See you next week!
Thanks for taking part today, it’s been really interesting to follow the discussion, which we hope you can continue for a while yet!
We’ll be back next Friday with another of these – in the meantime we’d love to hear from you either in the comments or via email about what you’d like us to talk about above the line. You can contact matthew.holmes@theguardian.com or sarah.marsh@theguardian.com – or indeed look out for us below. We’ll also be happy to try and pass on other points or questions to colleagues at the Guardian, so if there’s a burning issue you want to talk about let us know.
Have a great weekend.
More of your GuardianWitness wild camping images
Some of these pictures shared in response to a gallery we published earlier are really getting us in the mood for leaving the office, and indeed the city for the weekend.
Wild camping on Hunstanton Beach in Norfolk
I love camping and I love the beach so I decided to combine the two one night in May this year. It was lovely falling asleep to the sound of the waves and unzipping the canvas to see the sea just a few metres away!
Wild camping isn't always easy to do in England but if you find somewhere quiet, with little footfall you can do it. Just make sure you leave no trace, arrive late and leave early! It's a truly magical adventure.
Cliff top wild camp
Following a beautiful day walking the South West coastal path, spent a great evening under starry skies wild camping on the cliff top, This was the view I was greeted with in the morning, which was a nice accompaniment to a bacon sandwich.
Would you let a robot look after your child?
This week I attended a robotics exhibition in San Jose, California, where Chinese company Avatar Mind was showing off a “social robot” for children called the iPal. Already in production in China, the company hopes to start selling the humanoid robots in the United States in 2017.
The robot can talk, help with homework, dance, play games, and run a video stream so parents can keep an eye on their children while still at work. The founder told me children ages three to eight would be alright for “a couple of hours” without adult supervision with the iPal.
The idea of a robotic nanny has been around since the Jetsons, but ethicists have raised serious concerns about the potential dangers of leaving children with machines that approximate, but do not match, human interaction.
What do you think? Is leaving a child with a robot better than leaving her in front of the TV? Can a robot parent raise a human child?
Some historical context to the latest discussion below the line on Labour, which you’ve continued to discuss after earlier articles we highlighted.
Discussion of the week on diversity in advertising
Each week we ask our team of moderators to highlight a couple of conversations they thought were particularly interesting or enjoyable.
The first we’ll choose was in reaction to this piece on diversity in advertising, a response to a new H&M advert which, as the author describes with some scepticism, “features Normal Women™ doing Normal Things™”. You can click the links on the comments to follow the full conversation.
‘If this signals a change that includes more diversity going forward, then I’m in’
I thought the ad was gorgeous - sorry. How can you win? You put white thing women in an advert, you're not representative (true). You put a diverse range of women in an advert, you're pandering. True, there was something a bit tokenistic about the campaign, and they could have maybe done it a bit more subtly than having a bunch of "diverse" women in one advert saying "see how diverse we are???"
Then again, you have to start somewhere. If this signals a change in H&M's advertising that includes more diversity in all of their media going forward, then I'm in. Let's just see if they carry it forward.
Oh and on the unrelated paragraph about portraying mixed race couples - I had no idea it produced such backlash. I am a product of a mixed marriage myself, so I am frankly just bemused at furious reactions over mixed marriages and relationships. They've been a fact of life for thousands of years and have been increasingly common and will only get more common as air travel and multi-culturalism increases. I'm not even offended, I just find it highly amusing that there are still people out there who honestly believe that "mixing" is wrong. Next fact of life to get offended over - the sky is blue.
‘The problem is down to agencies insisting on hiring privately educated individuals with degrees’
I work in advertising. I've worked at several agencies and can tell you from experience that the problem is not down to gender imbalance (though this is definitely the case at the very senior levels). Nor is it necessarily down to a lack of ethnic diversity (though this still has a long way to go). In my opinion, the problem is down to these agencies insisting that they generally hire privately educated individuals with degrees. This means that my colleagues are effectively homogenised in their views and experiences. How then, is it possible for them to create ads which resonate with society at large, when they only hire individuals who have been living in a lovely middle-class bubble their whole lives? A lot of the products we make ads for would never be bought by such people. Rather, it's those in the council estates that flock to buy them en masse. And the disconnect between what they want, and what a lot of my colleagues think they want, is marked.
