Can technology replace teachers? You asked Google – here’s the answer

Harpreet Purewal in The Guardian


Anxiety about losing your job to technology is both a rational and growing fear. Andy Haldane, the chief economist at the Bank of England, recently estimated that 15m jobs in the UK were threatened by automation. Technology is reaching such levels of sophistication that it is capable not only of manual tasks but cognitive ones too, putting a wide range of jobs are at risk. The areas most vulnerable include driving and administrative work. But according to a report from Oxford University that looked at over 700 areas of work, teaching at all levels across the educational spectrum is a safe bet.

Yet the apparent safety of teaching as a profession doesn’t quite square with the boom in online courses. From the comfort of my sofa I can watch lectures from prestigious universities around the world, join the hundreds of millions of people who have enrolled on a Khan Academy course, enrol in a Mooc – a massive online open course – or upskill and change my career with a course from Lynda and many other education providers.

A lot of these courses are free, but those with accreditation attached tend to charge. The appeal for educational institutions is simple: you can pay a teacher once to deliver a lecture to an unlimited amount of students without having to pay for all the overheads it takes to run a building. Students are offered flexibility and can learn at a time and location that suits them. However, drop-out rates for these courses are extremely high and they present no real threat to education as we know it. It seems students still prefer a real classroom.

FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘The act of teaching isn’t just imparting what’s in your head to a captive audience.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

So why not replace teachers in classroom with technology? To understand why teachers’ careers are safe we need to ask two questions: what do teachers do all day and where does technology fall short?
A quick survey of teacher friends answers the first question: teachers provide pastoral care, direct the Christmas play, recognise and assist vulnerable pupils, cover break-time duty, mentor new teachers, collate data about pupils’ attendance and behaviour, mark homework, rig lights and dress sets for school performances, order resources such as textbooks and classroom equipment, write newsletters, take school trips, assess pupil attainment, meet parents, spot potential terrorists (ahem) in accordance with the government’s Prevent guidelines, lead assemblies, make endless photocopies, and appraise other members of staff. This list is incomplete and already sounds like a lot for a piece of technology to cover. But if you’re looking for an easy and long-term job, this isn’t it: almost a third of teachers quit within five years.

It’s likely that some of the administrative tasks that teachers do will be conducted by technology in the future, just as in other sectors, but what about the actual teaching? The act of teaching isn’t just imparting what’s in your head to a captive audience. Teaching is a performance, it’s reading the room and working it. This is where technology really falls short. Empathy is a key area of difficulty for technology and automation. Are the kids at the back of the classroom bored because you’re talking about something they find too difficult, because they know it already, or because you’re not presenting the information in a meaningful way? Human beings are able to pick up on a multitude of contextual clues to determine and respond to the emotional states of others. Technology can’t detect emotional states, let alone adapt its behaviour to cater accordingly.

‘The best teachers will use technology in the classroom as part of an expanding toolkit.’ Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP

Another area of difficulty for technology that is key to teaching is quick thinking. Any number of things can and do go wrong on a school day: a guest speaker cancels, the whiteboard freezes, buses are delayed or – the ultimate horror – the photocopier breaks. Human beings are able to think on their feet and reformulate their plans to adapt to new circumstances. Machines aren’t able to do this. Thinking on the spot is a key skill of teachers, and many cite the variety of the job as a reason for entering the profession in the first place.

We know what technology can’t do for students and teachers, but there are some reasons to be optimistic about the role of technology in education. Teachers in the UK often complain about the administration workload interfering with the actual work of teaching. Technology could aid data-gathering significantly, freeing up teachers’ time and allowing them to focus on more important aspects of their work. And internationally, technology has the potential to reach those who don’t have access to a classroom. In 2015 the British Council used Skype to deliver teacher training in Libya; and as far back as 1999 Sugata Mitra created “Hole in the Wall” schools by placing computers in slums in Delhi.

The best teachers will use technology in the classroom as part of an expanding toolkit, and hopefully they’ll see the benefits of smarter technology in the form of reduced clerical work. Classrooms will continue to change shape, but it’s safe to assume that there will be a human teacher at the front of them for a long time yet.

The Economics of Sex

Europe and the Austerity Fallacy

Yanis Varoufakis

Have cake and eat it too - How to beat Brexit, steal best state school pupils, get paid and retain tax charitable status

Anon




On 9 December I was perplexed to read The Telegraph headline “Private schools plan to offer 10,000 free places to children from low-income backgrounds”. 

