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Around 3% of people are estimated to be autistic and it is a lifelong disability. Most autistic people experience the sensory world differently, such as places being too loud or too bright. We also typically communicate in a more direct way than is usual.
In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 means that autistic people should receive reasonable adjustments – meaning organisations must make changes to how they provide their services to remove environmental and social barriers. Despite this, autistic people often experience society as highly disabling. We die between 16 and 30 years younger than non-autistic people, and have a suicide rate nine times higher.
Autistic people are often misunderstood by non-autistic people who fail to recognise how autistic people show empathy. This misunderstanding is embedded in many government bodies, which can result in dehumanising policies and services that do not meet autistic people’s needs.
We reviewed the evidence from a range of government and non-government research and reviews to understand how well autistic people fair in relation to government services. We looked at the areas described by William Beveridge, founder of the UK welfare state, as “the five giants”: health, education, employment, poverty and housing. Our findings, which focused on England and Wales due to differences relating to devolution, were bleak.
1. Health
Many government services designed to support autistic people are not available without diagnosis. However, in the UK, most autistic people aren’t yet diagnosed.
We found diagnosis waiting lists were long – for example, more then 20 months for people served by the Cardiff & Vale health board in south Wales. Across England, between June 2021 and 2022, the waiting list for an autism assessment rose from 88,000 people to more than 122,000.
Even with a diagnosis, autistic people often don’t receive healthcare that meets their needs. Some people don’t even tell doctors they are autistic, because they expect to be treated badly. Of those who have told their GP, more than 75% said their GP didn’t make any reasonable adjustments, such as allowing extra processing time during appointments.
Being expected to phone to book appointments is also difficult for nearly two-thirds of autistic people, yet many GP surgeries insist on phone calls to book appointments. Autistic people also report that clinical spaces are painfully bright, busy and loud, which can make it harder for us to explain what is wrong to the doctor.
2. Education
Autistic people often struggle in educational institutions because they rarely meet our needs. This can mean, for example, that autistic children are labelled as “troublemakers” by teachers, rather than disabled.
Despite autistic people accounting for only 3% of the population, around 80% of those sent to pupil referral units are autistic. This has lifelong effects, as only 8% of students with a “statement of special educational needs” or an education, health & care plan progress to university, compared with 50% of non-disabled people.
For autistic people who do make it to university, the disabled students allowance (DSA) should pay for extra costs – but less than one-third of eligible students get DSA. In addition, the support provided by universities is often poor quality or absent, leaving autistic students disadvantaged.
3. Employment
The UK’s Autism Act 2009 says that autistic people should be supported to be able to work. However, autistic people are less likely to be in work than non-autistic people.
Access to work is a UK government scheme to pay disabled people for the extra costs of working, but the application and claiming processes are complicated. Of the 42% of autistic adults who say they need help to access work, only 12% are getting it.
4. Poverty
Autistic people are more likely to live in poverty than non-autistic people. A 2009 report found one-third of autistic people in the UK were not in paid work or getting benefits. One reason for this is that the benefits designed to stop disabled people living in poverty, such as the personal independence payment (PIP), can be hard to apply for, especially for autistic people.
And for people who manage to apply for PIP, autism falls within the “psychiatric disorders” category, which means they are least likely to receive the award and most likely to lose their PIP upon renewal.
5. Housing
Around 12% of autistic people are homeless. As rent typically costs far more than the amount of money awarded in housing benefit, and autistic people are less likely to be in work or have access to benefits, they are more likely to struggle to pay for housing.
This can be made worse by the “bedroom tax”, which is when tenants in social housing have their benefit reduced if they have spare bedrooms. This affects single people under 35 especially, as they are only eligible for the shared accommodation rate. Autistic people can find it hard to live with other people due to their sensory needs, and there are few one-bedroom properties.
Autistic people who do not have somewhere to live are more likely to be placed in secure residential care, where they are subjected to similar confines to people in prison, by staff who may have limited understanding of autism. They can also be subjected to clinical “treatment” that has the same questionable origin as gay conversion therapy, and which guidance states should not be used.
The research supporting this approach, known as applied behaviour analysis (ABA), is often riddled with undeclared conflicts of interest. Those who experience ABA have been found to be more likely to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Worse, some autistic people in residential care have experienced abuse by staff. In the most severe cases, autistic people have died due to abusive and/or negligent treatment while in residential care.
