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The recent coronation of King Charles III was a high-profile example of when facial recognition technology has been used to monitor a crowd, but there are plenty of others. The technology is used by law enforcement all over the UK and other countries.
It’s now common in US airports. It’s being used to monitor refugees and identify dead bodies in Ukraine. Even Beyoncé fans have been subjected to it.
And there’s more to come. The UK government is reportedly planning to add facial recognition to the police’s body-worn devices, drones and numberplate cameras. It may soon be very difficult to leave your house without having your face scanned.
There are serious questions about whether the benefits of this technology outweigh such concerns. But steps could be taken to address the issues people are worried about.
Facial recognition can be used by police to scan many faces in a crowd and compare them with a “watch list” of known criminals. This “live facial recognition” is used with the aim of reducing crime. It can also be used retroactively on recorded CCTV footage.
In the UK, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 provides a legal basis for the use of surveillance camera systems in a public place.
And according to the government’s surveillance camera code of practice, it’s justifiable to use facial recognition systems in decisions that could negatively affect people, such as whether to arrest them, so long as there is a human in the loop to supervise and make decisions.
So the use of facial recognition systems, or those for other types of biometric information, cannot be used for autonomous decision making, such as automatically tracking a suspect across multiple camera feeds.
But why should this be of concern to law-abiding citizens? Civil liberties groups argue facial recognition use in public places affects our privacy and freedom, particularly in terms of its ability to track individuals at mass gatherings and to potentially engage in racial profiling.
Security cameras have long captured us as we went about our daily lives. However, authorities easily being able to put a name to a face in the video footage is something we’re not so used to.
The technology creates a situation where many more people could get caught in the sights of the authorities than before. A person’s casual indiscretions or errors of judgement can now be easily tracked and linked to a name and address.
Those with a criminal record could be targeted in public based on their past, regardless of whether they intend to carry out any illegal activity. The technology could provide new opportunities for racial profiling, where authorities track or suspect people based on their background, rather than because of specific information about them.
Facial recognition could also be used against people with no criminal past or plans to commit a crime but who the police simply want to stop, such as protesters. The Metropolitan Police may have announced that facial recognition would not be used to target activists at the coronation, but they also provoked outrage for arresting anti-monarchy demonstrators who were later released without charge.
It’s also important to recognise facial recognition technology still suffers from inaccuracies, which can result in false positive matches where an innocent person is mistaken for a known criminal.
With facial recognition posing such perceived threats, it could have a chilling effect on free speech and demonstrations
However, there are ways that the technology could be used more safely. Law enforcement teams could perform two preliminary steps – activity recognition or event detection – before they resort to face recognition. This approach can help minimise the potential for privacy violations and false positive matches.
Activity recognition refers to the process of identifying and categorising human activities or actions based on CCTV or other sensors. It aims to understand and recognise the activities of individuals or groups, which can include standard activities such as running, sitting or eating.
On the other hand, event detection focuses on identifying specific events or occurrences of interest within a given context. Events can range from simple events like a car passing by or a person entering a room to more complex events like accidents, fights, or more unusual behaviour. Event detection algorithms typically analyse CCTV and other sensors to detect and locate events.
Hence, activity recognition or event detection should be the first step before applying facial recognition to a surveillance camera feed.
Ensuring the data from cameras remains anonymous can also enable police to study the activities of people in the crowd while preserving their privacy. Conducting regular audits and reviews can ensure that the collected data is handled responsibly and in compliance with UK data privacy regulations.
This can also help to address some of the concerns related to transparency and accuracy. By using activity recognition or event detection as a first step, it may be possible to give people more clarity – through signage, for example – about what exactly is going on during police surveillance in a public place.
It is the responsibility of the state to ensure the privacy and security of its citizens in order to foster a healthy society. But if facial recognition is implemented in a way that a significant proportion of citizens feel infringes their rights, it could create a culture of suspicion and a society where few people feel safe expressing themselves publicly.
Nadia Kanwal 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 prison population has risen by around 74% since 1990, with 78,037 people now serving sentences. Research shows that taking part in educational activities while serving a sentence can help people cope with prison life and reduce reoffending.
There is an education department in every prison typically offering academic courses such as literacy and numeracy, and vocational courses such as joinery and bricklaying. However, numbers of people engaging in prison education are declining as it becomes increasingly undervalued and under-resourced. So, it’s vital to develop engaging educational activities in prisons.
One way to do this is to link education with family activities. Around half of the people in prison have children. Maintaining good relationships between parents and their children during a sentence can reduce reoffending and help people to reintegrate with their families upon release. It can also help children to better cope with someone close to them being in prison.
However, it is challenging to maintain family relationships because of the lack of meaningful contact between prisoners and their children. With our White Water Writers project, we believed that linking education with family activities would encourage prisoners who might not typically participate in education to get involved, and help foster better family relationships.
White Water Writers (WWW) gives groups of eight to ten people the opportunity to collaboratively plan, write and publish a full-length novel in just one week. Books go on sale online and the authors receive professionally printed copies of their novels. Originally developed in schools, WWW has enabled more than 3,000 young people to become published authors.
We decided to run the project in a prison to provide an engaging and motivating educational opportunity. We linked the work to families by inviting participants to write a novel for their children, who would then produce the illustrations for the book. Our research explored the impact WWW had on both the prisoners and their families.
Eight men from a prison in England took part, and were given four days to collaboratively write and publish a novel for their children, supported by a facilitator and prison staff.
A key principle of WWW is that no one from outside the group is involved in developing the plot, writing or editing. On the first day, each writer created their own character and, together, the group developed the plot. On the second and third days, they collaboratively wrote their novel. On the fourth day, they proofread it – and then the final day was a family day, where children visited the prison and produced the illustrations.
While the writers were initially a little daunted at the prospect of writing a novel, they worked hard to produce something their children would enjoy – the result was an exciting fantasy adventure of around 8,000 words. To understand the impact of the project, we then interviewed the writers, their families and prison staff about their experiences, as well as analysing their novel.
The book helped the children to better understand their fathers’ experiences. It had two main themes: “people not being bad” and “people changing for the better”. The villains in the book are not bad people. Rather, they experience difficult circumstances which lead to challenging emotions, and these in turn lead to bad behaviours.
However, by the end of the novel, the villains are reformed. For example, one character, who is a bear, is in prison at the start of the book but wants to change his life. The book ends with him putting his life at risk to save the world.
Many of the writers included their own children in the novel as characters. This helped them connect with their children, who enjoyed seeing themselves in the book. One participant said he wrote the plotline of his daughter becoming braver in the story to help her deal with the anxiety she was feeling about moving to a new school.
