaf to the Quran’s call for justice, equality and compassion

  Sadia Dehlvi in Times Of India

Whenever Muslim women approach the judiciary in a quest for justice, Muslim orthodoxy rallies against the abolition of Personal Laws. Their rhetoric of ‘identity under attack’ resumes. Clearly, Indian Muslims have moved beyond the politics of identity; choosing to express themselves through contributions to science, architecture, law, medicine, film, theatre, music, literature and other fields.

Debates over the validity of pronouncing talaq, divorce, three times in one go or over three months offer no solutions. Both methods find permissibility in schools of Islamic fiqh, jurisprudence. Unilateral divorce allows men to commit grave injustices by stripping women of honour and dignity, inalienable rights both in Islam and the Indian Constitution. It is unwise to expect reform from the community whose religious leaders have historically treated women as subjects and not equals.

Islamic law is a human endeavour that evolved over centuries with multiple schools holding diverse opinion. The principles of Islamic jurisprudence are weighing the benefit and harm of legal rulings in societies that jurists live in. Barring the foundational five pillars of Islam, nothing in Islamic law is definitive. Salafis and Wahhabis reject classical Islamic jurisprudence and philosophy. Their myopic literalist interpretations of Islam cause gross violations of human rights.

Sharia has always been flexible in adapting to changing times and situations. Umar, the second Caliph of Islam and companion of Prophet Muhammad, dropped sharia punishments for theft when famine struck Arabia. He realised people were stealing to survive. The eighth century Imam Shafie, founder of Shafie jurisprudence, changed many of his fatwas on migrating from Iraq to Egypt. Had sharia lacked movement, Islam would not thrive in India.

Islam is dynamic, understood and practised in a variety of ways in different cultures. Patriarchy remains deaf to the Quran’s call for equality, justice and compassion that extends to all humanity. Excluding women from leadership, patriarchy is blind to the Quran celebrating the wise consultative rule of Queen Sheba and her diplomatic engagement with Solomon.

Patriarchy fails to recognise the Quran honouring women as recipients of wahy, Divine Revelation; as experienced by Moses’s mother and Mariam, or Mary. Some famous early and medieval commentators of the Quran, such as Imam Hajar Asqalani and Imam Qurtubi, include Mary amongst the prophets.

The Islam of Prophet Muhammad disappeared within 40 years of his death with powerful and oppressive patriarchal tribes regaining power. The poor, women and slaves embraced by Islam were again marginalised. Islam’s paradigm shift in empowering women and slaves had created great difficulties for the Prophet. He sought political counsel from women, welcomed them in his mosque; encouraged women like Haqibatul Arab to deliver khutbahs, sermons. He appointed Umm Waraqa the Imam of her mosque, and sent a muezzin, one calling to prayer, from Medina to her village.

Some Islamic scholars, including the famous 9th century Imam Tabari, drew upon this precedent to proclaim it lawful for women to lead mixed gender prayers. American Muslim feminists are reclaiming this tradition despite the controversies it evokes.

Islam abrogated the concept of God as Father, saying, ‘Nothing is like Allah’. God transcends gender and is best understood as Noor, Compassionating and Illuminating Guidance. ‘He’, is used in the Quran and its translations because Arabic grammar is gender specific with no pronoun for the neuter gender. In most languages including Arabic, Persian and Urdu, the feminine is applied for ‘Zaat e Elahiya’, Divine Essence.

The word rahm, womb, is derived from God’s primary attributes Rahman and Rahim, Mercy and Compassion. Prophet Muhammad often likened God to a Mother who forgives her children. Traditional Arab poets addressed God in the feminine, literature that would probably be termed blasphemous today.

The Quran advocates equitable treatment of slaves and encourages freeing them, but does not specifically ban slavery. Responding to prevailing 7th century Arabian evils, Quran forbade the inheriting of women, female infanticide and abuse of slaves. Muslims across the world welcomed the abolition of slavery, believing it to be in accordance with Quranic guidance.