In every area of government services, we found policies that failed to account for known autistic needs. These failures have a cumulative impact throughout life. A lack of accommodations in education leads to less likelihood of securing accessible employment and greater reliance on benefits and social housing.
To improve this, the policy-making process needs to be made accessible to disabled people so that services meet our needs. This could include ensuring that consultation processes reach out to a broader range of autistic people, and then meet their needs to submit evidence.
It is also important that policy-makers put evidence from the autistic community ahead of evidence provided by non-autistic “experts” who fundamentally misunderstand autism, can have conflicts of interest, and thus can not speak on our behalf.
Autistic lives depend on it.
Aimee Grant receives funding from UKRI, the Wellcome Trust and the Research Wales Innovation Fund. We wish to thank Dr Gemma Williams and Richard Woods, co-authors of the chapter this article is based on.
Kathryn Williams receives funding for her PhD studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council. She is affiliated with Autistic UK CIC, where she is a voluntary non-executive director.
Warning: the following article contains spoilers for the first half of You series four.
Since its release in 2018, Netflix’s drama You has sparked both intrigue and controversy. Based on the fictional novel of the same name by Caroline Kepnes, the show follows the life of Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley).
Goldberg seems to be a charismatic and misunderstood literary lover, but soon reveals himself as an obsessive serial killer who stalks women.
By season four, viewers have witnessed Goldberg murder, marry and become a father, before he fakes his own death to cover up his tracks and relocate to London, child-free, where he continues to stalk women. In this series, Goldberg is working as a professor at a London university, cutting a confident, tweed-clad, but ultimately dangerous figure.
Goldberg’s abhorrent actions have been the subject of many commentaries, including critiques of the show’s potential to romanticise stalking, misogyny and abuse. But he is not the only chilling presence in You.
The power of this series of You lies in how it builds up and breaks down the idealised image of British academia – an image that is at once grandiose and grim, buttoned up and brutal.
On its surface, series four of You playfully explores “dark academia” – a term used to describe the internet trend for idealising the aesthetics of university life. Think collegiate Gothic architecture, classic literature and immaculately tailored outfits.
Read more: Five intellectual fashion statements from history that anticipated today’s dark academia trend
Academia has been romanticised in literature for centuries and in films for decades. But the dark academia trend has developed and popularised the glamourisation of university experiences further through social media such as TikTok and Pinterest.
In You, dark academia takes many forms: Goldberg’s attire, the opulent interior decor on campus and aspirational portrayals of writing. The show appears to be in on the joke of its initially twee framing of British academic life, featuring Vampire Weekend’s jaunty song, Oxford Comma, in the soundtrack to episode one.
But dark academia’s presence is far from purely decorative. The show makes clear that the ostentatious aesthetics associated with idealised university life cannot cover up the harm and horrors that occur for some as part of it.
In You – as in real life – such harm and horrors include the misogyny of academics such as Goldberg, who admonishes men who harm women despite being one himself.
“As a problematic man appropriating the words of a queer poet once said, the heart wants what it wants.” This line, delivered by Goldberg in episode one of season four, captures the character’s conviction that he is one of the “good” guys and an ally of those who are marginalised.
Similarly, despite British higher education’s reputation for progressive values,sexual harassment and violence persists in the sector.
As well as focusing on Goldberg’s life as a poseur professor, series four of You explores the murder of a colleague, who seems to have been intimately involved with a student. In part one of this season, the student-staff relationship forms little more than a minor plot detail.
This reflects the way the sector has arguably long ignored the potential harm to students in such situations. The government regulator has now proposed universities should be forced to document or ban staff-student relationships (as Oxford has just done).
Viewers also learn that Goldberg was “a last-minute hire” at his university, an aspect of the plot that may pointedly highlight the precarious working conditions that underpin much of academia and which contrast with the wealth on display in the campus buildings. Indeed, part one was released during ongoing University and College Union industrial action, which was prompted by issues of workload, short-term contracts, zero hour contracts and equality pay gaps.
In these ways, You continues to reveal the horrors of the disarming yet deadly character of Joe Goldberg but now also deals with the more monstrous aspects of academia.
Francesca Sobande 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.
