In her new book, the co-author of The Spirit Level gathers jaw-dropping facts about the inequality crisis in the UK – and explores creative ways to address it

There was a moment when reading Kate Pickett’s new book that I realised I was underlining something on nearly every page. Occasionally it was an exclamation mark, or a star. Other times, she herself was doing something similar. “I’m sorry to say that is not a typo,” she writes, at one point. And then, in a later chapter, “I’m going to have to put this in bold …”

It wasn’t stylistic commentary, although The Good Society is well written. Nearly every scribble was next to a fact. Pickett is a social epidemiologist, and deals in facts: “In the decade from 2011 to just before the pandemic, total spending on preventive services for families declined by 25%”, for instance. Or that half of children born in Liverpool in 2009 and 2010 had been referred to children’s services by the time they were five. Or that in 2023-4, England’s local authorities had only 6% of the childcare places they needed for children with disabilities (that was the bit Pickett wished to point out wasn’t a typo).

Starmer could improve our unfair electoral system to stop the hard right, but he won’t. All the party has left are threats about ‘splitting the vote’

Don’t let the Labour party say one more word about “splitting the vote”, in the forthcoming byelection or at any other time. With proportional representation, no one would ever need to worry about splitting the vote again. No one would need to choose the lesser evil to keep the greater evil out of office. We could vote for the parties we actually wanted. But the Labour government won’t hear of it. It insists we retain the unfair, ridiculous first-past-the-post system, then blames us for the likely results.

This is not because proportional representation is unpopular – far from it. Last year’s British Social Attitudes survey showed that 36% of people want to keep the electoral system as it is, while 60% want to change it. But as we are not allowed to vote on how we should vote, the decision is left in the hands of the corrupt old system’s beneficiaries.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Strangers used to open doors, help lift my pram and greet me with approval when I looked ‘like a mum’. After one simple haircut, I was treated very differently

In November 2000, two weeks after giving birth to my first and only child, I found myself collapsed in bed, breastfeeding in front of Top of the Pops, hair matted, sheets dirty, surrounded by sick-soaked muslin rags. I liked it. Or at least, it felt like a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing, until Madonna – who had given birth to Rocco Ritchie only three months earlier – appeared on the screen in a cropped leather jacket, belly bared, sexy-dancing to Don’t Tell Me. Did I feel inspired? Resentful? Brimming with pity for this attention-seeker? For sure, it was all three.

As the weeks wore on, I began to see how it might be possible to shower, put on actual clothes and maybe even pop to the corner shop. Occasional visits to cafes, museums and other warm, baby-friendly spaces soon followed and stopped me from feeling as if I had fallen into a well of loneliness.

The broad-brush, emotive telling of the questions around the neonatal nurse’s conviction uses arrest footage that her parents have said ‘would likely kill us’ if they watched. Did her mother’s howl of distress need to be broadcast?

The Investigation of Lucy Letby is at least the fifth documentary that has been produced in the wake of the neonatal nurse’s convictions in 2023 and 2024 on seven counts of murder and seven of attempted murder of babies in her care at the Countess of Chester hospital. Probably the best of them was ITV’s Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt? last summer. It did a fine job of meticulously explaining the evidence against her – and why a growing body of experts believe that at the very least her conviction on the basis of what was gathered is unsafe, and at most that none of the babies were murdered by her, but were victims of a chronically understaffed and mismanaged unit that might have sought to scapegoat an individual for its failings.

The Investigation of Lucy Letby does not compare in its attention to detail, preferring a broader-brush, more emotive telling of the story of either one of the most prolific female serial killers in history or one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in recent times. Its publicity has made much of the fact that it contains hitherto unseen footage of Letby’s arrest at her parents’ home. Her mother and father say they were unaware that it would be shown until Lucy’s barrister told them. “We will not watch it – it would likely kill us if we did.” When the footage is shown, you can hear her mother howl in distress as the police take Lucy away. It is an almost inhuman sound. It is hard to say what value such an inclusion adds except to warn the viewer to brace themselves for sensationalism along the way as the case is pieced together using accounts from the police, people – from both sides – directly involved with the case, Letby’s best friend Maisie and Letby’s current lawyer (not the one who represented her in court), Mark McDonald, along with media reporting from the time and tapes of her interviews with investigators.

The Investigation of Lucy Letby is on Netflix now

As a fierce contest takes shape between Labour, Reform UK and the Greens, John Harris and John Domokos take the temperature in an area of Manchester that feels like a microcosm of Britain - and find voters split between two completely different views of their lives, and the future

When Essex University’s Southend campus opened, it was a message of hope for a ‘left behind’ UK seaside town. Its closure will be felt far beyond its 800 students, some of whom will not get their degrees

The seaside city of Southend-on-Sea, on England’s east coast, looks grey on a winter afternoon in term-time. Its high street, bordering the university campus, is sparsely populated with market stalls, vape shops and discount retailers, and feels unusually quiet.

“There used to be lots of shops, restaurants and youth clubs around here,” says 23-year-old Nathan Doucette-Chiddicks. Now, the city is about to lose something else that it can scarcely do without.

PM says former cabinet minister and peer lied about ‘extent and depth of the relationship’ and should not have been appointed as US ambassador

• Newly released Jeffrey Epstein files: 10 key takeaways

PMQs is starting soon. Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

The Reform UK MP Lee Anderson has dismissed claims that his party’s plan to support the pub industry would cost far more than the £3bn it claims.

To be honest with you, we’re not interested in who you’ve been talking to. We’re more interested who we’ve been talking to, and we’ve been talking to landlords and small businesses up and down the country, and every landlord that I speak to … they want this VAT cut.

We can go on all day about the numbers. I’m not interested in the numbers that the BBC have sourced. You’re hardly a bastion of truth at the BBC when it comes to things like this.

This doesn’t add up. This is an unfunded tax cut which also pushes hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

Reform says that reinstating the two-child limit for most, but not all, families would save £2.29bn in 2026/27. The party claims its package of tax cuts would also cost £2.29bn – making it cost neutral – with the bulk coming from a proposal to halve VAT on hospitality, which it estimates would cost £1.7bn.

Billionaires and intellectuals attended events with the disgraced financier years after he served time for sex offense, files reveal

Newly released emails and travel itineraries appear to show that for years after Jeffrey Epstein served time for procuring underage girls for prostitution, he continued to attend exclusive dinners alongside Silicon Valley’s most famous billionaires.

The emails, part of a trove released by the Department of Justice on Friday, show that as late as 2018, Epstein was invited to or attended dinners alongside the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Google vice-president and later Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

Exclusive: Police say they will review allegation that Epstein sent woman to UK to have sex with Andrew at Royal Lodge, his former home

British police are to review fresh allegations that Jeffrey Epstein provided Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor with a woman to have sex with at the Royal Lodge in 2010, as it emerged that the former prince had moved out of his home.

The woman has claimed she spent the night at the then prince’s residence in Windsor, her US lawyer, Brad Edwards, said after the allegations surfaced over the weekend. The woman, who is not British, was in her 20s at the time, and was later given a tour of Buckingham Palace, it is further alleged.

Appointment of the ex-ambassador despite tarnished past raises potentially fatal doubts about judgment of PM and his team

In many political scandals there is an agreed full stop, a time for the circus to move on: maybe a resignation, certainly a police investigation. But for Downing Street, Peter Mandelson risks being a headache that simply will not end.

Mandelson’s future in public life is definitively over, or as definitive as you can be for a figure who, much as with the Conservative saying about Boris Johnson, would possibly need to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart before you could completely rule out another comeback.