Immediately I thought, ‘This is a good idea’

A few seconds later, I remembered that we are in the era of post truth politics. So, I thought let me look behind the spin and see what the proposal actually means.

Many of the UK’s fees collecting private schools are charities according to their tax status. This status has been challenged by successive governments who have found few instances of charitable work and more instances of price rigging. These schools also face the new prospect of Brexit and fewer fee paying EU students on their rolls. 

To overcome this threat, The Independent Schools Council (ISC) has proposed to teach 10,000 state school students if the government agrees to pay them £5,550 per student. This will enable the private schools to demonstrate their charitable work to retain their charitable tax status and will assure them with a steady supply of students to replace the EU nationals who may prefer to go elsewhere post Brexit.

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In my view this proposal reminds me of the PPP (private public partnership) and PFI (Private Finance Initiative) proposals which have bled the state’s coffers and unduly benefited private firms. Here are some ways the state will be worse off by accepting the ISC initiative. 

No further need to do charity work: Any private school charity has to demonstrate actual charitable work in order to enjoy its tax status as a charity. The ISC hopes this proposal will enable them to overcome criticism of not doing sufficient charitable work.

Raiding state schools of better able students: State schools already feel beleaguered with budget cuts affecting their ability to teach students. This proposal will result in a further exodus of better able students who will be cherry picked by the private schools.

I feel there is no need to accept the ISC proposals. ISC members already enjoy a subsidy in the form of a charitable tax status despite not complying with the requirements of a charity.

Secondly, the above proposal if accepted will resemble the Nissan deal where the state intervenes with a sweetheart deal to once again protect privileged profit making non charitable ‘charities’.

But, I must confess the ISC have adapted well to the era of post truth politics by presenting a self preserving proposal as a charitable act. Is it a case of eating cake and having it too?

Wolfgang Streeck: the German economist calling time on capitalism

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Outside was panic. Barely a couple of hours after Donald Trump had been declared the next president of the United States and even the political columnists, those sleek interlocutors of power, were in shock. At the National Gallery in London, however, one of the few thinkers to have anticipated Trump’s rise was ready to see some paintings. Over from Germany for a few days of lectures, Wolfgang Streeck had an afternoon spare – and we both wanted to see the Beyond Caravaggio exhibition.

Nothing in his work prepares you for meeting Streeck (pronounced Stray-k). Professionally, he is the political economist barking last orders for our way of life, and warning of the “dark ages” ahead. His books bear bluntly fin-de-siecle titles: two years ago was Buying Time, while the latest is called How Will Capitalism End?(spoiler: not well). Even his admirers talk of his “despair”, by which they mean sentences such as this: “Before capitalism will go to hell, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.”

What does such gloom look like in the flesh? Small glasses, neat side parting and moustache, a backpack, a smart anorak and at least a decade younger than his 70 years. Alluding to Trump’s victory, he cheerily declares “What a morning!” as if discussing the likelihood of rain, then strolls into the gallery.

Decadence… Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Photograph: The National Gallery London

You don’t merely look at a Caravaggio; you square up to one. The scenes are tightly cropped, with characters that jostle and stare at the viewer. Their mordancy is a tonic to Streeck, who laughs with delight. He pauses in front of Boy Bitten by a Lizard and admires how the lizard clings on with its teeth to the boy’s finger. At a scene of cardsharps he exclaims, “Feel the decadence! The threat of violence!”

He notes how many paintings date from just before the thirty years’ war: “They’re full of the anticipation that the world is about to fall apart.”

Then comes The Taking of Christ, a dark, dense painting that shows Jesus just after his betrayal by Judas. Gripped by his treacherous former disciple, Christ looks down, ready to be bundled off by the armoured Roman centurions. “Caravaggio is always there just before the explosion,” Streeck observes. “This morning might have been a Caravaggio moment: just before the election of Trump.”

Like Caravaggio before the explosion, Streeck has been hanging around this crash scene for years – long before the plane came hurtling down and the centrist politicians and pundits began rushing around.

At a time when macroeconomists have failed and other academics have retreated into disciplinary solipsism, Streeck is one of the few (other exceptions include Mark Blyth, Colin Crouch and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change) to have risen to the moment. Many of the themes that will define this year, this decade, are in his work. The breakup of Europe, the rise of plutocrat-populists such as Trump, the failures of Mark Carney and the technocratic elite: he has anatomised all of them.


