GUEST POST Like a challenging computer game? Try the Government Digital Service

Mark Valentine tried hard to prove his identity, and the Government Digital Service tried hard to prevent him.

The other day I had to do business with the Government Digital Service (GDS). This is one of those jolly three-word English phrases that make the heart sink, like Family Fun Day, Rail Replacement Service, Celebrity Game Show and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I suspect I don’t need to issue a spoiler alert to tell you that the weakest spot, in a weak line-up, was in the word “service”. There isn’t any. 

This claims to be a “beta” service. Apparently, this is IT speak for “here’s something we put together from four tin cans, a roll of wire and a clapped-out mellotron from the Moody Blues’ last album, now let’s try it out on the suckers”. But the GDS are being unduly modest. Actually, what they are offering is an “omega” service. It is the end of all things, particularly hope.

Neither worked. Repeatedly

To use their identity verification service, you have to try two things. One involves them taking control of your phone to photograph your passport. The other involves giving the government your bank account details. Despite certain misgivings, I tried both. Neither worked. Repeatedly. Nor did it work for several other people who tried it. Repeatedly.

But not to worry, there is a telephone support service. The icy voice of a woman who made Servalan sound like everyone’s favourite Auntie by comparison intoned: “We are experiencing high call volumes. Call back later.” They must be inundated with customers ringing them up to congratulate them on their wonderful system. 

Never mind, you can also email them. Their reply was very quick. It had been devised by a machine that had cut-and-pasted random text from their website, Pilgrim’s Progress, Waiting for Godot and the lyrics to ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ by popular music group Middle of the Road. 

I tried again. This time the reply, possibly from a near-human entity, was shorter. Had I tried rebooting? Funnily enough, I had, as this was the advice always offered to me by the young men with wispy ginger beards and smeared spectacles who always staff IT departments. If that doesn’t work, why not eff off it said. Well, it didn’t put it quite like that, it just referred me back to whatever benighted government department had started this whole fandango in the first place. 

As support services go, the GDS one is rather like being offered a boa constrictor in lieu of a truss. It crushes the life out of you. But if you like a challenging computer game at an ultra ultra level, go for it.

A 15th piece of evidence

The reason I had to use the service was because an arm of government wanted to verify my identity. I was surprised by this request. The taxman has always seemed cheerful about who I am when clawing away a chunk of my income, the Home Office were delighted to confirm that I was who I said I was when I bunged them £90+ for a passport, the Ministry of Transport are positively delirious when I send them money so I can road-test their potholes for them, and the NHS are so convinced by my identity  that they’ve devised a special Patient Access System whose chief purpose is to prevent me gaining any access to their services. 

When I counted up, there were at least 14 ways in which my identity seemed to be fairly well established. And that’s not counting my membership of distinguished bodies, genuinely useful, such as the National Trust, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Friends of Arthur Machen and the Network of Ley-Hunters.

Faced with this battery of existing identity evidence, the government agency involved came up with the obvious solution. What was needed was a 15th piece of evidence. And the best way of getting that was via the GDS, because government IT projects are well known for their unblemished history of successful implementation and their blissfully happy customers. Even better, if for some completely unpredictable and unlikely reason the GDS didn’t work, they had a fallback. They would use the Post Office! This was because of course the Post Office also has an unblemished history of—well, etc.

At this point I became suspicious. There is a devious business model taking hold which imposes complex, hard to understand rules, and erects difficult, nigh impossible methods of complying with the rules. This then enables the lucky organisation to rake in the fines. For cases studies, see private car parks, railway companies, postal services and the NHS Prescription Service. 

Perhaps this lot were in the early stages of implementing just such a wheeze. There was only one flaw in my theory. This would require them to exercise ingenuity, which, like competence and common sense, was not a quality so far especially conspicuous in their performance. Still, they might have stumbled on the idea by accident, in roughly the same way they conduct most of their business.

Head for the hills

Amazingly, when I visited the Post Office, in a last desperate gamble, the counter staff made their system work, eventually. You know your IT service must be bad when the Post Office can do it better. Of course, given recent history, I may yet find that I am prosecuted by PO officials for High Treason or Piracy on the High Seas and will need to conduct a fifteen-year campaign to clear myself.

