Organised by the magazine Building Design, it has (in my aesthetic judgement) produced a worthy shortlist and a worthy winner every year since its inception in 2006.

But there’s a big problem with the prize — not its subjectivity, but the fact that the winning buildings still exist. Indeed, buildings like them are still being built. Name-and-shame is not working.

There’s an argument to be made that things are getting worse. We’ve swapped the horrendous, but interesting, brutalism of the post-war period for the offensively bland spreadsheet architecture of the 21st century. In an age in which Jane Jacobs has won the intellectual battle against Robert Moses, we really ought to know better. Yet we continue to fill up our towns and cities with inhumane, alienating architecture.

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The hideous spread of 'spreadsheet architecture'

By Peter Franklin

It’s environmentally destructive too. For instance, around Victoria Street in London you see buildings that went up within living memory now being demolished and replaced. Though that’s no great loss to our heritage, it can’t be sustainable to throw-up these great piles of concrete, glass and steel only to tear them down again a few decades later. Is it not too much to ask our architects to design buildings that won’t just enhance our lives, but also outlive us?

It might seem paradoxical, but to end the cycle of destruction, we need to accelerate it. Every year, there should be a public vote to choose the worst new building in the land. The winner wouldn’t get a cup, but a wrecking ball. Yes, that’s right, it would be physically demolished — immediately and without compensation. Indeed, the owner would be required to foot the bill for the building’s de-construction (though they would have the option of suing the architect and the planning authority).

This would concentrate minds wonderfully. Instead of competing among themselves to épater les bourgeois, starchitects would need to design with due regard to the common good. Meanwhile, developers whose sole objective is to squeeze as much profitable square footage into any site they can get their hands on, would have to contend with the possibility of financial (as well as literal) ruin. The planners would come under immense pressure to do a better job too. At the cost of sacrificing one new building, development across the land would be greatly improved.

There’d be a minimum threshold of votes required to trigger a compulsory demolition, so by achieving a broad consensus behind new development — not least by properly involving local people in a positive planning and design process — it’s possible that no new building would have to come down.

But can the people be trusted? By placing the wrecking ball in their hands, would we imperil innovative projects that shock a lot of people at the time that they’re built, but come to be loved? Here I don’t mean the concrete monstrosities that sophistication-signallers like to rave over on Twitter, but genuine wonders like the Eiffel Tower.

We could, perhaps, complement the vote-to-demolish with a vote-to-save, but beyond that I am inclined to trust the people. Indeed, radical democratisation would do more good than harm, freeing architecture from the stifling conformity imposed by elite taste-makers and those who pay for their work.

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How communities lost their soul

By Nicholas Boys Smith

If there is a flaw in my modest proposal it’s that the focus would be on the tallest, flashiest new buildings — and therefore London. The problem isn’t that these aren’t crap, but that less prominent crappiness in other parts of the country might get overlooked. The prize therefore should be regionalised, with categories for a different scales and types of development. After all, we don’t just need well-designed, sustainable landmarks but also beautiful houses, shops and other everyday buildings.

Some of you might think that I’m ignoring the real objection to my idea — which is that the state can’t go round demolishing newly-built, structurally-sound private property. But it can and sometimes does. You could build a brilliantly-designed dwelling in an area that desperately needs more homes, but if you do so without planning permission, it’ll be knocked down. That’s the law.

Admittedly, my idea concerns buildings that have got planning permission. But that’s precisely the point: the planning system as it stands is failing. Over-and-over again it stops the development we do need while allowing development that makes places worse. Despite recent reforms, the system remains opaque, important decisions are made behind closed doors and the whole process advantages the rich and powerful over ordinary people.

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How beauty shapes our fates

By Phillip Blond

Unlike bad art or bad literature, bad architecture is something that whole communities are forced to live with. Our existing laws clearly doesn’t provide them with the protection they need, so we must redress the balance. I’d prefer it if we could move to a fully democratic, consensus-based planning system, but that won’t happen unless the developers, and the financiers behind them, are incentivised to make it work.

My proposal provides the incentive. I’ll admit it does so in a brutal, uncompromising manner, but fans of modernism should surely approve of that. 