Why should oligarchs be interested in their countries’ democratic stability if, apparently, they can be rich without it?

This summer, Britons mutinied against their government, their experts and the EU – and consigned themselves to a poorer, angrier future. Such frenzies of collective self-harm were explained by Streeck in the 2012 lectures later collected in Buying Time:

Professionalised political science tends to underestimate the impact of moral outrage. With its penchant for studied indifference … [it] has nothing but elitist contempt for what it calls “populism”, sharing this with the power elites to which it would like to be close … [But] citizens too can “panic” and react “irrationally”, just like financial investors … even though they have no banknotes as arguments but only words and (who knows?) paving stones.

Here he is in 2013, foreshadowing the world of LuxLeaks, SwissLeaks and the Panama Papers and their revelations of a one-sided class war – by the 1% against the rest of us:


Why should the new oligarchs be interested in their countries’ future productive capacities and present democratic stability if, apparently, they can be rich without it, processing back and forth the synthetic money produced for them at no cost by a central bank for which the sky is the limit, at each stage diverting from it hefty fees and unprecedented salaries, bonuses, and profits as long as it is forthcoming – and then leave their country to its remaining devices and withdraw to some privately owned island?

And in a 2015 essay, he warns that resentment against such elites will not be wholesomely Fabian but will instead take the form either of “public entertainment” or “some politically regressive sort of nationalism”. It will look less like Hillary than Donald:

Politicization is migrating to the right side of the political spectrum where anti-establishment parties are getting better and better at organising discontented citizens dependent upon public services and insisting on political protection from international markets.

In such long, precise, comfortless sentences, Streeck sets out the crises facing Britain, the US and the continent. His diagnosis is both political and economic, and it makes him what Chris Bickerton, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge, thinks might be “the most interesting person around today on the subject of the relationship between democracy and capitalism”.

 Lehman Brothers headquarters in New York’s Times Square, 2008. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Which makes him the most interesting person on the most urgent subject of our times. Eight years after Lehman Brothers keeled over and nearly took the entire banking system down with it, capitalism remains broken. British workers are suffering their most severe pay squeeze in at least seven decades. And even though politicians and the policymakers have pulled on every lever – cuts, investment, housing boom, hundreds of billions pumped into the markets – still the engine refuses to purr. The failure is international: the Bank of International Settlements, the central banks’ central bank, warned a few months ago that “the global economy seems unable to return to sustainable and balanced growth”.

Not for the first time, the sandwich board-wearers are declaring the end of capitalism – but today Streeck believes they are right. In its deepest crises, he says, modern capitalism has relied on its enemies to wade in with the lifebelt of reform. During the Great Depression of the 30s, it was FDR’s Democrats who rolled out the New Deal, while Britain’s trade unionists allied with Keynes.
Compare that with now. Over 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has destroyed its opposition. When Margaret Thatcher was asked to give her greatest achievement, she nominated “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.” The prime minister who declared “There is no alternative”, then did her damnedest to extirpate any such alternative. The result? The unions are withered, the independent tenants’ associations have disappeared along with the stock of council housing, the BBC is forever on the back foot, and local, regional and national newspapers are now the regular subjects of obituaries. A similar story can be told across the rich world.

Public discontent is fitful and fragmented, ready to fall into Trump’s tiny hands. Meanwhile, capitalism – unrestrained and unreformed – will die.

This isn’t the violent overthrow envisaged by Marx and Engels. In The Communist Manifesto, they argued that capitalism’s “gravediggers” would be the proletariat. Nearly 170 years later, Streeck is predicting that the capitalists will be their own gravediggers, through having destroyed the workers and the dissidents they needed to maintain the system. What comes next is not some better replacement but is more akin to the centuries-long rotting away of the Roman empire.

And, yes, his latest book is out just in time for Christmas. Not so long ago, such catastrophism would have been the stuff of Speakers’ Corner. Today, it goes right to the brokenness of politics.

Streeck is admired by the team around Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, and was invited to this year’s Labour conference in Liverpool (work commitments forced him to decline). One senior adviser described his relevance to British politics thus: “He is pretty blunt about how serious the situation is, for social democracy and capitalism.”


That we could modify capitalism towards equality and tame the beast – now those are utopian ideals
What gives Streeck’s analysis extra force is that he comes from the very establishment he now attacks. He has played many key roles: joint head of Germany’s top social science institute, an adviser in the late 90s to Gerhard Schröder’s government, one of Europe’s most eminent theorists of capitalism. While never a Third Way-er, he was friendly with David and Ed Miliband.