‘This is just the voice in the doorman’s earpiece saying, ‘It’s a flat night, let the people in we wouldn’t last night’.’
Okay, I've watched it. There were no women on the verge of obesity in there; there was no depressed and solitary-looking woman, there wasn't a woman with alopecia or rosacea. No one with MS, no amputee. I know why, you know why, so what's with the celebration of bullshit from H&M and Dove? This is just the voice in the doorman's earpiece saying, 'It's a flat night, let the people in we wouldn't last night.'
What do you think of David Shrigley's fourth plinth?
On Thursday Sadiq Khan unveiled the latest piece to occupy the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London – a seven-metre high bronze thumbs up by Manchester-based artist David Shrigley.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones calls it “phallic, ungainly and hysterically strident” – but gives a four star review.
We can go one better than an art critic. Reader Aubrey Leahy will be better known to many commenters and GuardianWitness contributors by his username on site: fourthplinth.
How could we not ask him for his thoughts?
Of his username he says: “Since I was a 14-year-old sea cadet in 1958, and part of a guard of honour celebrating Trafalgar Day, Trafalgar Square has always held a particular sweet spot and place in my heart.”
So what are his first impressions of the new piece occupying the plinth?
Perhaps thumbs up gives a nod to the fast-fading cheerful cockney spirit? It does seem to suit the plinth and convey the upbeat spirit of London. It’s certainly in keeping with the fact that each sculpture has been different. (My all time favorite remains Yinka Shonibare’s Ship in a Bottle).
I suspect it won’t be long before it gets a hat or a traffic cone added (as Nelson wore for the Jubilee). The main problem for me is am very familiar with another similar sculpture of a thumb which this reminds me of (at Clos Pegase winery in the Napa Valley). It would be awfully unoriginal to give it a thumbs up, so will instead give it a pig Latin Supra Pollice Verso.
So there we go – what do you think?
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Mental health and young women … what's going on?
Dr Liz England comments on a story out this week showing mental illness has soared among young women. She responds to the question – why are women more affected?
Women have always felt more comfortable coming forward and I don’t think men self-harm as much. Instead, they tend to turn to other things to ease their distress, such as alcohol. That’s why it’s important to have gender specific services. We are seeing more women with post traumatic stress disorder from domestic violence, after childbirth and from sexual violence they experience in relationships. Those sort of conditions need a different approach to ones we have as standard at the moment.
Similarly with men a different approach is also needed, and for them we need to make services and treatment accessible. We know that middle-aged men have the highest suicide rate, so what are we doing to get that group into treatment and support earlier. It’s good that we have identified these new statistics as if we know about these problems then we can plan services better and think, why is this happening?
Mental health problems are increasingly (there’s lots of reasons for this). I worry, in particular, about the impact of the media and social media. People are seeing things like self-harm on social media dn it makes it more accessible and we need to be really alert and able to talk to our children. We need to have that conversation around those issues and make sure they are safe.
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Pictures of the week
Picture editor Joanna Ruck shares some of her images of the week.
First, the images from Aleppo have been particularly hard to look at this week and very graphic and distressing. There’s a gallery of images from Aleppo you can see here:
As a counterpoint to those images, it’s always nice to look at a panda falling over ...
But the picture that caused us the most amusement this week was Jeremy Corbyn’s photocall as he arrived to give his speech to the Labour Party conference. We couldn’t decide if he’d accidentally walked onto the set of a hair commercial or looked like a headmaster on A-level results day.
Oh dear – lots of woe here. At least it’s Friday, people! (sorry weekend workers ...)
What makes a horrible boss?