The writers said they would not have engaged with WWW if it had not been linked to their families. The family visit day was an incentive, and they enjoyed creating something tangible for their children. All the authors said they improved a range of skills including writing, typing, computer skills and “soft skills” such as teamwork.
As many had negative experiences of education and few had any formal qualifications, they did not expect to complete the novel. Their success led them to feel proud of themselves: “The fact that I can write a thousand words, I am stunned,” one said.
The project also led the men and their families to feel more connected to each other. Family members discussed feelings of pride in what the writers had achieved.
We even discovered that one of the children had dressed as her character for World Book Day at school. She told her teacher about the book, and the class then used it as their reading book. One member of prison staff said:
How that child must feel to have something positive from her daddy and to share that with her classmates. I certainly didn’t expect that, and I think it’s a massive success and has obviously had an impact.
This suggests that linking projects with families, where appropriate, may be a way to increase engagement with education and provide meaningful opportunities for contact between people in prison and their families. This will have positive results not just for those in prison, but for their families as well.
Yvonne Skipper is a Trustee for the Charity eQuality Time which runs the White Water Writers project. She has received funding from Novus Prison Education, the British Academy, EPSRC and ESRC.
Zafar Khan, the former finance director of collapsed mega-contractor Carillion, has been banned from being a company director for 11 years. It is the longest ban imposed on an executive of a listed company by the Insolvency Service (IS) in 60 years, raising the prospect of lengthy bans for seven other former directors being pursued in relation to the collapse.
Khan, 54, is a former Ernst & Young accountant who joined Carillion’s senior finance team in 2011. He was promoted to chief financial officer in August 2016, replacing the long-serving Richard Adam, though he only remained in post for nine months as the company’s financial troubles prompted a boardroom clear-out.
Carillion then collapsed in 2018, putting thousands of staff out of work and leaving debts of around £7 billion, including a pension deficit in excess of £1 billion.
The government said that Khan’s disqualification was for several reasons, including causing the company to rely on “false and misleading information” that led to a material misstatement of profits in various projects to the tune of at least £209 million. He also sanctioned a £54 million dividend payment that couldn’t be justified because it was based on financial statements that did not give a fair view of the company’s position.
Khan has yet to respond to the announcement. The fact that only his disqualification has been announced suggests that he may have reached an agreement with the IS, perhaps in exchange for a lighter punishment. The remaining directors, including former chief executives Richard Howson and Keith Cochrane, as well as Richard Adam, are due at the high court later this year to defend the IS’s disqualification actions against them.
Khan, Howson and Adam have also been fined a total of almost £1 million by the Financial Conduct Authority for issuing misleading statements to investors about Carillion’s finances. They are reportedly appealing – again, it will be interesting to see whether this still includes Khan.
Carillion was created in 1999 after being spun off from construction group Tarmac. It mainly built and operated government buildings and infrastructure, and appeared to be in good health for much of its corporate life.
It was hard to see how the company could suffer from liquidity issues, particularly when it reported a record annual dividend of £79 million as recently as 2017.
However, Carillion’s fall from grace was swift and dramatic. On January 15 2018 it was placed into compulsory liquidation by the high court, the biggest of its kind in UK legal history.
As well as the loss of jobs, this had huge ramifications for Carillion’s many ongoing building projects, including schools, hospitals and roads – not to mention a facilities management business providing, amongst other things, school meals to children.
The government’s Official Receiver was put in charge of the liquidation, but appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to help oversee the process. This has involved things like completing schools and motorways, transferring hospital jobs and numerous contracts. PwC has earned more than £50 million in fees as a result.
Meanwhile, the 27,000 members of Carillion’s defined benefit pension scheme have seen their pensions reduced, and roughly 30,000 suppliers are likely to have lost most of the billions of pounds owed to them by the company.
The collapse initially triggered investigations by the National Audit Office and by several parliamentary committees. The parliamentary findings did not mince their words, finding that the directors “misrepresented the reality of the business”.
The report described the company’s collapse as, “a story of recklessness, hubris and greed … its business model was a relentless dash for cash”.
There have been previous high-profile actions against directors. The directors of the failed MG Rover group were disqualified for between three and six years in 2011, while the IS brought an unsuccessful case against the trustee directors of the Kids Company charity in 2021.
The difference with Carillion is that the directors face longer bans, and now the former finance director of all people has accepted the punishment instead of waiting for the court hearings. It may indicate that he agrees that the evidence is sufficient to show that he behaved in an unfit manner as a director.
It looks as though the IS has stuck to its guns over Carillion and is potentially heading for a significant success in its efforts to ensure that directors of listed companies do not see themselves as immune from the consequences of poor management decisions.
It hopefully sends a signal that the government is serious about punishing corporate wrongdoing. The big question now is what happens with the rest of the directors.
John Tribe 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.
Millions of UK mortgage borrowers could experience significant payment shocks this year. This is happening due to a steep rise in the Bank of England’s base rate over the past year to the highest level since 2008. This rate feeds through to many of the mortgage deals taken out by homeowners around the UK.
To attempt to alleviate some of the pain for homeowners that will see large spikes in their payments this year and next, major UK lenders agreed to provide limited help to those struggling with the mortgage repayments.
Among other measures, lenders that participate will agree to allow borrowers to switch to interest-only payment terms or to extend the duration of their mortgage. Borrowers will be able to return to their original deal within six months without any impact on their credit rating. Lenders have also been asked to sign up to a 12-month repossession break to provide a grace period to people at risk losing their homes due to arrears.
But while these measures will help some borrowers, they could cause unintended consequences and create further mortgage payment issues. First of all, the Bank of England’s base rate is already expected to rise to 6% by the end of 2023 and could go higher next year.
Interest-only borrowers’ repayments only include the interest charged on the loan and nothing towards the principal amount. So, after six months (and at the same level of income), they could face much higher payment shocks. If rates are still relatively high after 12 months, many households could still be at risk of losing their homes.
There is also the question of which lenders will participate in mortgage rescue plan – it is a voluntary scheme. According to the FCA, around 75% of lenders will join. Those borrowers with nonparticipating lenders would not be able to use the grace period or other measures.
Another overlooked issue in the rescue plan is that, according to my research, households across the various regions of the UK will be affected differently by the mortgage crisis. Payment shocks will be amplified for those in the areas with higher house prices and higher average loan amounts.
The table below shows the difference in the increase in repayments for an average loan amount across the UK, based on different types of mortgage product. These figures show what repayments would have been in June 2022 versus June 2023, when the Bank of England had increased rates from 1.25% (for June 2022) to 5.00% (for June 2023) – repayments will be even higher if it goes to 6%, as expected by financial markets.
