Three Chords

I recently had the misfortune to come across a website campaigning against the right for gay people in the UK to get married. It was called the Coalition For Marriage / C4M and as of the time of writing, has over 450,000 signatories to its petition which calls for the government to keep marriage “one man + one woman”. It claims to be an umbrella organisation which “reaches out to people of all faiths” — except gay people of faith, obviously.

It’s a faintly embarrassing stab at justifying the argument against gay marriage. There are four topic headings: “Marriage is unique”, “No need to redefine”, “Profound consequences” and “Speak up”. Each one of them has a paragraph of poorly-argued rhetoric against the right of gay people to be joined in marriage.

The Campaign For Marriage (C4M) website

The first point, “Marriage is unique”, argues that “marriage reflects the complementary natures of men and women”, and points to the long history of marriage always being “the union of a man and a woman”. Of course, in olden times, there were no gay people, as the histories of ancient Greece and Rome accurately reflect. Similarly, only the combination of female/male individuals results in a complementary experience — no two men or women have ever fitted well together as a couple. These facts are undisputed… right?

“No need to redefine” is perhaps the most unwittingly hypocritical of the claims, as it explains patronisingly that “civil partnerships already provide all the legal benefits of marriage”. Those shrewd gays! Of course the only reason they’d want to marry is for the tax breaks! They’re probably not even gay! Just couldn’t get a woman to fancy them. There’s clearly no cases where two people of the same sex just plain ol’ love each other, and want to have an all-singing, all-dancing wedding celebration instead of a stuffy legal procedure. No.

This point is expanded by the plainly false “it’s not discriminatory to support traditional marriage”. Sorry — yes it is. In what conceivable way is restricting a ceremony celebrating two individuals’ love for one another to people of a specific sexual orientation not discriminatory? But wait, there’s more: “no one has the right to redefine marriage for the rest of us”. Oh… except you, apparently. The government of the country actually do have that right, just as they control every other legal proceeding in the country. While marriage may be rooted in religious and spiritual tradition, the only part of it that is legally enforceable is the part where the papers are signed at the end. The rest is fluff.

The main body of the C4M campaign text

Point 3, “profound consequences”, is, I think, a joke. “If marriage is redefined, those who believe in traditional marriage will be sidelined”. Of course they will – poor old victimised straight people will be kicked out of their churches and prayer groups as hordes of rampant gays descend upon their places of worship with Will Young records and hotpants. Scaremongering aside, it’s hard to imagine how they could top this astonishing act of doublethink — surely those in favour of gay marriage are already being sidelined? But no: keen to outdo itself, they follow this with “couples seeking to adopt or foster could be excluded”. While this makes the wrong assumption that gay couples can’t currently adopt (they can), it stumbles on its own hypocrisy once more: even if they couldn’t adopt, surely that would mean gay couples are already excluded? So… it’s not discriminatory, but it’s okay if gays are excluded from marrying and adopting.

Best of all, this point ends with the hysterical addendum of “if marriage is redefined once, what is to stop it being redefined to allow polygamy?”. Yes! Or what if they redefine it to allow marrying animals? Or inanimate objects?! What if they force us all to marry squids in the sea and raise their deformed, mutated, chimeric squidling children, squirting ink in our faces as we try to teach them to hate gays?!!?! I ask you.

Last of all they acknowledge the controversy of what they’re preaching and add: “people should not feel pressurised to go along with same-sex marriage just because of political correctness. They should be free to express their views”. Except, of course, if those views include pro-gay marriage ones, which, we should remember, “would inevitably have to [be taught] to children”. Invoking the “political correctness gone mad” card is a smooth move by the C4M team — Daily Mail readers and sheepish Home Counties bigots will love this Jeremy Clarkson-esque call to arms. Yes, ban the gays! They bloody love political correctness!

The existence of this entire site (and its subsequent almost half a million signatories) has boggled my mind. I can’t believe there are that many people who genuinely think that allowing gay couples to formally express their love and devotion to one another will DESTROY THE VERY FABRIC OF SOCIETY FOR ALL TIME. It’s homophobia gone mad! Do they genuinely believe nonsense like “people’s careers could be harmed”? Whose careers? The people who make websites advocating no to gay marriage?! I can’t think of a scenario where allowing gay couples to marry will genuinely impact on any straight person’s life. The ‘worst’ it could lead to is a wider definition of a concept that’s existed for thousands of years and has evolved countless times through that period.