Over delegation and micro management. We've just said goodbye to someone who took delegation to the extreme and palmed off everything they did not feel like doing. For them it was all about hand picking the tasks that gave them the right exposure and allowing plenty of time for telling everyone just how busy they were. The unfortunate staff under her were saddled with a lot of the grunt work and tasks above their pay grade, for which they recieved nothing but constant harrassment from the boss to get the work done. She walked away with a fat bonus and no parting recommendation to management that her staff receive similar.
The worst bosses are the ones who demand you get some piece of work done by last week, and then call a 5 hour meeting to discuss how all the work is going. Sigh.
* Liars
* Those more concerned with their careers than their staff
* Those who pass blame down
* Those who steal the achievements of those below them
* Micro-managers
* Those who are too afraid to delegate
* Those who pass on responsibility but not the authority to deliver
That's my list over the years and what I say to all my staff is that they all see these people, these horrible bosses, so why therefore do so many when their time comes, behave in the same manner.
Basically if you wouldn't like it going to yourself then don't do it to others.
That being said I've met far more bloody horrible staff in my time than managers, but then there are more staff and the managers unfortunately have more ability to cause significant damage.
Also one final point to make is that "managers" and not "leaders" and vice versa. Those are two distinct skill sets and being good at one does not mean you will be good at the other.
More on bad bosses ...
Bad bosses - sure.
But I seem to remember that about 1 in 10 of us are bosses - that means that for every nightmare boss there are 10 nightmare employees.
No wonder bosses get a bit frazzled.
Go on then tell us about your boss
She's still at lunch. She left the office just before 11am.
And from the Guardian’s Martin Belam ... who isn’t at lunch but is hard at work in the comments:
Guardian staff I'm nervous about how Matthew and Sarah have changed the theme above the line to having dreadful bosses. What are they trying to say?
Updated
Where are all the women speakers?
As conference season got into its stride, I was caught (read: depressed) by the news that male speakers still outnumber women by two to one on political panels. Women in Public Affairs (WiPA) made the finding after examining the gender ratios at Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat conferences last year.
Based on the coverage this week, you’d be forgiven for thinking Labour’s conference had been all male. Headlines featured man after man, while some analysis of the week managed to feature no women at all (a dead male monarch, however, did warrant a mention).
Let’s take some comfort from Hillary Clinton who, on the other side of the Atlantic, gave us a masterclass in public speaking as a man’s voice tried to drown her out. (Best ignore the political pundits who thought they should focus on whether or not she was smiling.)
Who told Hillary Clinton to keep smiling like she’s at her granddaughter’s birthday party?
— David Frum (@davidfrum) September 27, 2016
You’re still talking politics below the line.
The problem for me as a voter is that both parties appeal to me for different reasons, I've voted both ways all my life, generally more labour than tory. But at the moment, I'd vote Tory because I'm not agreeing with labour on a lot of issues & I feel harassed by the tory-bashing. I don't like voting because of a party leader but jeremy & those around him don't appeal to me either.
I think this will be one of their problems come election time if things don't change - they paint anything tory as evil (despite tories winning more votes than labour) & they need tory votes to win anything. If they could just stop the tory-bashing & actually get on with policy, they might get a better message across the divide. They need to start saying how they are similar, not how they are different (although this will alienate momentum et al.)
What I really fear though is all those right-leaning labour voters, who tend to be socially right-wing, voting UKIP. UKIP are already on-course to win more votes despite the referendum & any equivocation from the tories or labour (which has already happened to a greater extent) on leaving EU & they'll push more & more to UKIP. Lib dems are a non-starter as corbyn has sapped any hard-left votes that may have gone their way. That leaves UKIP as the 3rd largest party in the HoC (future HoL?!) & they'll likely vote tory on many issues in the house. Overall, I think the future is grim-dark for labour unless they change tactics soon.
Labour can't beat the Tories, but the Tories could conspire to lose. Brexit is going to be a tortuous path for May as she tries to hold her party together.
Tricky for Labour too to square the immigration fearing working class element of their support with the liberal metropolitans that make up the rest of their vote. It's hard to see how that circle can be squared.
But it's May who has to run the gauntlet first, Labour can avoid committing to a position and wait and see how things go for her before announcing their own policies.