The design for a statue of a leading suffragette has been unveiled in Newport, south Wales. Margaret Haig Thomas or Lady Rhondda was a lifelong campaigner for women’s rights and was the first woman to hold a hereditary peerage, though she was barred from taking up her seat in the House of Lords. She was also a successful businesswoman at a time when married women were often excluded from gainful employment.
The statue by artist Jane Robbins is part of a wider campaign dedicated to marking the contribution of women to the history of Wales. The sculpture is expected to be cast in bronze and erected in Newport in 2024.
The relationship between statues and our understanding of history is complex. In 2020, the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston sparked important questions about what statues are for and how they contribute to the public’s understanding of the past.
Many statues, like Colston’s, were created in the 19th century as honorific symbols of power. Those representations of authority are now rightfully being questioned. Conversely, the creation of statues of women has the potential to acknowledge their often hidden yet important impact.
Across the UK, there are very few statues dedicated to named women that aren’t royal or mythological in nature. Out of more than 800 statues, only 128 are of named, non-royal women. Until late 2021, there was not a single such statue in Wales.
This is why the ongoing campaign to create a statue of Lady Rhondda matters. She was a woman who sat on the boards of 33 companies and became the first female president of the Institute of Directors in 1926. She was an outlier.
But looking only to Lady Rhondda’s professional success risks aligning her with those traditional forms of biography, memorials and statues that typically celebrate “great” men as exceptional individuals.
Very few women can fit into this mould. And this limited view of success may be one of the reasons we know so little about women’s influence throughout history. Fortunately, the work of historians has uncovered Lady Rhondda’s life story beyond her professional achievements.
Lady Rhondda was an active member of the militant wing of the suffragettes, the Women’s Social and Political Union, under Emmeline Pankhurst and was arrested for setting fire to a postbox. She travelled across Wales mobilising women (and a few men) to the cause.
One of her vital accomplishments was her push for further reform immediately after landmark changes to women’s rights in the early 20th century. In fact, she shattered the misguided notion that votes for women meant equality had been achieved.
When the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 permitted women to become professionals, such as solicitors, magistrates and civil servants, for the first time, it appeared that Lady Rhondda could also take up her hereditary peerage and sit in the House of Lords. But her entry was blocked by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead.
Though she lost her case challenging this and was never able to sit in the Lords, she spent the next few decades campaigning for reform until her death in 1958. Her efforts influenced the passing of the Peerage Act 1963, which enabled female hereditary peers to take their seats for the first time.
Lady Rhondda mobilised women to push for change on other fronts too. In February 1921, she established the Six Point Group. This was a pressure group comprising women able to vote at that time to work towards equal rights through legal reform. As their name suggests, they targeted six issues at a time. Once they had achieved as much as they could in one area, another issue would take its place.
The activities of the Six Point Group were publicised in Time and Tide, a groundbreaking feminist periodical that Lady Rhondda founded, owned and edited. It included work by literary greats such as Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw.
While the Six Point Group remains a relatively unknown part of the women’s movement, it asserted an important influence. It raised awareness of issues relating to equal pay, reform of the law on child assault and the rights of housewives. It was also behind the establishment of the Married Women’s Association, which I have argued had a profound influence on married women’s property rights throughout the 20th century.
The campaign for a Lady Rhondda statue was initiated by Monumental Welsh Women, an organisation seeking to correct the almost complete absence of statues representing women’s achievements throughout history. Efforts to fund the statue continue.
In contrast with traditional statues, Lady Rhondda’s will be just over 2 metres (7 ft) in height, so the public can observe its features up close. The statue’s hoop will be made from hand casts of the women involved with the project, symbolising unity.
If it is erected, the statue will create new opportunities for dialogue not just about why women should be commemorated, but how.
Sharon Thompson 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.
Joseph Stalin took his last breath 70 years ago. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage on March 5 1953, aged 74, at his dacha – or country house – west of the Kremlin in a leafy pocket of Moscow’s urban sprawl.
Now, more than 30 years after the end of the cold war Stalin played such a large part in starting, Moscow is back in the grip of an authoritarian leader in the form of Vladimir Putin. The Russian president may head a “democratic government” in name but, in reality, it is much closer to a dictatorship.