Repayment increases by region, June 2022 vs. June 2023:
The monthly mortgage repayments of households in London on standard variable rates (SVRs – the rate borrowers tend to automatically switch to after a fixed or tracker deal period ends) increased by £1,398 and by £1,142 for those on three-year fixed rate mortgages, for example. In the East Midlands, in comparison, average SVR repayments have increased by £587 and by £429 for three-year fixed rates since last year.
Taking current base rate changes into account, borrowers making interest-only mortgage payments will be even more exposed to future payment shocks when only repaying the interest on their principal loan amount. These borrowers will not have been chipping away at the equity part of their loans, like those on repayment mortgages, keeping their loan larger than it would have been if they hadn’t taken advantage of the rescue measure.
For the average principal loan amount of £250,000, for example, monthly interest-only repayments on the average UK SVR would be £587, compared to a total interest payment of £323 for a repayment mortgage (plus an additional amount towards paying off the borrowed amount, called the equity).
This is because when repayment borrowers pay interest plus equity, the total interest charged on a mortgage falls as the remaining debt decreases. So while repayment borrowers pay less interest as their equity builds and the principal debt falls, they still have to make higher payments overall.
So, for a three-year fixed rate deal, average total interest payments would be £497 per month for the six months for interest-only borrowers, compared to a similar repayment deal for which total interest payments would be £226. This means the exposure to overpayment when choosing to pay interest-only for the six-month rescue period would be:
Three-year fixed rate 6x(£587-£323) = £1,584
SVR: 6x(£497-£226) = £1,626
That is, choosing to pay interest only for six months could add at least £1,500 to a borrower’s bill over the life of the average home loan versus what they would pay if they remained on a repayment mortgage.
Regional differences will also come into play here when considering exposure to payment shocks and excessive mortgage payments. This is because households in regions with higher house prices borrow larger loans and so repay more over the life of the loan.
So, both base rate changes, but also the negative impacts of the mortgage rescue initiative will disproportionally affect households in areas with higher houses prices, such as London or East Anglia.
There is no straightforward solution to this situation, particularly since mortgage rates operate at the national level. A light-touch intervention, such as temporary caps on lenders’ profit margins could help. For example, if lenders were not allowed to make more than 2 percentage points above the bank base rate for certain mortgage products.
But the government also needs to consider the significant differences in payment shock levels across the country, particularly as it is likely to face a general election by January 2025, if not before. This is important when evaluating the robustness of the economy to recession, which already has an uneven effect on different locations and households.
Alla Koblyakova works as the Property Investment and Finance Course Leader at the Nottingham Trent University
The privatisation of water companies in England and Wales was supposed to bring efficiency and investment to a vital sector that had been starved of public funding. But since 1989, the industry has failed to invest sufficiently in replacing antiquated pipes and sewage treatment systems.
Rivers and seas have become increasingly polluted with raw sewage. Meanwhile, dividend payments, funded by water companies loading up on corporate debt, have soared.
The largest of those companies, Thames Water, has debts of almost £14 billion – roughly 80% of the value of the assets of the business. Rising inflation and interest rates mean this debt is increasingly expensive to service, let alone reduce.
If Thames Water collapses, the UK government is likely to step in and manage the company through a special form of business administration to ensure 15 million customers continue to receive their water and sewerage services. But state involvement would probably be temporary, with the aim of an eventual return to the private sector.
Many would see this as a missed opportunity to do things differently. There are already groups calling for Thames Water to be renationalised and brought into public ownership to remove the company’s profit motive and the pressure of paying dividends to shareholders. Instead, the theory goes that, as a local natural monopoly, Thames Water ought to be run as a publicly owned utility fully focused on providing a public service.
But doing this would be far from straightforward. To begin with, it would involve the transfer of corporate debt onto the government’s own balance sheet, which could dramatically constrain spending on other public services, such as the NHS and education.
Another complication comes from the fact that an administration process usually involves attempts to raise funds from the sale of company assets to pay off debts. But in the case of a water company, those assets are part of an integrated and complex infrastructure. It would not be practical to break up those assets if any new company was to go on providing water and sewage services to the public.
Renationalising Thames Water would therefore require the government to buy the assets. But the cost of doing so could be enormous, and the current shareholders would need to be adequately compensated. These include investors like pension funds, which the government would find politically hard to ignore.
And even though governments can generally borrow more cheaply than private sector companies (or even deal with its own debts by printing money), these options are not attractive. They could be inflationary, and would risk a negative response from the financial markets. Renationalistation could end up being seen as an expensive acquisition that brings no new money to improve the water industry.
An alternative would be to sell the assets to a new private company or investor. But existing water companies are unlikely to be considered suitable buyers on competition grounds (and many already face similar problems as Thames Water). Demands for significant future investment to meet tighter environmental standards are also likely to deter other investors.
A more attractive option might be to create a new kind of water provider – a bit like an unusual one that already exists in Wales.
Welsh Water has a unique corporate structure, with no shareholders and is run solely for the benefit of its customers. It is commercially run, with professional managers held to account by 62 independent trustees. While not perfect, its performance in recent years compares favourably with that of the other privatised water companies.
Welsh Water’s decisions are made not in the interest of profit-seeking shareholders but in the interests of broader society. Any profits made are either reinvested or returned to its 3 million customers in the form of cheaper services.
Creating such an organisation would not be easy. But there is a precedent in the case of Network Rail, a similar trustee-governed organisation, which was created when its commercial predecessor Railtrack went bust. Railtrack’s debts were subsumed into Network Rail, which were underwritten by the government (while initially staying off the public sector balance sheet). This change in ownership structure led to significant improvements on Railtrack’s atrocious safety record and reduced the cost of rail operations too.
A move towards the Welsh Water model would be in line with recent calls to turn all water firms into democratically run companies focused on public benefit. If renationalisation is considered to be too tricky politically and not viable economically, other solutions are available.
And while it is true that these public-interest companies are funded by debt, a government debt guarantee helps keep the costs of servicing this debt down (while costing the government very little). By not renationalising, the UK economy would avoid many considerable challenges – and a hefty water bill.
J. Robert Branston has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies and several other health related charitable organisations. He is a non-active member of the Liberal Democrats.
Phil Tomlinson receives funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalisation, and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for an Interact project on UK co-working spaces and manufacturing.
In the evolving relationship between technology and society, humans have shown themselves to be incredibly adaptable. What once left us breathless, soon becomes integrated into our everyday lives.
The astonishing functionalities of large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT were, just a few months ago, the epitome of cutting-edge AI. They are now on course to be mere add-ons and plugins to our text editors and search engines.
We’ll soon find ourselves relying on their capabilities, and seamlessly incorporating them into our routines.
Yet, this rapid acclimatisation leaves us with a lingering question: what’s next? As our expectations shift, we are left wondering about the next innovation that will capture our imagination.
