The new university challenge is to unravel Labour’s mess

‘Legacy” is a word that has sneaked into political fashion. It has begun to replace “delivery”, which has proved to be so awkward. Labour grandees are often said to be considering their political legacies and I wonder what they really do believe they have bequeathed to the nation over the past 13 years. It is just conceivable that they imagine they have achieved something with education, education, education, as promised, but their educational legacy is a perfect blueprint for what not to do.

Take universities. You could not hope for a better example of how to get everything wrong. The Blair-Brown years have demonstrated that it is actually quite easy to bring down standards in universities, wreck the chances and dash the hopes of hundreds of thousands of teenagers and reduce employers to complaining publicly about the quality of today’s graduates.

Labour’s legacy to education is a disastrous combination of inflation and devaluation. They have inflated schoolchildren’s expectations, urging them to believe that 50% of young people should go to university. To meet such expectations, they have continued with the Tory initiative to inflate the supply of universities by giving the status to all kinds of tertiary education colleges and deflating the idea of what a university is. Meanwhile, they devalued the standards of A-levels to inflate the numbers of children who could pass them to go to more and more universities.

Naturally this became more and more expensive. Even though the government spent more and more, it was never enough, so universities were obliged to deflate their teaching and pastoral care to lower, cheaper levels. At the same time they devalued their degree standards to inflate the numbers of students passing and getting high marks. Meanwhile, students had to borrow more and more money from a government loan scheme to pay for these places, so some were forced to drop out and others graduated with terrifying debt loads. They now face the world as graduates in inflated numbers with inflated expectations, inflated debt, devalued degrees and deflated prospects.

The consequences are making themselves painfully felt right now. Last week the government was forced to announce that more than three-quarters of universities in England are to have their budgets cut for this September — some by nearly 14%. And the government’s Higher Education Funding Council for England warned that yet further cuts may be imposed later in the academic year. We can now watch for the cuts to be made in precisely the wrong places — such as the disgraceful axeing by King’s College London of its chair of paleography, the UK’s only chair in the subject.

These cuts come in a year that has seen a record 23% rise in the number of students applying to universities. Last week the Conservatives claimed that 2750,000 sixth-formers with good qualifying grades will fail to get into a university course this autumn. The head of Ucas, the universities clearing house, advised students who had not got into their chosen universities to forget about the clearing system and “to reappraise their aspirations” instead. That is a lot of disappointed sixth-formers in a generation that Labour has deliberately encouraged to see university education as both entitlement and necessity.

There can no longer be any doubt that A-levels have got much easier. The number of pupils getting three A grades, once a rarity even at top schools, is now one in six — twice as many as when Labour came into office. Reliable long-term research from Durham University shows that individuals of the same general ability level would now be expected to score about two A-level grades higher than they did 20 years ago. The result, as Tesco for one has pointed out, is that it is now hard for employers to differentiate between candidates. The same is true at university entrance: Imperial College London warned in 2008 that grade inflation had made A-level results “almost worthless” in choosing between university applicants.

For those who do get to university, debt is often a heavy burden. A study published last week found that 28% of students expected to accumulate debts of £20,000 at university. Meanwhile, the student loan system, supposedly monitored by the government, is an alarming mess. Last week a damning report from the National Audit Office (NAO) blamed both the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Student Loans Company (SLC) for failing to learn from last year’s mishandling of the grant application system. The head of the NAO questioned last week whether the SLC is actually capable of dealing with twice as many applications this year. What this means for students is long delays and constant anxiety. It is a disgrace.

After all this worry and sacrifice, new graduates are not rewarded by the expected good jobs and high salaries. Work is scarce and employers are sceptical about their qualifications and are saying so openly. The independent Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR) recently published a manifesto calling on all political parties to abolish the target of getting 50% of under-30s into university. Carl Gilleard of AGR said this target has affected degree standards and creates problems for employers of graduates because they cannot be sure of the value of certain degrees: “It does not help young people’s life chances or represent a good return on their financial investment. It does little for the reputation of our universities either.”

No doubt all this was done with high-minded intentions in the name of equal opportunities. But a university in the true sense of the word is not a place of equality. It is a place of excellence. Academic excellence is elitist, of its nature. Years of bad schooling cannot be put right at an academic university by massaging the entry requirements or providing remedial classes. It is too late for that. As Chris Patten, the chancellor of Oxford University, said last week, diluting entry standards to make up for shortfalls in secondary education would soon mean we no longer had world-class universities.

What is so strange about Labour’s education policy is that it is at the same time both egalitarian and snobbish — egalitarian in insisting that all should have degrees and that higher education colleges are universities and snobbish in the old-fashioned belief that only a posh academic university degree really matters. And the tragedy of Labour’s education legacy is that is has done nobody much good.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

What women want is an end to hectoring by feminists

Women beware wimmin. International Women’s Day rolled around once again for the 99th time last week and many of the usual alpha females came out to celebrate.

Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama had an awkward little womanly moment together in the White House, although most Americans ignore the day. Harriet Harman took the opportunity to remind us how few women there are in British boardrooms. Her intrusive Equality Bill, which encourages discrimination against men in the workplace, was going through its final stages in the Commons last week.

It is true, of course, that there has been a lot for women to celebrate in the past century and we have the courage and persistence of earlier generations of feminist women to thank for that. But somewhere along the way feminism in this country has turned into something many women cannot identify with. I can’t. Harman, along with other prominent alpha females, expresses a kind of feminism that is so far divorced from what most women think and want that she might as well belong to another sex. Alpha females seem closer to the alpha male than to the ordinary woman in gender.

Harman’s thinking, like the feminist orthodoxy in the government, is based on the following assumptions, which have always seemed quite wrong to me.

First, that all women want to work (for money, outside the home). Second, that all women, including mothers, ought to work. Third, that all women want to do and are equally suited to doing the same work as men. Fourth, that if the number of women working in an organisation is less than 50% of the total, that is in itself evidence that women are being unjustly discriminated against. Fifth, that motherhood is a problem that makes it difficult for women to work. Sixth, that the problem of motherhood can easily be fixed by paid childcare, subsidised if necessary by the state. Seventh, that what all mothers want above all is “affordable childcare” to enable them to work: children don’t need much of their attention. And finally, that it is for the state to sort out all such family matters.

This is the 1970s mindset of Harman and of many alpha females in high places; this is how women like them feel and talk.

That’s how alpha females behave. They push out babies along with policy papers and tour the interview circuit proudly bearing breast pumps. One prominent headmistress went back to work only a few hours after giving birth to her third child last month, commenting that this would show her schoolgirls what woman is capable of.

It struck me as irresponsible; pregnancy and childbirth usually involve extreme hormonal upheavals and physical demands, even when all is well. It’s not for nothing that for the first few weeks after childbirth women have not been held responsible for their actions in law because they are often not themselves, so to speak.

That’s to say nothing of the psychological needs of mother, baby and other children or of the developmental and emotional needs of children after the first few months. Are these needs really best left to childminders and crèches? Most women don’t think so.

The latest alpha female planning to combine full-time work—very long hours and a constituency—with producing a baby is Joanne Cash, the prospective Tory parliamentary candidate for Westminster. If she gets into parliament, her first baby will be born only weeks after she takes her seat this summer.

I suspect that most mothers, remembering the arrival of their own babies, will regard this as daft. Even if things go smoothly, the demands of motherhood are such that Cash will be forced either to neglect the baby or to neglect the job. Cash is taking the approved Tory line—it’s not restricted to the left.

There is nothing new about alpha females giving their babies over to other people to look after; that has always been the price of great success, and successful women have taken it for granted. With the best of expensive childcare, it seems to work well.

However, I have come to feel strongly that it isn’t what most women want. I did hand my own first baby over to a full-time nanny so I could go back to a job in television with foreign travel. But before long I realised, like countless women, that what I most wanted was to be with my baby and work part-time from home, which I’ve done ever since.

We all tend to generalise from our own experiences: if Harman has, so have I (but then, I’m not in a position to impose mine by statute). At last there is some good evidence about what women really do feel about all this. Professor Geoff Dench of the Young Foundation has just finished a series of presentations for the Centre for Policy Studies and the Hera Trust based on evidence from the British Social Attitudes surveys since 1983, to be published tomorrow as What Women Want. In his survey of women’s attitudes, one of his conclusions is that the sisterhood is failing mothers.

Apart from married middle-class women in full-time work, most women would prefer to look after their children and work only part-time if possible. Most women value home and family life above a career—hardly surprisingly, since few women are offered careers and most must content themselves with jobs—and, he argues, women with these domestic priorities feel increasingly that the femocracy of career women in power doesn’t speak for them.

This is a bold inference. It’s drawn from the withdrawal of women from political parties, as expressed in the BSA surveys. Men have been increasingly losing interest in political parties over the past 20 years, but the process has been much faster among women and above all among mothers.

It is the Labour party that appears to have lost most support from mothers; support for Labour among working-age, working-class housewives went down from 52% in 1986 to 27% in 2008.

That doesn’t mean they’ve deserted to the Conservatives; the trend is towards “no party” disaffection. It is surely time, now, that women in politics started thinking about what women want, which is what is best for their babies and children.

I suspect it would actually be cheaper and better for government to enable women to look after their own children and families, if they want to, rather than nudging and driving them back into work. But it’s difficult for alpha females to understand such an unliberated desire. Women beware wimmin.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Unwanted men, we need you to curb the welfare Amazons

Are men surplus to requirements? The answer, after more than half a century of feminism and the welfare state, depends largely on class. Men from the employable and educated classes are still in strong demand among women. But much lower down the socioeconomic scale, among the least privileged, men have become — or have come to seem — entirely optional.

