Johann Hari

And now for the great news – from Africa. Yes, I know that seems like a perverse opener, with Robert Mugabe perpetuating his oozing Alzheimocracy, a looming famine in Ethiopia, and international peacekeepers failing to prevent genocidal massacres in Darfur. The cynics who jeer that Africa is a black hole for help feel they have the wind of no-change at their back. But some time next year – or soon after – a beautiful moment in the history of humanity will come to pass on the Western shores of Africa. An excruciatingly painful disease that has stalked humans for millennia will end – forever.

The story of how this came to pass begins just twenty years ago, in a tiny village in Ghana. The former US President Jimmy Carter stumbled across a crying woman who appeared to be cradling a baby to her right breast. He stepped forward to talk to her – but he reeled back when he realised a three-foot-long worm was inching its way out of her nipple, at the centre of an engorged purpling breast. It was one of eleven guinea worms taking a month or more to crawl out of the young woman’s body that summer. One was burrowing out from her vagina. The woman couldn’t speak; she could only howl.

She was living through a guinea worm infestation. One survivor, Hyacinth Igelle, says: “The pain is like if you stab somebody. It is like fire. You feel it even in your heart.” After seeing some victims, the journalist Nicholas Kristof called it “torture by worms.” The worm’s head causes a blister that often develop deadly tetanus; if the victims survive, they can starve because they have not been able to farm their fields for months. Most scholars now believe that when the Old Testament Israelites were afflicted by “fiery serpents” in their flesh, they were meeting this worm for the first time.

When Jimmy Carter first encountered the disease, some 3.5 million people were riddled with guinea worm. Tens of millions of people had endured it, from Europe to Asia; it was regarded as an intractable, eternal problem. The idea of eradicating it was mocked as “utopian”. But today, the number has been slashed by more than 99 percent. Fewer than 10,000 people in a few remaining pockets of Ghana and Sudan still suffer – and soon, there will be none at all.

This achievement is all the more startling when you realise there is no vaccination or cure for the disease. Guinea worm eggs are carried on the backs of a tiny water-flea, and glugged down by humans with their drinking water. The eggs hatch in your abdomen, growing over a year to three feet in length – and then they begin to dig their way out. They can choose any point of your body to emerge from: your eyeball, your penis, your feet, destroying as it goes. As it does, it spews millions more eggs into any water it comes into contact with. Once the worm is within you, the only help doctors can offer is to wait until it bursts out and wrap the worm’s head round a stick to try to very gently tug it out a little faster.

But you can stop people contracting the parasite in the first place – and Carter has, on a massive scale. The practices are startlingly simple: the distribution of egg-catching water filters that cost around sixty pence each, and mass education about why they matter. But it took a vast effort to get them in place, including brokering a ‘Guinea Worm Ceasefire’ to the Sudanese civil war that allowed aid workers free access. So Carter raised $225m from governments and private donors, and used it to drive the worms off the earth one village at a time. At 84, he is determined to outlive the last of these little parasites.

This Carter-led programme is sending guinea worm to the mourner-free graveyard of eradicated diseases, along with smallpox and (soon) polio. But it doesn’t end there. In a cynicism-drugged age, it is a reminder of what we can do, if we have the determination. Our governments are very good at building Weapons of Destruction – but for a fraction of the cash they could unleash Weapons of Mass Salvation, eradicating disease after disease. This programme should flush away the glib cynicism about aid to Africa along with the worm-eggs. It proves money from outside, if used intelligently, can massively improve the lives of ordinary Africans. Indeed, it can achieve goals that seemed at the start like utopian fantasies; it can reverse the curses of millennia.

One day soon, the last guinea worm will burrow out of its last victim. I want to take all those shallow, callow contrarians who say aid to Africa is worthless to witness that moment – and see if they still shrug quite so casually.

What made you gay? Was it a gay gene buried in your brain, an overbearing mother, or watching Jason Donovan on Neighbours at a formative age? The debate about the causes of homosexuality is one of the great detective stories of our time. Today, hundreds of scientific Poirots and Miss Marples are working in laboratories across the world, scouring over the strangest of clues: gay sheep, boys born with tiny penises, the shape of straight men’s fingers, and the sweet symmetry of your brain. It seems we could be on the brink of an answer – and there is a dark possibility we will end up wishing we hadn’t asked the question in the first place.