People will try to achieve all kinds of smart – and not-so-smart – things with AI. Many ideas will fail, others will have a lasting impact.
Our crystal ball is not much better than yours, but we can try to think about what’s coming next in a structured way. For AI to have a lasting impact, it needs to be not only technologically feasible, but also economically viable, and normatively acceptable – in other words, it complies with the values that society demands we conform to.
There are some AI technologies waiting on the sidelines right now that hold promise. The four we think are waiting in the wings are next-level GPT, humanoid robots, AI lawyers, and AI-driven science. Our choices appear ready from a technological point of view, but whether they satisfy all three of the criteria we’ve mentioned is another matter. We chose these four because they were the ones that kept coming up in our investigations into progress in AI technologies.
The startup company DoNotPay claims to have built a legal chatbot – built on LLM technology – that can advise defendants in court.
The company recently said it would let its AI system help two defendants fight speeding tickets in real-time. Connected via an earpiece, the AI can listen to proceedings and whisper legal arguments into the ear of the defendant, who then repeats them out loud to the judge.
After criticism and a lawsuit for practising law without a license, the startup postponed the AI’s courtroom debut. The potential for the technology will thus not be decided by technological or economic constraints, but by the authority of the legal system.
Lawyers are well-paid professionals and the costs of litigation are high, so the economic potential for automation is huge. However, the US legal system currently seems to oppose robots representing humans in court.
Scientists are increasingly turning to AI for insights. Machine learning, where an AI system improves at what it does over time, is being employed to identify patterns in data. This enables the systems to propose novel scientific hypotheses – proposed explanations for phenomena in nature. These may even be capable of surpassing human assumptions and biases.
For example, researchers at the University of Liverpool used a machine learning system called a neural network to rank chemical combinations for battery materials, guiding their experiments and saving time.
The complexity of neural networks means that there are gaps in our understanding of how they actually make decisions – the so-called black box problem. Nevertheless, there are techniques that can shed light on the logic behind their answers and this can lead to unexpected discoveries.
While AI cannot currently formulate hypotheses independently, it can inspire scientists to approach problems from new perspectives.
We will soon see more new versions of AI chatbots based on the latest LLM technology, known as GPT-4. We’ll see AI that can handle different types of data, such as images and speech, as well as text. These are called multimodal systems.
But let’s gaze a little further into the future. Auto-GPT, an advanced AI tool released by Significant Gravitas, is already making waves in the tech industry.
Auto-GPT is given a general goal, such as planning a birthday party, and splits it into sub-tasks which it then completes by itself, without human input. This sets it apart from ChatGPT.
Auto-GPT incorporates AI agents, or systems, that make decisions based on predetermined rules and goals. Despite installation limitations, such an functionality problems when used with Windows, Auto-GPT shows great potential in various applications.
Humanoid robots – those that look and move like us – have significantly advanced since the first Darpa Robotics Challenge in 2015, a contest where teams built robots to perform a series of complex tasks set by the organisers. These included getting out of a car, opening a door and drilling a hole in a wall. Many struggled to achieve the objectives.
However, startups are now developing “humanoids” capable of doing tasks like these and being used in warehouses and factories.
Advancements in AI fields such as computer vision, as well as in power-dense batteries which provide short bursts of high current, have enabled robots to navigate complex environments, maintaining balance dynamically – in real time. Figure AI, a company building humanoid robots for warehouse work, has already secured US$70 million (£55 million) in investment funding.
Other companies, including 1X, Apptronik and Tesla, are also investing in humanoid robots, which indicates that the field is maturing. Humanoid robots offer advantages over other robots in tasks requiring navigation, manoeuvrability, and adaptability because in part, they will be operating in environments that have been built around human needs.
The long term success of these four will depend on more than just computation power.
Humanoid robots could fail to gain traction if their production and maintenance costs outweigh their benefits. AI lawyers and chatbot assistants might possess remarkable efficiency. However, their adoption might be halted if their decision making conflicts with society’s “moral compass” or laws don’t agree with their use.
Striking a balance between cost-effectiveness and society’s values is crucial for ensuring these technologies can truly flourish.
Fabian Stephany receives funding as part of this lectureship via the Dieter-Schwarz-Foundation.
Johann Laux receives funding from the “The Emerging Laws of Oversight” project, supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
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.
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.
The UK is set to roll out a national lung cancer screening programme for people aged 55 to 74 with a history of smoking. The idea is to catch lung cancer at an early stage when it is more treatable.
Quoting NHS England data, the health secretary, Steve Barclay, said that if lung cancer is caught at an early stage, “patients are nearly 20 times more likely to get at least another five years to spend with their families”.
Five-year survival rates are often quoted as key measures of cancer treatment success. Barclay’s figure is no doubt correct, but is it the right statistic to use to justify the screening programme?
Time-limited survival rates (typically given as five-, ten- and 20-year) can improve because cancers caught earlier are easier to treat, but also because patients identified at an earlier stage of the disease would live longer, with or without treatment, than those identified later. The latter is known as “lead-time bias”, and can mean that statistics like five-year survival rates paint a misleading picture of how effective a screening programme really is.
My new book, How to Expect the Unexpected, tackles issues exactly like this one, in which subtleties of statistics can give a misleading impression, causing us to make incorrect inferences and hence bad decisions. We need to be aware of such nuance so we can identify it when it confronts us, and so we can begin to reason our way beyond it.
To illustrate the effect of lead-time bias more concretely, consider a scenario in which we are interested in “diagnosing” people with grey hair. Without a screening programme, greyness may not be spotted until enough grey hairs have sprouted to be visible without close inspection. With careful regular “screening”, greyness may be diagnosed within a few days of the first grey hairs appearing.
People who obsessively check for grey hairs (“screen” for them) will, on average, find them earlier in their life. This means, on average, they will live longer “post-diagnosis” than people who find their greyness later in life. They will also tend to have higher five-year survival rates.
But treatments for grey hair do nothing to extend life expectancy, so it clearly isn’t early treatment that is extending the post-diagnosis life of the screened patients. Rather, it’s simply the fact their condition was diagnosed earlier.
To give another, more serious example, Huntington’s disease is a genetic condition that doesn’t manifest itself symptomatically until around the age of 45. People with Huntington’s might go on to live until they are 65, giving them a post-diagnosis life expectancy of about 20 years.
However, Huntington’s is diagnosable through a simple genetic test. If everyone was screened for genetic diseases at the age of 20, say, then those with Huntington’s might expect to live another 45 years. Despite their post-diagnosis life expectancy being longer, the early diagnosis has done nothing to alter their life expectancy.
Screening can also lead to the phenomenon of overdiagnosis.