Already we have what the tabloid newspapers call an epidemic of single motherhood — young women who have chosen to have babies on welfare, without husbands or boyfriends. One in four mothers is single and more than half of these lone mothers have never lived with a man and survive on welfare.

As many of these women become grandmothers, a new pattern has emerged of three generations of mothers without a man in the house — lone granny, lone mum and fatherless children, all expecting the state to stand in for daddy, as of right. These women are not so much welfare queens as matriarchal dynasties of welfare Amazons.

In a study presented to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the sociologist Geoff Dench argues from the evidence of British Social Attitudes surveys since 1983 that there is a growing number of such extended man-free families: “Three-generation lone-mother families — extended families without men — are developing a new family subculture which involves little paid work.”

The culture is passed on, as you might expect. Lone grannies are significantly more likely to have lone and workless daughters than grannies with husbands or employment, and the same is true of their daughters’ daughters. Baby daughters (and baby sons, too) are imbibing with their mother’s milk the idea that men, like jobs, are largely unnecessary in any serious sense.

The problem with this new type of extended family, Dench says, is that it is not self-sustaining but tends to be parasitic on conventional families in the rest of society. In fact, it appears to lead inexorably to the nightmare of an unproductive dependent underclass.

Clearly one of the worst problems with such a subculture is that although it’s not self-sustaining it has a powerful tendency to replicate itself. A boy in such an environment who grows up without a father figure is much less likely — for many well documented reasons — to turn into the sort of young man a girl could see as a desirable husband. A girl who grows up without a father never learns how important a man could be in her own child’s life. She will not see her mother negotiating an adult relationship with a male companion, so she won’t know how to do it herself or imagine what she is missing.

Before anyone starts to point the finger of blame at such girls, it’s worth remembering that many of them are simply making a rational choice. Badly educated at a rough sink school, facing a dead-end, low-paid job that won’t even cover the cost of childcare, such a girl will naturally decide to do what she wants to do anyway and have a baby to love. She knows she will be better off having welfare babies than stacking shelves and better off, too, if she avoids having a man living with her, even supposing she could find one from among the antisocial, lone-parented youths on her estate. That is because the state subsidises this rational choice, disastrous though it has proved, and has done so for decades.

Women quite understandably now talk of such lifestyle choices as their right. They’ve been encouraged to. And the state has actually made poor men redundant.

There are all kinds of protest one might make at this state of affairs. It is outrageous, for instance, that more than half a century of socialism and feminism has managed to marginalise and make wretched the least privileged of men. Evidence of the failure and the alienation of working-class boys, compared with girls, is incontrovertible. “From him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away”, while to her that hath not shall be given just enough to get by on without him. So much for social justice and sexual equality.

There are further layers of injustice. The economist Professor Bob Rowthorn commented with some feeling last week that man-free women are very mistaken to imagine they don’t need men. The truth is they desperately need men in the form of all those male taxpayers (to say nothing of female taxpayers) who are forced to pay for a way of life that they don’t approve of and that they know to be socially disastrous.

It is hugely unfair to make responsible people who are struggling to support their own families struggle harder still to support women who won’t work. Family life is in a fine mess in this country. Looking after your own children has become a luxury that few women can afford, married or single, unless they abandon responsibility for themselves and go on benefits.

I doubt whether anything much can be done to untangle this mess. It is a knotty web of constant state interventions and their perverse consequences, and yet more interventions are likely to snarl things up even more. But if anything can be done, it must surely start with an emphasis on unwanted men at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Something must be done to help them become good prospects for girls wanting babies, so that they will be welcomed back into family life and become responsible family men, fathers to responsible sons. That means rescuing them from the failure, unemployment and general contempt to which many of them are now condemned. It means offering them consideration and respect — something they are routinely denied, to their deep resentment — and helping them earn it.

At a discussion of women and childcare at the CPS last week, a Conservative MP made the conventional suggestion that the workplace ought to be more feminised. Actually it is feminisation that is the problem; we have far too much of it already. Schools are feminised, run largely by women in ways that suit girls, not boys; exams have been feminised, and now girls do better in them; workplaces have been feminised; conversation and jokes have been feminised to sneer at testosterone-driven male aggression; and the entire welfare and benefits system has a bias against men. This is particularly hard on the poorest of men.

What we need now in society and in family life is not feminisation, but a new masculinisation. Otherwise yet more men will become institutionally redundant.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Behind the bullying, Brown is a dangerous weirdo

It was reassuring to hear from the prime minister last week that he has never hit anyone. No one had openly accused him of it, so it was perhaps a little odd that he felt obliged to volunteer this information. But in a week of avid speculation about his violent rages and his tendency to kick things, it was probably worth his claiming that he never actually punches anyone. People might believe it. And Brown and his supporters may even have succeeded in persuading some people that he is not a bully at all, or that if he sometimes gets a bit cross it is only with himself.