“I spent a long time in my life exploring the possibilities for an intelligent social democratic solution of the class conflict,” he explains over lunch. “The idea that we could modify capitalism towards equality and social justice. That we could tame the beast. Now I think those are more or less utopian ideals.”

He is thus a case study in the very thing he writes about: the demoralisation of centrist politics – and its radicalisation.

The great disillusionment came upon returning to Germany in 1995, after years teaching industrial relations in the US. It was the era of Germany being labelled “the sick man of Europe”, when one in five east German workers were unemployed. Through the metalworkers’ trade union, Streeck was invited to join a committee of trade unions, employers and government. Called the Alliance for Jobs (Bündnis für Arbeit), its task was to reform labour laws. Streeck believed this was “the last call for trade unions and social democracy”: the final chance to get more people into work without stripping workers of their rights.

“We came up with a good model, but everything we proposed was blocked – not just by the employers but by the unions, too.”

The Alliance fell apart and within a couple of years, Schröder had brought in the Hartz reforms – policies drawn up by a former Volkswagen executive that set up a new regime of workfare and benefit sanctions, and kicked the bottom out of the labour market.

A member of the Social Democratic Party, Germany’s counterpart to Labour, since the age of 16, Streeck finally cancelled his subs a few years ago. Would he still place himself as a social democrat? He quotes Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.” In another interview he has described “the most urgent task for the left” as “sobering up”.

The constant sobriety might prove wearing, were it not for his easy companionship. Listening back to the recording, the primary sound is Streeck’s laughter – that and “Jajaja!”, a Bren gun enthusiasm for any new idea or argument.

He also gives good gossip. A “power breakfast” with financial policymakers and investment bankers is dismissed as “clueless and so stereoptypical. They complained about the stupidity of the masses who didn’t understand the expertise that someone like Alan Greenspan was able to bring to central banking.” This is the same Greenspan who, as head of the US central bank in the bubble years, believed financiers could regulate themselves.

On this trip he went to a conference on Brexit. “I was shocked by the unanimous sense of guilt.” One former British ambassador “began by saying we have to apologise to our foreign friends for the vote to leave Europe. I said, ‘You ought to be happy to have sent a warning to the European Union.’”

He sees the support for Brexit and Trump as stemming from the same source. “You have a growing group of all people, who, under the impact of neoliberal internationalisation, have become increasingly excluded from the mainstream of their society.

Visions of London wealth … Canary wharf financial district. Photograph: DBURKE / Alamy/Alamy

“You look out here,” He gestures out of the windows of the National Gallery, at the domes and columns of Trafalgar Square, “And it’s a second Rome. You walk through the streets at night and you say, ‘My God, yes: this is what an empire looks like’.” This is the land of what Streeck calls the Marktsvolk – literally, the people of the market, the club-class financiers and executives, the asset-owning winners of globalisation.

But this space – geographic, economic, political – is off-limits to the Staatsvolk: the ones who fly yearly on holiday rather than weekly on business, the downsized, the indebted losers of neoliberalism. “These people are being driven out of London. In French cities it’s the same thing. This both reinforces them as a political power structure, and puts them completely on the defensive. But one thing they do know is that conventional politics has totally written them off.” Social democrats such as the outgoing Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi are guilty, too. “They’re on the side of the winners.”

International flows of people, money and goods: Streeck accepts the need for all these – “but in some sort of directed, governable way. It has to be, otherwise societies dissolve”.

Those views on immigration landed him in another fight this summer, when he wrote an essay attacking Angela Merkel for her open-door policy towards refugees from Syria and elsewhere. It was a “ploy”, he said, to import tens of thousands of cheap workers and thus allow German employers to bring down wages. Colleagues accused him of spinning a “neoliberal conspiracy” theory and of giving cover to Germany’s far right. Streeck’s defence is simple: “It is impossible to protect wages against an unlimited labour supply. Does saying that make me some proto-fascist?”

What gives this back-and-forth a twist is the little-known fact that Streeck is himself the child of refugees. Both 25 years old when the second world war ended, his parents were among the 12 million displaced people to arrive from eastern Europe in West Germany. Streeck was born just outside Münster in a room requisitioned by the state from a shoemaker. His parents were poor. “I remember they stole vegetables from the fields and coal from passing trains.”