Islamic scholars have responded creatively with Quranic verses sanctioning armed struggles. Invoking the principle of ‘asbab e nuzul’, cause of revelation, they rightly limit this relevance to ‘just wars’ against oppression fought by the first Muslims. Instead of similar creative engagement with regard to oppressive canonised laws for women, patriarchy maintains the status quo. Women’s rights can no longer be defined by political Islam or Arab culture and histories.

In matters of inheritance and nafaqa, maintenance, Quran guarantees a minimum financial protection for women but does not cap the maximum. Offering more financial and emotional security to women can never conflict with Islam. Prophet Muhammad famously said, ‘None of you believes till you love for the other what you love for yourselves.’

Sharia law denies the right of punishment to individuals, leaving this responsibility to the state. Sharia endorses responsible citizenry, making it mandatory for Muslims to comply with laws of the lands they inhabit.

Traditionally, women pilgrims travelling to Mecca required to be accompanied by a mahram, husband or other male relatives with whom marriage is forbidden. Negotiating modern challenges, many Islamic scholars have ruled it permissible for women to travel alone. They declare the state as mahram, for in ensuring security, the laws of the state replace the role of the ‘protective bodies’. This principle should extend to the Indian state.

Brexit may be the best answer to a dying eurozone

Larry Elliott in The Guardian

Staying in the EU means hitching ourselves to an undemocratic project run by and for a remote elite

 

Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck

The elephant in the room. Everybody knew what Mark Carney meant when he paused halfway through his regular three-monthly update on the state of the economy: the implications of Brexit.

The governor of the Bank of England did not pull any punches. He warned of a potential run on the pound and of possible problems financing the UK’s whopping balance of payments deficit. He said the Bank expected growth to be materially lower and inflation to be notably higher. Voters trust the Bank of England. They sat up and took notice. The opinion polls started to move in favour of remain. When the history of the referendum campaign is written, Carney’s may be seen as the decisive intervention.

In truth, there was more than one elephant in the room. Carney was right when he said there was a risk that the upheaval caused by Brexit could tip an already weakening economy into recession. But as elephants in the room go, this was the smaller, Indian version. The equivalent of the bigger, African elephant was the shocking state of the eurozone after the failure of the single currency experiment. This went unremarked by Carney, although it is relevant to the debate aboutEurope.

Why? Because, although Britain is likely to stay in the EU, Brexit will remain a live issue unless the eurozone can sort itself out. That means either admitting that the euro has been a terrible mistake, or going the whole hog and integrating further, with a single banking system, a Europe-wide treasury, and a democratically elected finance minister with the power to raise money in Germany and spend it in Greece. This is not going to happen any time soon, and perhaps never. Countries that joined the eurozone gave up a considerable amount of economic power when they adopted the euro, but they retained the right to raise their own taxes and make their own spending decisions.

Britain is not in the euro, for which we should all be thankful. But let’s be clear: staying in the EU means hitching the wagon to a currency zone unable to go forwards or backwards, and which will continue to struggle as a result.

The euro brought to fruition the idea of ever-closer union, a plan that dates back to the early 1950s. Lots of things considered good ideas back then are no longer considered quite so clever: system-built high-rise flats as the answer to slum housing; nuclear power to meet energy needs. Put ever-closer union in the same category as the Birmingham inner-city ring road: it seemed a good idea at the time.

Dan Atkinson and I spent the winter working on a book about the single currencycommissioned in the wake of last summer’s Greek crisis. The brief was to look at what had gone wrong from a left-of-centre perspective; to explore the widespread disquiet about the way in which a country that voted in January 2015 for an end to austerity ended up seven months later being forced to accept even deeper cuts in wages and spending.
The eurozone crisis is about more than Greece. It is about Italy, where the economy is barely any bigger now than it was when the single currency was introduced. And France, where unemployment is double the level of the UK or the US. And Finland, one of the most tech-savvy countries in Europe, where the economy is 7% smaller than it was before the start of the financial crisis. And even Germany, where an export boom and high corporate profits have been paid for by workers in the form of below-inflation pay increases.