I myself am completely unpersuaded by Peter Mandelson’s oily account of the prime minister’s high-minded good nature; after all, during his long and bitter estrangement from Brown, Mandelson went about telling journalists that Gordon was out to get him.

The real question isn’t whether Brown is a bully. It would be very surprising if the prime minister were not a bully, in some sense. Most people with power abuse it. Many act badly under great pressure. There are ferocious bullies at the top of most competitive worlds: in such worlds bullying is just the distorted, hypertrophied face of authority and power. The real question is whether Brown is the right sort of bully.

Bullying comes in many forms. At its most benign it is the technique of the sergeant-major or the old-fashioned schoolmaster to force the best out of unpromising recruits and students. I sometimes think that if I had not been relentlessly bullied by the best teacher at my school — regularly subjected to fear, abusive criticism and public humiliation — I would not have been forced to work hard and learn something. Bullying like this is unpleasant but it is not exactly personal; it’s not personally meant and the bully doesn’t particularly enjoy it. Above all, it is effective.

The kind of bullying of which Brown is suspected is entirely different. It is the uncontrolled raging of a desperate man, driven in his frustration and misery to lash out randomly at anyone nearby.

All the anecdotes about Brown’s rages, for what they’re worth, paint much the same picture: they reveal a man so absolutely overwhelmed by his own ambition and vanity, and so obsessed by the fear of injury to either, that at moments of threat he loses the run of himself. Such a man might well lose the run of the government in the process, for hysterically blaming the messenger, indulging obsessively in paranoid rumination and terrifying junior staff is not compatible with effective leadership; furiously denouncing anyone who disagrees with him as a traitor is unlikely to encourage people to speak truth to power; shifting blame onto advisers and briefing against them in the media will corrupt their advice, and isolate him.

This is bullying not as strength but as a counterproductive symptom of weakness. In a prime minister it is very alarming. And in the Brown government we see the results you might expect — constant indecision, U-turns, resignations and hasty and short-lived initiatives; a government at the mercy of its own changing moods.

What’s important here is not so much the bullying itself as the mental disorder beneath it — the red-hot emotional lava heaving beneath the eruptions, and its dangers in a public man. Admittedly amateurs are unwise to step on such uncertain ground, but having over many years had to think hard about various kinds of personality disorder in my extended family, I shall rush in where angels fear to tread. Besides, Brown abandoned any claim to respect for his privacy with his Piers Morgan interview, demanding our understanding for him as a person. He might not like that.

Whatever the truth of Andrew Rawnsley’s portrait of Brown, the prime minister is without a doubt the strangest, most emotionally dysfunctional person I have met. We were together at a dinner once and I felt that his inability to behave remotely normally was almost pitiful.

At times he fixed a broad, exaggerated smile to his face, almost randomly it seemed, and directed it at someone, but he kept getting it wrong — the wrong moment to smile, the wrong person to smile at and occasionally the wrong place to smile at. When challenged by one guest on some difficult economic point, he kept baring his teeth in the opposite direction, at the lovely bosom of a guest on his other side who was not part of the conversation. He made me think of an android with faulty programming.

Brown had not endeared himself to other guests at drinks before dinner with his arrogance. Lecturing several of us on the merits of Latin and the humanity of Adam Smith, he made it plain he assumed we were all less well educated and less intelligent. He had misjudged his company but had neither the quickness nor the social skills to pick that up or put it right, and this at a moment when he was clearly trying hard to make friends and influence people. When challenged, as an honest man who prized honesty, to put right, if only in private, a certain dishonest statement in parliament that day, he weaselled out of it.

Gordon Brown’s lack of self-knowledge and his lack of understanding of others, like his compulsive bullying and his obsessively savaged fingernails, seem to me to be clearly pathological. I may not be qualified to say so, but I am entitled to wonder about it and so is the electorate.

Recently a story emerged that Brown was being prescribed powerful antidepressants; the allegation was never substantiated so it was dropped. But what struck me was the widespread view at the time that a prime minister should not be asked about his mental health. That is nonsense. Significant depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, personality disorders and autism-spectrum disorders all can and do profoundly affect a person’s judgment and behaviour in disastrous ways. All are difficult, and some impossible, to treat. It is clearly in the public interest to know whether our prime minister is suffering from any of these disabilities.

When Brown was close to overthrowing his predecessor, Frank Field supposedly begged Tony Blair not to “let Mrs Rochester out of the attic”. We know what Mrs Rochester did when she got out. She burnt the whole house down and herself with it. I cannot know where personality ends and pathology begins, but I do not think that such matters, in public life, should be kept secret.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

Public servants wallow at our expense as the new first class

Class is an illness from which this country seems unable to recover. No sooner had new Labour soothed us into feeling better, murmuring that we were all middle class now, than old Labour spread the old infection of class resentment: listen to Gordon Brown’s jibes about the playing fields of Eton and his threats of class-war electioneering. And just as David Cameron tries to persuade us that we are all in this together, an old Tory nincompoop reminds us that we aren’t. We are still in two different compartments.