There is an old Chinese proverb I have just made up which reads: “Count blessed the day when you hear from no official.” If you hear from the GDS, take my advice. Sell all your possessions, burn all your documents, change your name, and head for the hills. Preferably the Himalayas.

Mark Valentine is a writer living in Yorkshire. Please don’t ask him to prove it.

The Joy of Six 1451

"Almost a quarter of pupils say they 'never' feel safe or 'only on some days'. ... Half of all secondary school pupils say they 'only sometimes' or 'never' enjoy school, and parents aren’t always aware – they underestimate this figure by a factor of three." Cara Cinnamon on the Department for Education’s newly published pupil experience data.

Prem Sikka states the bleeding obvious – to tackle child poverty the government must deal with parental poverty – but isn't it rare to see it stated?

Is your car journey suspicious? Police forces are trialling AI technology that enables them to identify and track “suspicious” journeys by drivers on Britain’s road network. Mark Wilding and Charles Hymas have the story.

Kathryn Rix explains the legislation that bound MPs suffering with prolonged periods of mental illness from 1886 until legislative reform in 2013.

Starr Charles reports that the Twentieth Century Society has selected 10 UK buildings as part of its annual list highlighting 30-year-old buildings it says deserve to be nationally listed. The society says: "Given that around 30 years after construction is often the point at which buildings are likely to require their first major refurbishment, any listing designation at this point would provide a timely opportunity to ensure that such works recognise and respond to what makes a building significant." 

"Reading the poems now, it is the lyricism that stands out and still surprises. Sometimes it seems as though the subjects Larkin writes about are merely placeholders for the poet’s deeper fascination with poetry, and its relationship with the passing of time." Jeremy Wikeley looks at Philip Larkin's early collection of poems, The Less Deceived.

The Joy of Six 1447

Keir Starmer's digital ID project is a techno-authoritarian’s wet dream, argues Carole Cadwalladr: "This is a policy that wasn’t in the Labour Party’s manifesto, that no party faithful campaigned for and that no voters were told about on the doorstep. Instead, after some brief ground softening by pet journalists in friendly newspapers, it appeared out of almost nowhere in late September."

David Nowell Smith shows that accusations of "left-wing bias" against the BBC have a long history and arose from newspapers' fear of competition: "The first coordinated newspaper campaign against the ‘Reds’ at the BBC was initiated by the Daily Mail in January 1937, less than two weeks after a new BBC Charter had given the Corporation further editorial independence."

Carolyn Jackson and Mieke Van Houtte say the high-stakes tests common in English schools could be having a serious effect on children’s wellbeing.

"Academics warned that recovery from the October 2023 cyberattack, apparently by an international ransomware gang, has been 'agonisingly slow'. Even the imminent restoration of functions such as the library’s online catalogue will be of only limited help to researchers still unable to access key resources: Frances Jones finds a lack of concern at the plight of the British Library.

"We handed a loaded weapon to four-year-olds." Alex Kantrowitz on the regrets of the man who built the retweet.

Dick Weindling and Marianne Colloms tell the remarkable story of the two men who robbed eight London banks in a morning: "Robert wrote a lengthy confession and said he did it for: 'the devilment of the matter – the excitement, the ingenuity, the almost impossible success to crown it all, urged me to attempt the fraud'."

The Joy of Six 1407

"The puzzle for me is what drives Labour politicians (and some others) around the ID card loop? What is the enduring appeal of ID cards that always survives facts and logic? Paul Krugman talks about ‘zombie ideas’, ideas that keeping coming back to life no matter how many times they are apparently killed off by reason and experience, such as the idea that the path to national prosperity is taxing the rich less. For New Labour, with Tony Blair still out ahead, ID cards are a beloved zombie." David Howarth on Labour's fixation with the idea of a national identity card.

Tim Leunig argues that Angela Rayner's problems with Stamp Duty shows that our taxation system is too complex: "When Angela Rayner bought her flat in Hove she owned no other house, in full or in part. It seems to me that the government’s own website is clear that Rayner was not liable for the higher rate of stamp duty. None of the further information on that page suggests anything different."