Readers really hate their bosses
I enjoyed reading the comments on this bitingly sarcastic article that describes the type of nightmare boss that seemed all too familiar to many of you. It came with a warning that some of you might recognise yourselves ... but it was your workplace leaders past and present that got the conversation going.
‘A local government micro-management manual’
This reads like a local government micro-management manual.
Only thing missing is the promotion of stupids for their loyalty.
‘The worst boss is one who is a liar’
I think the worst boss is one who is a liar.
That has been my full-on worst experience. He just lied and lied - you never knew whether something he said was true or completely devoid of any reality (not just exaggerated or slightly deviated but completely totally without any foundation of fact or basis).
He would lie about huge things and about small things. He would take credit (yes that makes sense - you can see the point in doing that at least) but then he would randomly just lie about something that he said either had been said or done, or hadn't been said or done --- where there was no point to it. He didn't get any advantage from so doing - except I suppose to wrong foot others.
Worst worst worst - terrible person.
He was also a control freak and would get really furiously angry if he thought someone wasn't fully in agreement with him. And you would have thought that all those traits would damage him and his career but it just didn't really seem to (I left obviously) but he seems to have continued on through life - lying and distorting and screaming at people (NO, he is not Donald Trump!) perfectly successfully in some ways.
Terrible, terrible, terrible person but could really suck up to someone when he wanted and put on this super-friendly facade. Ugh! Never again would I ever want to have to work in the same environment as someone like that.
‘I am spending this evening applying for another job’
"8. Treat people as if they’re idiots - Manage your employees with 10+ years’ experience with the same scrutiny you would apply to your interns:
My boss called me out on Friday, in front of parents, staff, pupils - booming that two young pupils should not have been walking ahead of me to their classroom, but behind me - then ordered me to go back to the door with them and do it again. I am 46 years old. I am also spending this evening applying for another job.
Do click on the links and get involved – do you have a nightmare boss? Did you recognise yourself in there?
Updated
Is this the answer?
To win, Labour need to attract Basildon man/woman. Corbyn ain't gonna do it, bruv.
Debate of the week: a look at whether Labour can win with Corbyn
We ran a discussion on Thursday about Labour’s chances of success under its current leader Jeremy Corbyn. We heard a variety of views on this (a few summarised below) and welcome more thoughts.
The Guardian’s John Harris said:
The Labour party will not win the next general election, but that isn’t the right way of looking at the problem. Labour is in the midst of the same crisis as its sister social-democratic parties across Europe, with one twist: as evidenced by all those new members, it is also home to the kind of new, insurgent politics we’ve seen with Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, the Bernie Sanders campaign in the US etc. Time spent this week at Momentum’s A World Transformed event in Liverpool reminded me that a great deal of Labour and the left’s future lies with some of the people involved (I’ve written a column about this, out later today), but a watershed moment is probably going to be a long time coming.
Freelance journalist Abi Wilkinson said:
I think there is hope. Corbyn’s conference speech was an attempt to reach out to his critics within Labour and many some to have responded in kind. There seems to be a growing awareness that different factions need to work together for the good of the party and the people it represents.
One reader below the line even offered advice to Corbyn:
Possible path to victory.
1. An electoral pact. The right win because they always vote together as one big monolith. Our turn. The scare of a small handful of Tories going over to UKIP was enough to panic Cameron into a Brexit referendum. I'm in a supposed Tory safe seat but the truth is that if you counted the Lib Dem and Labour vote together, we would comfortably win. That's repeated up and down the country. An electoral pact means not standing candidates against the most likely to win. It also means people can vote strategically yet maintain allegiance with the party of their conscience.
2. Stand a Labour candidate in Northern Ireland to recover ground lost in Scotland
3. Try and win over the 40% of non-voters.
4. As far as immigration is concerned, it really isn't rocket science. Saying Labour will build 60k new council homes a year is great but it is also arbitrary. Labour should go a bit further and say "we will institute whatever policy is necessary and build however many homes are required to make sure that house and rent prices don't outstrip wages, and if we can't achieve that, we'll look to reduce immigration"
Updated
Away from politics, you may have spotted the blue GuardianWitness link above. We’re inviting you to contribute to our latest photography assignment, which has so far resulted in this lovely gallery of readers’ images
Your views are starting to shape the conversation below the line.