But before we plunge into this argument, I have to offer a health warning. Too often, this debate proceeds on the assumption that if we find out homosexuality is innate or genetic, it is morally acceptable – but if we find out it is the product of social factors, it is a “choice” and therefore immoral. This skews the scientific discussion from the start, with gay people cheering on the scientists who say it’s all innate, and the homophobes cheering on the scientists who say it might not be.

The truth is: there’s nothing wrong with being gay, whatever the cause. Gay people need to base our claim to acceptance on one claim and one claim only: consensual sex is harmless (and usually fun). Adults can shag whoever they like. End of story. The debate about what makes us gay is fascinating – but it isn’t a debate about whether we have a right to live our lives freely. That debate is over among all decent people. We do not have to reopen it by gambling our claim for tolerance on a scientific debate that hasn’t ended yet. This is an article about the science – the morality has been settled.

So – what does the science say, and where could it take us? For most of the twentieth century, it worked on the assumption that homosexuality was caused by your upbringing. It took its cue from Sigmund Freud, pappy of psychoanalysis, who announced being gay was a result of having an overbearing bitch-mother who forced you to keep identifying with her. This meant you couldn’t go through the healthy process of transferring your allegiance to your father like all post-Oedipal straight boys should.

There was never any evidence for this theory, just Freud’s beautiful prose-poetry and a few ambiguous “case studies.” But variations of your-mama-did-it lingered on through the decades, dominating the way many people thought about being gay.

Then, in 1991, there was a bomb-blast. The neuroscientist Simon LeVay announced he had found a physical difference between the brains of gay men and straight men. By studying the brains of corpses, he said he had discovered that a bundle of neurons called the anterior hypothalamus is bigger in straight men than in gays. Size does matter.

Then, in 1993, the geneticist Dean Hamer went further and announced he had discovered a “gay gene.” He said a little clump on the X chromosome called Xq28 was the key to human sexuality; if it’s turned on, you have a gay; if it’s turned off, you have a straight.

Gay people across the world started to celebrate; homophobes started to grumble. But the scientific evidence soon started to fall apart. For gay brains, LeVay had been using the corpses of AIDS victims – and some scientists thought it could be the AIDS that shrunk their anterior hypothalamus. Meanwhile, geneticists said any claim to a gay gene was wildly overblown. When scientists repeated the ‘gay gene’ studies, they couldn’t find much correlation with sexuality.

So were we back to square one? Not quite. There was a renewed interest in the physical causes (if any) of homosexuality – and a cascade of studies has tumbled out since.

One of the most striking discoveries is that gay people have differently-shaped brains. Straight women have symmetrical brains, with two halves roughly the same size, while straight men have a slightly larger right hemisphere. So where do we fit in? Last year, researchers in Sweden found that men’s brains match the neat symmetry of straight women, while lesbians’ brains have the same swollen right hemisphere as straight men.

But this isn’t the open-and-shut proof that we are born different that it first seems. Brains are not unchangeable and fixed from birth; they develop differently according to how you use them. If you go blind as an adult and then learn Braille, the part of your brain that governs your right index finger will get much bigger. If you are a Buddhist monk and meditate all day, the part of your brain that controls deep concentration will become buffed up. It could be being gay that changes our brains, instead of the other way round.

Hmmmm. The best evidence suggesting there is some as-yet-unknown genetic component to being gay came elsewhere, when scientists studied gay twins. (No, not the way you study gay twins…) Professors Richard Pillard and J. Michael Bailey found that if one identical twin is gay, the other has a 50 percent chance of being gay too. But among fraternal twins – who grew up in the same womb and the same home but aren’t genetically identical – the rate is just 20 percent. (Among the population at large, it’s 4 percent.)

But how does the difference occur? Scientists were still looking, bemused, for clues. There was a series of dispersed facts, but little coherence.

We know for sure that being gay runs in families: around 12 percent of brothers of gay men are themselves gay. But how could there be an evolutionary advantage to a sexuality that makes you far less likely to have kids? Wouldn’t it just die out? Italian scientists cracked this question last year when they stumbled across proof the female relatives of gay men are more fertile than other women. So it seems although these genes are evolutionarily useless if passed on to a man, they are a real evolutionary advantage if passed on to a woman – hence their survival generation after generation.