Questions of historical continuity inevitably arise over the extent to which the Stalin era continues to inspire Russia’s rulers and its people, and whether Stalin bears any responsibility for Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine.
Is there a deeper logic at play here? Is it possible to rule Russia in its current form, with its enormous size, terrible history and imperial mindset, as anything other than a murderous dictatorship?
Every dictatorship stems from the same source: state power, largely unchecked, with the will and capacity to remove opposition and enforce obedience with extraordinary severity. Putin’s Russia has revived much of the old Soviet template.
There is the criminal justice system that’s become easier for the state to control.
There is the language of civilisational struggle. Once it was socialism versus capitalism, now it is “traditional” Russian values pitted against western liberal principles. The USA remains the primary target, but this is an inclusive xenophobia. Almost anybody in Russia may now be branded a “foreign agent” for anything as vague as coming under foreign “influence” and then engaging in anything political.
There is the stark inversion of rhetoric and reality. Socialism was loudly proclaimed in the late 1930s while nearly a million people were executed in silence. Today, a nuclear-armed Russia claims to be fighting its more vulnerable neighbour to preserve its own people from fascism.
And then there is Ukraine itself, because this is not the first time the country has been ravaged by decisions taken in Moscow. The Holodomor – the terrible famine in the early 1930s – took millions of Ukrainian lives following radical changes to Soviet agriculture. (Millions of others, especially Kazakhs, also died of famine during these years.)
For several years now, much has been made about the apparent revival of Stalin’s popularity in Russia. In 2019, an opinion poll suggested that 70% of Russians had a largely positive view of Stalin’s leadership. Much of this has to do with the cult of victory of the second world war (Russia’s “great patriotic war”), arguably the greatest triumph of Stalin’s rule.
But to liken Putin’s Russia to that of Stalin – based partly on Stalin’s recent rehabilitation – is flawed for at least a couple of reasons. For one, there are the significant differences between the Soviet Union and today’s Russia.
In a country largely controlled by the super-rich and elite allies of Putin, it makes no sense for Russia’s rulers to stress their Soviet predecessors’ commitment to some form of socialism. Nor would it help by dwelling on Soviet leaders’ oft-proclaimed anti-imperialism, even though they created an empire of their own.
And what about Stalin’s attitude towards Ukraine? He thought a distinctive Ukrainian identity would cease to exist, but not because Ukraine was merely an offshoot of a Great Russia. Stalin believed all nationalities would eventually dissolve into socialist internationalism.
This brings us neatly to Russia’s attitude towards its Stalinist past. For its rulers, the most consistent message in the Putin era has been the importance of a strong state that can safeguard Russia’s interests and unique historic identity – and the Soviet triumph in 1945 fits very well here.
But this is a necessarily selective approach to its Stalinist past, and it hasn’t been without complexity and criticism. In recent years Russia’s rulers acknowledged and condemned the crimes of the Stalin regime against its own people. Putin even dedicated a memorial wall to victims of Stalinist repression.
And what of the Russian people? Before 2022, even as Stalin’s overall reputation was on the rise, people were more inclined to condemn Stalinist repression than to excuse it. In fact, in 2018 more Russians than not seemed to think Stalin was an “inhuman tyrant”.
It is very difficult to weigh these questions in the middle of a horrifying war that challenges our sense of historical proportion. But if the Stalin era has inspired Russia’s actions in Ukraine, it has done so only through a selective approach to the past.
Nothing comes from nothing. Centuries of imperial rule and decades of dictatorship undoubtedly nourished the soil from which the Putin regime has emerged. But Putin’s quasi-dictatorship took time to form, and until the 2020s it was not yet clear how far Russia’s direction of travel would depart from more democratic and liberal values, or that its war in Ukraine would escalate so drastically.
More generally, we should not overestimate the importance of history. No group of people is trapped within a self-inflicted pattern of historical behaviour from which it is impossible to escape. And yet, the exodus of Russians since February 2022 suggests that some of those most likely to support a liberal alternative may never return.
James Ryan receives funding from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. He works for Cardiff University.
Ninety years ago, a young Welsh investigative journalist uncovered the Soviet Union’s genocide in Ukraine, Stalin’s attempt to stamp down on rising nationalism. The Holomodor, as it became known, was responsible for the deaths of some 4 million Ukrainians through deliberate starvation.