Although more cancers are detected through screening, many of these cancers are so small or slow-growing that they would never be a threat to a patient’s health – causing no problems if left undetected. Still, the C-word induces such mortal fear in most people that many will, often on medical advice, undergo painful treatment or invasive surgery unnecessarily.
The detection of these non-threatening cancers also serves to improve post-diagnosis survival rates when, in fact, not finding them would have made no difference to the patients’ lives.
So, what statistics should we be using to measure the effectiveness of a screening programme? How can we demonstrate that screening programmes combined with treatment are genuinely effective at prolonging lives?
The answer is to look at mortality rates (the proportion of people who die from the disease) in a randomised controlled trial. For example, the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) found that in heavy smokers, screening with low-dose CT scans (and subsequent treatment) reduced deaths from lung cancer by 15% to 20%, compared with those not screened.
So, while screening for some diseases is effective, the reductions in deaths are typically small because the chances of a person dying from any particular disease are small. Even the roughly 15% reduction in the relative risk of dying from lung cancer seen in the heavy smoking patients in the NLST trial only accounts for a 0.3 percentage point reduction in the absolute risk (1.8% in the screened group, down from 2.1% in the control group).
For non-smokers, who are at lower risk of getting lung cancer, the drop in absolute risk may be even smaller, representing fewer lives saved. This explains why the UK lung cancer screening programme is targeting older people with a history of smoking – people who are at the highest risk of the disease – in order to achieve the greatest overall benefits. So, if you are or have ever been a smoker and are aged 55 to 74, please take advantage of the new screening programme – it could save your life.
But while there do seem to be some real advantages to lung cancer screening, describing the impact of screening using five-year survival rates, as the health secretary and his ministers have done, tends to exaggerate the benefits.
If we really want to understand the truth about what the future will hold for screened patients, then we need to be aware of potential sources of bias and remove them where we can.
Christian Yates is a member of Independent SAGE.
Finland was recently named the happiest country in the world for the sixth year running. A range of theories have been put forward to explain why the Nordic nation continues to rank at the top of the table for happiness, from greater income equality to time spent in nature.
But one Finnish sociology professor credited the country’s position to “a cultural orientation that sets realistic limits to one’s expectations for a good life”. That is, he seems to believe Finnish people are happy because they don’t set their expectations too high.
So should we all lower our expectations to be happier? I would argue psychology research suggests the opposite.
Read more: Why Finland is the happiest country in the world – an expert explains
High expectations are important because they allow us to dream and create goals to work towards. Through a process called mental contrasting, we create judgements about our expectations of the future and decide which dreams are realistic to pursue and which ones we should let go.
For example, you may imagine yourself living a life with many friends around you. If you’re sitting alone at home dreaming about this and feeling sad about the reality of being lonely, mental contrasting helps you identify your dream, anticipate potential obstacles, plan to take action to overcome them and pursue a goal that will help you make friends, such as joining a club. So high expectations, when realistic, can serve as a motivating force to make a change.
High expectations also keep us optimistic, so that we keep going in the face of adversity. When a bad thing happens to someone and they develop an expectation that everything will work out well – despite the adversity and even if it seems unrealistic at the time – this can lead them to take positive steps forward.
For example, your expectation of finding a lifelong partner may diminish when your relationship breaks up. However, if you continue to have high expectations that you’ll meet the right person, you’re more likely to join a dating site and seek opportunities to meet new people.
Low expectations limit our capacity to develop and grow. Having low expectations that we’ll accomplish what we hope to is not a good way to adapt to changes in life, and can lead to feelings of helplessness and despair.
When we have low expectations of success following adversity, we’re more likely to give up, for example not bother trying a dating app. Even when our chances of success are objectively high, we will forego opportunities – perhaps to meet new people – due to our low expectations that things will work out well for us.
So, having high expectations can help us adapt to changing circumstances and keep going. It’s a sign of resilience, adaptability and wellbeing.
While it’s useful to set high expectations for ourselves, we also tend to perform better when other people have high expectations of us. This is called the Pygmalion effect.
Our belief that others see us as capable and believe that we can accomplish more than we think we can pushes us to perform better. Likewise, when others have low expectations of us, we generally perform worse.
The Pygmalion effect has been tested extensively in the workplace and education, showing similar results.
Setting expectations too high can have negative effects. Imagine you overestimated your skills and challenged yourself too much. Perhaps you started to play Candy Crush on your partner’s phone and their level is way ahead of yours. The mismatch of your skills and this challenge may lead to frustration and even anxiety.
To neutralise this, all you need to do is go back to a level better matched to your skill level – which you find challenging but at which you’re capable of achieving high scores to progress in the game. We tend to do the same in real life to keep the equilibrium.
For example, say you’re organising a dinner party for your friends. If you commit to cooking a sophisticated meal that’s too challenging, your anxiety may reach such high levels that you can’t enjoy your own dinner party. Instead, you could lower your expectations and prepare a meal that doesn’t require as much skill, but still challenges you (and that your friends will no doubt still enjoy).
We all have longings, a desire for an ideal version of our lives. Some of our longings become goals (for example, becoming a parent), and others become a lifelong desire that will likely never come true (for example, winning the X Factor).
One of the reasons people may not want to have high expectations is because they want to protect themselves from disappointment when their hopes are not realised, which is a valid concern. However, learning to manage our emotions when sadness and frustration kick in helps us cope more effectively with adversity.
The pros of high expectations in motivating us to set and achieve goals outweigh the cons, and any “protection” we might get from low expectations. Considering all this, I think it’s too simplistic to believe Finns are happier for this reason.
Jolanta Burke 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 results of Finland’s parliamentary elections signal a tumultuous period ahead. This was to a certain degree foreseen by pre-election polls, which indicated that prime minister Sanna Marin’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) was about to lose to the opposition conservative National Coalition Party (Kok), led by Petteri Orpo.
The final election result showed a significant shift to the right – and increased success for rightwing populists in particular. The next government is therefore likely to be a coalition of rightwing parties but difficult negotiations lie ahead.
Marin received a very high number of personal votes and her party actually increased its vote share and parliamentary seats but it was not enough to make up for the significant losses suffered by her coalition partners.
Among these parties, only the social-liberal Swedish People’s Party of Finland (RKP/SFP) maintained its position. The Left Alliance (Vas) and the Green League (Vihr) both lost ground. There are indications that among the supporters of these parties some chose to vote tactically for SDP in an unsuccessful attempt to preserve Marin’s hold on the premiership.
Meanwhile, the most significant loses were suffered by the agrarian-liberal Centre Party (Kesk), which has now lost its status as one of Finland’s largest three political parties.
Kesk appears to have been replaced by the rightwing populist Finns Party (PS) on its home turf (namely, the northernmost regions of the country, such as the electoral districts of Lapland, Oulu, and Savonia-Karelia).
