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The oldest outdoor swimming pool in the UK – the Grade II listed Cleveland Pools in Bath which first opened in 1815 – will reopen during the summer of 2023, after significant restoration. With a new 50-metre outdoor pool having opened in Brighton) in June and a council-funded restoration under way in Hull, the simple pleasure of the public outdoor pool is seeing a return to popularity to the UK.
In the early 20th century, an explosion of new outdoor pools opened across Britain. Taking the name “lido” from the Italian word for coastline, the boom of construction in the 20th century was part of the post-war public works programme, which aimed to create jobs and promote health. While indoor pools had been gender segregated, public lidos were deliberately mixed and became synonymous with fun and socialising.
Lidos at coastal towns such as Scarborough and Blackpool were destinations for residents and tourists. Lido design between the 1920s and 1940s was innovative and drawn from exotic sources, such as European resorts and cruise ships. They incorporated sumptuous sundecks, sophisticated outdoor restaurants and cafes, alongside vast inviting bathing areas. Impressive diving boards challenged those brave enough to leap theatrically and please the crowds. These lidos were able to accommodate thousands of visitors as wholesome, accessible leisure destinations.
Some of the most iconic lidos are the magnificent art deco sites in Saltdean, Plymouth and Penzance in the south of England. These stunning sites have thankfully been saved from demolition, many others were not. Lido lovers remain hopeful that another art deco site, Broomhill in Ipswich, will one day be restored.
Lidos were grand constructions and monuments of civic pride, both for those who created them and for those who frequented them. They reflected times of change in society and great optimism. At their peak, there were more than 300 active public outdoor pools in the UK, with 11 in Liverpool and 68 in London.
The 1960 Wolfenden report, Sport and the Community and the 1968 Sports Council report Planning for Sport were catalysts for the demise of outdoor swimming pools in policy. The mandate was that “as a general rule, [pools] should be indoors”.
Lidos fell into disrepair and were steadily replaced or destroyed, after councils no longer saw them as part of their leisure facilities and reduced or stopped funding. At the turn of the century, only around 130 public outdoor pools remained, predominately in the south of the UK. That number hardly changed in the following two decades.
The steady loss of these lidos didn’t go unnoticed. The Thirties Society’s report Farewell my Lido (1991) and then Janet Smith’s important 2005 English Heritage-funded book Liquid Assets (with a forthright foreword from artist Tracey Emin) document the history and argued passionately for a brighter future for these much-loved public luxuries.
But as local councils faced financial crises in 2008 and central government reduced spending further from 2010, leisure was treated differently. Responsibility for lidos was transferred to charitable trusts. Those that remained were preserved and saved by community groups or trusts and some local authorities, who understood their public value.
During the last two decades – and recently accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic where outdoor swimming was one of the few activities allowed for a while – there has been a steady growth in outdoor, wild and lido swimming.
And there are cultural markers of a resurgence, too. Fashion label Radley created a limited-edition lido handbag in 2016. In 2019, crowdfunding helped create The Lido Guide. The same year, a heart-warming novel, The Lido by Libby Page, beautifully captured the community spirit, history and value of lidos.
Photographer Christopher Beanland paid homage to lidos in 2020 through a global collection of outdoor pools and their stories. And then this year, Brit Pop band Blur choose the iconic 2014 Martin Parr image of a solitary swimmer in Gourock Pool for the cover of their upcoming album, The Ballad of Darren.
Over 30 lido schemes have emerged from 2021 onwards. They’ve been nurtured by the Future Lidos Group and their National Heritage Lottery funded pooling resources project. The design emphasis is once again on innovation, taking the lessons of lido heritage and the human connection which formed in these inclusive sites into consideration.
If Sport England’s policies can recognise the diverse value of lidos to public health and leisure, the next decade could see a further resurgence in restorations. Even more lidos could soon be making a welcome return across Britain, allowing more access to outdoor swimming – whatever the weather.
Michael Wood founded the Future Lidos Group in 2021 and is a volunteer on the steering committee for the Pooling Resources project. The Pooling Resources project received funding from National Heritage Lottery Fund in January 2023 to create a toolkit to support the restoration and creation of lidos. He has been a volunteer with the Friends of Tynemouth Outdoor Pool for 9 years. He has not personally received any fees for any of this work.
The British Museum has had to apologise after a translator’s words were used without permission. Writer and translator Yilin Wang shared on Twitter that their translations of work by the Chinese feminist poet Qiu Jin appeared in the museum’s exhibition, China’s Hidden Century, without consent.
The museum’s subsequent press release cited “unintentional human error”. It explained that it had corresponded privately with Wang and had now offered a fee for the use of the translations. Along with the Chinese poems, these were then removed from the exhibition. But the removal of the texts has also fuelled criticism of the museum, and sparked a debate about the role of translators.
Literary translation is legally recognised as an act of original artistic production. This means that translated literary texts enjoy their own copyright status, independent of the source texts. While Qiu’s work is now out of copyright because she died in 1907, Wang’s translations are not.
The role of original creativity in translation practices is frequently ignored or underestimated. It’s common to talk about reading “author X” rather than “translator Y’s translation of author X”. Even the Nobel Prize conveniently sidesteps the role of translators and their creative work when it confers its annual literary honour.
Recently, however, literary publishing has increasingly recognised the role of translators. In 2016, the International Man Booker Prize announced it would now split winnings evenly between the author and the translator. Translators are gaining visibility and it is becoming more and more difficult to pretend they don’t exist.
Read more: International Booker Prize 2023: our experts review the six shortlisted books
Translations are creative acts that take place in specific cultural contexts. They transform source texts into new, original literary works, and they can advocate for the source text and writer by introducing them to new readers.
Wang has written about the power dynamics of literary translation, including the barriers to access and participation faced by translators who are “outsiders” and translators of colour. In their essay writing, they draw specifically on their experience of systemic prejudice while translating Qiu Jin’s poetry.
They describe translation as an act of “reclamation and resistance” – and talk of the barriers they and others face finding a career in translation.
Like a translation, a museum is not neutral or objective. The objects and texts on display have been deliberately selected and positioned together. Just like the objects they frame, the words in a museum belong to someone and they have been chosen to tell a particular story.
Museums increasingly face pressure to reflect on their processes of acquisition and their contested ownership of items. This latest mistake – and handling of the fallout – shows that they also need to be transparent about the origins of the words they use to build the stories they tell.
Removing items from display is not standard practice for the museum. The museum made a public statement in 2020 that it would not remove “controversial objects” from display. A section of the website dedicated to “contested objects” explicitly engages with the provenance of some of its most famous pieces, such as the Parthenon marbles.
But now Wang has described the museum’s response as “erasure”, and Wang argues, it has troubling implications, both for the museum’s critical engagement with its own curatorship and for the power dynamics of its relationships with non-white contributors.
The British Museum said in a statement: “In response to a request from Yilin Wang, we have taken down their translations in the exhibition. We have also offered financial payment for the period the translations appeared in the exhibition as well as for the continued use of quotations from their translations in the exhibition catalogue. The catalogue includes an acknowledgement of their work.” Wang contests this.
Meanwhile, the story has not gone away. It has been reported in the Chinese and French media, and Wang’s still developing Twitter thread about the discovery has been shared over 15,000 times.
As momentum grows behind the criticism of the museum, it is a good time for all of us to consider how we value and engage with the work of translators, whose creative labour allows us to access worlds and imaginations far beyond our own.
Caroline Summers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Court of Appeal has ruled against the UK government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, adding a significant legal hurdle to the prime minister Rishi Sunak’s promise to “stop the boats”.
Under the migration partnership announced in April 2022, the UK government could send people to Rwanda who had entered the UK irregularly. Rwanda would then determine their asylum claims and, if they were found to be refugees, they would be resettled there. The government has argued this will deter people from making dangerous boat crossings across the English Channel, despite evidence showing such policies don’t work.
After a series of legal challenges, the European Court of Human Rights intervened to stop the first deportation flight from taking off.
In December 2022, the High Court found that the Rwanda policy was lawful. Now, the Court of Appeal has overturned that decision.
The main question for the court was whether Rwandan officials would accurately and fairly assess the asylum claims of people sent there from the UK. The claimants, a group of 10 refugees and the organisation Asylum Aid, argued that the Rwandan legal system would put genuine refugees at risk of being erroneously returned to countries where they would face persecution.
Two out of three judges agreed, finding that Rwanda’s current asylum system is not reliably fair and effective, citing five key reasons:
Asylum interviews are conducted in a brief and perfunctory manner, which could prevent a person from being able to fully explain their case;
Rwanda’s committee to determine refugee status does not allow lawyers to make arguments on behalf of a person, to help explain why they should be granted asylum;
Local non-governmental organisations do not have capacity to provide asylum seekers with legal assistance throughout the process;
Rwandan officials deciding applications do not have sufficient skill and experience to make reliable decisions, partly due to a lack of effective training; and
Judges in Rwanda may be susceptible to political influence and reluctant to overturn decisions not to grant asylum.
While the court noted there was nothing to indicate Rwanda was not trying its best to determine asylum claims fairly, Lord Justice Underhill observed that “aspiration and reality do not necessarily coincide”.
The majority judges also noted concerns about the safety of asylum seekers in Rwanda, including the extent to which Rwandan authorities are tolerant of protest and dissent. In 2018, Rwandan police shot and killed 12 refugees who were protesting a reduction in their food rations. Sir Geoffrey Vos found that these concerns were relevant to considering whether Rwanda was a “safe third country”.
All three judges agreed with the High Court’s decision on other grounds, including that sending asylum seekers to a third country is not necessarily incompatible with the UN Refugee Convention. This will no doubt be a worrying finding for critics of the government’s policy, who hoped the court would reinforce the UK’s obligations under international law.
This ruling effectively gives the government license to pass the burden of refugee protection on to poorer nations, even if they are prevented from sending people to Rwanda for now.
This judgment is a victory for refugees and the organisations that support them. It means that no asylum seekers in the UK will be sent to Rwanda for now – and maybe not ever.
These proceedings began with seven men being handcuffed, shackled and highly distressed as they were forced on to a plane. Over the past year, many men and women have received letters placing them at risk of removal to Rwanda. For these people, this judgment is not just a legal win, but a source of immense relief.
The illegal migration bill, which is currently facing fierce opposition from the House of Lords, legally requires the home secretary to detain and remove any person who arrives in the UK irregularly. With removals to Rwanda now unavailable, the viability of the bill is even less apparent.
Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman have said they will appeal the judgment to the Supreme Court. But even if the government succeeds, there is little to show that the plan will stop people travelling irregularly to the UK. The government’s own analysis acknowledges as much, stating:
Academic consensus is that there is little-to-no evidence suggesting changes in a destination country’s policies have an impact on deterring people.
The plan has already cost at least £120 million, and would cost a further £169,000 per person deported (compared with the £106,000 per person it costs to house an asylum seeker in the UK). With legal costs now stacking up, the Rwanda plan is quickly becoming very expensive.
These legal developments are a clear signal that the government should rethink its policy. If the government wanted to help people in need of protection while reducing the number of people risking their lives on small boats, it could open more safe and legal routes to the UK for people to seek asylum. Instead, ministers are doubling down on a plan that is costly, legally precarious, unlikely to work, and risks exposing people to more danger, rather than helping them reach safety.
Natalie Hodgson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The UK recently announced that it will join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), giving British businesses access to the 11 other members of the Indo-Pacific trade bloc and bringing its combined GDP to £11 trillion.
Some commentators have suggested the deal could make up for Brexit. It’s been called “a momentous economic and strategic moment” that “kills off any likelihood that it [the UK] will ever rejoin the EU customs union or single market”. Shanker Singham of think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs has even said: “it’s no exaggeration to say that CPTPP+UK is an equivalent economic power to the EU-28-UK”, comparing it to a trade deal between the UK and EU members.