Gareth Jones’ eyewitness reports, gathered at significant risk, were initially disbelieved and dismissed at a time when many in the west were supportive of Stalin as a potential ally against the growing Nazi threat in the early 1930s. It was only later, after the journalist was murdered in murky circumstances, that the full scale of what had taken place was recognised.
Jones, a linguist and political advisor before he turned to journalism, has become the subject of a feature film, several documentaries and numerous biographies. Yet his achievements, which hold lessons for today’s reporters, are still not well known.
Jones was born in Barry, south Wales, in 1905. His mother had worked in Ukraine as a tutor to the Hughes family, Welsh steel industrialists, who had founded what is now the city of Donetsk.
He had a talent for languages and graduated from Aberystwyth University with first class honours in French and then later from Cambridge with another first in French, German and Russian. In 1930, he was hired as a foreign affairs advisor to the MP and former prime minister David Lloyd George while also developing his freelance journalism.
In early 1933, Jones was in Germany covering Hitler’s rise to power. He was there on the day Hitler was pronounced chancellor and flew with him and Goebbels to Frankfurt where he reported for the Western Mail, a Welsh daily newspaper.
In March 1933, he made a third and final trip to the Soviet Union. He had earlier reported more explicitly than most on the economic crisis and starvation that was emerging. This time, he went undercover into Ukraine and kept notes of all he saw:
I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, “There is no bread. We are dying.” This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.
The report was denounced by the Soviets and also in the New York Times by its Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty. It was an early example of crying “fake news” to undermine uncomfortable truths.
Jones rebutted the criticism with a detailed analysis of the famine and its causes – but the mud stuck. He was banned from the Soviet Union and returned to Wales, unable to find work with major newspapers until he met the American press magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst had bought St Donat’s castle, a few miles from Jones’ home in Barry and supported him by publishing his articles in full.
The following year, he embarked on a world tour, focusing on Asia. He spent time in Japan and then went to China, moving on to Inner Mongolia with a German journalist. The pair were kidnapped by bandits and held hostage.
Jones’ body was found in August 1935. He had apparently been shot the day before his 30th birthday. Biographers have pointed to circumstantial evidence that the Soviet secret services, the NKVD, were involved in his kidnap and murder as revenge for his reporting. But there is no concrete proof of this.
Lloyd George paid tribute to him in the London Evening Standard newspaper following news of his death:
That part of the world is a cauldron of conflicting intrigue and one or other interests concerned probably knew that Mr Gareth Jones knew too much of what was going on. He had a passion for finding out what was happening in foreign lands wherever there was trouble, and in pursuit of his investigations he shrank from no risk. I had always been afraid that he would take one risk too many. Nothing escaped his observation, and he allowed no obstacle to turn from his course when he thought that there was some fact, which he could obtain. He had the almost unfailing knack of getting at things that mattered.
Today, as another generation of journalists reports on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Jones’ story holds a number of relevant lessons. Even as we are swamped with digital media, there is no substitute for eyewitness reporting and for reporters taking the risks to see for themselves what is happening.
Attempts to hold power to account will often be meet with denial – including from other media – but cries of “fake news” must be countered with hard evidence.
Reporting can be a dangerous occupation. The press watchdog, Committee to Protect Journalists, reported that 67 journalists had been killed last year – including 15 in Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Despite the risks, international reporting is as essential today as it was in the 1930s when Gareth Jones set out to tell the world what he had seen.
Richard Sambrook 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.
When Carlos Ghosn was escorted off his private jet after landing at Tokyo’s Haneda airport in November 2018 and promptly arrested for alleged financial misconduct, simmering tensions between carmakers Renault and Nissan over his plans to create a single, cohesive company became all too public.
The two companies, along with Mitsubishi, had forged an alliance in 1999 after Renault rescued Nissan from bankruptcy. This inauspicious start led to an imbalance in the alliance – Renault held 43% of Nissan versus the Japanese company’s 15% stake in its partner. After dealing with the effects on the companies of Ghosn’s arrest, as well as COVID-created supply chain disruption and shifting global demand towards electric vehicles (EVs), a recent realignment of the alliance signals an attempt to reset both companies’ fortunes.