Our investigations took us back to the last time Britain held a referendum on EU membership, when during the cabinet discussions Tony Benn warned that Britain was signing up for something that was undemocratic, deflationary and run in the interests of big business. “I can think of no body of men outside the Kremlin who have so much power without a shred of accountability for what they do,” Benn said.

Benn’s dystopian vision proved entirely accurate. When the architects of the new Europe looked to the future, they envisaged a new and better version of the United States of America. Europe would have all the good bits about the US – such as the economic dynamism, a large barrier-free market and a single currency – without any of the bad bits: the inequality, the high levels of incarceration, the poverty and the inadequate welfare safety net. 

This dream lives on. Yanis Varoufakis, the deposed finance minister of Greece, thinks the eurozone could be recast along Keynesian lines, with the rich and strong countries obliged to provide financial help to the poor and weak. Good luck with getting Germany to agree to that.
Economic policy has been relentlessly deflationary. The interests of bankers have been given a higher priority than workers’. Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus and Spain have been the laboratory mice in a continent-wide neoliberal experiment of a sort Tea Party Republicans in the US can only fantasise about.

Given the obscene level of long-term unemployment, the idea of Europe as the guardian of labour rights is laughable. The gap between the US and Europe has widened, not narrowed, since the launch of the single currency. Populist parties of both left and right are gaining in support. One left-of-centre argument against Brexit is that it would result in the breakup of the euro and by doing so set off a chain reaction that would lead to the next global crisis: a perfectly fair point. Those who fear that another recession and even higher levels of joblessness would threaten a return to the totalitarian politics of the 1930s are right to highlight the risks. Some on the left who want Brexit say that the time is not yet ripe.

The left-of-centre case for divorce is that Europe doesn’t work, is not remotely progressive and is heading for an existential crisis anyway. Last year’s threat was Grexit. This year’s threat is Brexit. Next year’s threat will be something else: Italy leaving the single currency, perhaps, or Marine Le Pen’s tilt for the French presidency.

This presents an opportunity for those who believe that the way ahead still involves closer integration. Jean Monnet, the godfather of the EU, always said that ever-closer union would be forged through crises, which is what Brexit would undoubtedly trigger.

If the polls are right, Britain seems unready to trigger this act of creative destruction and it will be left to Varoufakis to do out of office what he could not do in power: prove a different Europe is possible.

A different Europe is needed, but it is stretching credibility to imagine that the Europe of Greece and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership can easily morph into America with the nice people in charge. The eurozone is economically moribund, persists with policies that have demonstrably failed, is indifferent to democracy, is run by and for a small, self-perpetuating elite, and is slowing dying. The wrong comparison is being made. This is not the US without the electric chair; it is the USSR without the gulag.

Are funny people sexy ... or are sexy people funny?

Dean Burnett in The Guardian

In a recent guest post, Girl On The Net looked at the assumption that women “love a bad boy”, the cliché that women are attracted to more rebellious, undisciplined, aloof characters who play by their own rules like “treat them mean, keep them keen” etc.

But never mind the bad guy, what about the funny guy? It’s an equally common cliché that women are often charmed by a guy who can make them laugh. It certainly pops up in the media often enough. How many sitcoms have you seen where the at-best-average-looking bloke ends up with a woman who’s clearly “out of his league”, purely because he’s wacky, or witty, or cuttingly sarcastic?

Real life isn’t short of examples either. The acronym GSOH is practically mandatory for dating profiles. In his brilliant (if psychologically alarming) autobiography Becoming Johnny Vegas, Vegas pulls no punches when it comes to criticising his own physical appearance and shortcomings, but highlights how his increased comedy success lead to similarly increased attention from women (much to the annoyance of the more typically-attractive blokes watching, a phenomenon that has been scientifically recorded).