UK business and trade secretary Kemi Badenoch echoed such sentiments, telling Times Radio:
We’ve left the EU so we need to look at what to do in order to grow the UK economy and not keep talking about a vote from seven years ago.
The problem with this fanfare is that the government’s own economic analysis of the benefits of joining this bloc is underwhelming. There is an estimated gain to the UK of 0.08% of GDP – this is just a 50th of the OBR’s estimate of what Brexit has cost the UK economy to date. Even for those that are sceptical about models and forecasts, that is an enormous difference in magnitude.
Of course, the CPTPP is expected to offer the UK some real gains. It certainly provides significant potential opportunities for some individual exporters. But the estimated gains for Britain overall are very small.
The main reason for this is that, apart from Japan, the major players of the global economy are not in the CPTPP. The US withdrew from the Trans Pacific Partnership (the CPTPP is what the remaining members formed without it). And China started negotiations to join in 2022, but current geopolitics now make its entry highly improbable. India was never involved.
In addition, the UK already has free trade agreements with nine out of the 11 members. The remaining two, Malaysia and Brunei, are controversial due to environmental threats from palm oil production to rainforests and orangutans.
Britain’s existing trade agreements with CPTPP members
And despite the widespread public perception of the Asia-Pacific area as a hub of future growth, the performance and prospects of the CPTPP members are a mixed bag. The largest member, Japan, is arguably in long-term decline, as is Brunei, while just three members (Vietnam, Singapore and New Zealand had average growth in the last decade above 3% annually.
Finally, distance really does matter in trade. All the CPTPP members are thousands of miles from the UK, which explains their relatively small shares in UK trade at present.
While all of these points pour cold water on the suggested gains, there are some potential benefits from the CPTPP agreement, which allows for mutual recognition of certain standards. This includes patents and some relaxation of sanitary and phytosanitary rules on food items.
However, agreements over standards will involve the UK submitting to international CPTPP courts on these issues. This sits uncomfortably with many of the “sovereignty” objections to the European Court of Justice in relation to Brexit (largely from many of those who have extolled the CPTPP). It’s also notable that out of the nine agreements with CPTPP members that existed before the UK signed this deal, all but two are rollovers of previous EU deals.
But a trade deal with the CPTPP is worth more to the UK than separate deals with each member due to requirements around “rules of origin”, which determine the national source of a product. When a product contains inputs from more than one country, a series of separate free trade agreements may not eliminate tariffs. But if all the relevant countries are members of a single free trade agreement, then rules of origin on inputs from other members cease to be a problem (although there might be some issues if some members do not police the requirements properly).
While these benefits should be recognised, we should also acknowledge that the CPTPP is not the ideal agreement for Britain. As stated above, distance really does matter in trade – this is overwhelmingly accepted by modern trade economists.
Research shows that the rate at which trade declines with distance has barely changed over more than a century. This might seem strange because transport costs have fallen over time. But, as transport and communications have improved, firms have outsourced much of their production to complex supply chains that often cross national borders many times, with “just-in-time” supply schedules to keep down the costs of holding large stocks.
This means that, while trade everywhere has grown, there is still a big premium for trading (many times) across borders between contiguous countries. It is exactly this type of trade which benefits most from big comprehensive trade agreements that simplify rules of origin and regulatory paperwork.
This suggests that, while some elements of the the CPTPP offer benefits to the UK, it is unlikely to boost its trade in the way it does between countries around the Pacific Rim. For this sort of boost, the UK really needs to look towards its own neighbours. Of course, this is just the sort of agreement that Badenoch seems reluctant to discuss.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
One afternoon in mid-June, I sat with Ethan*, a local islander, at Nauru’s boat harbour. He was speaking about how life had changed in the country since the asylum deal with Australia was agreed. Just a few years before my arrival in 2016, the small Pacific island had once again been financed to process the asylum claims of migrants attempting to reach Australia. If successful, refugees would be resettled locally around the island. Successive Australian governments had taken a tough zero-tolerance approach, making sure that anyone making their way by boat without documentation would “never settle in Australia”.
Not far from where we sat, placards covered the fence of a refugee resettlement compound, reading: “We’re refugees not criminals,” and “Freedom is a Right Not a Crime, We Want Justice.”
“The thing is none of them want to be here,” Ethan explained, “and we don’t know who these people are, they could be dangerous. Why else does Australia not want them?” These fears were echoed to me numerous times in Nauru. “I’m so worried about having the refugee children in our school,” Sandra, a teacher at Nauru’s only secondary school, said on another occasion. “We don’t want to touch or go too close in case they say we hit refugees. And natural things like kids pushing each other on the playground. The next day it’s in the Australian news”. This teacher’s fears were confirmed several months later, with headlines like: “Nauru Government Denies Refugee Children Are Abused in Schools.”
Such accusations of savagery against refugees draw on colonial tropes of Pacific islanders as cannibals. Major global media outlets alleged that Nauru was a veritable heart of darkness, an “island of despair”, where refugees are “hacked with machetes” by the local population.
These sorts of representations created a fractious context locally: one produced by sending asylum seekers, many with devastating pasts, to a vastly different region of the world from their intended destination.
In January 2023, the UK’s High Court ruled on the lawfulness of the British government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. Under this £140 million agreement, undocumented migrants could find themselves sent to the East African country – 4,000 miles south-east of where they lodged their asylum applications. Once in Rwanda, they will have their asylum claims processed, and will be eligible for residency, not in the UK – their original destination – but in Rwanda.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg is expected to rule on the controversial policy by the end of the year. This proposed “outsourced” asylum policy directly mimics Australia’s so-called “Pacific Solution”, the impacts of which I have examined in my research. Since Australia’s Liberal prime minister, John Howard, at the turn of the century, boat arrivals have been the basis for copious media attention and resultant public anxiety in Australia. Controversial offshore policies in small Pacific islands like Nauru, combined with high-profile military and naval operations, are intended to reduce the number of people crossing the Indian Ocean.
This article is part of Conversation Insights
The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
Now, like successive Australian politicians, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is promoting the UK-Rwanda policy as a means of “stopping the boats”, but this time those crossing the English Channel from northern France. Just as Australian politicians stoked public anxiety, pursuing media attention and electoral gains, Suella Braverman, the UK home secretary, has called migrant boats from Calais “an invasion on our southern coast”. She also said: “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.”
I conducted long-term fieldwork in Nauru into the effects of the Australian government’s near AU$10 billion (about £5 billion) arrangement. I have also led anthropological fieldwork projects into similar outsourced asylum measures in regions as diverse as Guatemala, Jordan and Lebanon. What falls outside the global media headlines, from all sides of the political spectrum, is how these policies are realised in practice and whether or not they actually work.
I have interviewed migrants claiming asylum, as well as local residents, private security contractors and government officials. I found that these outsourcing schemes create a refugee industry economy that local populations become dependant on. For the asylum seekers and refugees, most with devastating pasts and equally hazy futures, being castigated to far off places not of their choosing all too often led to tragic instances of self-harm and suicide. In Nauru, the friction between different populations were apparent on a daily basis.
The boat harbour is a popular spot for Nauruans and refugees alike. It is one of the few places where you can swim safely without the threats of currents or the jagged limestone pinnacles that pierce through the island’s coastal waters. It is also a place where I have long conversations with asylum seekers down from the island’s Regional Processing Centres (RPCs). The RPCs are tucked deep in the heart of coral atoll’s jungle. Many asylum seekers take advantage of the afternoon open centre hours at the RPCs to catch a bus down to the boat harbour.
“No, I can’t swim, but I just like to come here because it’s cooler than at the centres. The heat sticks to you up there,” Khadija, an Iranian asylum seeker says to me. “In Iran, we never have this kind of heat.”
Like the majority of Nauru’s new refugee population, Khadija stands out. She’s 20 and most of her life has been spent in Tehran then Jakarta: cosmopolitan, urban hubs at odds with small Pacific island climes. She, as with so many other asylum seekers I speak with in Nauru, took a boat from Indonesia in the hopes of reaching Australia to claim asylum. The financial cost and possible dangers were enormous. It cost AU$10,000 (just over £5,000) for the boat alone, she tells me. But she and her sister were escaping extreme domestic abuse.
Not far from us, on the concrete walls of the boat harbour, sit a group of Nauruan Community Liaison Officers, also dressed in distinctive fluorescent vests. They are tasked with dealing with conflicts that arise between refugees and locals now that refugees are being resettled on Nauruan visas around the island. Our conversation moves to some of these conflicts. Khadija tells me:
I have Nauruan friends, but no, I don’t want to be here. I’d never heard of Nauru before I came here. I was scared, I didn’t know where they were taking me.
Abdul, a friend of hers, catches wind of our conversation as he dries himself off with a towel nearby. “I don’t think anyone had heard of this place! I mean, why would we want to come here? It’s a dump!”
“Well, a lot of Nauruans have been kind, but there are no jobs here for us here. How can we set up lives? No one wants to be here,” Khadija says, worry lines coursing her face.
We speak about the latest Guardian Australia media report of Nauruans beating up a refugee. Abdul has a lot to say on the matter: “You never know. Sometimes it’s true, there are fights that happen. Sometimes it’s desperation. Refugees trying to bring media attention to their situation. This is all expected. Send people to a very different part of the world where they don’t want to be and see what happens.”
Khadija interjects: “And refugees here will also do anything to get to Australia. You can’t send people somewhere so different and not expect them to protest. It’s not nice for the Nauruans, but a lot of refugees don’t care about that.”
I think of the placards covering the fence of a nearby refugee resettlement compound and the doors of the Australian-funded refugee businesses (largely beauty salons and takeaways) that are all firmly closed in protest. I had been in conversation earlier that week with a group of Nauruans working at the RPCs, who had told me of “shit smeared on the walls” and “taps left on” from asylum seekers in desperate protest. Only a few years before I arrived in Nauru, one of the RPC buildings had been burned to the ground.
“It’s not just between locals and refugees,” points out Khadija. “It’s also between refugees, of course. I’m Shia. My sister and I were put together with someone who’s Sunni. They made life difficult for us. They had to move us to a different section.” Abdul nods, adding: “There was one guy who had to be moved to separate hotel accommodation because it got so bad.”
The kind of secrecy, violence and segregation that Khadija and Abdul speak of underpins daily life in Nauru. Around the island, the destructive realities of outsourcing asylum are palpable.
Aziz, an Iraqi refugee, living in resettlement accommodation, tells me of the cries when he goes to sleep at night:
I hear my neighbour through the walls, I don’t know what he saw before he came to Nauru.
Marie, an Australian torture and trauma counsellor, told me “you can’t begin to help people work through trauma when it’s exacerbated by being in Nauru”. She says Nauru has never had the capacity or the infrastructure to effectively support asylum seekers and refugees.
Marie’s latter point is one I’ve heard several times. Prior to the Australian arrangement, Nauru had no history of refugee processing or resettlement. To make this outsourced arrangement a reality, the Australian government funded fly-in-fly-out Australian counsellors in addition to asylum legal support, interpreters, refugee adjudication and appeals tribunals, education and medics. However, counsellors like Marie were largely ineffective – palliative at best. Asylum seekers I spoke with described experiencing overwhelming powerlessness, depression, and identity crises because of the offshore arrangement.
Industry contractors I spoke with recounted similar stories of human suffering. Sarah, a facility manager from the Australian corporate management firm, told me of her recurring nightmares, having witnessed asylum seekers sewing their lips together in her work at the RPCs.
Vivian, a mental health counsellor to the Australian Immigration Department, made the damaging toll of working in Nauru explicit in our interview. She said:
The compromises that people are in, and every day going to work to do bad things to others is making them feel ill. I had a client who had breast cancer who said to me, ‘I believe that I will be punished for what I’m doing by getting my breast cancer back.’ It’s a toxic environment and it sends people mad.
Trevor, a security guard at the RPCs, described the hunger strikes he tried to resolve: “But it’s not just hunger strikes,” he added, visibly upset.