"A student can easily feed a PDF of the assigned book chapter to their AI application of choice and pass off the bot’s lukewarm analysis as their own; construct a study guide by uploading their notes to an AI tool marketed on LinkedIn by their peers; and even generate plausible rebuttals to arguments posed in discussion sections – all without arousing any suspicion from their overworked teaching assistants." Maria Gomberg on AI in American universities.

Marc Morris asks if William I's "Harrowing of the North" should be regarded as genocide.

"The best comedy does not 'feed prejudice and fear' but rather makes them 'clearer to see' he tells his students. But this view is challenged by talent scout Challenor, a smarmy agent up from London who takes a very different line. Comics are 'servants to the audience', not ‘missionaries’ but ‘suppliers of laughter’.  And in those two opposing views, we have the central tension of the play." Gerard Clough marks the 50th anniversary of Trevor Griffiths' play Comedians.

Gardens, Heritage and Planning visits the lost village of Imber on Salisbury Plain.

The Joy of Six 1399

Rei Takver reports on fears that Labour’s new data access law would allow a future Reform UK government to replicate an Elon Musk-style DOGE data-grab: "If Reform gains power in 2029, campaigners say it could use Labour’s data access law to carry out its policies, which include a crackdown on immigration, the radical downsizing of the civil service, eliminating 'government waste', and decimating the UK’s net zero projects."

The British right is adopting an increasingly extreme form of ethnic identity politics, while failing to explain what the rest of us are supposed to be so worried about, argues Jonathan Portes.

Toby Buckle insists American liberals should stop trying to act as the referees of political debate and recognise that they are partisans for one side of it: "The liberalism of the early twentieth century was a project aimed at social reform. That of the mid-century – of the New Deal, Great Society, and civil rights eras  – while certainly complicit in many of the evils of its world, was also a creed with a strong sense of its own values. Far from being content to 'neutrally' enforce existing rights, it sought to expand them and create new ones."

Katy Holland says The Sound of Music has never been popular in Austria because it challenges the way the country likes to paint itself as a victim of Nazi Germany: "Austrian officials, sensitive to the implications of wartime collaboration, initially objected to the use of swastika banners in Salzburg to depict the Anschluss, and relented only when filmmakers proposed using archival footage of Hitler being welcomed by cheering crowds in the city."

"Slag heap debris on the English coast has apparently been fusing into a new kind of sedimentary rock. A team of geologists studying the beach recently 'found a series of outcrops made from an unfamiliar type of sedimentary rock. The beach used to be sandy, so the rock must have been a recent addition.' ... Based on inclusions of trash amongst the sediments, such as a discarded coin, some of this rock could not have been more than 36 years old.'" BLDGBLOG has news of rapid geological change.

"There is only ten years between the two tv adaptations but technically a lot apparently happened in that ten years. The Children of Green Knowe looks as fresh as ever; it’s very difficult to believe that it is thirty years old. A Traveller in Time, only eight years older, looks visually awful." Maureen Kincaid Speller compares and contrasts television adaptations of two children's books.

Scottish Lib Dems question use of live facial recognition technology

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From Scottish Legal News:

The Scottish Liberal Democrats have filed 40 parliamentary questions on Police Scotland’s proposed use of live facial recognition in a bid to force the Scottish government to explain how the measures are compatible with equalities and civil liberties concerns.

The party’s justice spokesperson, Liam McArthur MSP, asked the questions after Police Scotland Chief Constable Jo Farrell vowed to utilise artificial intelligence technology and live facial recognition technology as part of the service’s forthcoming six-year strategy, despite police services south of the border facing legal challenges over their usage.

Campaigners have identified a series of problems with the technology, from the possibility of misuse to the propensity for errors, particularly in misidentifying ethnic minorities and women.

Liam McArthur has spoken to the website:

"I am concerned that decisions that dramatically reframe the relationship between the police and the public are being treated as an inevitable consequence of the march of technology.

"There needs to be a compelling need, an appropriate legal basis and a proper public debate before the police can consider moving forward with measures like this. That simply has not happened.

"If the Scottish government share these concerns, then they have been awfully quiet about it. Certainly they are concerns that the Justice Committee heard loudly and clearly in the previous session of parliament.