But the biggest advances in understanding what makes people gay haven’t come from genetics at all. Instead, they have come from looking at what happens to a foetus as it develops in the womb. It is in the nine months of baking that the biggest factors determining sexuality seem now to lie. It ain’t your genes that count; it’s what they are marinated in before you’re born.

All foetuses develop as females at first, whatever their tiny XX or XY chromosomes suggest. You only start to become male when, at a certain point in pregnancy, the foetus’ brain is masculinized by a flood of sex hormones. Most scientists now believe among gay people, this flood of hormones seems to have worked differently. Gay men seem to have been whacked with a great tide of prenatal androgens; lesbians seem to have been gasping for them.

How do we know? There is an accumulation of scattered evidence, rather than a single magic bullet. The first hint this is true comes with a strange phenomenon called the Big Brother effect. It’s simple: each older brother you have makes you more and more likely to be gay. A fourth son has a ten percent chance of being gay, compared to a four percent chance for a first son. At first, it was thought this might be to do with socialization. Are younger brothers maybe more coddled by their mothers, or more shunned by their fathers? But it turns out adopted brothers don’t have any effect on your sexuality at all. It is something that happens in your mother’s womb.

But what? A study from Brock University in Canada argued that a woman’s body sees a male foetus as “foreign”, and has an immune reaction against it. The womb remembers this weird assault, so the next time a male foetus comes along, it responds more efficiently, with a quicker or heavier dose of androgens.

The second hint is very different. At the University of Oklahoma, Professor William Reiner was studying boys born with severely small or no penises. Almost always, they have been castrated, given a rudimentary vagina, and raised as girls, despite their male chromosomes. But the trouble is – when they grow up, they almost invariably fancy women. Why does this matter? It shows, Reiner says, that “exposure to male hormones in utero dramatically increases the chances of being sexually attracted to females.” And so “we can infer that the absence of male hormone exposure [in the womb] may have something to do with attraction to males as well.”

The third hint comes if you look at your fingers. Women tend to have an index finger that is the same length as their ring finger. Men, by contrast, tend to have an index finger that is shorter than his ring finger. This kicks in early, so we know it is partly due to prenatal factors. A recent study found that lesbians have the same finger-ratio as straight men – but, confusingly, so do gay men. So what does this suggest? The study dug deeper, and found that the more older brothers you have, the more likely you are not just to be gay, but to have a finger-ratio that is like a woman’s. This suggests they have exposed to more prenatal androgen. If it explains why these men’s fingers are more female, couldn’t it explain why their sexuality is more female too?

And there the evidence, for now, peters out. It seems to tell us there is something of a genetic component to being gay, but a stronger component still determined by your life in the womb. Both ‘make’ you gay before you were born. But at the very moment when gay people claim their vindication for this, could we be facing a disaster?

The gay writer William Saletan warns: “The gay cultural war is about to turn chemical.” He says if a genetic/womb-juice explanation turns out to be true, it will be easier and easier to abort gay foetuses. “If the idea of chemically suppressing homosexuality in the womb horrifies you, I have bad news: You won't be in the room when it happens,” he says. “Parents control medical decisions, and surveys indicate that the vast majority of them would be upset to learn that their child was gay. Already, millions are screening embryos and fetuses to eliminate those of the "wrong" sex. Do you think they won't screen for the "wrong" sexual orientation, too? The reduction of homosexuality to neurobiology doesn't mean your sexual orientation can't be controlled. It just means the person controlling it won't be you.”

A series of experiments carried out in the US for the past five years seems to have played to these fears. A team of researchers at Orgeon State University has been investigating the sexuality of sheep, and early on, they proved what every sheep farmer knows: some 8 per cent of rams are gay. When it comes to sex, these woolly homosexuals shun ewes and engage exclusively in ram-on-ram action. They will swiftly pounce on any ram stuck in a fence - the sheep equivalent of the prison showers. The gay lovin' on Brokeback Mountain, it turns out, wasn't confined to Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.

And it gets more intriguing. When the team studied the brains of these gay sheep, they invariably discovered they have a substantially smaller hypothalamus than their straight male siblings. (Echoes of Simon LeVay after all.) This is the first hard scientific evidence of biological differences between gay and straight mammals - and they found these brain differences are already in place in the third trimester of pregnancy. Sheep, at least, are born gay or straight.

But it turns out this epidemic of gay sheep is a serious problem for the agricultural industry. This 8 per cent of rams are not breeding, and a further 8 per cent seem to be asexual. (Many of these might be lesbians who can't express their sexuality. Female sheep always express a desire for sex by just standing still. The world's fields may be littered with millions of lesbian sheep lying still, wondering why their dream-ewe never comes). If 16 per cent of your flock is cruising or day-dreaming, that's a lot of lost money.
That's why the experimenters began to try to something new: making the gay sheep straight. They altered the hormonal levels in their brains and monitored their behaviour. And the result? Many of the gay rams decided a bit of ewe wasn't so bad after all. They began to have heterosexual sex.

This experiment threw up difficulties for all sides of the millennia-long debate about homosexuality. It gives the forces of homophobia plenty to fume against by annihilating their most hoary argument: that gay sex is "unnatural". In reality, we live in - as the scientist Bruce Bagemihl puts it - "a polysexual, polygendered world", where species from beetles to shrews to chimpanzees have a consistent minority who prefer their own sex.

It's everywhere: cow elephants often masturbate each other with their trunks (why has Sir David Attenborough never shown it to us?) and in the Bronx Zoo there is a famous pair of gay penguins called Wendell and Cass who sit on a little rock they believe is their egg. Human homosexuality is just another example of a universal phenomenon.

But the Oregon studies also pose a serious challenge for the supporters of gay rights, like Martina and myself. At the very moment the world is being forced to admit homosexuality is not a choice, this experiment raises the distant prospect that it might become one after all. Gay tennis player Martina Navratilova sees it as a Mengele moment, raising the spectre of altering the brains of gay people to "cure" them of their "disease". The Oregon scientists can now detect gay sheep in the womb. She fears it is not a great leap to detecting gay foetuses in human wombs, and making possible mass homo-cidal abortions.

There is indeed a horrific history of attempts to "cure" gay people. Alan Turing was perhaps the greatest English genius of the 20th century, breaking the Nazis' codes at Bletchley Park and laying the groundwork for the invention of the personal computer. But when his consensual, loving relationship with another man was discovered, he was given an option: go to prison, or take "hormone therapy". He took the "therapy". He became impotent and grew breasts. After a year, he killed himself.
It's not hard to see how a range of violently homophobic rulers from Robert Mugabe to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would not be sheepish about misusing the idea that hormone injections into the brain can alter sexuality, or imploring parents to abort their wicked gay babies. Even though it's a huge leap from sheep to human sexuality, it could unleash another wave of hellish abuse of gay people.

Of course we shouldn’t go too far with the apocalyptic scenarios. The scientific evidence is much more tentative than William Saletan suggests, and identifying gay foetuses isn’t on the immediate horizon – or perhaps any horizon. If we could figure out how to ‘make’ a foetus straight, gay couples could equally figure out how to ‘make’ their children gay; we wouldn’t vanish from the earth.

And Charles Roselli, the Oregon project manager, argues his research could lead to cures for a range of medical conditions that stem from differences in sexual development. Some black and Asian groups understandably objected to research into the genetic differences between ethnic groups, but they have led to breakthroughs in the investigation of diseases that afflict mainly them, such sickle cell anaemia. The path of scientific progress is jagged; this may well produce advances as well as dangers for gay people.

So, what did make you gay, after all that? A dash of genes; a slathering of foetal hormones; and probably a side-dish of your environment too. But we must never add to this menu the red herring of morality. The morality of being gay has nothing to do with this science – and everything to do with the fact that gay sex harms no-one.

At the next election, the Brown stuff will hit the fan – and the British people will elect a blank space. David Cameron is known to us through a series of slick sound-bites and husky-hugging images. But beyond the great PR, what will we be getting? Dylan Jones, editor of GQ, has just published a series of interviews with the Tory leader called "Cameron on Cameron". It's mostly sycophantic swill – "David Cameron is the last person to call himself a genius..." – but if you root around, there are clues to the man behind the hologram.

The PM-in-waiting has built a string of images that create a fictitious David Cameron who is Normal and Nice. Here's an example: last week, Cameron holidayed in Cornwall, and summoned the press to photograph him playing Frisbee while his wife giggled in Boden catalogue swimwear. Then he waved goodbye and went on another holiday – on a £150,000 fleet of private yachts hired by his multi-millionaire father-in-law. Cameron insistently says we should judge him on his personality. He tells Jones, "Character is far more important than policy ... I think you should always trust your gut feelings about everything." So let's look at how the gut that would guide the nation was formed. Cameron tells Jones a series of stories about his own life.

He says he got his first paid job in politics this way: "I saw an advertisement in a careers' bulletin for a job in the Conservative Research Department, and thought, I can give that a go, and that was the job I got ... I went for an interview and I got the job." But he didn't get it – he was turned down. So he got his uncle – the Queen's equerry – to call from Buckingham Palace and suggest his boy get taken on. That's how David got his break in politics.

This privilege has given him a warped view of Britain. For example, Cameron complains that "the papers keep writing that [my wife, Samantha] comes from a very blue-blooded background", but "she is actually very unconventional. She went to a day school." Does going to a day school make you "very unconventional"?

This world-view, although it may seem trivial, is at the core of his policies. He tells Jones: "You could say, in this age we should just tax rich people more, but I don't think that's the right answer." He says "redistribution" has "reached the end of the road". Indeed, Britain's current social stratification is fine: "I don't buy these class things because they are all going." Maybe in his world it is. But the vast sociological evidence is not in dispute: after 30 years of Thatcherism, if you are born poor, you will stay poor; if you are born rich, you will stay rich. Social mobility has stopped. While Cameron sends his spokesmen to emote about this, in conversation with Jones he shrugs it off.

Indeed, Cameron will deepen the gap by dismantling the too-small, too-late Labour programs that are trying to start up mobility again. He would stop the £40-a-week given to poor students to stay on to sixth form. The only "solution" Cameron has presented to growing inequality is to punish the "undeserving" poor.

He will whittle down services largely for the children of single parents – SureStart, Family Credit – to pay for tax breaks for wealthier married couples. He is, Jones notes, a "huge fan" of the Wisconsin model of welfare reform, which cuts off single mothers from benefits for life after two years – whether they are prepared to work or not. Cameron singles out these "time limits" as crucial. He talks about how much he loves Nessa in Gavin and Stacey – but his policies would impoverish her.

The nature of Cameron's salesmanship is even clearer on the issue he used back in 2005 to decontaminate the Tory brand: global warming. He tells Jones he first became alerted to the urgency of this issue by Margaret Thatcher in 1989. But why then was he silent about it for the next 16 years, except to mock wind farms as "giant bird-blenders" and demand "a massive road-building program?" Now photo-ops have done their job, he has reverted.

He delivers a Clarkson-style rant against the pedestrianisation of city centres, and puts a chasm between himself and Zac Goldsmith: "We have a lot of people on the environmental team and he's one of many. He doesn't overpromote himself but I think sometimes people attach an enormous amount to him." Ouch.

On foreign policy, Cameron also lets his teeth show. He calls George Bush "very intelligent", and effectively endorses McCain for President. In 2005, he introduced McCain to Tory conference as "the next President", and now brags: "I'm a huge fan of John McCain and think he would make a great president." He repeats this point several times. About Obama, he says he made "a fantastic speech but I suppose he probably didn't do enough", and stresses "I don't see serious similarities".

Cameron's McCainiac approach to the world was clear in his response to the Georgia conflict. There are many issues where Putin is unequivocally thuggish and should be challenged, including the cyber-war on Estonia, the gas-based bullying of Ukraine, and the sheltering of the man who murdered Alexander Litvinenko on the streets of London. But Cameron, with McCain, has chosen to challenge Putin on one of the very few areas where there are shades of grey: the people of South Ossetia really don't feel part of Georgia, and do want independence backed by Russia. Cameron's extraordinarily aggressive stance on this signals a sabre-rattling foreign policy – when all our sabres are engaged elsewhere.

Yet there is one cause for hope buried in this little book. This man is beatable. the scenario I suggested – a Cameron victory – is not inevitable. His current lead in the polls is built solely on Brown's haplessness and a sweet, fluffy mask that can be tugged off. If Labour gets itself a leader who can expose this spinning dervish – and offer a vision of a fairer, less unequal country – then this book could yet end up where it belongs: in the remainder bin of history.

Does John McCain have a “hidden agenda” to “kill the UN”? That’s what the man who devised McCain’s big set-piece foreign policy proposal says – and he’s delighted it is sailing silently through the Presidential election campaign towards success.

This story begins with a Republican Presidential candidate who, despite the hype, doesn’t seem to know much about foreign affairs. McCain recently talked at length about problems on the “Iraq/Pakistan border”. The countries are a thousand miles apart. Asked how to deal with Darfur, he mused about his desire to “bring pressure on the government of Somalia” Uh – it’s Sudan, Senator McCain. He keeps expressing his desire to build up US relations with Czechoslovakia, a country that hasn’t existed for fifteen years.

But McCain does know one thing: he doesn’t like the United Nations. He championed George Bush’s appointment of John Bolton as the US Ambassador to the UN – precisely because Bolton scorns the UN as “irrelevant” and “a twilight zone”. He even announced “there is no such thing as the United Nations.” It was like appointing Marilyn Manson as Ambassador to the Vatican. This is part of a long seam of thinking on the American right: they opposed the UN’s creation by Franklin Roosevelt as an unacceptable fetter on American power, and have never been properly reconciled to it. Republican congresses have refused to authorise US dues to the UN – so there is now a backlog of $2.8bn outstanding.

Yet McCain cannot oppose the UN outright – because the American people support it so passionately. Contrary to the yokel-myth, a typical opinion poll – by Global Public Opinion – just found that 64 percent of Americans think the UN is doing a good job, compared to just 28 percent who support George Bush. Some 72 percent of Americans want the UN to play a bigger role in their foreign policy.

So McCain has decided to build up an innocuous-sounding alternative called a ‘League of Democracies’. It would be an alliance of countries the US labels democratic that can be used to legitimate US military actions. Charles Krauthammer, the conservative journalist who invented the plan, says: “What I like about it is, it’s got a hidden agenda. It looks as if it’s about listening and joining with allies… except the idea here, which McCain can’t say but I can, is to essentially kill the UN. Nobody’s going to walk out of the UN. There’s a lot of emotional attachment to it in the United States. How do you kill it? You create a parallel institution.” Gradually – over decades – McCain hopes it would make the UN wither away.

Any response needs to start by admitting the UN has serious imperfections. Its structure is absurdly antiquated, with the permanent members of the Security Council frozen as the winners of the Second World War. The Human Rights Commission became an obscenity, offering places to Sudan and Saudi Arabia. There have been some horrible scandals in the past decade: UN peacekeepers who commit sexual abuse still aren’t properly investigated; some of them cut corrupt deals with the murderous Congolese militias they were supposed to stop; and Kofi Annan’s son Kojo was involved in some dodgy dealings. Those of us who support the UN should be more outraged by these failures than anyone else.

But the US government has also committed horrible abuses and been riddled with corruption – and nobody suggests the solution is to abolish it. No: it is to make it live up to its greatest ideals.

In addition to these real flaws, the UN is too often used as a bright blue punch-bag for any old complaint about the state of the world. For example, the UN is routinely blamed for not intervening in Burma or Zimbabwe or Georgia – but the UN has no army of its own; it is only as good as its members. Blaming the UN for these failures is like blaming Wembley Stadium when your football team loses a match. The UN’s positive achievements are almost never mentioned. It was the UN vaccination programme that abolished smallpox – an agonising disease that killed hundreds of millions of people – from the human condition. It was the UN that talked Kennedy and Khrushchev back from the brink when they were poised to incinerate the earth.

The League would not even live up to its limited pro-democracy billing. If you study McCain’s foreign policy statements, you find that for him ‘democracy’ doesn’t mean a free and openly elected leader. No: it means a leader who supports US demands.

You can see this if you compare McCain’s reactions over the past fortnight to two different separatist movements: in Georgia and Bolivia. When it comes to Georgia, he says it is obscene for South Ossetians to secede from a country they never felt part of, and have never been directly ruled by. He orders the people there to decline the support of the foul Putin regime next door and remain glued to the government of Georgia, against their will, for the sake of keeping the country together. However, when it comes to Bolivia, McCain actively encourages separatism. The Bush administration – with McCain’s support – has been lavishing cash on the separatists in the gas-rich regions of this South American country in the hope they will declare independence.

Why does McCain think separatism is “evil” in one part of the world, and “necessary” in the other? The answer lies in the ground. In Georgia, the democratic-but-dissident-bashing government lets the US control the oil and gas that pass through the country. In Bolivia, the impeccably democratic government of Evo Morales wants to control it for himself. He is asking US gas companies to pay their fair share, and using the proceeds to lift his own people out of poverty. For that, he is dubbed “authoritarian”.

So there’s McCain’s definition of democracy underpinning the League: if you let us control your resources, you’re a democracy. If you try to control your resources yourself, you’re a dictatorship. Those of us who believe democracy is the most precious political value of all should be repelled to see it reduced to a propaganda term.

On an increasingly multipolar planet that has begun to disastrously heat up, the need for a shared set of rules we can all push our leaders to obey is greater than ever. But how do we make it work? We need to look beyond the cagey centrism of Obama – still too determined by America’s oil addiction, and the capturing of its politics by big money – to genuinely radical ideas. Albert Einstein thought the UN General Assembly should be directly elected, and it should in turn appoint the Security Council. This would create an even greater pro-UN momentum all over the world; and its peoples would immediately look to it in any crisis. The vision of a Parliament of Man is obviously distant, but it is a shimmering goal to begin slowly progressing towards. John McCain would slap us back in the opposite direction – towards a Hobbesian chaos regulated only by raw American power.

When did it become a ho-ho-ho national joke for our celebrities to beat people up? The nation is chortling today over the photos of a trashed Lily Allen punching a member of the public outside Ronnie Scott’s. Because she was reacting to a rude comment, the on-line message boards are filled with cries of “Get her Lil!”

She’s not alone. Cheryl Cole has been appointed the empathetic new judge on the X-Factor. Nobody seems to think she disqualified herself when she beat up a toilet attendant who merely asked her to pay for some sweets she had taken. As he blacked her eye, Cole called her a “black bitch”. Both John Prescott and Prince Harry were cheered for throwing punches. Alan Davies even bit a homeless man’s ear outside the Groucho Club, but we still see him as a cuddly national treasure.

There have always been violent celebrities – but this snickering applause is a return to an earlier, cruder age. Londoners used to cheer public executions and stroll past heads on spikes on London Bridge, but gradually praise for public violence faded. By the 1960s, if Lulu had beaten up a member of the public or Ronnie Corbett had set upon a tramp, their careers would have been over.

We mustn’t be naïve and nostalgic about that time: Sean Connery could say it was okay to hit a woman to “keep her in line”, and few objected. Wives and gay people were bashed with impunity. I don’t agree with David Cameron that our society is “broken” now but was by implication “fixed” then. But in this one crucial area – public indifference and abuse – we are regressing.

You can see this all around us, usually in more subtle shades. It’s considered normal now to go into a shop and buy something while talking on your mobile, without even acknowledging the minimum wage worker behind the till.

Are there political causes? The period when it was least acceptable to cheer on public aggression was the 1950s to 1970s, when the classes were moving closer together in income and life-chances. But for three decades now we have been pulling apart again: London is more unequal today than at any time since 1937. All over the world, the most unequal cities have the most paranoid and envious cultures. You are more likely to lash out at people you think are nothing like you. Look at Johannesburg or Houston or Sao Paulo: as London mirrors their income distribution, we mirror their aggression.

The solution is partly political – and partly personal. It’s hard to be kind when everyone around you is jostling and yelling and goading-the-Lily – but it is even more essential. When he was dying Aldous Huxley wrote: “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.’” We can all start by acknowledging that a punch in the face is not a punch-line.

This article was also accompanied by some shorter boxes I wrote:

Box II:

Today, I will board a Zeppelin, and sail above London. You might have seen the great floating phallus on the skyline this summer: a company called ‘Star Over London’ is takes you soaring above the streets like a bird for £180. But the reaction of my family has been bizarre. I have vanished to Iraq, Congo and the Gaza Strip, and they were annoyingly unpanicked, muttering “Have a nice time, love.” But yesterday my mother howled: “You’ll be burned! Burned!” Actually, the only Zepellin that ever blew up was 81 years ago; a German company is about to start offering week-long ‘air cruises’. Surely that’s a bit safer than Iraq?

Box II: Coming to a street near you: General Musharaff? Some poor Londoner is about to get the ex-dictator of Pakistan as a neighbour. He will join a long string of dodgy figures: Boris Berezovsky, Thaksin Shinawatra, and the Saudi opposition, for starters. But London has long provided a home for the political outsiders nobody else will take. When we let in Garibaldi and Marx and the ANC, they were despised by many. If we pick and choose too much, we exclude the deserving as well as the foul. The likes of Musharaff are the price we pay for the privilege of hosting the world’s great dissidents too.