Ghosn had been instrumental in the alliance as “le cost cutter” from French automaker Renault. He was a pivotal figure in the corporate rescue of Nissan, first as chief operating officer in June 1999, then as chief executive officer from 2001. Ghosn was synonymous with the Nissan revival plan. But for Nissan the rescue and subsequent alliance came with strings that led all the way to the French government (which holds 15% of Renault shares).
Unsurprisingly then, Ghosn’s 2018 arrest lead to years of managerial stagnation as attempts were made to resolve the imbalance in the partnership. Without Ghosn – dubbed “the god of cars” in some parts of the media – the accumulating challenges that faced the group took on a new urgency and the value of both businesses fell by almost 40% between 2018 and 2020.
After the pandemic and subsequent disruptions to both supply and demand, both businesses have continued to struggle. While Ghosn’s hope for a single, cohesive company has not been realised, protracted negotiations have resulted in a “rebalanced” alliance. This time it has to work. As Renault-Nissan faces a new era of electric vehicles for carmakers, it is now or never.
While the new alliance covers multiple issues and locations, the most important single item is the 15% share of Renault’s Ampere electric vehicle business taken by Nissan.
Even before the departure of Ghosn, there were some worrying signs of trouble ahead for these car companies, especially concerning Europe’s burgeoning EV market. Under the leadership of Andy Palmer, Nissan had pioneered the development and production of family-sized battery electric cars, launching the Leaf in Europe in 2011.
Alongside Renault’s Zoe EV, the Leaf (and the E-NV200 electric van) dominated Europe’s early EV market. By January 2015 it had been the market leader for four years – accounting for 14,658 sales out of a total of 56,393 in 2014. This meant the alliance held 46% of the total electric car market in Europe.
When Palmer departed Nissan in 2014, the emphasis on leading the electric car market seemed to wane. By March 2018, the Leaf and Zoe were still leading in terms of European market share, but competition was intensifying with new models from Tesla (Model S, Model X), BMW (the i3), Hyundai (Ionic Electric) and others gaining ground.
And as the electric car market pivoted from niche to mainstream, Nissan and Renault failed to capitalise on their early advantage. By November 2022, around one in four new cars sold in Europe were plug-in electric with year-on-year market growth of 26%. At this time Renault had fallen to ninth place in the electric car sales rankings (selling 5,321 of its Megane E-Tech cars). Neither Nissan nor Renault has a model in the top ten bestselling electric cars for the year to date.
Crucially, the continued market success of Tesla (with the Model Y and Model 3) has been mirrored by Renault’s main legacy competitors in Europe – Fiat (the 500) and VW (ID-3 and ID4) have been particularly successful. It was apparent by the time negotiations started on the new alliance that Renault in particular was no longer in a position of strength.
Now the alliance has to catch up. In 2018, there were about 60 plug-in and fuel cell models available in Europe. By 2025 there could be 333. Of 172 new battery electric models expected to be on the market by 2025, only 13 are from Renault-Nissan, compared to around 50 from VW Group. Investment in battery manufacturing is also growing, such that there could be 35 gigafactories producing the electric car power sources in Europe by 2035, from single digits at the end of 2022.
The alliance has some hope, but more importantly, some bold plans. Manufacturing will be easier and cheaper due to shared parts and designs between vehicle types. For starters, the Nissan Ariya battery electric SUV is based on the common module family electric vehicle (CMF-EV) platform, as is the Renault Megane E-Tech. An electric replacement for the Nissan Micra and a new Renault 5 will have 80% of their parts in common.
By 2028 Nissan plans to introduce solid-state batteries. But, by then, the global electric car market could see demand for 30 million cars per year. This may leave Renault-Nissan overwhelmed by faster legacy competitors in their respective domestic markets – as well as an ever-growing list of new entrants around the world.
The hope is that the new arrangements will unleash “strategic” creativity, allowing managerial freedom while retaining the cost advantages of shared volume. The risks are that technology may develop in another direction from Nissan-Renault’s current plans. But the alliance may also fail to execute such a complex restructuring in time to take advantage of this new auto world.
The alliance is a political as well as corporate arrangement. If it fails, it could show that Ghosn was right in the end about the need to turn the alliance into a single car company.
Peter Wells 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.