And for those with a strong constitution, there’s Dirty British Comedy Confessions, a site where people confess their sexual fantasies about British (and beyond) comedy stars, in often eye-watering detail (thanks to Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast for flagging this up, and the Greg Davies andNick Helm episodes in particular).

Ken Dodd has been making countless people laugh for over half a century, but still isn’t considered a sex symbol for some reason. Photograph: Gary Calton for the Guardian

The link between humour and sexual attraction has a lot to back it up, as the bishop said to the nun. Humour is widely regarded as a complex form of communication, allowing people to convey sentiments and information in an enjoyable and engaging way. If you’ve ever seen a seasoned lecturer make jokes (or at least, attempt to) you’ve seen how prevalent this notion is. So humour is a complex and valuable tool for modern humans. However, when you give a typical human anything at all, one of the main responses will inevitably be “how can I use this to get sex?” And lo, humour has become deeply entrenched in what is questionably referred to as “human mating”, and in a variety of ways.

At the most basic level, it makes sense that we’d be more drawn to someone we find funny. We encounter someone, they make us feel pleasure by making us laugh, we form a positive association with them, and have more positive feelings towards them. Basic associative learning, the kind Pavlov’s dogs demonstrated. Obviously, it’s a lot more complex than that; people can find novelty coffee mugs funny, doesn’t mean they want to have sex with them (although no doubt people who work in A&E could provide evidence to the contrary).

Another theory is that the ability to make jokes and amuse people is a sign of psychological health and fitness, as it requires intelligence, quick thinking, versatility etc. All these things suggest the person is a good mate, from a health and genetics perspective. So maybe jokes and wordplay are the verbal equivalents of a stag’s antlers, or a peacock’s tail; excessive displays of biological health and fitness.

Again, it’s clearly more complex than this. Very few women will look at a man who makes her laugh and think “Phwoarr, I’d love some of his gametes”. Also, the assumption that “humorous = psychologically healthy” isn’t a definite conclusion; there’s evidence to suggest that many people see excessive humour as a sign that someone is psychologically unwell, hence the whole “tears of a clown” cliché.

Depressingly for those who believe being funny can compensate for being physically unattractive, that seems to only work up to a point. An interesting study by Cowan and Little, which looked at humour and attractiveness found that physically attractive people were deemed to be “funnier” than less attractive people when the subjects could see the speaker. When presented with audio only, this effect wasn’t so pronounced.

Why would attractive people be considered funnier? Surely that’s not how humour works? One explanation is the “halo effect”, where our initial impression of a person causes a bias in all our other assessments of them. So if you look at a man and think “he is attractive”, when he makes jokes you’re more likely to think “he is funny” because you already have positive feelings about him due to how he looks.

It’s technically possible to separate humour from physical appearance, but it takes you to strange places. Photograph: Alamy

In contrast, because the humour-attraction link is well established and manifests in various ways, many might consider attempts at humour as synonymous with flirting. And if a person you don’t find attractive tries to flirt with you, most people really don’t like that, so you experience a negative reaction. Overall, it suggests attractive people have a much easier time of it when it comes to making people laugh. At last, the physically beautiful finally catch a break!

All this comes with many caveats. The style of humour and romantic intent plays a role, because people are complex and aren’t limited to binary funny/unfunny or sexy/unsexy judgements. You also can’t really filter out the countless cultural influences on our perceptions.

For example, the study mentioned above shows that humour is linked to attractiveness for both men and women, but the effect is stronger for women. Is this some deep-rooted evolved mechanism, or the result of everyone around us assuming that women aren’t “supposed” to be the funny ones? Any that are are defying convention, so receive negative responses for this. It’s nonsense of course, but then any woman who displays positive traits seems destined to be attacked for it. We live in a world where even the most physically flawless woman can be criticised and mocked in major publications because a photographer with a powerful camera glimpsed some cellulite between 2 adjacent skin cells.