His mother was a Sudeten German in Czechoslovakia, who was given 24 hours’ notice to leave when the war ended, taking only what she could carry. After Streeck left home she began to study the Czech language. “It was a sense of ‘If I can’t go back there I at least want to speak the language of those people who now live where I used to’.”

Her son went to a grammar school founded by Martin Luther, where he was taught Greek and Latin and expected to become a theologian. Instead, he fell in with the then-illegal Communist party. Aged 16, he was in charge of organising the reading circle – “suppressed literature such as the Communist Manifesto and Rosa Luxemburg” – and held it at the local employers’ association “because no one would ever suspect”.

In 1968, he was a student radical at Frankfurt, “but I never had any truck with the ‘marijuana left’. I felt closer to the working class than to the pot-smoking classes”.

Now he lives with his wife in part of a farmyard of a castle in Brühl, a small town just outside Cologne. The retiree is still up by six every morning and at his desk for 8.30. “I have learned to write only till 1pm. After that I give myself over to academic intrigues.” And to novels: when we meet, he is reading I Hate the Internet, by Jarett Kobek, a Silicon Valley engineer who claims that the internet has “fucked up” his life.

After lunch, we cross the Thames to King’s College where Streeck is to deliver a lecture. There is more gossip, this time about Greek politics and the hollowing out of the Syriza government. As teenagers, Streeck’s class travelled to Greece to look at antiquities. Instead, he began reading local newspapers on the king’s attempts to chuck out prime minister Georgios Papandreou. “I wrote a report in the school newspaper that was almost entirely concerned with the emerging military dictatorship.” Sixty years later, he is working on a book about democracy in southern Europe.

The lecture room is packed, students spread across the floor and peering around the wall at Streeck, absent-mindedly playing with a paperclip and quoting Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. [pause] In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms can appear.” In the lecture’s interval, a variety of students buy his books and hover about for him to sign them. At the end, a student asks: “what should the left do?”

Occupy protest in Frankfurt, 2011. Photograph: Arne Dedert/EPA

It is the same question I’d put a few hours earlier. Both times, Streeck warns he is about to disappoint us. To me he cites an Occupy protest in Frankfurt. Days before that, he says, thousands of police were deployed to Germany’s capital of finance. “The authorities were scared shitless. I think more such scariness must happen. They must learn that in order to keep people quiet they need extraordinary effort.”

No mention of ballot boxes; nor of any need for a bigger vision “because the others don’t have a blueprint”.

But, I say, Nigel Farage and the rest are at least pretending to have an answer.

“And we should criticise them.” The press always talks of a lack of business confidence, he says; now is the time for the voters to demonstrate a lack of public confidence.

The analogy doesn’t work and, listening back to the tape, I can hear agitation in my voice. A businessperson can go on an investment strike; he or she can hoard cash. Even if voters sat out an election, they would still face the consequences. Muslim mums would get their headscarves ripped off, a Polish man could get stabbed to death for going in the wrong kebab shop.

In a phone call a couple of weeks later, I press Streeck again. “If I look 10 or 20 years out, I don’t like what I see,” he says. Nor is he alone: he quotes a new book by the former head of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, and his projection of “great uncertainty” ahead.

But doesn’t he want something better than a new dark ages for his grandchildren? “If I am honest, now I am thankful for every passing year that is good and peaceful. And I hope for another one. Very short-term, I know, but those are my horizons.”

Sweden’s recycling is so revolutionary, the country has run out of rubbish

Hazel Sheffield in The Independent

Sweden is so good at recycling that, for several years, it has imported rubbish from other countries to keep its recycling plants going. Less than 1 per cent of Swedish household waste was sent to landfill last year or any year since 2011.

We can only dream of such an effective system in the UK, which is why we end up paying expensive transport costs to send rubbish to be recycled overseas rather than paying fines to send it to landfill under The Landfill Tax of 1996.

The UK has made strides in the proportion of waste recycled under an EU target of 50 per cent by 2020. This has underpinned hundreds of millions of pounds of investment into recycling facilities and energy recovery plants in the UK, creating many jobs. We’re not quite at that target yet. Recycling in the UK peaked at around 45 per cent of all waste in 2014.

Since then, provisional figures from the ONS have shown that figure has dropped to 44 per cent as austerity has resulted in budget cuts. The decision to leave the EU could be about to make this situation worse. While Europe is aiming for a 65 per cent recycling target by 2030, the UK may be about to fall even further behind its green neighbours.