The PS has gained seven seats and now has 46 MPs, making it the second largest party in the new parliament. This indicates a heavy rightward shift among voters in both middle-sized cities and rural communities, as well as in the more ethnically homogeneous Finnish regions of the north, where the PS became the largest party. The PS has a new female leader, Riikka Purra, who seems keen to push even further on the radical agenda set by her predecessor Jussi Halla-aho. Purra proved to have significant personal popularity in this election.
The remaining seats are divided among the conservative Christian Democrats (KD) (5 MPs), the economically liberal one-man show Movement Now (Liike Nyt) (1 MP), and the representative of the autonomous Åland islands (1 MP, usually joining the parliamentary group of RKP/SFP on grounds of their common Swedish language).
While Finland has lost Marin as prime minister, from a gender perspective, the results of these elections nevertheless cement the standing of several women party leaders. Marin and Purra are the most prominent but seven out of the nine parties in parliament are now led by women. Even among the future MPs, the gender distribution is decently balanced, with 46% women and 54% men.
Marin was a trailblazer on the international stage as a young and charismatic woman heading the Finnish government and she did secure a very good result for her party. But this was not enough to shore up her coalition.
Marin showed clear leadership skills during the COVID-19 pandemic and the unfolding economic recession brought about by the war in Ukraine. However, it appears that the policies Marin and the SDP had identified to balance stimulating economic growth and public spending in education, social services, with preparation for a green transition did not gain enough traction among the Finnish electorate to guarantee her continued premiership.
Kok and Orpo’s winning ticket appears to have come off the back of promises to bring in financial restraint while expanding nuclear energy. The PS and Purra, meanwhile, ran on a platform literally promising to “Save Finland!” from alleged uncontrolled migration, EU meddling and the Finnish government’s welfare overspending.
As the leader of largest party in the coming parliament, Orpo now has the task of negotiating a stable governing coalition. Preferably, he will collect the support of more than half of the Finland’s 200 MPs to ensure that stability. The negotiations ahead won’t be easy, since any potential coalition with the rightwing populist PS makes for a very hard sell to the centre-right parties.
So even with the election over, it remains to be seen if Finnish politics is about to switch from being a source of international inspiration to being run according to a rightwing populist isolationist ideology.
Ov Cristian Norocel 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.
At a time of almost constant political upheaval across the UK in the last few years, sometimes it feels that nothing would surprise us. But the astonishing events that unfolded in Glasgow on the morning of April 5 managed to detonate that notion. At the end of the new first minister Humza Yousaf’s first seven days in charge, the Scottish National Party (SNP) was in the global spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
Police Scotland announced that they had arrested a 58-year-old man as a “suspect in connection with an investigation into the funding and finances” of the SNP, the governing party of the country. Minutes later the media revealed that person was Peter Murrell, ex-chief executive of the SNP and husband of the recently retired first minister, Nicola Sturgeon.
The nature of the specific arrest of Murrell is relatively new in Scots law. He has not been charged with any criminal offence and was released yesterday evening within the 12-hour window police have to charge or free a suspect – pending further investigations.
What this type of arrest does allow for though, is the possibility of searching premises linked to the individual in custody. On cue, cameras showed the rather shocking spectacle of the extensive police presence at both Murrell’s home – complete with screens and a plastic gazebo – and the SNP offices in Edinburgh where he spent 24 years in his leading role.
Although it already seems another era, Murrell entered the Scottish public consciousness relatively recently when he resigned three weeks ago during the SNP leadership campaign over a row with the media about membership numbers.
For someone so entwined in the biggest Scottish political party for so long – Murrell’s first political job was as office manager for ex-first minister Alex Salmond in the 1990s – it is clear that, as new party leader Yousuf said: “This is a difficult day for the party.” However, this was something of an understatement as fleets of police vans pulled up outside party headquarters and a helicopter hovered over Murrell and Sturgeon’s home just outside Glasgow.
It is not fully clear what the police investigation covers and what evidence they are searching for. It was reported last week that the police had passed a dossier to Scottish criminal prosecutor the Crown Office on their initial investigation into the finances of the SNP. A decision to take that investigation further would be made by the independent prosecutor; clearly, given Wednesday’s events, that decision was executed.
The issues around the investigation seem to focus on a specific fund of £600,000 that was raised by the party from members and supporters for an independence campaign that has not taken place.
This is not the first time financial issues have been raised about the funds. There was a discussion internally in the SNP with MP Douglas Chapman resigning as party treasurer in May 2021 because he said he was not given enough information about the finances to be able to do his job. This accusation was rejected by other party officials, as was the possibility of any police investigation into the finances at that point.
It was then revealed last year that Murrell had loaned the SNP £108,000 in 2021. Initially the party accounts did not directly indicate the money had come from him – this was revealed by the Electoral Commission. Some repayments had been made to Murrell, but £60,000 is still due to be repaid.
These may be some of the issues being explored by the police as they are all related to the finances of the SNP, but it is impossible to be specific. The announcement of the arrest came with the warning that the Contempt of Court Act 1981 is now live.
The Crown Office has taken a strong approach with several high-profile and controversial criminal cases in Scotland in recent years. People have been successfully prosecuted for breaching reporting restrictions on live criminal cases on a variety of media. In a statement on Wednesday evening, Police Scotland advised the public to exercise caution if discussing events on social media.
Clearly, though, the shock of Murrell’s arrest has some way to play out and more will be revealed as events unfold. For the SNP, already under fire for the bitterly divisive nature of its leadership contest and the choosing of a continuity candidate for its new party leader, the optics are not good.
Nick McKerrell 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 Antarctic Ice Sheet, which covers an area greater than the US and Mexico combined, holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 57 metres if melted completely. This would flood hundreds of cities worldwide. And evidence suggests it is melting fast. Satellite observations have revealed that grounded ice (ice that is in contact with the bed beneath it) in coastal areas of West Antarctica has been lost at a rate of up to 30 metres per day in recent years.
But the satellite record of ice sheet change is relatively short as there are only 50 years’ worth of observations. This limits our understanding of how ice sheets have evolved over longer periods of time, including the maximum speed at which they can retreat and the parts that are most vulnerable to melting.
So, we set out to investigate how ice sheets responded during a previous period of climatic warming – the last “deglaciation”. This climate shift occurred between roughly 20,000 and 11,000 years ago and spanned Earth’s transition from a glacial period, when ice sheets covered large parts of Europe and North America, to the period in which we currently live (called the Holocene interglacial period).
During the last deglaciation, rates of temperature and sea-level rise were broadly comparable to today. So, studying the changes to ice sheets in this period has allowed us to estimate how Earth’s two remaining ice sheets (Greenland and Antarctica) might respond to an even warmer climate in the future.