So it’s assumed that men “should” be the funny ones, and women are the ones who “choose” funnier men. But there’s no rule saying it has to be this way. And this (and nearly every study into the area) focuses solely on heterosexual relationships. There’s nothing to say homosexual interaction doesn’t use humour in similar ways, but the stereotypical culture roles would now throw everything off, so cause even more headaches for scientists.

Overall, while it seems clear that humour and sexual interaction are strongly linked, the idea that funny people are sexier isn’t quite so obvious. People who are already attractive often get perceived as funnier, because the people attracted to them want them to be, even if it is at a subconscious level.

This isn’t an absolute of course, what with humans being as messy and complex as they are, particularly when it comes to sex. Some people really are irresistably drawn to someone who makes them laugh, regardless of looks. Other people have no interest in dating a wannabe clown at all. But, with all that in mind, if you’re wondering why so many current comedians seem to be attractive young men with trendy hair, now you know.

Why a new toilet law could flush cafes and takeaways down the pan

Chitra Ramaswamy in The Guardian

How many seats in a coffee shop does it take to necessitate provision of a customer loo? Fifteen? Five? A solitary stool and a sticky counter? An existential question and one that, according to this toilet-user, depends on a complex set of circumstances, from what’s on the menu to where the chairs are positioned. (Five outside? Toilet unlikely. Four inside? Expect a small, whiffy loo with no paper towels in the dispenser.)

The correct answer, according to section 20 of the 1976 Local Government Miscellaneous Provisions Act, is 10. As in, cafes with fewer than 10 seats are not legally required to provide customer loos. Which is presumably why you can’t scoff a sausage roll in Greggs and then demand use of the washroom but you can order a takeout coffee in a central London Starbucks and get a key to the saddest toilets in Soho. (When it comes to public conveniences don’t be fooled by the romance of a key.)

Despite the 10-seat guideline, thousands of takeaways and coffee shops could now be forced to install a toilet or get rid of seating following a recent case in Hull. Two branches of Greggs, both of which had fewer than 10 seats, lost a legal battle with the council after the judge ruled that not providing facilities gave them an “unfair commercial advantage”. If the ruling, which is being appealed, sets a precedent, as many as 21,500 takeaways and 5,230 coffee shops across the UK – the vast majority of which are small independent businesses – could be affected.

“It would be a major problem,” Raymond Martin, director of the British Toilet Association, says. “Most of these are not going to be able to provide a toilet. Many would be forced to close down.” Would he expect a loo in a takeaway with only a few tables? “It does seem right to provide a toilet if a takeaway allows me to consume food and stay on the premises for a period of time,” he replies diplomatically. “But should we force takeaways to put in toilets? I don’t think we can.”

UK public toilets mapped: where's your nearest?

 

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The real issue, he adds, is the loss of public toilets from our cities and town centres. The law currently does not compel local authorities to provide public toilets – of which there are around 4,000 in the UK – and the result is that Britain has lost more than 40% of its facilities in the past decade. “We reckon we are losing toilets faster than we’re gaining them,” Martin says. “Every day we get calls from councillors saying: ‘We’re thinking of closing some, if not all, of our toilets. What’s our legal position?’ In years gone by, people would have got their food from a takeaway and then used a public toilet later. That is no longer the case.”

Meanwhile stores, supermarkets, petrol stations and other commercial providers have stepped in, hopeful that, after we’ve relieved ourselves in their lovely free toilets, conveniently located right at the back of the store so we have to walk past all their goods to get to them, we’ll do a spot of shopping. Perhaps toilets are the latest trick in retail, the new piped muzak luring us in to spend a penny before we spend, spend, spend. “The government wants people out shopping, eating, keeping the economy flowing,” Martin notes. “But it doesn’t want to provide the toilets.”