Why are we sending waste to Sweden? Their system is so far ahead because of a culture of looking after the environment. Sweden was one of the first countries to implement a heavy tax on fossil fuels in 1991 and now sources almost half its electricity from renewables.

“Swedish people are quite keen on being out in nature and they are aware of what we need do on nature and environmental issues. We worked on communications for a long time to make people aware not to throw things outdoors so that we can recycle and reuse,” says Anna-Carin Gripwall, director of communications for Avfall Sverige, the Swedish Waste Management’s recycling association.

Over time, Sweden has implemented a cohesive national recycling policy so that even though private companies undertake most of the business of importing and burning waste, the energy goes into a national heating network to heat homes through the freezing Swedish winter. “That’s a key reason that we have this district network, so we can make use of the heating from the waste plants. In the southern part of Europe they don’t make use of the heating from the waste, it just goes out the chimney. Here we use it as a substitute for fossil fuel,” Ms Gripwell says.

Sweden’s heating network is not without its detractors. They argue that the country is dodging real recycling by sending waste to be incinerated. Paper plant managers say that wood fibre can be used up to six times before it becomes dust. If Sweden burns paper before that point it is exhausting the potential for true recycling and replacing used paper with fresh raw material.

Ms Gripwall says the aim in Sweden is still to stop people sending waste to recycling in the first place. A national campaign called the “Miljönär-vänlig” movement has for several years promoted the notion that there is much to be gained through repairing, sharing and reusing.

She describes Sweden’s policy of importing waste to recycle from other countries as a temporary situation. “There’s a ban on landfill in EU countries, so instead of paying the fine they send it to us as a service. They should and will build their own plants, to reduce their own waste, as we are working hard to do in Sweden,” Ms Gripwall says.

“Hopefully there will be less waste and the waste that has to go to incineration should be incinerated in each country. But to use recycling for heating you have to have district heating or cooling systems, so you have to build the infrastructure for that, and that takes time,” she adds.

Swedish municipalities are individually investing in futuristic waste collection techniques, like automated vacuum systems in residential blocks, removing the need for collection transport, and underground container systems that free up road space and get rid of any smells.

In the UK, each local authority has its own system, making it difficult for residents to be confident about what they can recycle and where. “We need more of a coherent national strategy in England to the collection of recyclable materials, rather than the current approach, whereby it is largely left to individual local authorities to determine their own collection policies,” says Angus Evers, partner at Shoosmiths and a convenor of the UK Environmental Law Association’s Waste Working Party.

Local authorities will often start by recycling the highest volume materials because they are measured according to the proportion of waste recycled, so bigger items count for more. “Whatever we end up with in the UK, we need a system which collects all recyclable materials rather than cherry-picking the easiest and cheapest,” says Richard Hands, chief executive of ACE UK, the drink carton industry’s trade association.

Mr Hands points to his own drinks carton industry, which includes Tetra Pak, SIG Combibloc and Elopak. Through ACE UK, these brands have driven up carton recycling, more than doubling the number of local authorities collecting cartons from 31 per cent in 2011 to 65 per cent in 2016.

He says that the UK needs to build infrastructure around recycling plants so that it can stop sending waste overseas. Some local authorities already have a “no export” policy to achieve this. “Growing the UK waste industry will create jobs and generate UK-based revenue for the economy,” Mr Hands says.

Angus Evers says a better domestic recycling system should be a part of our strategy for leaving the EU. “The materials we currently export represent a huge drain of valuable resources going out of the UK that could be used in the UK economy to make new products and reduce our imports of raw materials. If we have aspirations to be less dependent on Europe, then we need to be more self-sufficient and recycle more,” Mr Evers says.

And what will Sweden do if we stop sending it rubbish to feed its heating system? Ms Gripwall says the Swedes will not freeze – they have biofuels ready to substitute for our exported waste.

Why Corbyn could come up Trumps

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

The season of looking back with big ideas has come early this year, thanks to Brexit, Donald Trump and now the referendum rout in Italy. And two of these big ideas tend to converge. The first is that populism is on the march, thanks to those “left behind” by free-market orthodoxies. The second is a despairing cry of: “Where, oh where, is the political left when we need it?”

In the UK, those “left behind” are now in the sights of all political persuasions, but most conspicuously from the right and from those experts so derided by the Brexiteers. Theresa May has made social justice a theme of her early months as Prime Minister, while the minuses of globalisation have featured even in a speech by the head of the Bank of England, along with arguments that something – though it is unclear precisely what – should be done.

The difficulty is that the mooted solutions are unpalatable, especially to those who have thrived amid free movement and the free market. More redistributive taxes in the Scandinavian mode; swingeing tariffs on imports of cheap foreign goods; walls, literal and metaphorical, to keep cheaper labour out; incentives for employers to keep jobs at home; subsidies for workers who would otherwise be priced out of their jobs by foreign competition – none of these are seen as desirable or realistic. They fly so much in the face of all the prevailing assumptions of a generation.

If the ideas about populism in the UK and its causes differ little from those swirling around elsewhere, we have our own local personification of the political left’s failure in the figure of the Labour leader. Jeremy Corbyn is seen as inept and divisive; a man who became party leader by a fluke and has no prospect whatsoever of becoming prime minister.

Why not? To his detractors, the reasons are so obvious that they hardly need to be stated. He is in every way a throwback to an age that is long gone. He may have taken the advice about suit-wearing offered vicariously by David Cameron’s mother, he may have learned from Michael Foot about how not to turn up on Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph. But he lauded Fidel Castro after his death, and he still harps on about exploitative employers and profiteering bankers.

He has absorbed nothing from the victories of Tony Blair and what makes a modern Labour party electable; nothing about aspiration from erstwhile Mondeo Man, and nothing about remaining “intensely relaxed” with people getting “filthy rich”. No wonder, Corbyn’s opponents would say Blair is contemplating a comeback.

The fact that Labour’s poll ratings are disastrous, that a party candidate lost their deposit at the last (Richmond Park) by-election, and that one-time safe northern constituencies are haemorrhaging votes via Brexit to Ukip are all reasons why Labour under Corbyn is supposed to be a lost cause. And, of course, to return to appearances, Comrade Jeremy just does not look or sound prime-ministerial, and everyone knows he is a hopeless administrator: not leadership material at all.

This is not, however, anything like the whole truth. Labour’s poll ratings are dismal at least in part because it is presenting itself as a divided party. And whose fault is that? There is an ideological rift between the mainly Blairite MPs and the grassroots who – post-Ed Miliband – were given a vote for leader. Under that system, Jeremy Corbyn has won the leadership convincingly, not once, but twice. So who is perpetuating the division – the majority or the minority? In other contexts, those who don’t accept the rules of the democratic game have been called variously “sore losers”, “Remoaners”. Who, I repeat, are the non-democrats here?

Under Corbyn, Labour’s record in by-elections has been creditable – it has not lost a single seat it previously held – despite the fervent hopes of some that a loss would offer a pretext to oust him. And after the Brexit vote, has Labour’s record been any worse than that of the divided Conservatives? On the contrary, in the former Attorney General, Keir Starmer, the non-managerial Corbyn has somehow found a persuasive spokesman. Emily Thornberry is making a decent job of shadow Foreign Secretary. Labour has been scoring points on benefits and the NHS.

If it were united, it could do much, much better. But it would have to be united on Corbynite, old-Labour terms – the very terms, in fact, which explain Labour’s appeal to a whole new constituency: all those young people allegedly turned off by politics, who thronged the rallies of a bearded 67-year-old. At a time when the great and the good lament the political disengagement of the young, Corbyn has struck a chord with a programme of back-to-basics leftism from which he has barely deviated over decades.

After Iraq, the financial crisis, the spinning away of the super-rich, and the legions “left behind” by late 20th-century capitalism, those basics have a new resonance. This is why one of the big questions of the year has been: where is the left when we need it? But it is also why those who embraced Blairite centrism don’t want to know. It is their model of ideological flexibility and economic compromise that has aged badly, not Corbyn’s attachment to the old verities. It is the old left – of workers’ rights, the social-safety net, redistribution, and equality, of opportunity if not outcome – that has to be the source of Labour’s revival.

These are not my politics, and – according to some – Labour is already up to its old “splittist” tricks, with Trotskyite entryism again a threat. But there is a place for an old British left perspective on the world and its coherent critique of capitalism could yet enjoy electoral appeal. Corbyn is building a passable team; he has scored points at Prime Minister’s Questions, and in tapping into the youth vote, he has done what no other party leader has managed to do.

He may not look, sound or behave as a prime minister-in-waiting and the polls have him doomed – but these are not necessarily counter-indicators in this perverse age.