Labour has to confront all the issues which lost it the 2010 and 2015 elections and are keeping people away from the party. A perceived economic incompetence, raising taxation, immigration, benefits abuse (no matter how small it may be it needs to be dealt with), and weak foreign/defence policies.
These issues don't have to be dealt with by accepting all of the Tories arguments, but they have to be addressed. If you bury your head in the sand like Labour wish to do, they will lose again.
how Labour can defeat the Tories
By learning from the only Labour leader to defeat the Tories in the last 40 years?
Correct - a Socialist government is unelectable as there will never be a majority for that.
Things will also change post Brexit and Westminister politics will matter a lot more since so many EU directives and laws will cease to apply. For example like renationalisation of railways, subsidising steel the industry (illegal under EU rules).
The only way Labour can win is to oppose the Tories from the left and the right. Make a case for lower taxes, less red tape and get business and hard working people on your side.
This thread is a part of the problem - the whole focus is negative and on beating the Tories, when the message needs to be positive and how Labour can win.
Blair didn't win by telling everyone how shit things were because to most people things aren't that bad.
So called progressive alliances are also a non starter.
Updated
How can Labour defeat the Tories? A view from conference
Hilary Wainwright wrote a piece this week from Labour conference headlined The new politics isn’t just protest – it’s about change from the ground up. Here she shares some more thoughts.
From participants to journalists, most people found that in Liverpool this week political life was at Momentum’s The World Transformed rather than the official Labour conference. I’d go further: the apparatus running the conference attempted to stifle the new life that Momentum’s diverse energy is infusing into the party.
Party unity has always been an imperative prior to elections. The left has generally abided by this norm. The parliamentary right, it seems, has no such sense of obligation. It is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of electoral defeat.
MPs who want to avoid the kamikaze logic of their colleagues should show that the left doesn’t have a monopoly on unity. It’s the only chance of defeating the Tories.
What do you think? Tell us in the comments.
The week's most read: from the man who brought you Brexit to tube chat
Among our most-read this week was a letter from a man who hasn’t had sex with his wife for six years after she ignored his advice on weight loss.
Elsewhere, Stuart Heritage’s opinion article on owning his first home (and having buyer’s remorse) was popular with our readers.
There were also a lot of hits for the story about Sadiq Khan’s plans to launch an inquiry into into foreign property ownership. He told the Guardian he would carry out “the most thorough research on this matter ever undertaken” amid widespread concern over rising housing costs and gentrification.
Finally, everyone was keen to read about the man who brought us Brexit and tube chat badges, although not being completely well-received, have – ironically – got people talking.
Welcome to this week's social
Hello and welcome once again to Guardian Social, a place you’ve been coming back to for the last few weeks to discuss the week’s news and views while we hover about posting links, posing and responding to questions while generally keeping things moving.
We’re open to suggestions and always willing to take the conversations in ways you want them to go, so get involved below the line and we’ll see you down there!
Updated
After every period Labour has had in office there has been a backlash from the left. It happened in the 1950s after the Attlee government. The left were unhappy with NHS charges, the policy on nuclear weapons and towards the Soviet Union. This led to infighting which kept the party out of power for 13 years.
After the Wilson/Callaghan governments of the 60s and 70s we got the infamous i infighting of the 80s. Corbyn's mentor helped build a myth that the party had betrayed socialism and was just the same as the Tories. This helped keep Labour out of power for 18 years.
So now after the Blair/Brown governments we're getting the same thing. The left are trashing the parties record and focusing on the past. They cannot see what led Labour to success in the past. The only difference each time this happens is that the divisions get deeper and the time in the wilderness seems to get longer. 13 years, 18 years and how long now? 25-30?
Can Britain afford to wait that long or like the Liberal Party a century ago, has Labour's time just come to an end?