Sir Nicholas Winterton, the Conservative MP, made an astonishing protest against proposals that MPs should no longer travel first class on trains. His explanations were beyond parody: he said he felt it was quite wrong for MPs to have to travel with the rest of us as it would make it impossible for him to work, and it would put chaps such as him “below” local councillors and local government officials and even, for heaven’s sake, below army majors.

Besides, the rest of us in standard class are “a totally different type of people”. That at least is a relief to my feelings — I wouldn’t want to be at all like Winterton — but his explanations could not fail to irritate. “I didn’t say they weren’t as good, but they are in a different walk of life. They are doing different things. Very often they are there with children.”

Words fail me. The idea that people who cannot afford first-class tickets (or can’t persuade the state to pay for them) belong by definition to the disorderly underclass, and are therefore to be avoided by their rightful masters, is something I thought Conservatives had at least learnt not to express.

There are millions (and I mean millions) of people who are a great deal better educated, more scrupulous and more mannerly than Winterton, who cannot afford first-class tickets and would think it daft to pay for them even if they could. If they, like him, have to work on a train journey, they book a seat in a standard-class quiet carriage. It’s true that there aren’t always enough places in quiet carriages, but perhaps if MPs and similar such luminaries were forced out of their ignorant seclusion, they might realise they ought to do something about train travel.

However, although it took a silly, superannuated Conservative to remind us of all this, what is truly despicable is that Labour is no better. Since 1997 new Labour ducks have taken easily to the waters of state-subsidised privilege, as of right; they are just as keen on paddling round designer duck houses and rabble-excluding moats as any Tory booby. “The many, not the few” — that’s what they claim to stand for.

In fact they’re quite content to let the many do the standing while they themselves sit without a hint of self-reproach in the quiet comfort of first class, both literally and metaphorically. They are not even embarrassed by the phrase.

We have a government — and, more widely than that, a centre-left establishment in the public services — that gives every impression of being obsessed with inequality. We are lectured constantly by new Labour about the evils of social exclusion, the lasting damage done by real inequality, the social malaise that follows social injustice, and the central importance of imposing equality by law — complete with an ambitious Equality Bill. The Conservatives do not disassociate themselves from this rhetoric — quite the reverse.

Yet, over 13 years in office, this same political class has left in place, on the country’s state-subsidised, public-service trains, the astonishing notion of first class — a notion that is an offence against the idea of equality. And (with some honourable exceptions) it is happy to travel first class at the expense of the low-paid and the poor.

Admittedly, there are some people who do need special treatment, for reasons of security or perhaps of sanity — pop stars, the Queen, a few secret agents and the prime minister. Then there are those who just want special treatment and can pay for it out of their own money. But if there is little or no need for special treatment, and if — as with train tickets — the cost-benefit ratio is daft, then there can be no possible reason the taxpayers should bear the expense of it. Equality is, or ought to be, good enough for most people.

I never travel first class (apart from buying an occasional £5 weekend upgrade in the past). But I have often walked through first-class compartments on my way to steerage, wondering what sort of people could afford to sit in them, and I can confirm Winterton’s point that they are stuffed full of public servants who are not paying for their own seats. Local authority workers, BBC apparatchiks, politicians, civil servants and armies of quangocrats are there, squandering vast sums on the tiny advantages that a first-class seat has over a standard quiet seat.

What is so remarkable is the unthinking sense of entitlement. You might have expected it from some of the worst grandees of the past but not, surely, from present-day public servants. Altogether, this is an odd way to carry on for those whose working lives are spent in the aggressive pursuit of equality in every form — through statutory equality agendas, new equality legislation and the mind-numbing equality rhetoric adopted so aggressively by all political parties. First-class rail tickets for dedicated egalitarians are a comic example of cognitive dissonance.

What’s really going on, I think, is that the nature of class war has changed. The old virus has mutated. The old social and political divisions have given way to two new classes — rather as on the trains. Those in economy are most of us, paying for the comforts of those in first class. And those in first class are the new political class — all those who owe their advancement and their security and their pensions and their privileges not to their backgrounds or their talents, or even necessarily their political parties, but to the state and our taxes.

Member of the first class are various, from the Tony Blairs to the Wintertons, but whatever they say about equality, they are in fact united in defence of their right to their privileges and to having their own undemocratic way.

And in his strange cry of complaint Winterton was speaking not just for the old order, but also for the new first class. It is this class that is the new cross-party adversary of the good society, but, just like the old class virus, it will be hard to fight.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

The insidious triumph of the facelifting classes

It is bad enough getting old. What makes it worse is the constant pressure, these days, to deny it or disguise it. There is endless media wittering about 40 being the new 30 and 70 being the new 60, with the implication that we all should look and feel at least 10 years younger than we are. Now Emma Soames, Saga magazine’s editor-at-large, has come up with an irritating new celebration of being 50: women in their fifties are, supposedly, newly fantastic and having a new, fantastically improved youthful time of late-onset confidence and vigour. She calls them — in one of those neologisms that make one’s granny glasses fug up with annoyance — the Quintastics.