Self-immolation, self-harm, riots, arson, suicide, jumps from roofs, sewing lips. Asylum seekers are desperate not to be here and so many of them have been through all kinds of traumatic experiences I can’t even imagine before being sent here.
Sarah and Trevor are just some of the many industry contractors I spoke with who bear the scars of witnessing these devastating situations. In fact, lawsuits from past contracted Australian workers to Nauru still plague the Australian government.
Many locals were initially sympathetic to the plight of refugees. However, over the years, this sympathy turned to anger as Nauruans contended being represented as savages and human rights abusers in parts of the media and by certain refugee solidarity activists. “Look at this stuff they write … They haven’t even been here,” says Oliana, a Nauruan government worker.
The kind of outsourcing arrangement between Australia and Nauru seems outlandish, but it is not unique. It is part of a model of wealthier western countries funding poorer countries to carry out border enforcement. Australia is often cited as a case study of outsourcing asylum, but this system has historical precedents.
Asylum as a formal international legal procedure was institutionalised across the early 20th century. European governments sought increased control over the demographic makeup and political structure of their nation states. Some feared disproportionate numbers of undocumented migrant arrivals. It was in this climate that the international refugee agency – a precursors to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) – pioneered systems of so-called burden-sharing.
In the early 20th century, the Nansen Office and Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees spearheaded moving refugees (largely Russians, Armenians, and Greeks) between countries. Just a few decades later, huge numbers of Jewish refugees sought to escape the atrocities of the second world war. Many European countries refused to provide sanctuary to Jewish refugees, referring to the “Jewish problem”.
Instead, countries as far flung as the Dominican Republic and Ecuador promoted themselves as destinations for Jewish refugees to attract political and economic support. The International Refugee Organization - UNHCR’s precursor, active between 1946-1952 - took this system of burden-sharing to new heights, relocating more than a million refugees from Europe to the Americas, Israel, South Africa and Oceania between 1947 and 1951.
As asylum seekers changed from eastern Europeans to Africans and Asians from the 1970s, the term “asylum seeker” attracted negative connotations in western political and media discourse. It became shorthand for economic opportunism, mass movements and threats to security. Tough measures on asylum, including intercepting migrants before arrival, soon become a touchstone for left and right-leaning governments alike.
Outsourced asylum models have since been adopted across the EU. There are agreements with eastern Europe, Turkey, north and East Africa, and Central Asia. The US has experimented with several of what are termed extra-territorial asylum processing schemes, including processing Haitian asylum seekers in Guantanamo in the 1990s, establishing facilities to assess asylum claims across Central America, funding local advertisements to dissuade migrants, as well as financing border enforcement and national asylum systems across Mexico and Central America.
Many Asian countries, including China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have implemented restrictive detention and temporary visa practices for African migrants, in particular. So-called transit regions, such as South Asia, eastern Europe and North Africa have also seen significant levels of funding and resources going into policing, detention, and other forms of immigration control.
The UK has toyed with different externalised border enforcement measures over the years. The Rwanda deal is one such arrangement. Sunak has said that he will do “whatever it takes to make the Rwanda plan work”, describing “illegal migration” as an “emergency”. In June 2022, the first flight of four asylum seekers from the UK to Rwanda was blocked after an injunction from the ECHR alleged it was a violation of civil and political rights.
Others question the efficacy of the £140 million Illegal Migration Bill that is designed for only a small number of asylum seekers: the Rwandan government has agreed to receive 200 asylum seekers a year across a five-year trial period. Meanwhile, Braverman has declared that relocating people to Rwanda is a “ground-breaking migration and economic development partnership” and “an innovative way of addressing a major problem” of “billions of” people coming [to the UK].
Anti-migrant protests outside asylum seeker housing in Knowsley and Dover in the UK have also led to concerns that the Conservative government is capitalising on xenophobic sentiments. As legal debates continue around the legitimacy of the arrangement, Sunak has put together legislation that would disallow anyone reaching the UK to claim asylum without prior clearance.
The legislation would extend the government’s ability to detain them beyond the current permissible 28 days. It would also enable their deportation to a third country, such as Rwanda – the only country that has agreed to such a strategy. The former home secretary, Priti Patel, attempted deals with countries including Ghana and Kenya, which were rejected locally.
But Rwanda has yet to experience the implications of the deal. Rwanda does have a recent failed history of taking asylum seekers through a similar arrangement. In agreement with Israel’s Netanyahu government, Rwanda received some 4,000 Eritreans and Sudanese between 2014 and 2017. At the time, Netanyahu marshalled a similar narrative steeped in racial bias around the country’s mistanenim or “infiltrators”. Israel paid the Rwandan government US$5,000 for every asylum seeker, each of whom received US$3,500 and their airfare. Almost all are thought to have left the country immediately. Yet, unlike the proposed UK-Rwanda deal, this coerced voluntary deportation scheme did not involve a long-term asylum processing and resettlement arrangement. Such a proposition presents far greater concerns: ones raised not just in Nauru but also across my other fieldwork sites.
Flores is a picturesque island village in Guatemala’s northernmost Petén region. Located deep in the jungle in Lake Peten Itza, it is a place where the concept of claiming asylum to – not from – was little heard of prior to 2010. I am sitting in Flores’ main church square for World Refugee Day in June 2022. It is a new event for the island, put together by UNHCR’s new Petén field office, to socialise Guatemalan residents in refugee protection. Under the slogan “Reborn in Guate”, UNHCR has devised a day-long programme of art, folklore, dance, music and poetry.
“We have to be careful with using the word refugees,” whispers Alessandra, a UNHCR official, as a group of young Honduran rappers take the stage. “Many people, particularly Indigenous Maya, still have such vivid memories of when they were refugees. We don’t want it to seem like anyone’s getting preferential treatment or that they accuse our new refugee arrivals of gaming the system”.
This goes back to Guatemala’s four decade-long civil war. From the 1950s to the 1990s, genocidal policies claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Maya, or Maya Q’eqchi’. During this period, the US provided counter-insurgency training and military supplies to Guatemalan military and police, which heightened the escalation of violence.
In Santa Elena, just across the causeway from Flores, I have a long conversation with a local fruit market vendor, Estella, about this time. She was a young girl when the civil war broke out. Caught in the gunfire between guerrilla forces, she and her family, like so many Maya Q’eqchi’, eventually crossed the border to Mexico in the 1980s in hopes of survival. After nearly a decade living in different refugee camps in southern Mexico, she eventually returned to the Petén as a middle-aged woman in 1995, not long after the peace process negotiations.
“Most of my life, I was in fear of the military finding my family,” she says. “We moved between refugee camps in Mexico, almost every year it felt like. Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo,” she slowly counts the different states on her fingers, adding:
We never knew if the Mexican government was on our side or if we might be handed over to the Guatemalan army. The Guatemalan army was always coming into Mexico, looking for guerrilla soldiers in the camps. We knew that if they found us, we would be killed without any mercy, we’d seen this happen to others.
All those years spent living in exile in refugee camps before returning to the Petén, gives Estella pause when discussing the new refugee programmes. “It confuses me. These people aren’t refugees. They haven’t been through the kind of suffering we have,” she says. “Many Maya never got their land back and still live as refugees in Guatemala. They have all these programmes for the new refugees, and make such a big deal about them, they even get a month of accommodation, but we Maya experience so much inequality that has never been resolved.”
Guatemala still has one of the most unequal systems of land tenure in the world. The violence of the civil war resulted in the loss of livelihoods for many Maya, including huge unemployment that lingers to this day. Oil palm plantations, taking over great swaths of north-eastern Guatemala that are home to Q’eqchi’ communities, are continuing to fuel displacement. Substantial numbers of Guatemalans are also deported back from the US and Mexico each year (almost 100,000 migrants in 2022 alone), compounding these tensions.
It is for this reason that the Guatemalan government avoids calling resettled regional migrants refugees. Officials I speak with at Guatemala City’s Migration Institute emphasise avoiding the term. Not only does it evoke traumatic memories for many, but the government fears public perceptions of preferential treatment of US-funded, regional refugees.
Yet, Guatemala is visibly promoting itself as an asylum destination, as the World Refugee Day celebrations make clear. In our conversation, Estella references the posters that cover Santa Elena’s central bus station. At her recommendation, I go to look at the almost tourist-style advertisements that stretch dramatically across the façade of the arrivals hall. One is fringed with stick figures of people running for safety and the logos of UNHCR and El Refugio de la Niñez, Guatemala’s national refugee support agency. At its centre, it features a family holding hands as they clamber over train tracks. In large blue font, with the words “danger”, “protection”, and “refugee” highlighted, it reads:
“If your life is in danger, and you cannot return to your country, you can ask for protection as a refugee in Guatemala. We can help you!”
Around another corner in the terminal, signs point towards a small office, the Attention Centre for Migrants and Refugees. Inside, I see a small team of Guatemalan social workers with leaflets explaining the process of claiming asylum in Guatemala.
These efforts constitute the US’ latest outsourced asylum strategy. As part of a regional approach begun in 2017, known as the Regional Comprehensive Protection and Solutions Framework (or its Spanish acronym MIRPS). Guatemala, together with Mexico and other Central American countries (Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras and Panama) is steadily developing the capacity to receive and support asylum claims in the country. Santa Elena is a way station for Honduran migrants making the long journey up to the US. Heightened US-funded border enforcement further south along Guatemala’s main land borders has also pushed more people to pass through the northern Petén border, where I conducted my research.
Migrants are encouraged to claim asylum for Mexico or Central America, rather than making their claims to the US. Limitations at the US-Mexico border, combined with the exorbitant costs and danger of making the crossing undocumented, are pushing more migrants to applying for asylum regionally. Claiming asylum in Guatemala or other third countries might soon be a legal requirement. In 2023, the US Supreme Court issued a hotly contested proposed rule known as the “transit ban” – asylum seekers who pass through a third country en route to the US-Mexico border must claim asylum there first.
But very few migrants are interested in claiming asylum locally. Like the UK-Rwanda deal, the US plan also functions largely as spectacle. Although the numbers of asylum claims filed to Guatemala’s new National Commission for Refugees is increasing, only 634 refugee visa holders and 1,410 asylum-seekers reside in Guatemala.
Estella’s confusion at the visible effects of outsourcing asylum in Guatemala foreshadows additional dynamics that the UK-Rwanda deal might produce. Like Guatemala, Rwanda is also a country with a tragic history of producing refugees. The 1994 Rwandan genocide led to the massacre of next to a million people. Horrific numbers of women were sexually assaulted. Over two million Rwandans fled to neighbouring countries in Africa’s Great Lakes region including Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Following the end of the civil war, an estimated 1.3 million Rwandan refugees returned after over two years in exile. As with Guatemala, memories of exile and return are ever-present in Rwanda. Outsourcing asylum to regions with pre-existing local refugee populations can incite the tensions voiced by Estella and others I spoke with.
Unlike Guatemala, Rwanda does have a history of formal refugee protection outside of the return of its own citizens. Almost 164,000 refugees live in refugee camps or urban areas in Rwanda. However, these refugees are from surrounding East African regions, such as the DRC and Burundi. Those asylum seekers who have received notices of intent from the UK Home Office (making them at risk of being sent to Rwanda) are largely from the same countries as those I met in Nauru: Afghanistan, Iran and Syria. These are countries that are ethnically and linguistically distinct to Rwanda.
Even in the US asylum arrangement with Guatemala, most refugees given residency there are from surrounding Spanish-speaking countries. Here, the emphasis is on developing a viable regional resettlement framework. That the UK is considering sending asylum seekers from far different regions to a country still raw from its own refugee dynamics does not bode well. It was the cultivation of ethnic hierarchies between Tutsis and Hutus under Belgian colonial rule that resulted in the 1994 Rwandan genocide in the first place.
My fieldwork findings from Nauru and Guatemala paint a bleak picture of the impacts of outsourcing asylum, relevant to the UK-Rwanda arrangement. The British government is setting up for similar entrapment in a costly operation, totals that in Australia financially spiralled to an estimated AU$9.65 billion (over £5 billion) since July 2013.