But like the Yorkshiremen in Monty Python, I can in all honestly tell them how lucky they have it: when I was a child in the late 1980s, London secondary schools were a genuinely terrifying prospect. I remember two enormous lumps kicking the shit out of each other on my first day, and in my school — one of the best comps in inner London — a significant minority of the boys were just being warehoused by 14.

Beyond that age they learned very little; they believed there was no point in being there, but the educational consensus was that the more years everyone spent in school, the better for them and society.

So while you often hear people lament that children should be allowed to roam free, my actual radical proposal — the one people usually think is a joke — is that child labour should be reintroduced.

Sure, when you put it like that, it sounds a bit… regressive. Perhaps I also think women should be denied the franchise or that MPs should be elected by rotten boroughs? Maybe the return of serfdom?

But it only sounds radical because we associate child labour with past times of extreme poverty and poor working conditions. For my generation it’s Rik from The Young Ones castigating an elderly woman about the “good old days” when you had “four-year-old kiddies digging coal”. And those days were indeed awful. Dan Jackson’s brilliant recent book The Northumbrians recalled the heart-breaking tragedy of the 1862 Hartley Mining Disaster where the bodies of young boys were found with their tiny arms around their brothers.

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Could national service save higher education?

By Mary Harrington

Not even an ironic reactionary like me would lament the decline of infant mortality and workplace fatalities brought about by health and safety legislation. We obviously wouldn’t allow children to do dangerous work in factories today, and many of the most horrific roles once done by kids are obsolete anyway.

But many adolescents — children, I suppose — could enter the workforce far earlier than they currently do, and would benefit from it. Fourteen is a perfectly reasonable age to leave full-time education for someone not academically inclined, after which they could drop everything but Maths and English and attend school maybe two days a week. For the rest of the time they could learn a trade through an apprenticeship scheme, or even — if they wanted — go to an office.

Even younger children could benefit from occasional work. The Government recently announced that they had caved into big business pressure by allowing farms to hire more desperate migrants to undercut British workers (not quite their wording, admittedly).

This is because, without cheap labour, apparently the “crops will rot in the fields”.

Sure, British adults won’t pick fruit at the meagre wages offered, because they’ve been spoiled by such luxuries as housing and food — but British children could.

Fruit picking season ranges from June to September, ideal time for groups of schools to go away together for a week, along with teachers or parent volunteers. Kids could be paid a few quid for a couple of hours’ picking. My eldest would happily do it if her friends were there. They would enjoy doing something communal and useful; it could even be presented, dare I say it, as a patriotic act.

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What if we gave children a vote?

By Polly Mackenzie

But for children a bit older, the working environment allows them to interact with adults, adopt adult social norms and learn skills when their brain is rapidly absorbing information. They could also earn money at a time in life they really want it.

I suspect that a lot of teenage crime in London exists because boys reach an age when they want disposable income but there’s no way for them to legally earn it. They’re also mentally and physically under-stimulated by schoolwork they know brings them little tangible benefit. (This is arguably more acute among boys because they’re generally more goal-driven, respond when stakes are high, and easily give up when they’re not). Instead, during those crucial developmental years, they often learn negative behaviour through frustration and drift, so that by the time they’re finally allowed to enter the labour force, they’re already unsuited to it.

At the moment, almost half a million people aged 16-24 are unemployed, but many might not be, if they’d been allowed to start work a bit earlier — with a lower minimum wage. Experience would make them more attractive to employers; it would also get them in the habit of work, so they’d be more likely to adjust to working quickly and stick to it.

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Why men should be banned

By James Kirkup

Prolonged education also cuts adolescents off from wider society. One of the worst aspects of British society — and where it contrasts poorly with Catholic cultures like Italy or Ireland (still, just about) — is that we have a great deal of generational separation. Young people benefit from working and socialising among those older than them, not only because they’re a calming influence but because they can subtly instruct them on how to behave.

Working young helps insulate children from one of the biggest pitfalls of modern life: extended or even permanent adolescence, which happens when people learn responsibility too late. It also helps a person form a place in a society. Not having enough money is pretty much the worst thing in the world — and reducing poverty should be the central “social justice” aim of governments — but not having a role or purpose is almost as bad.