How the heart sinks. Of course it is possible to have fun at 50 (or at 90), if life is treating you well. Of course there are many consolations in maturity. And of course many fiftysomething women today really are healthier, more youthful and more energetic than their mothers and grandmothers, thanks to better doctors and better diets throughout their lives. And thanks to better opportunities, they now often have more interesting lives in late middle age and beyond.

However, what matters in all this age chat is not so much how old one is as how one looks. So long as one’s health holds out, the only problem with getting old is looking old; otherwise one’s birth date would be of little interest. If it weren’t for our mirrors, most of us would be unable to believe how old we have mysteriously become. And what we see in our mirrors is how others see us. So if fiftysomethings are to be seen as fantastic, or as the new 40 or whatever, they must look it. If they don’t — if the so-called Quintastics look every thin-lipped, slack-eyed, grey-haired day of their sixth decade as nature intended — most of them won’t be having such a fantastic time. They will find themselves being ignored and passed over in favour of slack-eyed, grey-haired men and wide-eyed, bright-haired women.

Sexist ageism is always with us, no matter how we struggle against the thought (and indeed against the phrase). Embarrassing the BBC into having a couple of fiftysomething female newsreaders will not change the fact that we are all drawn to youth and the beautiful signs of youth, particularly in women; we are distressed by the wrinkles and pallor that suggest nature is through with us, or at least through with the ageing babe on the telly.

As every woman of a certain age comes to learn, there is a point when you become invisible. People stop paying you attention. No doubt evolutionary biologists have explanations for this. But we know, unless we choose to ignore it, that there is all too much truth in the words of the old song: keep young and beautiful if you want to be loved and — which is part of the same thing — if you want to hold on to whatever power you had in your prime.

Some people — increasingly few — talk of ageing gracefully and one can only admire them. However, ageing as nature intended is not easy to do in a world obsessed with youth and appearances. It is particularly difficult for people working in industries in which seeming young matters, such as the media, from public relations to the music business.

Interviewing cosmetic surgeons a few years ago, I was told again and again that their patients are now no longer actresses and society beauties. They are ordinary-looking middle-aged women, and increasingly men, too, who are terrified of losing their jobs if they show any signs of getting old and past it. And since there has been an extraordinary revolution in cosmetic medicine in the past few years, there is an obvious and growing pressure to make use of it. Looking more attractive than nature intended is a fringe benefit; vanity is not primarily the point.

Having a little work done, in the coy phrase, is now so successful and so discreet that most people feel they can get away with it. The shame and indignity attached to cosmetic surgery are fading away and in any case you don’t need to go under the knife: there are lesser interventions such as hormone replacements, nutraceuticals, cosmetics for protection against photo-ageing, various kinds of lasering for removing blemishes and injections into one’s cheeks of one’s own body fat, “harvested” — in the beauty bandits’ chilling expression — from podgier parts of the body, where it isn’t wanted, to plump up the face and recreate its youthful curves. Ridiculous though all this may sound (and dangerous though some of it is), there is absolutely no doubt that it gives many people new confidence and what is really a new lease of life.

The problem, though, is that all these possibilities are beginning to conscript everyone into a rejuvenation arms race. An acquaintance of mine, a great beauty and literary lioness, complained to me a few years ago that all her richest and most glamorous contemporaries suddenly looked at least 15 years younger than she did. They had all had superb facelifts and she felt, with some reason, that she now looked like their aunt. She did not follow their lead into the hands of a top surgeon, being one of those people either wise enough or cautious enough to avoid it, but she did wonder, she said, whether she really belonged to the facelifting classes anyway.

And that is the point about looking and feeling fantastic at 50 or indeed at 40 or 60. Youth is a class issue now because it has become a commodity. It’s an advantage — perhaps soon more of a necessity for some purposes — that people can buy. People who have enough time and money to spend on top surgeons and dermatologists, on the best diets, best nutraceuticals and food additives for rejuvenating gloss and glow, on cosmetic dentistry, bifocal contact lenses, top hair colourists, the most rigorous of gyms and trainers and plenty of rest and recreation, will always — even without cosmetic medicine — look far younger and feel far healthier than people who can’t afford such things. This difference is already apparent; before long it will become a significant and visible social division.

Actresses who look sexy at 60, or women who are now Quintastics or evergreen granny-babes, must have a demoralising effect on most women. It is expensive to keep the ageing self feeling and looking fantastic and, for those who can’t afford it, these role models must be distinctly irritating. Those who can afford it should either be truthful about it or keep quiet about it; it is not something to celebrate.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

We must target radicals – before they target us

If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, the same is true of public safety. The failed airline bomber at Christmas has reminded everyone of that. But vigilance is not the same as constant state surveillance: that would make freedom itself the price of public safety. It is surely obvious that vigilance must be carefully directed and focused — in other words, targeted. Only by careful targeting of the few can we avoid indiscriminate, mass intrusion into the freedom and the privacy of the many.