Rwanda is a country that, unlike the UK, does not have a substantial Middle Eastern diaspora. The Rwandan government will require enormous investment to support new populations from well outside the East African region. The British government – and ultimately taxpayer – will end up shouldering these costs. Sustaining the operations in the face of ongoing activism and High Court pushbacks will require evermore Rwandan investments to ensure its international legal compliance. Rwanda, like Nauru, will have major challenges to contend with too, including education, social integration, housing capacity, and mental health and trauma-related concerns.
As a migration governance strategy, the UK-Rwanda deal makes little sense. It will cost the British taxpayer far more than the economic and social benefits of integrating the small number of migrants into the British workforce.
Since the post-war era, international migration worldwide has remained stable, as a percentage of the global population it stands at 3.6%. This is a fraction of the world’s population, meaning that most people migrate within countries, rather than across borders. The majority of irregular migrants to the UK are visa over-stayers and not those who take a boat across the English Channel. Typically, it is also not the poorest people who migrate. Taking a boat is an expensive endeavour and migrants require considerable resources to migrate, particularly across international borders.
A new deal was finally struck for Nauru after almost a decade of indecision as to how to end the arrangement. It came amid a backdrop of deepening civil unrest, a series of tragic self-immolations, and a Guardian Nauru Files campaign that made global headlines. The Australian government arranged with the Obama administration a deal in which 1,250 refugees from Nauru and Manus Island would be resettled in the US.
These resettlement places were still honoured when Donald Trump entered office in 2016, as part of what Trump notoriously described as the “dumb, dumb deal”. Hamid, an Afghani refugee acquaintance in Nauru, sent me an email at the time. He expressed his excitement about his upcoming move to the US, but also his fear at the racism he might encounter. Like Hamid, most refugees have since been resettled across the US, Canada, and eventually through the long-standing New Zealand offer. But 60 refugees remain in Nauru, with the country still marred in refugee protests locally.
Heated debates continue in Australia. In March, the Albanese Labor government, the Liberal Party and the One Nation Party voted against the Green Party’s Migration Amendment Evacuation to Safety Bill 2023. This bill called for those refugees held in Nauru to be moved to Australia, while the Australian government pursued further resettlement options.
Nauru remains funded by the Australian government with the possibility that these operations might be restarted in the future. In October 2022, the Australian government awarded an AU$422 million (roughly £230 million) contract with the US-based private prison contractor, Management and Training Corporation, until September 2025 to hold refugees in Nauru.
Instead of debating the legitimacy of asylum, countries could benefit from providing work rights to migrant populations. The UK is well prepared for meeting these integration needs. Because of centuries of migration (much wrought through colonialism) the UK has already invested significant resources into supporting newcomers keen to integrate into the labour market. The Oxford Migration Observatory recently found that higher net migration reduces pressure on government debt over time. Incoming migrants are generally younger and of working age than the wider population. This means that they are more likely to work and contribute to public finances.
Not only is this shown to support migrant livelihoods, but it can also benefit the economies of sending and receiving countries in the long-term. These kinds of boosts to the economy and the labour market are much-needed in the post-COVID-19 and post-Brexit labour environment.
Back to 2016 and I am sitting in a senior Australian bureaucrat’s office in Canberra, discussing the standstill underway with the Nauru arrangement. I ask what the future holds for the offshoring policy. “Most politicians want it to end, but they’re unsure how to do it without losing face,” he replies.
Protests, many refugees on suicide watch, hunger strike, people sewing their lips together, no one interested in integrating locally in Nauru, it frankly just isn’t sustainable. It was never meant to be.
He pauses, adding: “Not to mention, ethically. It’s a laboratory experiment gone wrong.”
All names have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.
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Julia Morris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
For anyone trying to understand where interest rates and inflation are heading, it has been a strenuous few days. Jay Powell, chairman of US central bank the Federal Reserve, warned senators he may have to do more to fight inflation than expected, indicating the prospect of interest rates rising more sharply again. Similarly Christine Lagarde, his counterpart at the European Central Bank (ECB), has said that the eurozone is far from ready to declare victory over inflation.
But just as borrowing costs look set for uncomfortable new highs, there were signs of further complications in the form of a nasty sell-off of US banking stocks amid fears that rising interest rates are damaging their balance sheets. This then dragged down markets in Europe and Asia.
So where are we likely to be heading from here?
The world’s major economies have been fighting steep inflation for nearly two years now. After many years of prices only rising very slowly, annual inflation shot into double digits in many economies in 2022. This was thanks to supply chain disruptions in response to COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, which drove up energy and food prices.
The ECB, Fed, Bank of England (BoE) and other central banks raised interest rates aggressively to try and bring inflation back within their 2% targets. The UK and US have raised their benchmark rates from near zero a year ago to 4% and 4.5% respectively, while the equivalent ECB rate is up to 2.5%. This has had a marked effect on banks’ lending rates, as anyone trying to borrow money in recent months will be well aware.
UK, US and Eurozone interest rates
Until recently, it seemed likely that these rate rises were topping out because inflation had peaked. Headline inflation in the US fell from 9.1% in June to 6.4% by January partly thanks to easing food price pressures. This prompted the Fed to raise its benchmark interest rate by only 0.25 points in February, having been raising it in increments of 0.75 points only a couple of months earlier.
In the eurozone and UK, inflation has been moving in the same direction, with decelerating energy prices particularly benefiting Europe, though it has still been judged high enough in both areas to warrant monthly rises of 0.5 points. Overall, however, it suggested that central banks were on target to get back to 2% in the coming year or so.
Inflation rates in US, UK and eurozone
Yet it may have been too soon to breathe a sigh of relief. While the most recent monthly inflation numbers were still ticking downwards, it turned out to be a different story with core inflation. This closely watched measure strips out volatile items such as food and energy to give a clearer sense of price behaviour across the economy.
In the eurozone core inflation rose from 5.3% in January to 5.6% in February, while in the US it went from 4.6% in December to 4.7% in January. Both of the most recent numbers were above what the markets had been expecting. Only the UK’s most recent core inflation has been below expectations, though at 5.8% it’s still much higher than the Bank of England would like.
UK inflation vs core inflation
The reason why core inflation is staying raised could be linked to the fact that unemployment is so low. In the eurozone’s services sector, for example, we’ve been seeing rising wages as companies compete to pay for workers. Another factor has been companies raising their prices more quickly than usual to maintain their profit margins.
As most consumers will know only too well by now, raised inflation erodes your living standards. It means that people can buy fewer items with the same amount of money, making weekly shopping increasingly stressful.
As Powell and Lagarde have been signalling, the latest inflation data point to a need for further aggressive interest rate rises to come. The ECB is due to make its next decision on rates on March 16, with the Fed and BoE meeting the week after. Lagarde has already said it is “very, very likely” that the eurozone’s rate will rise by another 0.5 percentage points, while the market expects a similar rise from the US.
The effects are simple: the higher interest rates, the more borrowers need to pay back. Mortgage holders with tracker mortgages or whose fixed deals are coming to an end will be paying more. There is the consolation that people will be paid more on their savings accounts, though there can be a lag.
The most recent data is the latest US jobs figures (known as non-farm payrolls), which point to a slight decline in the unemployment rate from 3.5% in December to 3.4% in January. This would normally be good news but lower unemployment and increases in monthly salaries are providing the cushion for consumers to spend more in response to rising prices, which is of course adding to the problem.
On the other hand, bank stocks are selling off because the markets worry that banks’ financial positions are being compromised by the effect of rising rates on their vast bondholdings: the higher the rates, the lower the value of bonds. This is potentially a concern, but at least for now it’s probably not going to change the direction of travel.
Until core inflation is definitely under control, borrowing costs are going to rise more sharply than everyone was hoping. All eyes will be on the US inflation data in the coming days to see if there is any reason to change course.
Supriya Kapoor ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
You’re walking down a busy street on your way to work. You pass a busker playing a song you haven’t heard in years. Now suddenly, instead of noticing all the goings on in the city around you, you’re mentally reliving the first time you heard the song. Hearing that piece of music takes you right back to where you were, who you were with and the feelings associated with that memory.
This experience – when music brings back memories of events, people and places from our past – is known as a music-evoked autobiographical memory. And it’s a common experience.
It often occurs as an involuntary memory. That is, we make no effort to try to recall such memories, they just come to mind spontaneously.
Research has recently begun to uncover why music appears to be such a good cue for invoking memories. First, music tends to accompany many distinctive life events, such as proms, graduations, weddings and funerals, so it can play an important role in reconnecting us with these self-defining moments.
Music also often captures our attention, due to the way it affects our minds, bodies and emotions.
When music draws our attention, this increases the likelihood that it will be encoded in memory together with details of a life event. And this then means it is able to serve as an effective cue for remembering this event years later.
In recent research my colleague and I found that the emotional nature of a piece of music is an important factor in how it serves as a memory cue.
We compared music with other emotional memory cues that had been rated by a large group of participants as conveying the same emotional expression as the music excerpts we used. This included comparing music with “emotional sounds”, such as nature and factory noises and “emotional words”, such as “money” and “tornado”.
When compared with these emotionally matched cues, the music didn’t elicit any more memories than the words. But what we did find was that music evoked more consistently positive memories than other emotional sounds and words. This was especially the case for negative emotional stimuli. Specifically, sad and angry music evoked more positive memories than sad and angry sounds or words.
It seems then that music appears to have the ability to reconnect us with emotionally positive moments from our pasts. This suggests that using music therapeutically may be particularly fruitful.
The familiarity of a piece of music also, perhaps unsurprisingly, plays a role. In another recent study, we found that more familiar music evokes more memories and brings memories to mind more spontaneously.
So part of the reason music may be a more effective cue for memories than, for instance, our favourite film or favourite book, is that we typically reengage with songs more often over our lifetimes compared to films, books or TV shows.
The situations when we listen to music may also play a role. Previous research shows that involuntary memories are more likely to come back during activities where our mind is free to wander to thoughts about our past. These activities tend to be non-demanding in terms of our attention and include things like commuting, travelling, housework and relaxing.
These types of activities align almost perfectly with those recorded in another study where we asked participants to keep a diary and note when music evoked a memory, along with what they were doing at the time it happened. We found that daily activities that often go hand in hand with listening to music – such as travelling, doing chores or going for a run – tend to lead to more involuntary memories in the first place.
This contrasts with other hobbies, such as watching TV, which can require our mind to be more focused on the activity at hand and so less likely to wander to scenarios from our past.
It seems then that music is not only good at evoking memories but also the times when we are more likely to listen to music are the times when our minds may naturally be more likely to wander anyway.
Music is also present during many life events that are distinctive, emotional or self-defining – and these types of memories tend to be more easily recalled.
Indeed, the power of music to connect us with our past shows how music, memories and emotions are all linked – and it seems certain songs can act as a direct line to our younger selves.
Kelly Jakubowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
When you think about human evolution, there’s a good chance you’re imagining chimpanzees exploring ancient forests or early humans daubing woolly mammoths on to cave walls. But we humans, along with bears, lizards, hummingbirds and Tyrannosaurus rex, are actually lobe-finned fish.
It might sound bizarre but the evidence is in our genes, anatomy and in fossils. We belong to a group of animals called land-dwelling sarcopterygians, but vast amounts of evolutionary change have obscured our appearance.
We think of fish as expert swimmers, but in fact they have evolved the ability to “walk” at least five times. Some species pull themselves forward using well developed fore-fins, while others “walk” along the ocean floor.
Our sarcopterygian ancestor evolved lungs and other air-breathing mechanisms, bony limbs, and a stronger spinal column before venturing on to land. These adaptations were useful not only in aquatic environments but allowed our ancestors to explore land – they were “pre-adaptations” for life on land.
The water-to-land transition was one of the most significant events in vertebrate evolution. It may have started as a way to escape from predators, but the landscape our ancestors discovered was already rich with plants such as mosses, horsetails and ferns, as well as arthropods (millipedes) which had colonised land millions of years earlier.
Walking independently evolved several times in fish, making it an example of evolutionary convergence (similar traits that evolve independently, like wings in bats and birds). The evolution of walking in fish is rare though. There are more than 30,000 species of fish as we know them today (not in the evolutionary sense), of which only a handful can “walk”.
Sarcopterygians differ from other types of fish in several important ways. For example, our fins (limbs) have bony supports and muscular lobes that allow us to move on land.
This adaptation is thought to have been crucial for tetrapod (amphibians, mammals, reptiles and birds) evolution during our transition from water to land in the Late Devonian period, some 375 million years ago. Many of the genes involved in forming limbs and digits in tetrapods are also found in water-bound sarcopterygians like lungfish, which indicates these traits evolved in our ancient common ancestor.
We don’t know which species this ancestor was, but it probably looked similar to the coelacanth, which has a rich fossil record and is a “living fossil” that today inhabits the West Indian Ocean and Indonesia.
Walking sarcopterygian fish are either extinct, like Tiktaalik, or so highly evolved that we don’t recognise them as fish any longer (tetrapods).
One example of a living fish that walks is the mudskipper (of the Oxudercidae family). These fish live in mangrove swamps and tidal flats and use their pectoral fins to walk on land. These fins help them to escape from aquatic predators, forage for food (they consume organic material in mud), and even interact with each other on land by finding mates.
Another example is the walking catfish (Clarias batrachus), which uses its pectoral fins to travel over land, helping it escape from drying ponds and find new habitats.
The little skate (Leucoraja erinacea) is a cartilaginous fish related to rays and sharks (as opposed to bony fish, including sarcopterygians). It is another fish that “walks” underwater on fins like legs, mimicking the movements of land-based animals.
The little skate is of great interest to scientists researching the evolution of locomotion because it evolved fin-based walking independently from sarcopterygians. However, until now, the genetics behind the walking of the little skate was difficult to study due to a lack of quality data.
That changed recently when researchers from Seoul and New York used cutting-edge technology to construct a high-quality assembly of the little skate’s genome. The scientists discovered that it only uses ten muscles for fin-based walking, while tetrapods commonly use 50 muscles to move their limbs.
A big question about vertebrate evolution is: what genes are important for developing the muscles that enable walking? To find out, the team looked at which genes were active in the nerves that control limb muscles (motor nerves) in a mouse, chicken and little skate.
They discovered similar gene expression patterns in motor nerves that help these muscles function. So walking fish may have taken several different evolutionary paths, but this recent study suggests a common genetic mechanism.
By the end of the Triassic period roughly 201 million years ago, both dinosaurs and mammals had evolved excellent running abilities. Humans refined these locomotor powers, evolving numerous adaptations that make us one of the most efficient and capable running species on the planet.
These adaptations include a spring-like Achilles tendon which helps store energy, a long stride and balanced centre of gravity, and sweating to cool down. These adaptations allow us to run long distances with great endurance, though at slow speeds.
Our ancestors used running for hunting, to escape predators, and for foraging. It has shaped our anatomy, physiology and culture. And many studies show that walking and running are crucial to our wellbeing and physical health.
It has been a long road from the origin of walking in our fish-like ancestors who first colonised land. But walking and running remain a central part of our lives, and our evolutionary success.
Chris Organ does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Keeping up with the latest digital cons is exhausting. Fraudsters always seem to be one step ahead. But our study found there is one simple thing you can do to drastically reduce your chances of losing money to web scams: slow down.
In fact, among the various techniques used by scammers, creating a sense of urgency or the need to act or respond quickly is probably the most damaging. As with many legitimate sales, acting fast reduces your ability to think carefully, evaluate information and make a careful decision.
The COVID lockdowns made us all more reliant on online services such as shopping and banking. Quick to take advantage of this trend, scammers have since increased the rate and spectrum of online fraud. Cybersecurity company F5 found phishing attacks alone increased by over 200% during the height of the global pandemic, compared to the yearly average.
One fraud type many people fall victim to is fake websites (spoof legitimate business or government websites). According to a nonprofit that handles consumer complaints Better Business Bureau, fake websites are one of the leading reported scams. They caused estimated retail losses of approximately US$380 million (£316 million) in the US in 2022. Actually, losses are probably far higher because many cases go unreported.
We developed a series of experiments to evaluate what factors impact people’s ability to distinguish between real and fake websites. In our studies, participants viewed screenshots of real and fake versions of six websites: Amazon, ASOS, Lloyds Bank, the World Health Organisation COVID-19 donation website, PayPal and HMRC. The number of participants varied, but we had more than 200 in each experiment.
Each study involved asking participants whether they thought the screenshots showed authentic websites or not. Afterwards, they also took tests to evaluate their internet knowledge and analytical reasoning. Earlier research has shown analytical reasoning impacts our ability to tell between real and fake news and phishing emails.
People tend to employ two types of information processing – system one and system two. System one is quick, automatic, intuitive and related to our emotions. We know experts rely on system one to make quick decisions. System two is slow, conscious and laborious. The ability to perform well on analytical reasoning tasks has been associated with system two but not system one thinking. So we used analytical reasoning tasks as a proxy to help us tell whether people are leaning more on system one or two thinking.
An example of one of the questions in our analytical reasoning test is: “A bat and ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”
Our results showed higher analytical reasoning ability was linked to a better ability to tell fake and real websites apart.
Other researchers have found time pressure reduces people’s ability to detect phishing emails. It also tends to engage system one processing rather than system two. Scammers do not want us to carefully evaluate the information but engage emotionally with it. So our next step was to give people less time (about 10 seconds compared to 20 seconds in the first experiment) to do the task.
This time we used a new set of participants. We found participants who had less time to judge the credibility of a webpage showed poorer ability to discriminate between real and fake websites. They were about 50% less accurate compared to the group who had 20 seconds to decide whether a website was fake or real.
In our final study, we provided a new set of participants with 15 tips on how to spot fake websites (for instance, check the domain name). We also asked half of them to prioritise accuracy and take as much time as they needed while the other half were instructed to work as quickly as possible. Working quickly rather than accurately was linked to worse performance, and to poor recall of the 15 tips we provided earlier.
With increasing internet use among all age groups, scammers are capitalising on peoples’ tendencies to use more intuitive information processing mechanisms to evaluate whether a website is legitimate. Scammers often design their solicitations in a way that encourages people to act quickly because they know that decisions made under such conditions are in their favour. For example, advertising that a discount is ending soon.
Muck of the advice about how to identify fake websites suggests you carefully examine the domain name, check for the padlock symbol, use website checkers such as Get Safe Online, look for spelling errors, and be wary of deals that sound too good to be true. These suggestions, obviously, require time and deliberate action. Indeed, possibly the best advice you could follow is: slow down.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Like many other countries, the UK has developed a plan for a central bank digital currency (CBDC). A digital pound would essentially act like an online form of cash suitable for everyday payments. It would not earn any interest like a standard savings account (or even some current accounts), but it could increase access to financial services in the UK.
The Bank of England recently proposed a general framework for how a digital pound would work. It has suggested an ambitious timeline for introducing one by 2025. You have until June 7 2023 to tell the bank what you think of its plan.
The success of a UK CBDC will largely depend on whether the benefits of offering a digital currency outweigh the costs of creating and rolling out the infrastructure needed to support the new payment system.
There are clear benefits to CBDCs, such as increasing financial inclusion by providing an easier way for the UK’s 1.2 million unbanked residents to register for banking services. The online wallets that would hold people’s digital pounds could also be used by the government to make “fiscal transfers” such as passing tax subsidies or support payments on to households and businesses.
But the Bank of England’s current proposal is also seeking answers to some questions about a digital pound. In particular, how (or if) it could coexist alongside other digital currencies such as cryptocurrency assets. While the bank suggests several models, broadly speaking this could help reduce systemic risk in the crypto sector and further increase banking options for UK consumers.
Read more: What are stablecoins? A blockchain expert explains
The Bank of England’s CBDC consultation paper specifically mentions stablecoins. These are digital assets that are issued by private companies, unlike a traditional currency which is issued by a government. And unlike digital currencies such as bitcoin, the value of a stablecoin is pegged to a stable asset like the US dollar or British pound – but what about a digital pound?
The bank talks about the overlap between what a stablecoin and a digital pound could offer. It argues they could “coexist” in a mixed payments economy. It compares this to how we use both cash and bank accounts in the same payment system right now, pointing to technology developments such as ATMs that have made this coexistence even easier over the years.
Stablecoins would need to be “fully backed with high-quality and liquid assets” in order to complement a digital pound, according to the bank. It adds:
In contrast to the digital pound, stablecoins, regardless of their backing asset, would be a liability of the private-sector issuer rather than a claim on the central bank. That means they would be private money, like commercial bank deposits.
It also suggests a model in which these backing assets could be “held entirely with the central bank”, adding that this would make the stablecoin “economically similar to the digital pound” and reduce financial risk.
If the digital currency was used to back a stablecoin, this would mean that the issuer would provide holders with stablecoin tokens based on the value of digital pounds that could be used by customers for payments (both domestic and international) as well as trading in cryptocurrencies. These private forms of money would operate on the blockchain, which helps make payments easier and less costly. In some countries, stablecoins are already being used as a hedge against inflation and macroeconomic uncertainty.
This could also have benefits for the crypto industry. Currently, stablecoins are managed by private banks or organisations that are not regulated and audited. But a stablecoin backed by a digital pound in an account held with the central bank would be much more transparent and trustworthy. The central bank could regularly audit stablecoin providers’ reserves. Legislators could also impose capital requirements, for example mandating the percentage of issuers’ reserves to be kept in the account with the central bank.
But there is a trade-off here: extreme capital requirements could affect the profitability of stablecoins. Since they are typically linked to interest-bearing assets like Treasury bonds, they can make money from their holdings – that is, the assets held against the stablecoins they issue.
In contrast, a digital pound-backed stablecoin issuer would be unlikely to earn interest on its account at the central bank. While a typical bank such as Lloyds has reserve accounts at the central bank that earns the base rate, it is unlikely that the Bank of England would give a stablecoin provider the same kind of account. This would entail being subject to the same regulations, which could affect the flexibility that crypto asset providers tend to value.
Stablecoins backed by a digital currency held at the central bank could certainly address some of the systemic issues surrounding this type of crypto asset. Over the past year, a major stablecoin has collapsed in value. This typically happens when a market event prompts holders to rush to withdraw their holdings and the issuer has difficulties fulfilling so many redemptions at once.
If issuers were holding a certain percentage of liquid digital currency reserves at the central bank, this would ensure they had funds to process redemptions or withdrawals while maintaining the coin’s value against the digital pound. And even if an issuer bankruptcy did occur, a central bank could also provide insurance to stablecoin customers to protect their assets to a certain level.
Much like cash and bank accounts, it is possible that digital assets and stablecoins could coexist and even complement each other. Further, a digital pound could shine a light on the growing role of private money in the economy. This would help to make the financial system more secure while also fostering financial inclusion.
Ganesh Viswanath-Natraj does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Despite its unusual choice of protagonist – obsessive stalker and serial killer Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) – Netflix’s You is entering its fourth season, with audiences around the world streaming the many crimes he commits in the name of “love”.
Goldberg’s narration (spoken directly to “you”, the changing subjects of his obsessions) draws viewers in with his backstory and attempt to use logic to explain his behaviour.
His ability to manipulate situations to get the attention of his romantic crushes suggests that with strong belief and dedication to the pursuit of “the one”, we all can make others fall in love with us. As an academic who researches stalking, I think this message is dangerous.
Persistent unwanted contact from a potential or past suitor is not romantic. It is scary, it is uncomfortable, it is stalking.
Though You is fictional (based on the novels of Caroline Kepnes), it depicts realistic characters and stalking behaviour. For example, Goldberg uses “neutralisation” (the internal justification used by a person to defend actions deemed wrong by society) to rationalise his violent decisions.
A study in 1957 found that delinquent youths justified their behaviour through techniques of neutralisation, while stressing they were fully aware that their activities were illegitimate. Research into cyberstalking and harassment mirrors these findings.
Goldberg’s appeal is that he is aware of his actions but explains his logic in a way that is understandable to an emotional audience, who can relate to feelings of infatuation. This is concerning if some viewers start to mimic these sentiments and act on their emotions as the character they’re watching does.
Goldberg is an exaggerated version of the romantic hero, who wants to court the heroine and live happily ever after. His obsession with locking down “the one” reinforces a fantasy myth that has been told for decades. Considering the extensive popularity of the series, I’m concerned by the glamourisation of stalking and disregard of the criminal nature of Goldberg’s coercive tactics.
Developed by experts in the field, The Stalking Risk Profile gives professionals structured guidelines to assist them in making informed decisions about the risk and treatment of stalking perpetrators.
The set of categories considers the context and motivations for stalking behaviour, as well as its function. Goldberg exhibits traits of an “intimacy seeker” according to the stalking categories, but as You progresses, he fluctuates between the identities of a “rejected” and “resentful” stalker who feels wronged by others or wants to reconcile with his partner.
Goldberg details obsessions with Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail, series one), Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti, series two and three) and Marienne Bellamy (Tati Gabrielle, series three and four), believing each time that they are his romantic soulmate.
He researches his romantic interests extensively – mainly through social media – and creates a projection of their character. This trend is common among the young audience the series is catered towards.
The behaviour of “intimacy seeking” stalkers is frequently motivated by a serious mental health condition, that involves mistaken ideas about the victim, such as the belief that the two of them are already in a relationship when they aren’t (known as erotomaniac delusions).
Creating an emotional bond and an intimate relationship is the motivation for intimacy-seeking stalkers, and Goldberg’s character portrays this effectively.
Goldberg’s infatuations start from this “intimacy seeker” standpoint. But when he manages to secure a relationship with his interests, his paranoia leads him down a path of violence towards anyone who threatens the potential union.
This happens in the form of the stalking, kidnapping and murder of his partner’s friends, former partners and eventually the romantic interest themselves. Goldberg’s motives to stalk continually change, but he constantly relies on his expertise to monitor his victims’ social media and track them down.
He convinces the audience that he simply cannot help himself, though he tries many times to stop his obsessive thought and stalking fixations. But this is where the realism of You fades away. The violent path that Joe goes down is less common among real life “intimacy seeking” stalkers.
But hopefully it brings the audience to the realisation that his thought process is chauvinistic, abnormal and that his stalking behaviour is used as a means to commit extreme violence and murder.
As each series of You comes to a close, it becomes apparent that this “average Joe” who spends most of his time obsessing over a romantic muse and manipulates every situation to attain “love”, can never live happily ever after.
Kritika Jerath does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Pressures on gender recognition laws, the strong opposition to drag shows and increasing incidents of violence show that stigmatisation of LGBTQ+ people still exists, especially for those who do not conform to societal expectations around gender and sexuality.
A 2021 report by Stonewall highlighted how people in the UK still experience feelings of “fear, resentment, pity and disgust” towards those who identify as LGBTQ+, especially transgender men and women.
Amid such social turmoil, drag culture has become even more important for representation.
The most visible elements of drag are the fabulous outfits, the drama of lip-synchs and iconic catchphrases. However, the rich cultural history of drag for breaking social conventions and challenging gender stereotypes must not be forgotten.
From the theatres of 16th century England to the height of ball culture in 1980s New York, drag has provoked conversations and questioned social norms.
Drag has always been, and still is, a powerful tool to advance acceptance and raise social consciousness around inclusion within society. Above all, drag’s power is its contribution to the destigmatisation of LGBTQ+ people, which is needed to enhance their self-worth and wellbeing.
Our research focused on the reality TV show, RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality TV competition for drag queens. The participants are given different challenges every week and their performances are assessed by a panel of judges. These days, it is almost impossible to think of drag without also thinking of the global influence of the show and its creator RuPaul Charles.
Now in its 15th season in the US, with several worldwide spin-offs and a strong social media presence, the show has made important inroads in bringing themes traditionally considered taboo to prime time television. This spotlight has allowed the wider public to become more familiar with the struggles of this community.
In our research, we argue that drag has helped in two main ways: positive representation and humanisation. We also argue that there is much more scope for harnessing Drag Race’s positive momentum and disrupting the backlash against drag.
In their performances, drag queens represent the bending of gender norms (expectations of how men and women should act) in the form of entertainment. Contestants play with gender norms and make it acceptable for their audiences to do the same.
In doing this, they enhance the representation of minorities that have been historically hidden from the public eye. Cisgender men might dress up as divas of the 1950s, gender non-conforming people can play with different gender conventions, transgender men or women explore different domains of gender performances and women can play with both masculinity and femininity.
This provides LGBTQ+ viewers with a rich register of visible identities. Audiences can see themselves represented in the multitude of different performances of drag. Drag has helped the public to become more aware that gender can be a shifting concept and be more open towards the this community.
Drag also has the power to “humanise” LGBTQ+ people by making them more relatable. One of the key features of RuPaul’s Drag Race is showcasing the struggles of gay, lesbian, gender-nonconforming and transgender people.
In the show, contestants tell stories of being stranded when they came out, affected by HIV/AIDS, rejected by their families, or attacked in the streets. These stories allow audiences to understand that other people might have experienced similar struggles.
In a world characterised by episodes of stigmatisation and increased difficulty, brands like RuPaul’s Drag Race can leverage positive representation and humanisation to spread acceptance and awareness.
Different types of organisations (reality TV shows and advertising agencies) can follow the example of drag queens in sharing their stigmatisation experiences and so contribute to shifting public opinion of stigmatised groups.
While the reach of drag as entertainment allows people to be visible and spread important messages, this does not come without sanctions. RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants are often insulted, threatened, and trolled offline and online. However, the representations on the show remain unapologetic, speaking to many LGBTQ+ people who are still finding their feet and need encouragement.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Listening to people talk about views that clash with your own can be galling. Families all over the world avoid controversial topics. In the UK, for example, mention Brexit and watch everyone in the room tense up.
But if you only speak to people who think the same way you do, you live in an echo chamber. Being around people who think differently from you can increase your self-awareness and acceptance of others and is vital for learning. That’s why we carried out our recent study into whether focusing on your core values can help you engage more openly with others.
Conflict is part of life. Difficult conversations may feel uncomfortable but research shows there are things you can do to make talks with people who have directly opposing views more productive and less combative. For example, one study published in 2019 found that reminding people they have more in common than they think with members of groups they dislike can diminish people’s hostility towards those groups.
Researchers have argued receptiveness to opposing views and intellectual humility lie at the heart of healthy debates. Intellectual humility is owning or accepting your own shortcomings out of a genuine desire for knowledge and truth. It is about developing an increased awareness that you do not have all the answers and it is possible your views might be mistaken. An unassuming attitude makes people more open to appreciating others’ views. It doesn’t mean you have to suspend critical thinking though.
We tested whether there’s a way to enhance intellectual humility. We used an approach called values-affirmation, in which people reflect on one or two cherished personal values, such as freedom, equality or family security. Previous research found a brief period of reflection on personal values may increase people’s sense of integrity when they feel threatened. Contemplation also seems to make people more thoughtful and open-minded in response to text that challenges their views.
In our experiment, we invited participants in groups of two or three to the lab. After completing a range of psychological questionnaires assessing personality, intellectual humility, and self-esteem, half of the participants were asked to reflect on their most important value (for example freedom and equality) by writing about the significance their chosen value has in their lives and how it informs their behaviour. The second group, the control group, instead wrote about their attitudes to beverages such as tea and coffee. Afterwards, participants took part in a 15-minute group discussion about the pros and cons of raising student tuition fees to pay for university education.
Recordings of the debates were analysed by linguists from our team for conversational markers that indicate high or low intellectual humility. They coded participants’ contributions to discussions along with several other features including tendency to dominate the discussion, to engage with others’ opinions, or to convey their own convictions as certain, obvious and unchallengeable.
Participants who reflected about their most important value engaged in the discussion in a more humble way compared to participants in the control group. For example, they were more supportive of other speakers even when they were at odds; they tended to avoid dominating discussions; they were less likely to treat their own opinions as facts. Afterwards we asked participants to rate how they much they were feeling different emotions on a five-point scale (ranging from very slightly to extremely). The values-affirmation group reported feeling more empathic, giving, grateful, and humble compared to the control group.
Our research showed how a simple intervention can enhance intellectual humility in conversations. More than half (60.6% of participants) in the values-affirmation group showed more intellectual humility in debate than the average person in the control condition. This finding, as well as the enhanced feelings of tolerance people experienced, suggest reflecting on values can improve the quality of discussions on controversial issues.
Many conversations about controversial issues happen online, however. Face-to-face dialogue is very different from online communication, particularly when the people involved don’t know each other or obscure their identity. In theory, an intervention that supports intellectual humility in face-to-face dialogue may help online dialogue, but we can’t be sure without more research. If one thing is clear from science it’s that we shouldn’t avoid discussions about controversial topics, but we do need to change the way we approach them.
Research leading to the paper was partially funded by a subaward agreement from the University of Connecticut with funds provided by Grant No. 58942 from John Templeton Foundation. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of UConn or the John Templeton Foundation.
Research leading to the paper was partially funded by a subaward agreement from the University of Connecticut with funds provided by from John Templeton Foundation (Grant No. 58942 ). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of UConn or the John Templeton Foundation. Alessandra Tanesini was also the recipient of a Fellowship funded by the Leverhulme Trust
Monkeys, apes and lemurs are cute, familiar and lovable. But an estimated 60% of all primate species are listed as vulnerable, threatened or endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a network of environmental organisations.
You’ve probably heard about the main problems, like deforestation and the loss of habitat. But primates are a diverse group of animals with a wide geographical range, so there are many more subtle ways our actions as humans put these wonderful animals at risk.
Everywhere we go, our best friends are likely to go with us. Our review shows that dogs are present in many primate habitats. These predators sometimes kill and injure primates, but they also may simply chase and harass them, disrupting their socialising or foraging.
Being on the lookout for harassing dogs is stressful and causes primates to use more energy. Reducing these potentially lethal encounters depends on conservationists communicating with dog owners, who often don’t recognise the danger their dogs pose to such wildlife.
When diseases jump between animal species, they can cause serious harm to a species that does not have the necessary resistance. Dog diseases such as canine heartworm and parvovirus can be passed from dogs to primates, and could potentially be fatal. There’s also the possibility that pathogens – viruses, bacteria or parasites – could evolve to spread more easily or become more deadly.
If you live outside a country where primates live, you may never see a live primate outside of a zoo. Nevertheless, your media choices can still affect their conservation.
Researchers have discovered that our choices of what we watch on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok can end up fuelling the use of primates as pets or in entertainment. Primates are cute, and we love to watch videos of them. However, many of these pictures and videos show them in artificial contexts, such as primates wearing clothes or interacting with office equipment.
When people view such content, they often say they want a primate as a pet and are less likely to believe that these animals are endangered.
We can help to protect primates by not viewing or sharing videos that show animals in unnatural situations. The responsibility for interacting with primates respectfully is even higher for those who live near primates or those who embark on wildlife tourism.
People’s activities can affect where primates live, what food they eat, and how they live their lives. Many tourist destinations in these types of locations cater to people’s desire to interact and take pictures with primates by keeping them as pets or encouraging feeding or similar interactions.
Our research found that these practices harm the animals, increase the poaching or the trade of primates, and can lead to dangerous situations for both the primates and people. Photographs that show monkeys posing with humans alarm primatologists because we understand the risks of being bitten or of passing on diseases. But the wider public may be unaware of these dangers.
The potential for disease transmission between humans and primates is high, partly because of our closely related biology. When diseases move from animals to humans they are known as “zoonoses”. And when they are transferred from animals to human beings, they are known as “anthroponoses”.
The African apes – chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas – seem to be particularly vulnerable to human respiratory infections. Protecting these endangered animals from infectious disease is an important conservation goal.
The risk of disease transmission between humans and nonhuman primates is worsened by close contact. Some primate species have always lived near people. But as human need for space grows and primate habitats become more fragmented, these encounters become more common.
Primate tourism also brings humans closer to wildlife, with people sometimes even holding the animals or sharing food with them. The pet trade goes further and brings wild primates into our homes, where animals can contract illness from their owners and vice versa.
Preventing the primate pet trade and encouraging safe and respectful interactions with wildlife are vital for both human and nonhuman primate health.
These are only a few examples of the ways humans impact wild primates. And animal biologists are increasingly interested in such human-generated issues for wildlife conservation.
Tracie McKinney is affiliated with the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group's Section for Human-Primate Interactions (SHPI).
Michelle Rodrigues is affiliated with the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group's Section for Human-Primate Interactions (SHPI).
Sian Waters is affiliated with the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group's Section for Human-Primate Interactions (SHPI)
Cats and dogs famously don’t get on with each other. We seem quite able to recognise a fight between these two species. However, even experienced cat owners can struggle to tell the difference between rough-and-tumble play and scraps between cats. Some people may tell themselves it doesn’t matter and cats just do what they want. But knowing when to intervene is important for a cat’s welfare.
A recent paper published in Scientific Reports studied how to differentiate between cat-to-cat interactions, including when play escalates to aggression. The study, which analysed videos of cats socialising, found owners can help their pets’ welfare by monitoring their cats and intervening when aggression starts. Another finding was that cats can have short-term disagreements, not unlike the way humans have squabbles with their friends.
But to be a good peacemaker and stop a genuine conflict, you need to understand the evolutionary history of our companion cats’ social lives and interpret their body language.
Cats are originally a solitary species. For the domestic cat, living with us can often mean living close together with other cats. A recent study found that a little over one in two cats (55% of the cats from 5,129 respondents living mainly in the UK, but also other European countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA) live in a so-called “multi-cat” household.
Domestic cats are more flexible than their ancestors. They’ve evolved to become a semi-social species. But not all cats can tolerate sharing their home with another cat, which may stress them out.
Heredity factors as well as early life circumstances will affect a cat’s ability to live with another cat. Often same-sex combinations find it easier to share their living space, particularly two females with familial ties.
When cats live together, they may merely share the same home or they may bond. One sign cats enjoy one another’s company is if they sleep together with their bodies and heads directed towards each other.
But cats may also value a certain spot for warmth, a view, or the company of their human which may make them choose to lie close together. At the same time they may show signs they are too close for comfort, for example they may face away from each other, or one cat may stare the other down. Such cats are also less likely to play together.
Kittens romp with each other and play with objects by themselves. The peak of social play is between the ninth and 14th week of a kitten’s life. Kittens that live with their litter mates for longer may become more practiced at the social skills involved in play. Play is crucial for a kitten’s development. It’s indispensable for cats who will share territory with other cats later in life.
How do you recognise actual, true, play in kittens and cats? Actual play can be recognised by:
1) A balance and equality in the play (reciprocity), for instance switching positions when wrestling and chasing.
2) An inclination for the cats involved to move towards each other (their bodies will be directed towards each other for most of the time) in relaxed and exaggerated ways.
3) They aren’t hissing, growling or spitting at each other.
4) Neither cats’ ears are pinned back.
5) When they raise their paws towards another cat, they keep their claws sheathed.
6) When they bite each other it can be part of the play, but it will be inhibited – so their teeth won’t actually dent the other’s skin (or worse).
Cats are nuanced, complicated creatures and so is their play. They may also engage in play fighting – a mixture of play and fighting, which may be more difficult to recognise. This kind of interaction can harm the social bond between the cats.
Whenever you hear vocalisations such as growling or hissing, see enlarged pupils, prolonged staring (with hard eyes or tense bodies), the use of claws and teeth (recognisable by hairs coming loose), you need to divert the cats’ attention in a calm way to stop the interaction. For instance by making a soft sound or by offering a toy at a short distance from the cats.
If you find little scabs – wound crusts can be a mere speck – it’s a sign cats were not playing, but fighting.
Social play can be an enrichment for cats, but only if it is balanced and pleasurable for all cats involved. If one cat becomes an object of play, for instance by being chased when it does not want to be chased, don’t laugh it off as “just playing”. Instead, look at alternative ways for all cats to feel safe.
Creating hiding nooks and high places gives somewhere for a cat that does not want to be chased to escape. Cats can play on their own. But even in single-cat households, play is a great way for owners to strengthen their connection with their cat.
Ineke van Herwijnen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
It’s been reported that NHS England has paused plans to deliver a training programme to improve inclusion of gender diversity in pregnancy services. This is following a reported “revolt” by midwives. However, our recent research suggests training is needed and that professionals may actually welcome it.
The Maternity Gender Inclusion Programme was due to be rolled out in the first three months of 2023 across 40 NHS providers offering educational resources for staff. It was informed by research from national charity, the LGBT Foundation. This research found many trans and non-binary people were not confident in accessing “maternity” services or in professionals’ ability to care for them.
The programme was paused following an open letter signed by around 650 clinicians, researchers and members of the public. This letter was critical of the LGBT Foundation’s research.
While there are always limitations in research, the LGBT Foundation’s was one of the largest studies of its kind globally. Its findings are also generally consistent with international peer-reviewed research. Other research undertaken by Equality Network also demonstrates how reproductive services can be challenging and complex to navigate for trans and non-binary people.
If healthcare data systems were designed to routinely collect data on service users’ gender identity, outcome data relating to trans and non-binary people could be more reliably compared to the general population. Equally, medical results based on sex would no longer be improperly flagged and relevant screening and serious diagnoses would no longer be missed.
The proposed NHS programme was also criticised for being excessive, as some midwives may never care for a trans or non-binary person. However, this is not a strong argument for not preparing staff to do so. Perinatal professionals will care for more trans or non-binary people in future as societies become more inclusive of these communities who are no longer discouraged from giving birth.
Most research conducted so far has focused on the childbearing experiences of trans men. We spoke to more than 100 UK health professionals (predominantly midwives) for our recent research and it is the first to focus on their educational needs and experiences in this area. Along with the majority of people in the UK, our participants were generally trans inclusive. Nevertheless, they remained frustrated by a lack of knowledge about relevant terminology and how to use gender inclusive language.
Only a small minority of our participants expressed concerns that terms like “pregnant people/parents” may erase (cisgender) women. While our data may not be representative of all midwives, the open letter against inclusive education equally cannot tell us how widely these views are held within the profession at large. The loudest voices may in fact be in the minority.
The majority of our participants were keen to understand how to practise in an inclusive manner. Barriers to this included systems built exclusively for cisgender women, where it is assumed that all pregnancies take place in heterosexual relationships.
Some professionals reported witnessing transphobia among midwifery colleagues (for example, mocking and refusing to use personal pronouns). Education and training may go some way towards tackling such discrimination within these services.
Providing appropriate care for both cisgender women and trans and non-binary people need not be mutually exclusive. Overall improvements in practice and services can benefit everyone. So let’s provide the training and resources that professionals need without making maternity services the latest battleground in a culture war.
Sally Pezaro works for Coventry University and the Nursing and Midwifery Council. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Midwives.
Adam Jowett works for Coventry University. He is a Chartered member and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, is Chair of their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Board and Chair of their Sexualities Section which exists to promote psychological research on LGBTQ+ issues.
The arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro, one of Sicily’s most infamous mafia bosses, has reminded many Italians of the extreme violence he was associated with when operating as a leading figure of Cosa Nostra.
Denaro appears to belong to another time – when the mafia brutally killed at will. And it is indeed true that the period of extreme violence with which he is associated has been confined to the past. But that does not in any way mean Italy’s organised crime groups have disappeared in the 30 years Denaro has been in hiding – they’ve just had a rethink about how they operate.
The Italian mafia has drastically reduced the number of homicides it carries out. Violence is now used in a much more strategic and less visible way. Rather than bloody and conspicuous murders, the modern mafia intimidates with crimes that are less likely to be reported to the police – such as arson and physical assault or sending threats. Murder is now a last resort.
The violent conflict between the Sicilian mafia and the Italian state reached its climax in the early 1990s. This was a period characterised by massacre after massacre, including the notorious bombing on Via D'Amelio in 1992 that killed magistrate Paolo Borsellino and five members of his entourage. In 1991 alone, there were 1,916 homicides – 718 of which were of a mafia nature.
The media covered every twist and turn. Politicians spoke in parliament about the scourge of organised crime. Mafia activity occupied a significant place in Italy’s public discourse and cultural imagination.
The authorities reacted with force. New laws were enacted, such as the “41-bis” prison regime, which included the threat of solitary confinement for members of organised crime gangs. A local municipality could be stripped of its powers for up to two years if local officials were thought to be working with the mafia, and a nationally appointed technocratic administration installed to clean house. A national anti-mafia directorate was also created so that more resources could be dedicated to the fight against organised crime.
In the years that followed, data shows a radical decrease in the number of mafia-related homicides, from 718 in 1991 to just 28 in 2019. In 2020, there were 271 homicides in Italy, compared with almost 2,000 in 1991. With 0.5 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, Italy now has the fewest homicides in Europe after Iceland and Slovenia – fewer homicides per capita than Norway, Switzerland or Luxembourg.
At the same time, an interesting trend can be identified. In ongoing research, I’ve been analysing the archive of RAI (Italian National Television) over the past 40 years and studying the content of national and regional news bulletins. It’s clear that in years with more mafia homicides, media coverage related to the mafia increases, measured by the percentage of news on the mafia topic.
Conversely, when mafia homicides decrease, the topic is talked about less and there are fewer interventions in parliament. For example, between 1992 and 1994, organised crime was cited in 15% of speeches by parliamentarians. Within 20 years it was being mentioned in just 4.3% of speeches.
In other words, the more the mafia openly kills, the more attention it attracts from the media and politicians. It’s important to note that these are not necessarily years in which the mafia has been any less active in other ways. The smuggling, racketeering and corruption continues unabated. Only the most noticeable violence is in retreat.
All of this suggests that the decrease in the number of homicides could, at least in part, be a strategic choice. Criminals have worked out what they need to do to fly under the radar and be left to their own devices.
This does not mean that violence is no longer used – it is simply more targeted. As reported every year by the anti-mafia charity Avviso Pubblico, local administrators are now the main targets of the mafia. They are sent threatening letters and are treated with aggression in person at a rate of about one incident per day. This phenomenon goes almost unnoticed by the media, which would surely pay attention were a member of the national parliament face intimidation or violence. At best, local officials might see their experiences reported in the local press; it’s rare for such incidents to be reported on at a national level.
The mafia thereby neatly achieves its goal of influencing local politics without attracting media and political attention. Election periods are particularly delicate: mayors are subject to the most threats at these times, particularly in the period immediately after taking office, as local criminals see an opportunity to take control of the newcomer.
This strategy has facilitated the mafia’s economic expansion. While the number of murders has declined, the number of properties and businesses seized from the mafia has ballooned – again suggesting that a drop in violent crime is not necessarily an indicator of a drop in other types of criminal activity. In 1991, the state seized two companies and four properties from the mafia. In 2019, 351 companies and 651 properties were seized.
These figures could be read as indicating that law enforcement is doing a better job of identifying economic crime, and that could indeed be the case. But other data lends weight to the more pessimistic interpretation of the facts.
In 2019, assets relating to organised criminals were seized in 11 Italian provinces (largely in the northern regions) that had never previously experienced mafia activity. And today, each police operation related to organised crime leads to seizures of about €1 million (£880,000). At the end of the 1990s, the average value was about €50,000.
This suggests that far from being in retreat, the mafia is expanding into new areas of the country, and finding more lucrative opportunities as it goes.
Gianmarco Daniele does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Eight days before Prince Harry’s memoir Spare hit shelves elsewhere, copies went on sale prematurely in Spain.
Over the next few days the UK media, scrambled to acquire Spanish copies of the book, having been unable to get English versions for themselves. Their reporting on the story was initially based on these Spanish versions.
The fact that many of the quotes had been translated from English to Spanish and then back into English was barely acknowledged. Sometimes, this results in change, or different versions, as we see below. The book’s tagline is “His Words. His Story.” and part of the coverage centred around why it was important that these were Prince Harry’s own words. Yet what those words actually were, depended on where you read them.
One much quoted extract from Spare is Prince Harry’s account of how many members of the Taliban he had killed. He writes:
So, my number: twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed.
This was a focal point for early spoilers on the book and was quoted differently in different publications.
On Sky: “So my number: twenty-five. It was not something that filled me with satisfaction, but I was not ashamed either.”
In The Times: “So my number is 25. It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me.”
Neither of these translations is wrong. They show different ways of rendering the same idea – but the cumulative effect is important.
It was unclear whether early criticisms were responding to the published version or alternative translations. Those attacking the author for his stance may not in fact have been responding to “his words” at all.
A more detailed example comes in Prince Harry’s account – here taken from the book in English – of losing his virginity:
Inglorious episode, with an older woman. She liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze. Among the many things about it that were wrong: It happened in a grassy field behind a busy pub.
Unsurprisingly, this was another of the most frequently quoted leaks. But again, the wording is not consistent. The Daily Mail quoted:
“… a humiliating episode with an older woman who liked macho horses and who treated me like a young stallion. I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and sent me away. One of my many mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a very busy pub.”
There are some significant differences. Firstly, a shift in agency and responsibility: a “quick ride” is recast to position Harry as dominant (“I mounted her”), while “things that were wrong” become “my many mistakes”, suggesting self-accusation.
There is also awkwardness, in the term “macho horse” and in the reference to ass spanking: would the author who talks elsewhere about his “todger” also say “ass”?
The different word choices may be partly about different translators working on the text that appeared in different places. A translator collaborates in rewriting the author’s text, brings out its interest and value, reads carefully for hidden layers of meaning and confronts difficulties and inconsistencies.
Languages don’t map directly onto one another and there is often more than one way to translate a given word or phrase. What’s notable here is that the invisibility of the English to Spanish to English translation process leaves readers not understanding why there are different versions.
Translation theorists have talked about translation as a kind of “rewriting”. Recognising the translator as an active writing agent is key to exploring the ethical question of whose voice is heard in translated texts.
However, the participation of others in the telling doesn’t necessarily mean Spare is no longer Prince Harry’s story.
Storytelling is central to how we establish our identity, and it is social. We rely on communities to retell our stories and so, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre explains: “We are never more (and sometimes less) than co-authors of our own narrative.”
But how far can the ownership of Prince Harry’s narrative stretch when the words are no longer “his”? As we have seen, when fragments and differently translated snippets are all presented as “the text”, the resulting inconsistency undermines the authenticity of the story, and with it the agenda of the book.
The marketing for Spare and media appearances surrounding its publication have leaned heavily on a bid to “tell my own story” and resist “words being taken out of context”. The realities of translation show how difficult this is.
Caroline Summers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
People’s first instinct when engaging with conspiracy believers is often to try and debunk their ideas with factual and authoritative information.
However, direct confrontation rarely works. Conspiracy theories are persuasive, often playing on people’s feelings and sense of identity. Even if debunking conspiracy theories was effective, it’s difficult to keep up with how quickly they appear and how widespread they travel. A study showed that during 2015 and 2016, the number of propagators of Zika virus conspiracy theories on Twitter twice outnumbered debunkers.
But research into how to talk with conspiracy believers is beginning to show returns. We’ve developed some conversation prompts to use with people you know or only meet in passing. But first, if you want to address someone’s conspiracy beliefs you need to consider the root causes.
People are attracted to conspiracy theories in an attempt to satisfy three psychological needs. They want more certainty, to feel in control, and maintain a positive image of their self and group. During times of crisis, such as the COVID pandemic, these needs are more frustrated and people’s desire to make sense of the world becomes more urgent.
Yet, conspiracy beliefs do not seem to satisfy these psychological needs and may actually make things worse for people, increasing their uncertainty and anxiety. Conspiracy theories don’t just affect people’s state of mind, they can also impact behaviour.
For instance, people who believe in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories - such as the idea that pharmaceutical companies cover up the dangers of vaccines - reported more negative attitudes towards vaccinations and an increased feeling of powerlessness one month later. This is what makes it so important to reach out to conspiracy believers.
One important tool to reduce conspiracy beliefs is the power of social norms. People overestimate how much others believe in conspiracy theories, which influences how intensely they buy in themselves. A study in 2021 found that countering this misconception with information about what people actually believe diluted the strength of anti-vaccine conspiracy beliefs among a sample of UK adults.
Inoculation is a promising route, too. Giving people factual information in advance of exposure to conspiracy theories can reduce belief in them. This approach could work well in cases like vaccination where people might not think much about the issue before it becomes important to them (for example when they need to decide whether to have their children vaccinated).
You can inoculate yourself too. Research has found that the way people think about control can reduce the likelihood they will subscribe to conspiracy theories. People who are focused on achieving goals find conspiracy theories less appealing than those who fixate on protecting what they already have. The authors of this paper argued that concentrating on shaping your future fosters a sense of control, which reduces conspiracy beliefs.
To help with those difficult discussions with conspiracy believers we developed some evidence-based conversation starters.
An open-minded approach starts with asking questions and listening. It builds understanding with the person. Listen carefully, and avoid defending your own beliefs. Ask questions like this:
When did you first start believing in (briefly reference the conspiracy theory)? And how has this impacted you psychologically? What do these beliefs offer to you?
Work on what psychologists call conversational receptiveness to foster empathy which can bridge the gap between the beliefs you each hold. Say things like:
I understand that…; So what you’re saying is…; How does this make you feel?; Tell me more…; I’m listening; and thank you for sharing.
Affirm the value of critical thinking.
If the person you’re talking to already perceives themselves as a critical thinker, redirect this skill towards a deeper examination of the conspiracy theory itself. For example:
We probably both agree that asking questions is important. But it is key we evaluate all pieces of evidence. We need to weigh up the information and make sure we check the evidence that we agree with as well as the things we don’t like or make us feel uncomfortable.
Highlight how conspiracy theories are not as commonplace as people might think.
Readdressing social norms can help address people’s need to protect a group they identify with. Such as:
It is far more typical than you might realise for your neighbours to get vaccinated and protect themselves against COVID-19. People want to work together to protect our community. It’s about us all trying to help people with medical conditions who don’t have the choice to get vaccinated.
Encourage them to be forward-focused and inspire them to put their energy into areas of their life where they experience more control, like this:
There are some aspects of our life that we have no control over, but there are plenty of areas where we have full agency. Let’s list some examples where we have power and independence that we can then focus on.
These conversations can be difficult, but they are crucial. Using an empathetic, understanding, and open-minded approach will nurture trust. Research shows that gaining someone’s confidence is important to preventing radicalisation.
Reassure the person if they feel uncertain, make them feel more in control if they are worried or powerless, and help them make social connections if they feel isolated.
Daniel Jolley has received funding from the British Academy and Not Equal.
Karen Douglas has received funding from the European Research Council, Leverhulme Trust, British Academy, Australian Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council.
Mathew Marques is a member of National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance Social Science Advisory Group.
The cost of electricity rose sixfold between January 2021 and November 2022 as the impact of the COVID pandemic combined with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to push up wholesale energy prices.
Without government intervention, household electricity costs could have grown sixfold too. But the energy price guarantee (EPG) launched in September 2022 was designed to limit the per-unit price charged to all consumers.
Under the scheme, a typical customer should pay around £2,500 per year (£3,000 from April 2023), according to government estimates. The government then compensates suppliers for the difference between the per-unit cost they face to buy energy and the maximum they can charge to customers. But this is a costly burden and the public funds used to do this could be deployed to support households in better ways.
Read more: How the UK energy crisis plan will affect bills and price inflation — an economist explains
When discussing energy, there are also environmental considerations, of course. Heating and lighting UK homes account for almost a fifth of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. And efforts to reduce these emissions are moving far too slowly. According to government data, the residential sector, alongside agriculture, has the worst record for reducing carbon emissions over the last 30 years.
And with governments becoming increasingly aware of the need to tackle this problem, wholesale energy prices will probably remain high as more taxes on carbon emissions are introduced globally. But until emission taxes become a reality, it could be more effective to overhaul energy policy to pursue two main aims:
Meeting these goals will take a new approach, both to energy support and to how the government deploys its transition strategies, including more local and regional collaboration.
While the EPG is a step towards the first goal, it ignores the second. Indeed, the analysis I conducted with my colleagues at the University of Warwick highlights that the EPG has regressive effects. It reduces energy costs for families with high incomes and high usage.
At 2022 market prices (represented by the dashed blue line in the chart below) an increase in energy use leads to a pronounced increase in annual bills. Under the EPG (the solid orange line) bills increase less sharply as usage goes up. This means that super-consumers will benefit most from the EPG.
Within the roughly 280,000 UK households with an annual income over £150,000, around 14,000 consume more than twice as much energy as nearly 50% of all other households in this high-income group.
Rising energy costs versus consumption
A lack of focus on energy efficiency investments is also an issue in national energy policy. And confusing short-lived policies, lengthy paperwork and late reimbursements can mean programmes fail to fully spend budgets.
This can trigger a termination of a scheme until a new one is drafted, leaving customers to wonder whether energy efficiency investments are worthwhile if the government cannot make up its mind about what to provide. For example, the plateauing of solar panel installations has been linked to the halving of the government’s renewable energy feed-in-tariff scheme in 2012.
Conversations with local councils during our research into this issue have also highlighted that despite more closely understanding the needs of the population, local councils feel underfunded and under-supported to help with the transition to net zero. And national government programmes sometimes miss important segments of the rural, rental, and middle-income population, for example.
A broader and more coherent strategy is needed, under which the national government works with local authorities. Our research shows that 10.9 million properties in England alone could benefit from energy efficiency investments in terms of reduced energy use, reduced energy bills, and reduced carbon emissions.
Indeed, the next graph shows that at least 5.8 million properties would benefit from improved wall insulation such as solid or cavity wall insulation, 2.8 million properties would benefit from roof or loft insulation and 7.1 million properties could benefit from floor insulation. Further, there are at least 3.7 million properties that could benefit from condensing boiler upgrades.
Residential energy efficiency improvements
But how can these investments be made, while still supporting families who struggle to pay their bills? Replacing the EPG with a more progressive price structure that keeps revenues neutral would be a solid first step. Our research suggests that a two-tier tariff could better target energy use subsidies towards low-income households with low energy use while charging market rates for high users who can afford to pay higher rates and invest in energy efficiency.
And if receiving a large bill still does not encourage families to use less energy, a renewed push to encourage smart meter uptake could help people plan their energy use. This could also open up new opportunities for conservation and demand management, as my upcoming research on water conservation in the US shows.
Community-level strategies could also help the government support households on their journey towards energy efficiency. Research in this area shows that firsthand experience and word of mouth can go a long way to convincing people to adopt green investments. Neighbours joining forces might help reduce contractor costs.
It will take a joint effort, at all levels of government, to reach net zero without leaving the most vulnerable behind. At the local level, organisations with strong community ties, such as faith-based groups, could help restore trust in energy policies that have flip-flopped too often in the past. Local councils are well-positioned to identify these pockets of trust and bring them to fruition. Only by recognising the role of these forces can national policy succeed in tackling this challenge.
Ludovica Gazze receives funding from the ESRC and J-PAL.
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