"Ministers and senior officers need to set out why these decisions are being taken and answer for the consequences."

Liberty has a page on police use of live facial recognition technology with links to numerous briefings and resources.

The Joy of Six 1252

"The experience of that Royal Commission - on long-term care for older people - is instructive. It made four major recommendations relating to: free personal care, a cap on care costs for accommodation, the establishment of national care standards, and integration of services. We are still awaiting effective action on all of these." Bob Hudson asks why social care is never fixed.

Annie Hickox on the 'toxic positivity' - the dark side of all those simple recipes for dealing with unhappiness and depression that spread so frictionlessly across social media.

Privacy International says the use of social media monitoring by government and commerce is increasingly prevalent and largely unregulated. 

Thomas Horabin held North Cornwall for the Liberal Party at a 1939 by-election, defended it in 1945 to become the only parliamentary representative of West Country Liberalism, but crossed the floor to join Labour two years later. Jaime Reynolds and Ian Hunter weigh up his maverick career.

"There was something else in the house, unmentioned and unlabelled. A sort of shadowy presence that hovered by the back door. No one referred to it, so I kept quiet, but without ever really actually seeing anything I knew it was a boy. A boy of about 10 or 12, in short trousers and a cap. I acknowledged him as I walked by, much as I would acknowledge a single magpie, with a dip of the head and a murmured incantation." Esther Freud discusses Walberswick, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and ghosts.

Tom Moran shows that our false belief that Shakespeare had little knowledge of Latin and Greek - the basis of many a nutty theory about the authorship of his plays - rests on a misunderstanding of the meaning of "though" in a poem by Ben Jonson. Fascinating stuff.

Nick Clegg, Roe v. Wade, Facebook, privacy... and Lord Bonkers

Remember when Nick Clegg told us he would defy the law and refuse to register for an identity card? (It was during a Lib Dem leadership election, if that helps narrow it down.)

I thought of him when I read this Guardian story:

When local Nebraska police came knocking in June – before Roe v Wade was officially overturned – Facebook handed the user data of a mother and daughter facing criminal charges for allegedly carrying out an illegal abortion. 

Private messages between the two discussing how to obtain abortion pills were given to police by Facebook, according to the Lincoln Journal Star. The 17-year-old, reports say, was more than 20 weeks pregnant. 

In Nebraska, abortions are banned after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The teenager is now being tried as an adult.

Court documents filed in June and made public on Tuesday show how tech companies including Facebook contribute to criminal prosecutions of abortion cases. 

I've never liked Facebook. I helped run an account at work, but only had a personal account for a few days before I deleted it. I once bought a book on Facebook, and that made me dislike it even more.

Facebook reminds me of the days when corporate social media was a new thing and training courses told you that your ideas about privacy were old fashioned. Young people didn't care about privacy at all: they put their whole lives online.

That bright-eyed approach didn't last long in the real world, but somehow it remains hard-wired into Facebook. Perhaps it's because of its origin in universities. There, making new friends and showing that you have made them, is all.

The Guardian quotes unnamed experts who say this shocking case shows the importance of encryption and minimising the amount of data Facebook stores on its users.

Those experts are right.

As to Nick Clegg and Facebook, I think Lord Bonkers got it right too:

Who should I bump into in London today but our own Nick Clegg? Curious to know what he is doing with himself these days, I treat him to lunch at one of my clubs.

He turns out to be full of his new job, telling me how Satan’s chief operating officer Mephistopheles called him while he was walking in the Alps last summer and invited him to fly to Hell to meet Satan himself. "I said to them, if you're prepared to let me into the inner circle, in the black box, and give me real authority, then I'm interested."

Clegg describes Satan to me as "a shy guy" and "thoughtful", before adding: "The thing that persuaded me to do it is Satan and  Mephistopheles asking the right questions for the right reasons - about things like the barrier between free speech and prohibited content, wellbeing of children, integrity of elections, AI and giving people control over their data."

Let us put churlish thoughts aside and hope that Clegg can do for Satan what he did for the Liberal Democrats.