Yet for many people targeting is almost a dirty word. So is discrimination, even though it actually signifies careful, rational distinction between things, rather than all-purpose injustice (which is pretty much its opposite). After the failure of the young Nigerian terrorist to blow up an aircraft and the failure of the US intelligence services to stop him, almost every suggestion made about how better to deal with terrorism in our midst is met with angry objections.

Take the question of whether Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — the Christmas bomber — was radicalised at University College London (UCL) or somewhere else. This seems to me to miss all the points. It is admittedly disturbing that Professor Malcolm Grant, the president and provost of UCL, felt able to say that what Abdulmutallab did “came as a complete shock to the UCL community”.

These days any university ought to be very vigilant about its student Islamic society (Isoc). Abdulmutallab was once head of the UCL Isoc and had organised a “war on terror” week that ought to have alerted anyone who took extremism among Muslim students seriously. So, too, should his invitation to a notorious radical preacher to speak to the society.

Even a modest amount of pastoral care would surely have alerted someone at UCL that this lonely Nigerian rich boy was turning, as per the standard casebook model, into an enraged fundamentalist, even though strictly speaking he may not have been chosen for jihad while in London. And he was, after all, known to British intelligence.

Grant’s ignorance is extremely odd. Anybody running a British university, especially one in London, ought to know that Isocs on many British campuses have become centres of radicalism — and not just radicalism, but alarming Islamist hatred, or at least frighteningly illiberal and fundamentalist views. Yet chancellors have been extremely reluctant to acknowledge that. They have ignored or denounced those who have tried to make them face it, in a way that suggests little respect for the academic ideal of keeping a mind open to evidence.

Abdulmutallab, for instance, was the fourth head of a British university Isoc to have been charged with a serious terrorist offence. Post hoc is not necessarily ergo propter hoc — after something doesn’t necessarily mean because of it — but the truth is that British universities are some of the safest, richest waters for Islamist recruiters to swim and fish in.

A study (and YouGov poll) published in 2008 by the Centre for Social Cohesion gives a worrying account of the attitudes of young Muslims on British campuses. Extremist preaching and extremist texts are routinely propagated. The poll found that one in three Muslim university students here believed that killing in the name of their religion could be justified. This figure was almost doubled, to 60%, among students who were active members of Isocs; 40% supported the introduction of sharia into British law and 58% of those active in Isocs supported the idea of a worldwide caliphate. Bad enough, but even worse was the fact that the UK’s Federation of Student Islamic Societies rejected the report entirely, as did the National Union of Students and the higher education minister of the day.

The government is less blind now to these facts, but in this context it is quite remarkable that the provost of UCL and his colleagues should be quite so “completely shocked” by Abdulmutallab’s transformation into a terrorist.

However, whatever the cacophony of denial and wilful ignorance, I do not think it is the role of universities to spy on their students. I share the liberal academic belief that universities are places of freedom of speech and association and students are entitled to say daft things in dodgy groups, as are their teachers. It is that belief, I hope, that prompts vice-chancellors to deny the problem exists. But denial of the facts is a poor strategy to preserve what is good.

What chancellors should be saying is not that Muslim extremism doesn’t exist on campus, or that it doesn’t matter, but that it is not their problem. If spying is to be done — and clearly extremist students must be spied on and already are — let it be done by proper spies, not by academics. Nor should it be done by the police. It must be done by specially trained and highly skilled secret service agents (as it already is). Obviously a university has a duty to report on anyone who breaks the law, but otherwise it is not there to do the life-saving dirty work of intelligence services.

For the secret services to target particular people and groups in this way is infinitely better than for the university to watch and control everybody with constant surveillance. Yet the media today are full of angry protests against targeted vigilance like this. Take passenger profiling and targeted body searches at airports, much discussed last week.

It simply won’t do to say that profiling and targeting don’t work. Of course they are not foolproof and human error is always with us: against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain. And of course public safety depends on agencies that defend us working together and of course they may all fail together at times. That may be the price of freedom.

Yet it is perfectly clear that profiling for several risk factors combined must be hugely better than a total lack of discrimination. It’s no counter-argument to say that some terrorists are women, or white, or whatever, and that profiling would have failed to spot them. Maybe so; total success is highly unlikely. But there are some serious risk factors, such as being Muslim and young and much travelled between certain countries, that together are enough to justify extra vigilance. To deny this is to express a different agenda or an indifference to the safety of one’s loved ones. Profiling is part of the acceptable price of public safety.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

It’s a no-brainer – bring on the pills that will make us smarter

In among all the gloomy predictions for the next decade is one that is astonishingly cheering. In the near future neurologists will be able to halt the process of Alzheimer’s disease. At present they can treat only the symptoms but soon, having detected the disease in its early stages with biomarkers, they will be able to stop it getting any worse with drugs that are neuro-protector agents.