Tradition for tradition’s sake is pointless: something is passed down from generation to generation because it has some inherent value and meaning for that generation. If it stops being useful in the current age it becomes an heirloom, a relic of the past, like your granddad’s old pocketwatch or a homophobe from Gloucestershire. If we refuse to allow definitions to change and adapt as society does, then the things they define ultimately die and become memories rather than living, breathing things. I can’t understand why anybody would want to do this to something they so obviously believe in.

The C4M logo

Part of me wants to put up a rival website called ‘Coalition for White People’ which replaces all references to gay people and same-sex couples with ones to black people instead. It could campaign to remove black people from British society, since “throughout history Britain has always been the nation of white people. If black people are allowed in, those who believe in traditional whites-only society will be sidelined”. Remember: “it’s not discriminatory to support traditional whites-only society”. Then I remember that the actual C4M website is already beyond parody.

We live in a world with effectively unlimited resources for communicating like this — creating campaigns, petitions, sharing views and dialogues. Please, C4M and your supporters: don’t waste these resources, not to mention your lives, preaching discrimination and prevention to other people just trying to live theirs. Go home, love your partner if you have one, and stop trying to tell other people how the fuck they should love theirs.

It hardly sounds like the most stimulating of legal documents. As a title, Directive 2002/58 on Privacy and Electronic Communications lacks the punch of, say, SOPA or PIPA, although its potential impact on European society could be measurably similar.

Having gained the dubious privilege of a catchy pseudonym (the E-Privacy Directive), it’s already been marked out as a subject of discussion and controversy. Put simply, the directive aims to regulate, for the first time, unsolicited spam, personally identifiable website traffic data, and most controversially, cookies.

If you’ve managed to read this far it’s probable you’re already familiar with cookies, but for those of a less technical bent, a cookie is essentially a small text file that sits on your computer storing information linking you and a specific website. A website can set a cookie on your computer which contains information (say, for example, the date you last logged in), and that same website (and only that website) can read it back out again when you visit in the future.

So why the controversy? The directive aims to require websites to ensure their users are “made aware of information being placed on the terminal equipment they are using”. While it makes a few exceptions (specifically for shopping cart applications where it’s reasonable to assume some tracking of purchased items), in general it aims to protect users by ensuring they “have the opportunity to refuse to have a cookie or similar device stored” on their computer.

That "Stay signed in" checkbox? Probably uses a cookie.

For the privacy conscious, this all sounds reasonable and straightforward. Why wouldn’t you want to be informed when a website was tracking information about you? From the perspective of web developers, however, this becomes significantly more troublesome. Currently, a cookie can be set completely transparently, with users ideally being unaware that the process is taking place. This isn’t for nefarious, sneaky data-stealing purposes — it’s to ensure the user’s experience as they browse is seamless and streamlined. Almost every time you tick a “remember me” button on a login screen, you’re implicitly asking for a cookie to be stored on your computer to achieve this functionality.

This new legislation requires, somewhat vaguely, that websites provide a “[method] to request consent”. Some sites have already begun to experiment with how this could work: a popup box requesting permission to set cookies is currently one of the more popular ideas, although it’s unclear how this aligns with the directive’s further requirement that this experience “should be made as user-friendly as possible”. Many of the more complex websites today set dozens of cookies on every page impression.

You may be wondering when this new law comes into effect. The answer, somewhat bizarrely, is May 25, 2011. The law was passed, and, well, nobody did anything. In the developer community there was initially an air of disbelief and confusion about whether this was really going to happen. The government were equally stumped, with legal experts unable to offer advice on dealing with the implementation since nobody had worked out how to actually implement it. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) quickly agreed that an effective start date for the new law would be one year later, eg. May 25th 2012. As that date approaches, website owners are beginning to scramble into action to avoid becoming the subject of potential litigation.

It should be clear already that nobody wants to pepper their website with permission dialogs and request popups. While some guilty culprits may baulk at the idea of revealing just how much tracking they’re doing, others may be more concerned by the impact to their business. The prospect of running, say, an online shop, competing against US and other markets where the directive doesn’t apply, seems particularly unfair.