Box III: Every Londoner should see the suffocating new Brazilian film Elite Squad – because it exposes the ‘war on drugs’ we too insist on fighting. The movie follows an idealistic recruit to Rio’s drug squad as he realises that even when these cops use extreme violence, they can only ever scratch at the surface of the drug trade. Why? Prohibition hands one of our most profitable industries to gun-toting gangs. It is their best friend. As Milton Friedman said: “Al Capone was the product of alcohol prohibition; the Crips and the Bloods are the product of drug prohibition.” If we hand the supply of drugs to doctors, pharmacists and off-licenses, we can bankrupt the gangs in one swoop.

The next general election is hurtling towards us with the force of a damp sponge. We have, at most, twenty months until Decision Day – but who expects there to be a great fizzing debate? Who thinks we, the people, will have a chance to dig deep into our country’s problems and tell our leaders how to put them right? Nobody. Instead it will be like an X-Factor final in a bad, bad year: which empty shell sounds sweetest? It’s a bleak thought: in one of the world’s oldest democracies, none of us expects democracy to work as it should.

But elections do not have to consist of the airless circulation of soundbites, bike-riding-photo-ops and ignorance. We can do better than this. While we still have time, the three main parties can table a Democracy Bill before parliament – to make sure we can make an informed choice between them. I would put at the very top of the Bill public funding of political parties, and proportional representation. But Cameron’s Tories have combined with a weird coalition of Blairites and Bennites within the Labour Party to thwart both. So let’s stick here to simple measures all three parties could swiftly agree on before the looming election.

Item One: Deliberation Day. The American political scientists Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin have come up with a simple democracy-deepener. Declare every general election a national holiday – and offer every citizen £150 to take part, there and then, in a day of debate, modelled on jury service. In the morning you watch a televised debate between the main political leaders, and then you divide into groups of fifteen who go off for an hour to discuss what you’ve seen. Together, you figure out a series of questions you want to put to local representatives of the political parties – about any issue on earth. Then, when all the groups come together, the ‘foreman’ of your ‘jury’ puts your questions. After lunch, you reassemble to debate what you’ve heard. Then you vote, and take your cheque.

The national political debate would no longer consist of ten-second soundbites. Suddenly, politicians would be able to talk in proper nuanced paragraphs – and we could argue back. We could move beyond sterile slogans – like ‘tough on crime’ or ‘war on drugs’ or (oh God) ‘Forward not Back’ – to try weighing evidence. To Independent readers, this might seem unnecessary, but two-thirds of British people tell pollsters they have not had a single conversation about politics in the past two years. What kind of meaningful democracy can emerge from that? For many, Deliberation Day would be a bottle of Perrier in a political drought, a chance twice a decade to think seriously about the future of their country and their planet.

Item two: ban opinion polls during the election campaign. Great slabs of election coverage is dominated by the horse-race: look at this Mori poll! Have you seen this Harris? People know the result of the election in advance – so they don’t bother to vote. In France, they stamped this out by banning polls in the run-up to voting. It forces the media to cover the issues, and it injects suspense. Their turn-out was almost double ours.

The Democracy Bill also needs to deal with the way we receive our information inbetween elections. Put bluntly: newspapers – the most sophisticated way of analysing the news – are sickly, with ageing and dwindling readerships. In the US, they are dying. At times, being a newspaper journalist can feel like being a coal miner in 1975. While blogs can be great, they depend on newspapers doing the heavy lifting of sending costly reporters out to conduct investigations. If newspapers die, a large part of our democratic debate dies with it.

So… Item Three: In the US, the president of the Carnegie Corporation, Vartan Gregorian, has proposed a solution: a law requiring universities to add a small fee to their students’ tuition, to pay for a daily newspaper subscription of the student’s choice. It would help inform young voters and get many into the ink-habit, and it would give newspapers access to a lucrative new demographic. Poor students don’t pay fees, so their bill would be picked up by the state. As an added bonus, papers would be pressured to be more progressive, since this vast new student market tilts left.

We can take these three steroids to bulk-up our democracy now – or we can sit back and snore through another narcoleptic election, only to wake up sometime afterwards with a jolt to ask why our government isn’t doing what we wanted. Isn’t the few billion pounds this Democracy Bill would cost us a price worth paying for a proper participative democracy, rather than this feeble husk?

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