Our recently published results show that ice sheets are capable of retreating in bursts of up to 600 metres per day. This is much faster than has been observed so far from space.
Our research used high-resolution maps of the Norwegian seafloor to identify small landforms called “corrugation ridges”. These 1–2 metre high ridges were produced when a former ice sheet retreated during the last deglaciation.
Tides lifted the ice sheet up and down. At low tide, the ice sheet rested on the seafloor, which pushed the sediment at the edge of the ice sheet upwards into ridges. Given that there are two low tides each day off Norway, two separate ridges were produced daily. Measuring the space between these ridges enabled us to calculate the pace of the ice sheet’s retreat.
During the last deglaciation, the Scandinavian Ice Sheet that we studied underwent pulses of extremely rapid retreat – at rates between 50 and 600 metres per day. These rates are up to 20 times faster than the highest rate of ice sheet retreat that has so far been measured in Antarctica from satellites.
The highest rates of ice sheet retreat occurred across the flattest areas of the ice sheet’s bed. In flat-bedded areas, only a relatively small amount of melting, of around half a metre per day, is required to instigate a pulse of rapid retreat. Ice sheets in these regions are very lightly attached to their beds and therefore require only minimal amounts of melting to become fully buoyant, which can result in almost instantaneous retreat.
However, rapid “buoyancy-driven” retreat such as this is probably only sustained over short periods of time – from days to months – before a change in the ice sheet bed or ice surface slope farther inland puts the brakes on retreat. This demonstrates how nonlinear, or “pulsed”, the nature of ice sheet retreat was in the past.
This will likely also be the case in the future.
Our findings reveal how quickly ice sheets are capable of retreating during periods of climate warming. We suggest that pulses of very rapid retreat, from tens to hundreds of metres per day, could take place across flat-bedded parts of the Antarctic Ice Sheet even under current rates of melting.
This has implications for the vast and potentially unstable Thwaites Glacier of West Antarctica. Since scientists began observing ice sheet changes via satellites, Thwaites Glacier has experienced considerable retreat and is now only 4km away from a flat area of its bed. Thwaites Glacier could therefore suffer pulses of rapid retreat in the near future.
Ice losses resulting from retreat across this flat region could accelerate the rate at which ice in the rest of the Thwaites drainage basin collapses into the ocean. The Thwaites drainage basin contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by approximately 65cm.
Our results shed new light on how ice sheets interact with their beds over different timescales. High rates of retreat can occur over decades to centuries where the bed of an ice sheet deepens inland. But we found that ice sheets on flat regions are most vulnerable to extremely rapid retreat over much shorter timescales.
Together with data about the shape of ice sheet beds, incorporating this short-term mechanism of retreat into computer simulations will be critical for accurately predicting rates of ice sheet change and sea-level rise in the future.
Frazer Christie receives funding from the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation.
Christine Batchelor 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.
Between 1820 and 1920, four million people emigrated from Ireland to the US. Many were fleeing hunger and destitution and so brought with them an “exile” nationalism – a conviction that they were forced to leave by British misgovernment and exploitation of Ireland. Little wonder, then, that the Irish diaspora in the US played a crucial role in supporting, and particularly financing, the struggle for Irish independence.
When the Northern Ireland conflict broke out in the late 1960s, Irish America again mobilised in support of the region’s nationalist minority community. The diaspora saw the conflict in simplistic terms, as a renewal of the fight for Irish freedom from British imperial domination.
Events like Bloody Sunday in January 1972 – when British troops shot dead 13 civil rights protesters in Derry – understandably reinforced such views. As a result, money and even arms (more easily acquired in the US) began to flow across the Atlantic and into the IRA’s hands. In this period, therefore, Irish American actions only contributed to further bloodshed in Northern Ireland.
By the 1990s, the diaspora was playing quite a different role, one which was crucial to the region’s peace process and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. There were various reasons for this. Firstly, more sensible voices had emerged in Irish America. Instead of supporting the IRA, or advocating a British withdrawal and the reunification of Ireland, they pressed for radical reform that would achieve real equality for the nationalist minority.
Secondly, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the global picture had drastically changed. Previously, the White House had largely avoided commenting on Northern Ireland. The US relied on the British government to contain the communist threat in Europe and would not risk offending it for fear of losing that support. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, president Bill Clinton did not need to worry in the way that his predecessors did about damaging the Anglo-American “special relationship”. He thus listened to those in Irish America who argued that the White House should play a role in the peace process then emerging in Northern Ireland.
Most controversial was Clinton’s decision in January 1994 to give Gerry Adams a US visa. This came at a time when the IRA was still bombing Britain, and the Sinn Féin leader was seen by most people as an apologist for republican violence. The British government was outraged by Clinton’s decision, and John Major refused to take his calls for some time afterwards – a undeniable rarity in US-UK relations. However, when the IRA called a ceasefire six months later, Clinton appeared to be vindicated. Giving Adams a US visa had allowed the Sinn Féin leader to demonstrate to the IRA the gains that could be made by adopting a purely political strategy.
Clinton then sent a trusted confidante, the recently retired US senator, George Mitchell, to chair peace talks in Northern Ireland. Mitchell managed to steer discussions in which some parties still refused to directly address one another, and instead communicated only through him as chair of the talks. His patience was phenomenal, and Mitchell played a major role in bringing about the Good Friday peace settlement.
After Clinton left office in 2001, the George W. Bush administration helped in the difficult process of implementing this accord. The IRA still refused to decommission its weapons, but pressure from the US – which, after 9/11, showed no tolerance for anything that might be seen as terrorist activity – helped force it to do so. Similarly, the Bush administration pushed Sinn Féin towards accepting reformed policing arrangements in Northern Ireland.
In Irish America, figures like Ted Kennedy, who had been crucial in bringing Sinn Féin into the peace process, now insisted that it accept all the rules of the new political order. Even the hardline unionist party, the DUP, was impressed, and was eventually obliged to share power with Sinn Féin.
Thereafter, the US played a limited role in Northern Ireland – until Brexit. The UK’s departure from the EU created significant challenges in managing the Irish border, and thus posed a threat to the Good Friday Agreement as it is generally considered a hard border on the island of Ireland would go against the spirit of the deal. Irish America responded by reorganising and lobbying to protect the accord. Even when running for the presidency in 2020, Joe Biden – fiercely proud of his own Irish heritage – famously tweeted a warning to the UK: “We can’t allow the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit.”
After Biden’s election, pressure from the White House undoubtedly helped steer Boris Johnson towards a Brexit deal which prioritised peace in the region.