The Joy of Six 1033

Winston Churchill was the greatest Englishman of the 20th century, but "his view of Indians, not to mention Africans, remained until the end of his days that of the Victorian lieutenant of Hussars he once was". Max Hastings says modern politicians who claim Churchill’s mantle embody his worst traits.

Carly Page looks at recent events in North Ayrshire and concludes that we are not ready to accept facial scanning in schools.

For 20 years, a Tennessee baby thief kidnapped more than 5000 children from the streets, hospitals, and shanty towns of Memphis. Erika Celeste tells the story of Georgia Tann.

Gawain Towler on how Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy became a moral litmus test against tyranny.

Mary Colwell explains why she fights for one of the UK’s most endangered birds, the curlew: "Though they haven't got bright, showy colours they are somehow utterly beautiful with an understated magnificence. I liked something about the way they lived in the world, sang to the world, and drifted through the world with a light touch."

"His second movie was 'Anchors Aweigh,' where, opposite Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, he glimmered with cuteness and innocence, totally lacking the irritating over-trained precocity of most child actors of the era. Dean Stockwell seemed real. By the time he was ten years old, he was supporting his entire family. He viewed his contract as a prison sentence. He hated acting." Sheila O'Malley celebrates the 70-year career of Dean Stockwell.

The Joy of Six 1009

"There is a lot of common ground between most councillors about the pragmatic methods needed to deliver services and a better future for those they represent. That common ground too often gets dissipated by an unnecessary tribalism and arrogance with people defending their tribe to the end instead of accepting compromise and joint working and rightful involvement." Richard Kemp looks at the new coalitions emerging after this month's local elections.

Maddy Shaw Roberts reports that musicians and music businesses are warning time is up for UK grassroots acts and European orchestras are resistant to booking UK artists because of ‘paperwork and expense’.

"The law remains fully committed to backing the ‘static’ but specifically to the propertied ‘static’. Modern methods of control over space and access to it are not only legal but technological – CCTV and other surveillance, ID cards, swipe cards, fingerprint and face recognition software. Open space in many of our cities appears free and easy, but lots of concourses, squares and plazas in new developments are privately owned, and you can be prevented from protesting, hanging out or doing pretty much anything depending on the power and will of private corporations." mudlark121 surveys 1000 years of laws against travellers, wanderers and trespass

Richard Mabey mourns the debasement of the English hedge.

"One of the new Road Collision Reporting Guidelines stresses that journalists should not use the word 'accident' for a road collision but, instead, use 'crash'. Carlton Reid on new guidelines for journalists.

Alun Harris offers a quick guide to the work of the horror writer Ramsey Campbell.

Six of the Best 827

"Hammond presented a narrative that explained who the Tories were, what they had done and where they were going that was fathomable and even a little compelling to the objective viewer." Nick Tyrone finds Philip Hammond a more impressive politician than his leader.

Silkie Carlo explains why we should be worried about the mass surveillance of shoppers.

"As the years went by the idea of a confident working class taking its destiny into its own hands - either collectively or through some individual expression of rebellion such as Arthur’s - gradually went out of fashion." James Bloodworth debates the meaning of Alan Sillitoe's novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 60 years after its publication

"To this day the sacrifice of thousands of watermen who worked on Britain’s canals before serving on the front line has yet to be commemorated." Phil Hoad has news of plans to put that right.

Parul Sehgal explains the persistence of the ghost story in American literature: "In the modern ghost story, especially the American kind, something different occurs. Ghosts protest norms - slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration - the norms that killed them."

Phil Hoad on the career of Muriel Box - Britain’s most prolific female director you've never heard of.

Tim Farron slams Shami Chakrabarti's intention to abstain on Snooper's Charter

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I am more and more puzzled by the actions of Shami Chakrabarti, who has junked her reputation to serve under a leader of the opposition who gives every indication of being on course to lose the next election horribly.

True, it is a well-worn path - when I was a teenager the leading lights of what is now Liberty were Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman - but Chakrabati risks becoming a figure of fun.

The latest blow to her reputation is the news that she is to follow other Labour peers in abstaining on the government's Snooper Charter this week.

Tim Farron, as quoted by the Sunday Mirror, is suitably outraged:

“Shami sold her principles to get a peerage. 

“She has sold the final bit of her credibility by accepting a shadow Cabinet role in a party which plans to sit on its hands and wave through this illiberal and intrusive Bill.”

And:

“What really smarts is that she has spent her whole career attacking others for the craven thing she is about to do. 

“Shame on her. I actually thought better of her.”

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Alistair Carmichael writes on the Commons debate on the Investigatory Powers Bill: "The Bill is rotten to its core and I wish we could have blocked it as we did in Coalition when faced with the Communications Data Bill. Dealing with Tories in government was difficult. Dealing with Tories in government and Labour in opposition is impossible."

The Sports Direct scandal is the result of successive governments desperate for jobs, says Conrad Landin.

"If I ever see you in the street, I hope you get shot." Dawn Foster on her experience of moderating comments on the Guardian website.

Steve Parnell looks back at the work of the angry and passionate Ian Nairn, the outspoken critic of England’s 'subtopian' demise.

The Birmingham Conservation Trust takes us to Moseley, where 1945 prefab houses can still be found.

"I think these were the first books where I really had a sense of place from them, whereas Blyton’s descriptions don’t tend to be of anywhere specific and nicely pleasantly general, Saville’s descriptions of location were precise and taken from real life. It made me want to visit Shropshire and since I was 16 or 17 I have done, frequently. Its become one of the places I love to be most in the world." A contributor to World of Blyton recalls discovering the charms of Malcolm Saville.

So far Corbyn has not forced the Lib Dems to be a centre party

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In August, as it was becoming clear that Jeremy Corbyn was going to win Labour's leadership election, I blogged about five consequences of that development.

It is early days, but the predictions I made there seem to be holding up reasonably well. One, however, needs to be revisited.

I wrote:

Whether the Liberal Democrats like it or not, they will be seen as a centre party.

But so far it hasn't turned out quite like that.

In part this is because the campaigns the Lib Dems have taken up under Tim Farron - cuts to tax credits, refugees, government surveillance - have taken up have a distinctly radical flavour. Perhaps that is inevitable when you are campaigning against the government and that government is run by the Conservatives.

But it has far more to do with the confusion that surrounds the Labour Party. So fuzzy has their image been under Corbyn that it hard to say what we would need to do to be to the left or right of them.

Yes, he has surrounded himself with Trots and Stalinists and John McDonnell, but that has not lead to clear left-wing policies.

McDonnell did reject George Osborne's 'fiscal chater', but only after he had first said the would support it.

Labour peers ducked the opportunity to reject Osborne's cuts to tax credits.

And Andy Burnham supported the government on new surveillance powers in spaniel-like terms:

It would help the future conduct of this important public debate if the House sent out the unified message today that this is neither a snooper’s charter, nor a plan for mass surveillance.

It is early days, but it may be that Corbyn's Labour Party will resemble the SNP. Its members will be convinced it is a radical, anti-austerity party even though an objective consideration to its polices paints a rather different picture.

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"Corbyn’s rise to power is a symptom of Labour’s political impotence. The post war social democracy that utilized the central state to tax and spend to compensate for the failures of capitalism is redundant. None of the other leadership candidates were able to offer an alternative." A cracking analysis of Labour's travails by Jonathan Rutherford.

Renate Samson explains why the government's draconian surveillance plan won't protect us.

"The weakness of the centre-right in UK politics has been masked for a long time by Cameron’s pre-2010 spin, a few progressive social policies and the restraining hand of the Liberal Democrats within the coalition," says Simon Wren-Lewis.

Miles Goslett blew the whistle on Kids Company and Camila Batmanghelidjh.

Experiments in Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire shows that Britain's farmland bird population can be protected, argues Mark Avery.

Carl Wilson looks at Elvis Costello's relationship with his father and makes the happy suggestion that "I'm a secret lemonade drinker" sounds like a line from one of Costello's own songs.

Alex Carlile co-owns a consultancy with an ex-MI6 chief

From the Guardian website this afternoon:

Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation who this week mounted a spirited defence of the intelligence services, has received £400,000 from a private consultancy he co-owns with a former head of MI6. 

SC Strategy Ltd, the company that Carlile established with Sir John Scarlett, who ran MI6 from 2004 to 2009, is described as offering clients strategic advice on UK policy and regulation and has paid out dividends to the pair totalling £800,000 over the past three years, according to accounts filed with Companies House. 

On Monday, Carlile made a pointed intervention in the debate over the extent of powers enjoyed by the security and intelligence agencies in advance of the government’s publication of the draft investigatory powers bill on Wednesday.

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Never mind the increase in tuition fees: more students than ever from poor backgrounds are going to university. Or are they? Peter Horrocks says think again.

Duncan Campbell tells the story of a life spent unmasking Britain's eavesdroppers.

Andy Boddington reports a breakthrough in the battle for affordable housing in Shropshire and other rural areas.

Africa has half as many lions as 20 years ago, but don't blame trophy hunting say Lochran Traill and Norman Owen-Smith.

"When the lights are dipped, Macgowan actually seems to be Savile. God knows how, but he even captures the bulging eyes, the indulgent slouch, the sense of flipped switches that Savile constantly conveyed. One moment boasting and bullying, the next retreating into a passive-aggressive haze of cigar smoke." Guy Mankowski reviews An Audience With Jimmy Savile.

Lemon Wedge revisits the great Ealing drama It Always Rains on Sunday. "This is the East End at the nadir of post-war austerity; everything’s on the ration and everyone's on the make. 'A dose of salts or a good hiding' is the answer to any domestic difficulty."

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"Britain's main liberal party is probably about to elect an evangelical Christian as its leader. If you're someone who follows US politics, you may want to read that sentence back a couple of times to check you got it right." Christian Today on Tim Farron's faith and politics.

Martin Petts is supporting Tim, but he wants to see a second leadership election soon - one where the candidates do not have to be MPs.

"There was general agreement across broad divides of opinion that Snowden - love him or hate him - had changed the landscape; and that change towards transparency, or at least 'translucency' and providing more information about intelligence activities affecting privacy, was both overdue and necessary." Duncan Campbell reports from the Ditchley House conference on intelligence, security and privacy.

Jonathan Freedland pays tribute to Tony Judt.

Spitalfields Life photographs some of the area's buildings, 40 years after Dan Cruickshank led a campaign to save them.

The Leicester Mercury has a feature on the city's lost railway stations.

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It seems that David Cameron’s enthusiasm for mass surveillance comes from watching TV dramas, says Paul Bernal.

Nick Tyrone asks a question that has long puzzled me: Why is Scottish nationalism somehow "nicer" than English nationalism?

"Thirty-three children have died in custody since 1990, 31 of which were self-inflicted. After each death, the state, in the guise of the Ministry of Justice, claims to have learned lessons from the fatality and assures the public that steps have been taken to prevent further young deaths. And that is it, until the next death, when these tired, weasel words are dragged out again." Eric Allison and Simon Hattenstone on a strange media silence.

Jeffrey Richards reviews Steven Fielding's "A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It".

Words of wisdom from Bryan Appleyard: "The more I think about it, the more it is clear that very little of importance can be found online. Sure, there is a lot of information, but there always was. It just took more time to find. The internet is useful, fun, exciting, quick. But if you want the real thing, get a human."

In Their Shoes uncovers the history of Lambeth Walk. Oy!

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Nick Harvey paid tribute to the former Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe at his funeral on Friday.

"Far from completing the modernisation they once promised they have, in large part, abandoned the project. As a result the electorate, generally speaking, reckons the Tories just as extreme as Ukip." Alex Massie on the failure of Cameron and Osborne.

Tiffany Jenkins dissects the left's current enthusiasm for censorship.

Vladimir Putin is living in another world, says Cicero's Songs.

"The Ronald Pinn I created from the distant memory of a young man in a graveyard became, in imitation of the bent police officers who inspired his creation, an illegal alien in a world of bespoke reality." In a long and fascinating piece, Andrew O'Hagan examines identity in the modern world.

Jack Spicer Adams has a photo essay on Birmingham Central Library: "I went to say goodbye to this divisive Birmingham landmark and fine example of brutalist architecture. I’ll be sad to see it go."