Teenage boys like to feel needed. This really hit me a few years back when during an unexpected snowfall — there hadn’t been snow in London for well over a decade — all the cars in our area were stuck, and the drivers, many of them mothers with children, stranded. It was obvious that the boys on their way home from the nearby secondary school loved all this — for once, wider society actually needed them.

Having a job, going to an office and earning money — and with it the opportunity to work, and earn, even more — gives teenagers a role. If they don’t turn up for work, the company suffers; if they don’t turn up to school, it doesn’t make the slightest difference except for the purpose of government statistics.

Children often have an instinctive sense of when adults are giving them BS and so while official orthodoxy is that school is good for everyone, loads of kids know this isn’t true — and indeed many economists and experts suggest that education has very little impact on GDP. Among others, Bryan Caplan, author of The Case Against Education and Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann in The Education Myth both argue that education is an overrated part of economic development.

Various studies show that extended education is not good for all, and that most of the benefits of both secondary and tertiary education are down to signalling — i.e. it’s worth having an education certificate simply because everyone else has one, rather than because it actually improves your life.

Likewise more years at school don’t have much impact on people’s life outcomes, and while education reduces crime it’s largely because it warehouses potential offenders for the time being. Evidence from China suggests that adding an extra year of schooling does little to improve anyone’s lives, while an extra year’s schooling in Turkey has precisely 0% impact on men’s income.

So why keep all kids in school, when instead they could be learning how to be useful, earning and saving, and developing at a crucial stage in their lives?

Whenever a teenager gets involved in something bad it’s often lamented that the kids grow up too soon these days, exposed to violence or sex at too early an age; but maybe we don’t allow some of them to grow up quickly enough. Set the kids free.

Now, more than 1,000 breeding pairs are believed to live in the Chiltern hills and around. When I drive back to my parents’ place in Oxford, I often see 20 or 30 between crossing the M25 and reaching the Oxford ringroad. They ride the thermals gracefully, looking for roadkill. In the Cotswolds once I saw one taking off a few yards in front of me; it had been feasting on the carcass of a fox, I think. It was huge, like an eagle, and thrilling to see.

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Why wilding should make our hearts sing

By Amy-Jane Beer

Red kite are not the only successful reintroduction of a formerly native British species. In Scotland, the sea eagle — also driven to extinction in this country 100 or so years ago — was reintroduced in the 1990s, and have started to breed. Ospreys returned naturally to Scotland and have been reintroduced to England, after being driven extinct in the 19th century.

Perhaps more spectacularly, beavers have been reintroduced in Gloucestershire, Devon and Scotland; they had been extinct in Britain for at least 250 years. Their revival has changed the waterways around there: the dams they build filter the rivers, removing silt from the water; they create big, still pools that fish, insects and amphibians can breed in and waterbirds feed from. The Devon reintroduction saw a 1,000% increase in frogspawn levels and a growth in local bat populations (they feed on the insects that bred in the ponds). Beaver dams also reduce the risk of flooding further downstream, by breaking up the flow of the river.

These species, though, could be just the start. Beavers, red kite, ospreys and sea eagles are all relatively recent losses to Britain’s natural heritage: we were, once, a nation of incredible wildlife. Perhaps it is time to be more ambitious about what we bring back.

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Will Brexit leave us dining on rat poo?

By Tom Chivers

Ross Barnett’s marvellous book The Missing Lynx tells the story of Britain’s lost megafauna, and it gets much more dramatic than red kite and beavers. There were hyenas in Yorkshire, which coexisted with humans. There were cheetahs, and lions (the bones of which were found when Trafalgar Square was being excavated); there were giant Irish elk, six foot tall at the shoulder. Mammoth, of course. Woolly rhinos. Sabre-toothed cats. Aurochs: vast great deadly wild oxen that could look a tall man in the eye. Hippos in the Thames.

Humans killed them all, as we did in so many places, all over the globe. Clever, cooperative tribes of humans, innovating in spectacular ways — developing lethal spear-throwers that could put a killing length of sharpened wood through an elk’s shoulder-blade from a safe distance, or driving great herds of animals off cliffs and harvesting the bodies. Barnett thinks that much of the northern part of the northern hemisphere was essentially a mammoth-based economy. People have tried to argue that all the extinctions were due to ancient climate change, but they all happen in a geological eyeblink after humans reach a new area; the evidence strongly suggests that we did it.

I don’t think anyone would suggest that we reintroduce hippos to the Thames now, or hyenas to Yorkshire. They may have coexisted with humans, but they were driven locally extinct around 10,000 years ago.

Other species, though, were more recent victims. The lynx — a beautiful big cat, shy, about the size of a labrador, with gleaming eyes and a shimmering, multicoloured coat — still lived in the forests of Britain around the time of the Norman conquest. There are serious conversations being had about reintroducing it here.

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By Simon Cooke

Of course, reintroducing red kite (diet: mainly dead squirrels), ospreys (fish) and beavers (mainly tree bark) is one thing. Sea eagles, too, although they are rumoured to take young lambs and are therefore not universally popular with Scottish farmers. Making the case for apex predators may be more difficult.

I think it is a case worth making, though. There’s reason to think that reintroducing lynx would be a popular move. Barnett, in his book, says that about 65% of poll respondents were in favour. There’s no risk to humans — Eurasian lynx are still extant from Norway to Siberia, including large parts of western Europe, and there have been no recorded attacks. Recent reintroductions to Switzerland have been a success.

We could go even further, though. If lynx are reintroduced successfully, and Britons grow used to sharing these islands with proper predators again — not just foxes and wildcats and birds of prey — then we could think bigger. Wolves lived in Britain, not that long ago. They probably went extinct around 1700; there were deliberate drives to kill them.

They are widely feared. The Big Bad Wolf, and so on. But again, the risk to humans is minimal. There are a few attacks reported every year worldwide, very occasionally fatal, but humans and wolves coexist in huge areas of both the New and Old Worlds; the number of attacks is tiny.

Wolves are generally shy of humans. There are thousands living in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Russia and elsewhere. In some of those countries, they are protected as endangered species; in others, they are not, and in Bulgaria they have a bounty on their heads as though it were the late middle ages all over again. (In Russia, wolves in the south-east are under pressure and occasionally eaten by the increasing tiger population, because Russia is extremely hardcore.)

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By Tom Chivers

Sea eagles, ospreys and beavers have driven tourism to the areas they are introduced; people would be even more likely to visit for the chance of seeing a lynx, or a pack of wolves. And just as beavers have improved their local ecosystems, so would these great, beautiful creatures. Much of Britain has a problem with deer — they have no natural predators, so they need to be culled; if they are not, they damage young trees. Apex predators — lynx and wolves — would help reduce their numbers, improve the health of Britain’s forests and increase the variety of species that live in those forests. An ecosystem with no top predators will always be incomplete. And healthier forests capture more carbon; it would have genuine global benefits.

There are obvious risks — not to human life, really, but to farm animals. There are ways around that, though. Barnett suggests that compensation for farmers could be established — the government could simply pay a bounty for each sheep mauled, but a better way to do it would be to pay farmers for keeping areas of their land wild and suitable for these incredible creatures. (This could actually be a benefit of Brexit, if we change our system of farming subsidies once we leave the Common Agricultural Policy.)

Still, it won’t be universally popular. I spoke to a former Forestry Commission worker in Scotland recently who was unconvinced that beavers had been a good thing, because their dams flooded some fields; farmers are nervous about lynx. The wild boar that have been accidentally reintroduced in Scotland and the Forest of Dean are controversial — they cause damage to gardens and farmland, although they also improve forest health and attract tourists. But broadly speaking, the reintroductions that have already happened have been successful, and Britain’s wildlife — and humans — benefit from them.

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By Peter Franklin

I’ve written this from quite a stark, utilitarian point of view — it will improve ecosystems, attract tourism — but I also think there’s something good for the soul, something quasi-spiritual, about watching big animals in the wild. Those red kite make my heart leap when I see them, and that’s when I’m looking out of my windscreen while driving a pair of fractious children down the M40.

Years ago, I did a safari in the Kruger National Park in South Africa, and saw lions eating a giraffe, a jaguar sitting quietly in a tree, elephants and rhinos and hippos, and it was one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever done. Imagine seeing comparably cool animals in Scotland or Northumbria, the thrill of knowing you share your home with these majestic things.

So red kite and beavers are just the start. Let’s go for lynx, and if lynx work out, wolves. And then, maybe, if wolves work out, one day we could be really brave, and reintroduce bears.

On top of that, the soaring cost of tuition places a disproportionate debt burden on poorer students, who are less likely to have help with living expenses from family; they graduate £57,000 in debt, compared with the £42,000 debt of their better-off peers.

We need a new approach. One that will reduce the total number of graduates to better fit the UK’s employment requirements, while levelling the economic playing field between rich and poor and improving the quality, attitude and employability of new graduates.

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Why liberal feminists don't care

By Mary Harrington

My radical policy would make university degrees fully government-funded, including living expenses, but make them contingent — for the entire UK student body — on prior successful completion of two years’ public service, either in the military or (for conscientious objectors) the NHS.

To make it work, we would need to widen the definition of military service beyond the frontline. After basic training, young people might drive minibuses on unprofitable public transport routes in rural locations, help fill in potholes, or provide Meals on Wheels to the elderly. It would be important to provide accommodation — as much for esprit de corps as to act as a social leveller — as well as food and a small stipend. There should be no impediment to public service on grounds of economic background.

For egalitarian reasons, it would be essential to ensure service tasks were assigned rather than chosen, as a precaution against the sharp-elbowed middle classes pulling strings to ensure their offspring received a cushy posting. And the scheme would need to offer roles compatible with mobility issues or other access requirements, for young people with disabilities.

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By James Kirkup

Why do it? As things stand, academics describe a student cohort that has been so over-praised by parents and teachers that they believe themselves automatically entitled to good grades. They approach education as paying customers, which feeds the entitlement, and drives grade inflation. Eliminating the consumer dynamic would be the first step in getting higher education back on track.

The MoD’s Army Leadership Code describes its values as “Courage, Discipline, Respect for Others, Integrity, Loyalty and Selfless Commitment”: two years spent internalising these values, while rising early and doing as you’re told would be good preparation for taking undergraduate life seriously. And a little practice in the art of temporarily subordinating personal desires in pursuit of the public good might not hurt either.

It would put some off applying. This is no bad thing. It would be a quick and easy way of reducing our surplus of graduates. Filtering out those young people without the character to complete two years’ public service would also raise the calibre of those graduates, ensuring they’re ready for the challenging world of work.

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By Peter Franklin

The policy might also improve access to top universities for the less well-off, by deterring their more highly-strung and overparented middle-class peers from applying. Research has linked helicopter parenting — a distinctly middle- and upper-class behaviour — to increased neediness and lack of self-reliance in students. Requiring young people to commit two years to communitarian service would either reduce the number of fragile middle-class university students in favour of their more self-reliant, working-class peers — or else cure them of their fragility. Either outcome would be a net benefit to universities, which are currently experiencing a crisis of mental health issues as well as student entitlement.

The policy would doubtless cause outrage. But an inverted version of it already exists in the UK, in the form of the Army Undergraduate Bursary — which offers up to £24,000 paid throughout your degree, conditional on completing a subsequent year at Sandhurst and three years’ service as an officer. Similar schemes to the UK army bursary operate in many countries, including Turkey and the USA.

Objectors might also complain that housing, feeding and paying two million young people for an extra two years, on top of funding their university education, would be prohibitively expensive. But the outlay needed to facilitate two million young people performing public service would hardly be money wasted.

In any case, higher education is subsidised by the taxpayer even now to the tune of nearly £4bn. If we take into account the fact that only 17% of students are ever forecast to pay back their full student loan, this figure is much higher. The government is just keeping that £100bn of mostly bad debt off the books. Why not re-route it?

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Why 'separate but equal' is a fraud

By Polly Mackenzie

At present, the system of tuition positions higher education as a transactional good, sold to student consumers on the basis that the ‘graduate premium’ outweighs the cost of loan repayment and as such is worth the investment. This approach has been justified on the basis that it has improved access. But so far, marketising higher education has neither improved the quality of degrees — quite the opposite — nor done much for young people’s employment prospects apart from raising the bar for the ‘graduate premium’.

Restoring full funding for university education in exchange for civic participation would level the socioeconomic playing field for applicants, and also reintroduce an older understanding of education not as a consumer good but as a public good that benefits all of us. It would also underline the fact that the purpose of higher education is not personal enrichment but to train the future leaders of society for a lifetime of service.

Those wishing to embark on a life of leadership and public service should see no hardship in performing some of this upfront, while those seeking only their own selfish advancement would be welcome to study overseas, at their own expense.

“Will you let them drink and smoke, too?”

This is usually the first response I get when I propose enfranchising all citizens under the age of 18. The answer is, obviously, no. We have laws that prevent young people from drinking and smoking because these things are harmful. Voting, by contrast, is not harmful; drawing an X on a ballot paper is substantially less dangerous than inhaling toxic smoke into your lungs.

Before you start freaking out, let’s be clear: this wouldn’t mean the sudden election of a government that promised free ponies and paintball instead of the NHS. At the last count, 17% of the population were under the age of 18, and I am not proposing that only children should vote — simply that they deserve to have a voice in shaping our shared future.

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By James Kirkup

Still, there are two significant arguments for continuing to deny children the vote. Firstly, that they are too young to understand politics, or the consequences of their decisions; secondly, that they are vulnerable to outside influence, and will just vote the way their parents do — or against their parents to spite them.

The first is a reasonable concern. But we have already set, as a nation, an age threshold at which we expect children to understand the law sufficiently to be able to abide by it. It’s the age of 10: the age of criminal responsibility in England. From 10, a child is required to follow the law, and if they do not, they can be punished by the state.

How can we argue that a 10-year-old has the judgement required to understand the law and the consequences of breaking it — and then argue that a 10-year-old doesn’t have the judgement required to understand democracy or the consequences of voting? If you have to follow the law, you should have a role in making it.

And until you reach that age of 10, your parents should be able to cast your vote as your proxy. Clearly, a small baby would struggle to exercise their vote directly, given their basic inability to control a pencil. But a parent with a second vote, to cast in their child’s name, could be expected to consider that child’s interests, and talk to them about their choices and ideas from an early age.

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By Tim Bale

Of course, this brings us to the argument of undue influence. Whether the parent is directly casting their child’s vote or not, we can expect the family environment to shape a child’s choices. But then, you could say the same thing about any one of us. None of our votes really make sense, from first principles. We all have stories and experiences that shape our political identities — and the votes we cast from election to election. If some children vote the way their parents do, that makes them no different from millions of adults. If some children vote to spite their parents, the same is true of some adults.

If some children vote without really understanding the facts; if some spoil their ballot paper with a drawing of a penis; if some vote for the candidate whose surname starts with A simply because they’re at the top of the list; if some vote for the party with the prettiest logo: they are simply following in the footsteps of generations of voters before them.

There is no test of wisdom or thoughtfulness for over-18s. A distant relation of mine voted Leave in the referendum convinced that Turkey had already joined the EU. She was wrong. But she still had the right to vote: the right to be wrong, and the right to be heard anyway. We shouldn’t use age as a proxy for seriousness: we should enfranchise every citizen, wise or foolish, young or old. The right to vote should be inalienable.

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By Polly Mackenzie

Now, there is a toxic movement, in particular on the Remain side of the Brexit debate, to celebrate the idea that Leave voters — and social conservatives more broadly — are dying off. That’s evolved in some places to proposals to strip the vote of the over-70s, arguing that they don’t have a stake in the future, in the way young people do. These arguments are repugnant. Every citizen has a right to their vote, no matter their age.

But we do have a problem when the electoral system is inherently biased towards the 83% of the population who are over 18. By granting the vote to all children — exercised by proxy until they reach 10 — we would simply rebalance the system to recognise that all citizens are equal.

But of course, that’s a general principle, not an absolute rule. There are some things that should be prohibited, because the overwhelming evidence shows that even with all the information and the freedom to choose, we end up with results bad enough to justify intervention that limits the actions of individuals or groups.

That is the basis for my conclusion that it’s time to ban men.

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The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

To be clear, I’m not advocating the elimination of my sex, nor that we be proscribed by law. My proposal is a modest one. I think men should be barred from holding elected office. Not forever, mind. This would just be a temporary measure, lasting perhaps 10 years — enough to cover three general elections under the infamous Fixed Term Parliaments Act.

At those elections — as well as those for devolved assemblies, local councils and mayoralties — only female candidates would be eligible to stand. The electorate would be unchanged: I have no desire to see men disenfranchised, not least because female politicians would need to compete for their votes. But for that decade, politics would be for women only. Men would be left to spectate, comment and criticise — and perhaps argue for faster progress towards the day when they too could wield power.

That’s the policy. What on earth is my justification for it? Why would anyone, let alone a man, propose such a thing?

Well, to go back to my initial premise: look at the evidence. We men have had an awful long time to get this right, to use our freedom and power to run things in the interests of the whole country. Have we taken that opportunity? Of course not. We’ve messed things up, and unless something radical happens, we’ll keep on doing so.

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How the Lib Dems could seize power

By James Kirkup

I barely have room to list all the ways in which we’re screwing up. Maybe I should start with the most visceral — and talk about how we abuse and kill women. Even the official statistics, which inevitably exclude abuse that isn’t reported, show that 1.3 million women experienced domestic abuse last year. That’s 8% of the adult female population. Those figures include 139 women killed by men, who are generally partners and relatives.

This should be a scandal, a matter of outrage. Likewise the horrible, insidious trend towards men killing women then claiming in court that it was “a sex game gone wrong” — and sometimes getting away with it. Perhaps in some cases that’s true, but if so it’s the poisonous fruit of a rancid online culture of pornography that depicts choking women during sex as normal.

Surely though, not all men do this stuff? Surely we’re talking about a minority? Yes indeed. But where’s the male outrage, the anger from the majority? Why is it that the only politicians and journalists who regularly yell from the rooftops about these horrors are women? The fact that domestic violence and abuse are still often confined to the subdivision of “women’s issues” is proof that men have failed to use centuries of accrued power and authority wisely.

Another exhibit: the women’s prison estate, a collection of women most of whom are victims of abuse and who pose a greater threat to themselves than society. It should shame us to lock them up and worsen their lives, but again: how many men say so?

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By Paul Embery

More evidence for the prosecution can be found across the economy. Girls beat boys at school, but start to fall behind at university. Even when male and female careers begin on equal wages, the man will, on average, out-earn the woman within 10 years. The burdens of childcare and elderly parents fall on women, who don’t just suffer lower wages but smaller pensions and often worse health.

(This stuff is bad for men as well as women. I know several psychiatrists who think that male suicide — the biggest killer of men under 45 — is tied up with rigid ideas of male responsibilties to earn and succeed at work. If it were easier for more women to balance family and career, more men might do the same — and fewer men might die.)

Again, the failure to act — the collective male failure to resolve problems that are well-known and soluble but which happen to fall most heavily on women — is a sign of the failure of male leadership.

Put simply, if it were men being intimidated, beaten and murdered; men being demeaned and abused as entertainment; men whose careers were being routinely stunted — would successive parliaments mostly composed of men have done so little in response?

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Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

This isn’t just about policies and laws. It’s about culture too, about the messages sent from those who run the country and dominate the debate to the rest of us. Imagine what the country would start to feel like if it became utterly routine, not worthy of note, to listen to a news report or political debate in which every voice was female. What message would that send to a generation of children about gender roles and aspiration? We’ve had two female prime ministers to date and those exceptions are effectively used to tell girls that if they’re truly exceptional too, they can get to the top. What if that wasn’t exceptional but normal, boring even?

Would we get better government, better politicians, if we banned men from high office? Of course not; women are no more intelligent, sensible, competent or rational than men. This isn’t some soapy attempt to argue that all-female governments would be kinder to the weak, more generous to fluffy animals and less likely to go to war than those run by men. Female politicians are as capable of vice and virtue as male ones. They’d screw up too, then answer for their failure. That accountability is the bedrock of elective politics.

Which is precisely why we men should step back and give them the chance to do so. We’ve ballsed things up, for women and ourselves. Time to give up and let someone else try to do better.