This was a prediction made by Professor Barbara Sahakian, a distinguished neuroscientist at Cambridge University’s department of psychiatry, last week. I can only imagine that everyone was too busy hurrying to the sales to give this extraordinary statement the attention it deserves. It sounds like a real liberation, both for Alzheimer’s sufferers and their families and for anyone who fears old age.

Quite apart from the personal miseries of Alzheimer’s, the economic costs of dementia are vast and are threatening to become overwhelming as we face the grey tsunami of an ageing population. This is a disaster that may now not happen because research in this field is developing so fast.

That isn’t the only extremely cheering thing Sahakian said. She was discussing cognitive enhancement drugs — smart pills — and while she gave a lot of attention to their use for people with cognitive disabilities and neuro-psychiatric disorders, she also talked about their use for healthy people. Some of the drugs that already help patients with Alzheimer’s or ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) can also bring great benefits to healthy adults.

People are already using them to make their brains work better — to improve their memory or concentration, to enhance their entrepreneurial skills, or their performance at chess, on the piano, for a speech, in exams or in writing to a deadline.

Sahakian made no secret of the fact that some of her scientific colleagues regularly use cognitive enhancers — such as modafinil — to deal with jet lag, to improve their mental powers or just to get in a good day’s work. She even wrote an article in Nature magazine in 2007 called Professor’s Little Helper, which gives you the general idea. Smart pills really do make you smarter and they’re here, for those who can get hold of them.

I have been waiting for them for years, ever since a brilliant young Californian scientist told me in 1982 that they were on their way. A few years after that another Californian told me that he had managed to speed-write several lucrative soft porn novels while on Ritalin — the drug frequently prescribed for children suffering from ADHD (and, sadly, prescribed for lots of children who don’t suffer from it as well).

In crude terms it’s a kind of “speed”, to use the 1960s slang for amphetamines or uppers; it certainly does concentrate the mind and up one’s productivity, although it wouldn’t be the well informed person’s first choice of smart pill.

However, there’s a growing demand for it among the healthy, even in this country: recent research at Liverpool John Moores University found that children with prescriptions for ADHD treatments were routinely selling their drugs and so, sometimes, were their parents.

Students around the world are increasingly getting hold of other smart pills, such as modafinil or Adderall, and the trend is growing. There’s some evidence that ambitious parents are getting smart pills from the internet for their children. But this use of unprescribed smart pills is not really very smart: the user doesn’t know what he’s getting from uncontrolled suppliers.

All the same, it is tantalising. Here are respectable scientists unashamedly popping pills to bolster their already bulging brains. Sahakian herself asks why not, if the drugs are safe, effective and non-addictive? Which of us over 40 hasn’t noticed a gradual loss of certain memories and an inability to store new ones? Which of us hasn’t envied someone else’s higher powers of concentration, or speed of thought, or greater talent in playing Bach? How frustrating it is to sense that one is using only a tiny part of one’s mind and its memories. How exhilarating it would be to leave all such limitations behind, if only for a few hours.

The most obvious objection to this brave new brain world is that not enough is yet known about the long-term effects of some of these drugs. That will change in time; before long the risk-reward relationship will be much better understood. But I suspect that even if the smartest smart pills really were safe and non-addictive, there would still be people who would be against them.

There will always be those who for religious reasons say we shouldn’t interfere with nature or attempt to play God, as if we didn’t do that all the time; trying to eliminate polio or treating cancer are obvious examples. Besides, what is wrong with humans playing God? I am all for it, especially as God doesn’t seem to be doing it.

Then there will always be puritans who object to anything with a hint of pleasure about it; puritanism is “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”, which I certainly would be if I could play the piano just a little bit more like Mitsuko Uchida. Then there is the usual argument that taking smart pills would be unfair — unfair to those who didn’t want to take them, or to those who couldn’t get them.

While there is some truth in that, there is not enough. The world is full of unfairness; we already have a very unequal distribution of life enhancement across the world. Take people with bad eyesight. The tiny minority of the very rich get laser correction. The fairly rich get contact lenses. Others have to make do with prescription spectacles, while the world’s poor can have only off-the-shelf glasses and the very poor get nothing. Does that mean there should be no sight enhancement for anyone? And as for the argument that smart pills are a kind of cheat, one can only ask whether it is cheating to wear contact lenses, or fit prosthetic limbs, or eat brain-enhancing superfoods.

What Sahakian is trying to do in talking to non-scientific audiences is to get a public debate going. Normally the call for a public debate fills me with gloom, but in this case we really need one. Cognitive enhancement is already a fact of life and now the smart pills are here. They will bring risks as well as wonderful rewards and we ought as a society to be ready for them, to use them wisely and well and legally. I can’t wait.

Meanwhile, a happy and cognitively enhanced new decade to everyone.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk