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Riots broke out in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, following the lethal police shooting of a 17-year-old boy named as Nahel M. An investigation into his death is ongoing but the situation has already triggered protest and anger. Whatever the investigation concludes, the incident forms part of a complex, deep-rooted problem in France.
It raises the memory of the violence that spread across the city’s suburbs in 2005, lasting more than three weeks and forcing the country into a state of emergency. Many of the issues behind the unrest back then remain unresolved to this day and have potentially been aggravated by ever worsening relations between the police and the public.
During my extensive fieldwork in the suburban estates of Paris, Lyon and Marseille I have seen and heard first-hand the grievances that are now being cried out on the streets of Nanterre.
Certain suburbs of large French cities have, for decades, suffered from what has been labelled the worst “hypermarginalisation” in Europe. Poor-quality housing and schooling combine with geographical isolation and racism to make it virtually impossible for people to stand a chance at improving their circumstances.
Evidence has long shown that people living in poor suburbs can expect to face discrimination based on the very fact of living in those suburbs when they apply for a job. Even just having a certain name on your CV can rule you out of employment thanks to widespread racial discrimination.
Discontent among young people in these places has been brewing for decades as a result. The first riots of the kind currently happening in Paris took place in Lyon as far back as the 1990s.
And yet, outside moments of crisis, there appears to be practically no discussion by French leadership about how to tackle the problems that drive so much anger in the suburbs.
President Emmanuel Macron presents himself as committed to re-industrialising France and revitalising the economy. But his vision does not include any plan for using economic growth to bring opportunity to the suburbs or, viewed the other way round, to harness the potential of the suburbs to drive economic growth.
In two presidential terms, he has failed to produce a coherent policy for solving some of the key problems of the suburbs.
Police brutality is a topic of great concern in France at the moment, beyond the Nanterre incident. Earlier this year, international human rights organisation the Council of Europe took the extraordinary step of directly lambasting the French police for “excessive use of force” during protests against Macron’s pension reforms.
Policing appears stuck in an all-or-nothing approach. In a recent interview I helped conduct for a documentary in the suburbs of Marseille, residents pointed to successive cuts to community based police officers, based in the estates, as key reasons for increases in tension between the population and the police. Protests, meanwhile, are met with tear gas and batons.
Successive governments have used policing to control the population to prevent political turmoil, eroding the legitimacy of law enforcement along the way.
And yet, the police are extremely hostile to reform, a stance that is aided and abetted by their powerful unions and Macron himself, who needs the police to crush opposition to his reforms.
Former president Nicolas Sarkozy is infamous for inflaming tensions during the 2005 riots by referring to the people involved as “scum” who needed to be pressure washed from the suburbs. Macron, too, has been repeatedly criticised for striking an arrogant, tone during his political career, making numerous gaffs including suggesting an unemployed worker only needed to “cross the street” to find work.
However, his consiliatory response to the death of Nahel could not be further removed from Sarkozy’s stance. He has called the killing “inexcusable” and held a crisis meeting to seek a solution to the crisis.
A trip to see Elton John perform while the riots occurred was perhaps not advisable and comments about young people being “intoxicated” by video games were somewhat misguided, but Macron has at least tried to calm tensions and not inflame them.
A key problem for him, however, is the diffuse, de-centralised nature of the protestors. There is no leadership to meet and negotiate with, and there are no specific demands that need to be met to defuse the tension. As in 2005, the riots are occurring spontaneously, sometimes estate by estate.
That makes escalation very difficult for the government to stop. And it underscores the need for a far more wide-reaching, thoughtful response to tackle the entrenched, decades-old problems of poor social prospects and police brutality in the suburbs of French cities.
Joseph Downing 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.
Research has shown that in the early months of the COVID pandemic people in the UK both reported reading more and used reading to cope with the anxieties brought on by sudden changes to their lifestyle.
Since those early lockdown days, people have been writing about their experiences of the pandemic. And now, nearly three years since the lockdowns began, books are still being written and being published on COVID. Like other significant catastrophic events (think wars, 9/11, Brexit), this new genre of writing could continue for some time.
Poetry enjoyed a resurgence in public interest during the pandemic. As a literary form, it is easy to share and can capture emotion in widely relatable and comprehensible ways.
During the lockdown months, reading and sharing of poetry increased. For example, King’s College London ran a “#poemsfromlockdown” initiative that saw contributors record themselves reading a favourite poem and then share it via Twitter.
The website Poetry Generation posted videos of poetry being read by elderly people who were feeling isolated. Many established poets published lockdown poems offering their own perspective on the power of poetry to make sense of the catastrophe. Slowly but surely whole collections inspired by the pandemic began to appear.
Over the last year, I have been researching the language of what I have termed “COVID poetry” (collections of poetry written during or directly influenced by the pandemic) and the ways that readers respond to these poems.
Although poets’ experiences of the pandemic and lockdowns vary, there are some shared characteristics. Often the collections will draw attention to the pandemic in immediate and explicit ways. For example, George Sandifer-Smith’s Empty Trains (2022) draws attention to reduced commuter travel and Kate Fox’s The Oscillations (2021) has “After” and “Before” sections relating to life post- and pre-lockdown.
Many of the collections reflect public concerns about social distancing – isolation, fear and uncertainty about the future. But many other collections, and the poems within them, cover more personal concerns. Jamie Hale’s Shield (2021), for example, is a powerful set of 21 unpunctuated sonnets about living through the pandemic as an immunocompromised person.
The poet Claire Shaw argues that during the pandemic:
We discovered we needed poetry more than ever before – its ability to console and connect, to express sorrow, to find beauty, to create meaning.
Some critics have suggested that literature offered much needed ways to reexamine the world around us in light of the changes forced on us by the pandemic. Not everyone feels the same. A study of public attitudes towards “corona poetry” in the Netherlands and Belgium, for example, revealed more negative feelings towards the genre than positive ones.
Research has shown however, that not only does reading have therapeutic value but that it provides a space for empathy. When we read, we build representations of the minds of others and can gain a better insight into their experiences.
As part of my own research, I have begun to look at how readers – a few years on from the onset of the pandemic – talk about COVID poetry to make sense of both their own pandemic experiences and those they read about.
In a recent paper, which reports on participants’ responses to The New Shape of Fear from poet Michele Witthaus’s collection From a Sheltered Place (2020), I found that readers reported being drawn into the world of the poem and aligning its events and experiences with those of their own.
They often used the poem as a springboard for exploring their memories of similar events and aligned themselves with the viewpoint in the poem, showing empathy with the situation being described.
They were able to move away from the specifics of the poem to reflect on, for example, how people might feel about social distancing and mask wearing at the time of reading, even when it was no longer compulsory to do so.
So what might the future hold? It may be that there is a space for COVID poetry to play an important role in education in order to help people come to terms with their pandemic experiences and encourage empathy.
Poetry is capable of conveying the emotional experience of living through the pandemic in powerful ways that resonate with readers. It’s likely that we will continue to turn to poets to help us understand the strange events of the COVID pandemic for years to come.
Marcello Giovanelli 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.
In the wake of her decision to resign, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s outgoing first minister, said that life for women politicians who “put their head above the parapet” is “much harsher” and “more hostile” now than at any time in her decades-long career.
Women are better represented in politics than ever and with flourishing online feminist activism such as #MeToo, more and more women publicly claim their rights. This, however, has created a backlash against women’s rights that women in the public eye bear the brunt of.
There are more women than ever in political office. As of December 2022, 26.4% of parliamentarians worldwide are women and there are 30 women serving as elected heads of state or heads of government.
Yet, the UN Women agency calculates that at the current rate, it will take 130 years to reach gender equality in the highest positions of power. The trajectory is upward. The rate of progress, slow.
Having women dare to “put their head above the parapet” is important. Research has shown that most legislative changes on women’s issues worldwide have been achieved thanks to pressure from feminist movements. Where women are part of the decision-making process they are able to instigate change and improve lives, not only by addressing women’s issues but also by, for instance, promoting welfare policies and investing in public goods. This is also a very current issue. As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been argued that countries headed through the crisis by women leaders emerged form the pandemic in better shape.
All this raises a dilemma. Women’s involvement in politics has been hard won but those who lead the way appear to be paying a high cost. There may be more women in offices of authority and influence than ever before, but everyday women in such positions face violence and abuse directed towards them: from sexist and misogynist comments about their appearance to death and rape threats to physical assault. This is abuse that men do not suffer to the same extent.
Violence against women serves to reinforce a gender system where the roles, responsibilities and norms of women and men are clearly defined. Those who fall outside of them are punished and forced to comply. Women challenging the idea of politics and the public sphere as a “man’s world” are targeted to “show them their place in society” and that has consequences.
A report on violence against women politicians in South Asia, for example, found that 90% of women in India, Nepal and Pakistan felt that violence breaks their resolve to join politics. Another Report by the Fawcett Society this year found that 93% of women MPs in the UK said that online abuse or harassment has a negative impact on how they feel about being an MP.
For our work with Amnesty International on violence against women and girls, we had no shortage of case studies of women in the public sphere who spoke up only to be faced with online and offline violence. Often this abuse is compounded by a host of demographic factors, including race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion and disability. Diane Abbott, the UK’s first black female MP, who has been in the job since 1987, came close to quitting due to racist and sexualised abuse.
For Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, negative media attention “wasn’t just about me as a woman … it was also steeped in classism and about where I come from, where I grew up”.
Kim Leadbeater, sister of the murdered MP Jo Cox, was faced with a barrage of homophobic abuse while campaigning for Batley and Spen. In the UK, Jewish and Muslim women MPs face the most abuse on social media.
In only six weeks in 2022, Muslim MP Naz Shah received nearly 5,000 toxic messages on Twitter. Shah says she has come to see it as part of her routine:
I still wake up to a daily barrage of racist, Islamophobic, sexist and hate-filled tweets.
We need to think about how key institutions (political parties, parliaments, governments) deal with the abuse directed at women who put themselves forward. State legislation, such as the UK’s online safety bill or Bolivia’s 2012 law specifically criminalising political violence and harassment against women, are important steps in the right direction. But without addressing the still all-too common attitudes that assign women to the private sphere and define politics as the sphere of men, we will not be able to solve the problem.
Without creating an awareness among young adults of violence against women and girls, its causes and possible solutions, women who engage in online and offline politics will remain targets of bias based on gender. Indeed, we need political institutions to lead in this cause instead of leaving organisations such as the UN and Amnesty to bear the burden.
Parveen Akhtar had a consultancy contract with Amnesty International Hungary to develop online material on Violence against Women and Girls.
Anne Jenichen had a consultancy contract with Amnesty International Hungary to develop online material on Violence against Women and Girls.
Patricia Correa 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.
Four Insulate Britain activists recently stood trial at Inner London crown court on a public nuisance charge for blocking a busy London junction in October 2021. Like Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain is waging a civil disobedience campaign to force the government to implement policies to tackle climate change and fuel poverty – namely, suspending new licenses for fossil fuel drilling and renovating homes to help people use less energy.
But this trial was unusual. One of the defendants, David Nixon, ignored the judge’s instruction not to explain the reasons for his actions to the jury. The trial judge sentenced him to eight weeks in prison for contempt of court.
Courts in England and Wales are taking a more active role in determining the extent of the right to protest, and some recent verdicts appeared to vindicate this right in law.
These included the case of the Colston 4, acquitted by a jury of causing criminal damage to a statue of slave-trader Edward Colston in Bristol and the Stansted 15, whose conviction on terrorism-related charges for blocking a Home Office deportation flight was overturned on appeal.
The overall trend is rather different, however, and much more worrying.
Higher courts are restricting the defences available to protesters on trial and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is deciding which charges to bring in order to exploit this restriction. Judges, meanwhile, are more forcefully managing trials. The outcome is that defendants are increasingly unable to explain to juries not just what they did, but why they did it.
The court of appeal overturned the Stansted 15’s conviction but ruled that “necessity” defences be removed from future protest cases. These allow defendants to argue that they acted to stop a greater crime, or to save someone from harm, enabling them to explain their motives to juries.
In the Stansted case, the trial judge had ruled that the jury should not consider this defence. The court of appeal agreed and confirmed the principle, in what we described as “a hollow victory” for protest rights.
In another case (R v Ziegler), the supreme court upheld a magistrates’ court ruling that convicting defendants for blocking the road outside an arms fair in east London would be an unjustified restriction of their article 10 and 11 rights to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly under the European Convention of Human Rights.
Unlike the Stansted 15, the defendants in this case had been prosecuted under the Highways Act 1980, which lets them make a “lawful excuse” argument. Lawful excuse, much like necessity, allows defendants to claim that they acted reasonably in the circumstances, placing their actions in a wider context.
The supreme court’s decision initially led to a number of other verdicts where protesters were acquitted for obstructing a highway. Defence teams assumed that Ziegler could be applied to other offences with explicit lawful or reasonable excuse defences, such as criminal damage.
In the Colston 4 trial, one of the legal arguments made in court was that even had the jury found the defendants guilty of causing criminal damage to Colston’s statue, it would have been disproportionate to convict them of the offence given the importance of freedom of expression.
The higher courts have since acted swiftly to shut down this argument. The court of appeal ruled in 2022 that the trial judge was wrong to accept Ziegler might apply in the Colston case.
The high court ruled similarly for aggravated trespass by HS2 protesters in the March case of R v Cuciurean. And the supreme court followed suit when confirming the legality of no-protest buffer zones around abortion clinics in Northern Ireland in December.
As a result, whether defendants in protest cases can explain their actions to a jury depends upon the offence they are charged with. Wider motives can only be raised where lawful excuse is explicitly provided for in the law and, even then, for only a narrow range of offences due to the limited interpretation of Ziegler.
It’s perhaps no surprise then that the CPS has brought a raft of public nuisance rather than highway obstruction charges against Insulate Britain protesters. Unlike obstructing a highway, public nuisance does not require a court to balance the impact of the protest against the defendant’s article 10 and 11 rights.
But if this explains the limited range of defences available to protesters, it does not explain why Nixon was imprisoned. That requires an understanding of the changing role of judges in England and Wales.
Recent legal reforms mean judges are increasingly concerned with narrowing the range of issues open to legal dispute in order to expedite cases. If a judge rules that no defence exists in law to a given charge, they can also direct that no related evidence can be called by the defence.
The trial judge no longer stands above the case, but manages it. Nixon’s contempt conviction is a flexing of this judicial muscle.
In Nixon’s case, conviction for contempt of court seems particularly disproportionate – penalties for breaches of case management orders are not regularly enforced.
But beyond the question of what penalty should be applied for ignoring trial directions, there lie more fundamental ones about the operation of the criminal justice process.
Trials determine guilt or innocence, but they also signal to the public about matters of collective importance and moral value.
The legal philosopher Antony Duff suggests that criminal cases are a means of holding fellow citizens to account for their behaviour. A trial fails in this regard if it doesn’t let defendants account for their behaviour in ways that are meaningful to them.
Juries continue to acquit defendants in similar protest cases despite the framing of the law and the attempts of judges to manage trials. There is a long tradition in the UK and US of juries acting as a check on state abuse, allowing an acquittal in the face of the law if a conviction would be morally inappropriate.
But if jurors cannot hear the claims of defendants, we may ask how they are supposed to assess whether a given prosecution is appropriate, or if the actions of the defendants have significant moral or community value. Cases such as Nixon’s should invite us to consider what juries are for, and what upholding freedom of expression means.
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Steven Cammiss is a member of the Labour Party.
Graeme Hayes is a member of the Labour Party
The EU is preparing to abandon its longstanding restrictions on state aid to take on US and Chinese subsidies over green technologies. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is spearheading a new commitment from EU leaders to “act decisively to ensure its long-term competitiveness, prosperity and role on the global stage”.
She has talked about the need to counter hidden subsidies from the Chinese, both in green tech and in other sectors, though the trigger for the EU’s new approach is really President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). This has committed the US to a record US$369 billion (£305 billion) to green its economy, including using tax breaks and subsidies.
It effectively tears up the international consensus around not using state aid, embracing what the US has railed against for years. The Economist has said that globalisation is no longer about racing, but racing and tripping others.
The EU is now proposing to introduce its own tax credits and subsidies for cleantech companies, as well as fast-tracking regulation in this area.
Meanwhile, the UK has been coming under pressure from the likes of car manufacturers to respond. So far, it has been trying to find exemptions to the US’s general approach of only offering incentives to products made in America, while also claiming the UK has no need to subsidise these kinds of areas because it is already ahead.
The economics of this drift to protectionism are worrying. Our recent research on the effects of state subsidies in China suggest that such policies could do the US and EU economies more harm than good overall.
Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, states have played a significant role in developing their economies. China is the recent prime example, where the use of subsidies to develop particular industries such as electric cars or solar panels has been highly visible.
India seems to be moving in the same direction. The government is paying half of the cost of making computer chips, among a variety of incentives to encourage investment in different sectors.
Equally, in the developed world, government procurement has driven many world-changing innovations. Whole sectors such as biotech and information technology relied on government procurement to get started. America’s Silicon Valley originally grew on the back of military contracts, for instance.
Research in this area does acknowledge a case for subsidising infant industries in which a country wants to specialise. China’s state subsidies in the steel and solar panel industries would be a good example.
Yet there is a price to be paid: the money a government spends means that less will be available for helping its citizens in other ways. For example Brazil’s wheat-industry subsidies in the 1980s were estimated to have produced a net loss of 15% to welfare spending.
Around the same time, it was estimated that if the EU removed the common agricultural policy, the extra money available for government spending could increase real incomes by between 0.3% and 3.5% as a proportion of GDP. Findings like these probably explain why the World Trade Organization has discouraged state aid for decades.
The new green subsidies will create winners and losers at different levels. Within the EU, for example, it will un-level the playing field between member states. Those that can afford to spend more on their green tech industries will potentially crowd out those with less.
Even within a country, there’s unlikely to be a win-win. Our research team has recently published a paper about China’s subsidies, using a new approach that makes it possible to estimate the direct and indirect effects on subsidised and non-subsidised firms at the same time.
This is the first time anyone has looked at subsidies in this way. Our project looked at 1998-2007, since those were the years where the necessary data was available.
We found that subsidised firms become relatively more productive, thus making them more competitive. Yet firms that are not subsidised can see their productivity growth reduced.
The determining factor is whether they operate in a geographical cluster alongside subsidised firms. When more than a quarter of firms in a cluster in China were being subsidised, the remainder suffered.
Those losing out were typically foreign-owned firms and those owned by the Chinese state, while private Chinese firms were the beneficiaries.
When we aggregated all the data, it showed that this negative indirect effect tends to dominate. In other words, subsidies produce unintended losers and make the market less competitive and more inefficient as a whole.
The bottom line is, subsidies are not without problems, even for China. In the last decade we have seen what “losers” can do to an economy, or a society - think of movements towards populism and autocracy in many places.
Therefore, there needs to be a more thorough debate about the benefits and costs of subsidies before states apply them, and some carefully designed policies to prepare for the potential losers.
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.
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