There are some possible ways out, though. The advent of the much-misunderstood HTML5 offers some new techniques that may be used to circumvent the need for cookies. This is still uncertain, however, as the directive is deliberately vague about the technologies it applies to. If web developers simply switch over to other, similar techniques, it seems likely the ICO and others will simply clarify the scope of the law and request permission for them, too.

The ICO website's effort at asking users to approve cookies

One such workaround is the sessionStorage and localStorage APIs, known together as “web storage” (or “DOM storage”). These are features supported by many newer browsers which allow developers to store small “key/value pairs” inside the web browser, which can be read back either during that particular browsing session (eg sessionStorage) or in a “persistent” state, meaning the data can be read after the browser has been closed and reopened. A “key/value pair”, since you ask, is essentially how a cookie works currently. The key is the name of the data being stored, eg “last_login_date”, and the value is simply the specific data associated with that key, such as “2012-05-25”.

Both of these web storage functions differ from traditional cookie-based tracking in a number of ways. Firstly, and perhaps most significantly, they do not come equipped with expiry dates. Normally, when a cookie is set, the developer specifies a date that the cookie becomes invalid. This means that after 30 days, your email provider may require you to login once again, after your cookie expires. In the case of web storage, the data is held indefinitely, so although the web app can delete items stored locally, they won’t expire naturally like many cookies do. Secondly, this data can only be set and read back on the user’s browser, rather than by a program running on a web server. While this may not be as significant for a user, it can introduce major challenges for developers planning to simply switch over from using cookies to web storage. Latterly, a website can now store up to 5MB of data in web storage. A traditional cookie offers a paltry 2KB.

There are arguments currently taking place in the web community about the value of the web storage tools, with some developers criticising their performance issues and suggesting we move towards newer technology like IndexedDB or SQLite, but browser support for these kind of tools is even less reliable than the web storage ones. There are other, older methods, like falling back to browser sessions (which requires the rather ugly tactic of appending long text strings to URLs in order to track sessions without cookies) or using databases (more complex and perhaps overkill for storing small pieces of data). It looks like we might just have to keep using cookies, and do whatever the law says we have to do.

News websites' tracking usage (click for full size)

A cynic might suggest that most website owners aren’t keen on the new law because it will force them to reveal just how many tracking cookies they set. Indeed, the Guardian (my employer) has been accused of having too many cookies and tracking tools on its pages. Most of the data stored here, though, is pretty innocuous, and almost always unintelligible for the end user. Much of it is advertising related, so partners can see how many people have seen their ads, and increasingly the Guardian uses techniques like A/B testing, which allows it to show different things to different visitors to the site so we can measure how well they do. We use cookies in order to track who saw what, and make sure people’s browsing experience is consistent. There are also a couple used to track when users have logged into the site, whether they have any settings for what order to display comments in, and other assorted bits of functionality.

Large websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google and others use techniques like this constantly. Facebook and Google in particular are famed for their rigorous user testing process, where they roll out new features and designs to a small percentage of their userbase, measure the performance, then roll the best ones to everyone. As the Guardian develops its online products further, we use more and more of these kind of methods too. While critics can suggest there are too many tracking cookies or data being stored, the majority of it is used to improve the user experience and even enhance the site so you get new or experimental features before everybody else.

Cookies have their flaws, too. There’s no way to set a cookie across more than one device (or even more than one browser), so some webapps struggle to give users a consistent experience if they use a version of the app on their mobile, desktop and tablet, for example. While this new legislation is forcing developers to examine the alternatives, it does have the benefit of pointing out the limitations of the technology and perhaps giving the community a pointer in the kind of direction we should be moving towards in terms of tracking and analysing users.

Usage figures for the ICO's website when they introduced opt-in cookies (source: cubeworks.co.uk)

Analytics and advertising are two aspects of the web that are never going to go away. We can complain about invasions of privacy and ads following us from site to site, but the reality is that when the E-Privacy Directive takes effect, European users are going to have an irritating and degraded web experience. Being pragmatic, is this a price worth paying? Traffic hugely dropped off from the ICO’s website after they implemented their example of how permission-based cookies could work. It’s certainly worth highlighting to website owners that they should evaluate the amount of tracking they do and ensure it’s appropriate, but the reality is that this law isn’t going to magically improve users’ privacy and stop evildoers tracking people across the web. It’ll inconvenience casual web users, irritate web developers, and potentially cause European websites to drop in traffic as overseas visitors get sick of dealing with irritating hoops to jump through every time they want to visit a page.