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
What’s the difference between a state broadcaster and a public broadcaster? The dispute over the close relationship between the BBC chairman, Richard Sharp and the former prime minister Boris Johnson, has seen some people – including on one occasion a BBC presenter – refer to it as a “state broadcaster”. The BBC is usually called a public service broadcaster (PSB) – and other PSBs around the world still look to the UK model as an example of good practise. The difference is significant and matters.
The formal distinction seems straightforward. State broadcasters – as found in countries such as China, Iran, parts of the Middle East and increasingly eastern Europe – broadcast in the interests of the state. They have leadership directly appointed by the government, high levels of government editorial control or censorship, direct political funding, and are directly accountable to the government.
Public Service broadcasters, meanwhile, operate in the interests of the wider public. They enjoy editorial independence from government and are usually funded via some sort of mechanism designed to insulate them from direct political control but provide a degree of open accountability to the public that funds them. How that is achieved, however, can be complex and involve compromises.
The latest debate over political influence at the BBC raises some difficult questions about independence and accountability.
Public broadcasters need to demonstrate they are impartial and not politically aligned or directed. At a moment of highly polarised politics, with the increased scrutiny and criticism it brings, this is difficult. Users from both the left and the right regularly criticise the BBC for not representing the world as they see it.
Read more: The controversial business of researching BBC impartiality
As a consequence, the BBC has suffered a decline in trust in its services. With that comes scepticism about its impartiality and independence.
Traditionally, the BBC – like other public institutions – has enjoyed editorial and operational autonomy while being institutionally accountable to government through the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the National Audit Office (NAO) and parliamentary select committees.
For decades it was overseen by a government-appointed board of governors, separate from the management. This mutated in 2007 into the BBC Trust – still separate from management but with greater resources to scrutinise the executive.
In 2016, David Clementi, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, undertook a further review of the BBC’s governance. He recommended a unified board, with management and non-executive directors around the same table, and a chairman appointed by government. Separate oversight moved to the media regulator Ofcom (whose chair is also government appointed).
For most of its 100 years, a form of direct government appointment of non-executive governors, trustees or directors has been the norm. It has largely worked. Even when the World Service was directly funded by government, it was widely recognised that its journalism was independent.
But in the current climate of distrust in both media and the UK government, such arrangements are increasingly interpreted as interference. The BBC sometimes attracts accusations of being closer to state broadcasting than a model accountable to the public.
The suspicion is less about direct political interference than soft influence through appointments such as Sharp as chairman shortly after he brokered a £800,000 loan for the then prime minister and the appointment of non-executive directors with recent government experience including Robbie Gibb, formerly director of communications for then Conservative prime minister Theresa May.
Governments of the past have often appointed those they believe to be politically sympathetic. But there is a sense that the current Conservative government has taken Margaret Thatcher’s famous inquiry of “Is he one of us?” to new levels.
The BBC’s management has been openly focused on impartiality – largely interpreting this as political. The chairman is on record as saying he believes the BBC’s staff have a soft-left bias which needs addressing.
Their problem is that the current crisis demonstrates that impartiality is as much about independence and accountability as it is about political balance. And those are harder to measure.
Further, the unified board means those responsible for demonstrating the BBC’s editorial independence on air, by reporting on itself, are around the same table as colleagues trying to defend the corporate interest. Chinese walls were easier when the governors or trustees sat separately from the management.
To stem further decline in trust, the BBC will need to demonstrate political independence at the highest level – beyond what has been required in the past. And it needs to find ways of demonstrating broader public accountability beyond Parliament and watchdog Ofcom. The public cannot practically oversee the BBC – but greater openness away from the committee rooms and boardrooms of London would help.
Some senior executives at least recognise this. The new CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, announced on her arrival she wanted to bring greater transparency to how news judgments are made. In an all-staff email she said:
The question I would like to ask you all to think about here, is this: to ‘the pursuit of truth with impartiality and accuracy’, how might we credibly add, ‘and with transparency’ – to lead the world in delivering what consumers say they need, if they are to continue to trust us.
Greater independence, open accountability and transparency in operations are hard things to deliver. But they can reassure the public and build trust, they are increasingly recognised as core elements of the impartiality expected of a public broadcaster, and needed to insulate them from any misguided accusations of straying towards state broadcasting.
Richard Sambrook worked for the BBC for thirty years, finally as Director of Global News and the World Service.
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