Cookies aren’t perfect, but policing the cookie jar isn’t the solution to the problem either.

I’m something of a sceptic of social media at times, as this blog has previously documented. Having built much of the Guardian’s Facebook app, I’ve experienced much of the social giant’s promotional guff surrounding how making your products ‘social’ can impact their success hugely. While the Guardian’s app has been surprisingly successful (pretty much solely down to its social nature) I’ve still doubted that it can work for anyone who isn’t operating at Facebook’s scale.

The last few days have proven me wrong, though, as ever. I’ve been using a cycling app on my phone which a few people had brought up in conversation. It’s called Strava and I was immediately impressed when I downloaded it at just how pretty it was. As an Android user I’m pretty used to its apps looking a little, well, underloved, so it was a pleasant surprise to see Strava’s attractive and well-designed UI. Design praise aside, the way the app works when you’ve been using it to track your bike rides was something of a revelation to me.

It’s pretty simple to use: start it up then shove your phone in your bag and get on with riding your bike. Upon reaching your destination, stop the app, then wait for the upload to complete so the number crunching can begin. Here’s a sample of the kind of thing it gives you when your ride is done:

So far, so straightforward. There are a ton of other apps that provide this kind of functionality.

It was only when I started exploring the UI that I figured out the real benefit of Strava: “segments”. A segment is basically a user-submitted area of a route (whether cycling or running) of a range of lengths, usually covering a specific street or area. One of mine, for example, is the fearsome Blackfriars Bridge (just the bridge itself). You can see a segment highlighted on the graph below:

The segments are shaded green on the elevation chart above, and users can click through on them for more detail on that segment. There’s also a pretty table below listing the ones you covered, and allowing you to submit your own. But wait — there’s more.

Upon clicking a segment, you reach a page detailing the route and its elevation and other details. But – but! – this is where it becomes social. First, at the top, you see a little sidebar with this kind of data:

Here, at-a-glance, we can see the best times (broken down by gender), and my own best time (today, since you ask) alongside it. If we scroll down, though, we get the really fun part:

For this segment, I can now see all the registered members, and their best times for this ride. My own ranking of #14 means I couldn’t quite squeeze into this screenshot, but I’m taking some comfort in knowing that most of the top records have been stuck that way for a year, so they must be pretty tough to beat.

The upshot of this data is that for the first time this morning, I found myself accelerating with effort across the aforementioned Blackfriars Bridge as I mentally pictured a few dozen ‘ghost cyclists’ whizzing past me — the member list of that particular segment. “Must… beat… jds_1981…” I panted to myself as I dodged a few confused tourists. Of course, I didn’t quite make it to the top. But the idea that now I was participating in a bit of friendly competition with other app geeks was quite exciting. I always scoff at the suggestion that developers should “gamify” real life, but the people at Strava have managed to do just that.

As well as these global rankings, Strava also lets you unlock Achievements for beating your own personal bests, if not that darn jds_1981 fellow. While not strictly social, the emphasis on turning something you did anyway into a positive way to track and improve your performance is awesome.

To clarify: I’m not claiming Strava invented these concepts or pioneered their use in the field of sports tracking apps. But for me, this was the first time I’ve really seen it done in such a way that I felt the benefit as an end user. I haven’t added any friends on the app yet, not having too many cycling geek mates, but even the prospects of ranking my rides against other London cyclists is interesting enough, if only to answer my burning confusion over whether I’m an average rider or better (or worse…).

In short: you can keep your bloody Like button. This is what proper social sharing should be like.

We in the technology world are a self-centred bunch of people.

I recently attended a training course where we were asked to complete Myers-Briggs tests to figure out our personality types. I’d never previously completed one and was initially sceptical, but after receiving my result I was a little more convinced. I’ll spare you the details of reading my psychological profile, but essentially, it described a person keen to work alone and formulate ideas with analysis, pragmatism and creativity. This is a persona I imagine many geeks, nerds and general technologists exhibit. It’s more than just a cliché to acknowledge the link between steps on the autism scale and attraction to computer-based roles. We all seem to have these aspects, to one degree or another.

There are no shortage of famous modern tech geniuses who exhibit these characteristics: Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are amongst the obvious names that come to mind, with their famous alienation of others and singular focus on their ideals. The other common factor here, though, is the obsessive adulation these type of figures are laden with, and the wider tech society enjoys describing itself in similar terms.

Our community has a tendency to talk itself up. Paul Graham’s widely-read Maker’s Schedule essay refers to the reasons programmers struggle to work in traditional business setups, and describes the annoyances and challenges caused by interruptions like meetings and other “process”. Graham writers:

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

I don’t disagree with anything Graham says here or in the rest of the essay, and indeed, I’ve felt frustrated at interruptions disturbing what I’m working on. But this self-worship concerns me too. Developers (“makers”) aren’t some special race of superhumans, whose every sensitivity and quirk needs to be preciously catered for. We’re normal people and shouldn’t be made to feel otherwise. Developers love to scoff at project managers and HR people, clogging up important coding hours with pointless meetings and busywork. Again, while there’s some truth to that, it’s also supremely arrogant to label ourselves as somehow above the systems everyone else works with (grudgingly or not). Without those people and their work, what’s left? Who does the often-unpraised legwork in putting the right people together, rescuing failing projects and facilitating disputes? It’s not the maker.

It’s not just Graham either. Michael Lopp (aka “Rands”) has written several times on nerds and “the Nerd Handbook“. In that essay, designed to guide “the nerd’s companion” through life with them, Rands discusses the unique nerd temperament. Here’s an extract:

First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong. A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.

As with Paul Graham, Rands isn’t wrong here, either. But it’s another step along the road of self-aggrandizement. By again implying that nerds and geeks are, in some sense, intellectually superior, Rands runs the risk of not only alienating non-nerds, but overloading his poor subject matter’s brain with delusion. Any nerd reading the article will immediately nod knowingly, thinking “Yeah, I do that”. Great. Aren’t we geniuses for knowing what binary code is? But what are we doing with that knowledge? Feeling smug for amassing trivialities is ridiculous, whether those trivialities are cutting-edge and current or thousands of years old.

Finally, we have the god complex once more. This is where Steve Jobs’ legion of followers have form. I spotted this tweet only today:

Earth is indifferent to Design. It’s existed mostly unchanged for thousands of years. Designers do not change the world. We change *people*.

January 20, 2012 4:20 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@nathan_ford

Nathan C. Ford

Once again, the sentiment of the tweet is sound. But the accreditation it assigns, again, to tech nerds, is hyperbole. If we continue to sit around and pat ourselves on the back for “changing people” or “knowing how the magic works”, we’ll lose sight of the fundamentals: we should be making stuff.

Of course, Jobs, Zuckerberg and co — they all “made stuff”. But maybe they wouldn’t have had the creative breakthroughs they felt if they’d been surrounded by smug yes-men, echoing praise and grand compliments while forgetting the whole point of being a “maker”. We’re not intrinsically special or gifted, whether we’re INTJs, ESFPs or WTFs. We’re simply given the opportunity to collaborate with others and build on their skills and output to produce something greater than the sum of its parts. Let’s not lose sight of it.

Lewis Roman, Young Apprentice candidate

“Are you a glory hunter, Lewis?”, Karen Brady asks a teenage scouser. “Yeah”, he quickly assures her, straightfaced. They sit across from one another in Lord Alan Sugar’s televised boardroom, as Lewis takes responsibility for his failure to adequately present their product to the buyers. Along the table, the perfectly-coiffured Harry M smirks with the self assurance of someone who knows they are a winner in life, if not in the context of this particular episode of Young Apprentice.

Brady corrects poor Lewis, right, clarifying what exactly “glory hunter” means in this context. He quickly denies the accusation and ultimately dodges the bullet, and we see the portly Dan, another regional accent (this time it’s a brummie), bear the brunt of another of Lord Sugar’s disappointed finger stabs as he’s fired.

Lewis should have been fired. His presentation to the buyers was horrific: he read most of it from a printout, stumbling over words and phrases like a junior school nativity play. His plucky scouse charm, on top form when caricaturing the plummy Harry M (below left), was suddenly nowhere to be seen as he visibly floundered when speaking in public. Waiting in the wings, visibly fuming as the presentation fell apart, was the sharply-dressed economics student Harry M. School prefect, polo enthusiast and with a cut-glass RP accent, he was everything that used car salesman-esque Lewis wasn’t. If he doesn’t end up winning the show, he’ll end up leading a company or making a killing in business. Why? Because he was born to.

Harry Maxwell, Young Apprentice candidate

The BBC, with its public service remit, can’t simply fill shows like this with rugger buggers and Sloane rangers, despite their proclivity to win in the business world. So of course, they throw in a few of the Lewises and Dans of this world. Gutsy, charming northerners, probably from a modest background but entrepreneurial. Probably won’t win it, but might get through to the final stages as a feelgood story, before the well-groomed rich kid steps in to win it. Now of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and the Apprentice is by no means the only route into business. Sugar himself is a rags-to-riches success story, and never shuts up about his less-than-glamorous origins. But it feels like something here is balanced in one particular side’s favour.

This same lack of balance has been present outside of the television screen, though. Around half a year ago, we saw a quarter of a million people take to the streets to protest against government cuts and the perceived wealth gap in Britain. The protest was peaceful (beyond the apparently rogue “black bloc” anarchist element, which the main body of the protesters distanced themselves from). Middle class white families came out for the day, shook their signs and placards, then went home again.

Three months ago London went up in flames as the social underclass had a riot of their own. Shoe shops were looted, electronic goods were robbed on demand and angry youths set their own shopping centres on fire. This wasn’t a dialogue or a political challenge: it was an inarticulated protest. This was a subclass of society unable to express itself at the injustice other classes were equally angry about. Even now we see similar groups to the initial ‘safe’ protest occupying St Paul’s in the City of London. They have information tents, lectures, formal demands and a kind of self-organising governance inside the camp. The kids smashing up Foot Locker felt the same sense of injustice, the same half-understood sense of being short-changed and walked over, but weren’t equipped to articulate those feelings in ways other than the primitive violence of their response.

This isn’t to suggest that every rioter in London this summer was merely a frustrated wannabe-critic, unable to find the words to protest against corruption; likewise I’m not suggesting everyone attending the protest march in early 2011 was a chai-sipping Guardianista marching in their Birkenstocks. But it seems to me that when the inherent class divide present in society is now playing itself out on TV for our entertainment, we need to take a step back.

Gbemi Okunlola, Young Apprentice candidate

The opposing team on Young Apprentice had a similar issue. Gbemi Okunlola, right, leader of the girls’ team, delivered some equally uninspiring pitches to the buyers. Two of the other girls on her team, both of them young, white, self-confident and well-spoken, wrinkled their noses in obvious distaste at Gbemi’s abruptness and brash attitude. What do they want from her? What do we want? Is the Apprentice aiming to adhere to all of the stereotypes of businesspeople: posh accents, generic suits, and the put-downs and one-liners of the privately educated? In what way is a black south London girl telling her team mate to (for example) “get stuffed” any less appropriate than the latter asking her why she doesn’t “reconsider her attitude”?

It made me despair a little for the state of the nation, as melodramatic as it sounds. The Apprentice is a business show and it’s perhaps safe to say that the lucky rich kids steaming ahead here would be at a loss when experiencing the kind of challenges I imagine kids like Lewis and Gbemi have experienced. But why do they have to have those kind of experiences to start with? The fact is that we can never affect real change in society while those two kinds of protests (for those two kinds of people) aren’t unified. When the university-attending students occupying London can share dialogue with the disaffected youth smashing up KFC, then we’ll see what the power of a pissed-off populace can achieve. Until then, we’ll only achieve a partial revolution serving only a part of our diverse society.

Hayley Forrester, Young Apprentice candidate

Hayley, left, one of the aforementioned team mates, “passionately disagrees with people claiming benefits when they could be working”. While it’s great for a 16 year old to have strong political views at that age, perhaps Sugar and his cohorts could take advantage of the situation they’ve engineered to get these kids to teach each other some lessons. Make them swap lives for a month and drop Hayley into Lewis’s Merseyside, an area of astonishing deprivation and joblessness. Meanwhile let’s see Lewis realise his brash confidence will fail him every time alongside the polished Toryism of the home counties. It might not teach him what being a glory hunter is, but it’s possible we’d all gain an insight into quite why our society seems to be dizzily tearing itself in two.