This also explains why Biden will be visiting Northern Ireland to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The US government, and Irish America, both feel that they helped create peace the region, and want to preserve and celebrate this achievement.
Peter John McLoughlin has received funding in the past from the AHRC, Leverhulme Trust, the Irish Research Council, and the Fulbright Commission. He is a member of Greenpeace.
The Good Friday Agreement ended a conflict that claimed more than 3,500 lives between 1968 and 1998. It is estimated that one-third of the adult population in Northern Ireland has been directly affected by bereavement, physical injury or trauma.
Peace agreements often now include provisions (such as truth commissions) to deal with the legacy of past conflict. Addressing the rights and needs of victims, these mechanisms seek to balance competing demands for truth, justice, accountability and reconciliation. The Good Friday Agreement controversially provided for the release of all paramilitary prisoners who had served two years and agreed to the peace process. But broader legacy issues were deemed a bridge too far.
The “moment” of political agreement presents a unique opportunity to confront the horrors of past conflict and violence. As a lawyer interviewed in the course of recent research I carried out with colleagues on the South African transition noted:
The first five or ten years is a great window of opportunity in every way … [you have to] use that space because it all really closes down.
The rights and needs of victims were not central to the Good Friday Agreement negotiations. A 1998 report by Northern Ireland victims commissioner Sir Kenneth Bloomfield proposed practical measures to deal with their pain and suffering – but, in many respects, the window of opportunity was lost. In the decades following the agreement there was pressure from the European Court of Human Rights to deal effectively with Troubles-related offences and deaths. In response, successive UK governments commissioned a series of initiatives to explore how everyone involved might holistically deal with legacy issues.
But it wasn’t until 2014, after multiple false starts, that the British and Irish governments and four of the five main political parties in Northern Ireland finally signed up to the Stormont House Agreement. This proposed an independent historical investigations unit to look at outstanding cases relating to deaths during the Troubles and an information recovery body that would enable people to seek and privately receive (via interlocutors) information about the Troubles-related deaths of their relatives. The information provided to this body would not be admissible in legal proceedings. There was also provision for a major oral history archive and an implementation group to lead on broader reconciliation efforts.
Following years of delay, the UK government finally committed to legislating for the Stormont House Agreement legacy mechanisms in 2020. But in a dramatic about-turn just weeks later, then prime minister Boris Johnson sacked his secretary of state for Northern Ireland and scrapped the Stormont House Agreement, instead pushing for a sweeping amnesty for Troubles-related crimes. This was fuelled by a misleading narrative that there has been a “witch-hunt” against British army veterans who served in Northern Ireland (only one veteran has been successfully prosecuted since 1998).
For the past year, the UK government has been moving forward with the Northern Ireland Troubles (legacy and reconciliation) bill. This fundamentally undermines the Good Friday Agreement. The incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into domestic Northern Irish law was a cornerstone of the GFA. This bill significantly limits the ability of people in Northern Ireland to challenge alleged breaches of the ECHR by closing access to the criminal, civil and coronial courts for Troubles-related cases.
The GFA also committed the UK government to “devolve policing and justice issues” to Northern Ireland, as indeed occurred in 2010. This bill now seeks to unravel key elements of the devolution of policing and justice. It proposes to grant people accused of serious Troubles-related crimes conditional immunity from prosecution, setting the conditional bar so low as to make that immunity practically guaranteed. Many regard this as a thinly veiled attempt to ensure that state actors are not held to account for their actions in Northern Ireland.
The bill is opposed by Northern Ireland’s victims, the Council of Europe, UN special rapporteurs, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, the Irish government and all political parties in Northern Ireland. The government has suggested that the existing legal system is not delivering for victims. The legislation thus proposes setting up a commission to help victims recover information, but the proposed body lacks the legal powers to access the kind of information necessary to enable people to find out what happened during the Troubles.
All accept that successful prosecutions in Troubles-related cases will now be few and far between (and nobody can serve more than two years for Troubles-related offences). The key point is that legal investigations have been increasingly successful in recent years in delivering information to families and exposing embarrassing details concerning state involvement in past human rights violations.
The implementation of the Good Friday Agreement has, in recent years, been significantly undermined by the government’s focus on matters English. There has been a notable determination that British army veterans should not be prosecuted, or indeed even properly investigated for conflict-era offences, and indifference about the implications of such a policy in Northern Ireland and its compatibility with international human rights law.
Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, has indicated that the Irish government could not rule out taking an interstate case to Strasbourg if the UK government makes its bill law as they believe it contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights.
In the meantime, victims are being retraumatised by the ongoing denial of their right to find out the truth about what happened to their loved ones and to see those responsible held to account.
The EU and the US administration played a crucial role in securing the peace agreement in 1998. The best efforts of Dublin, Brussels and the Biden administration are now required to prevent it unravelling.
Anna Bryson 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.
Seals, sea lions and walruses – a group of animals called pinnipeds – have been heavily exploited throughout much of human history. Many of these species have at some point even been threatened with extinction.
But, in the UK, their decline has largely been reversed. Since the Conservation of Seals Act 1970 prohibited the killing or injuring of grey and harbour seals around the UK, the number of grey seals in the country has doubled to 157,000 – although there seems to be significant regional variation. More than one-third of the world’s grey seals now populate the UK’s waters.
This is excellent news for seal conservation. But it can be problematic for the fishing industry, which now faces an increase in damage to catch and gear inflicted by seals. Understanding how seal populations are changing will help manage their interactions with fisheries and other marine industries.
Grey seals and other pinnipeds are intelligent and highly adaptable creatures, able to switch their prey and foraging habits to suit their environment. But the threats these species face are changing fast. Slow to reproduce and vulnerable to climate change and disease, these now common animals could become threatened in the future should conditions continue to change.
The population expansion of UK grey seals is probably the result of several factors.
In the decade that followed the Conservation of Seals Act, rising populations may have been the result of a lack of hunting or managed culls. Culls were carried out at some grey seal sites in the 1970s, but not as blanket attempts to control the overall population.
But since then, population increases may instead be due to changes in food availability. In the absence of other sources of mortality, food availability often drives population expansion. And grey seals are opportunistic foragers that feed on whichever prey is easiest to catch.
Several studies have looked at how grey seal diets have changed over the past few decades. By examining the hard parts that remain in seal faeces such as bones and shells, it is possible to reconstruct their prey. This technique underreports some food groups such as salmonids, but is currently the only method that allows scientists to quantify a seal’s diet.
In three separate years (1985, 2002 and 2010), seal faeces were collected in coastal areas of Scotland and eastern England. Seal diets consisted of 66 different species, showcasing their ability to exploit whatever prey becomes available.
When large fish are absent, they hunt smaller prey such as sandeels. But, as populations of larger prey species such as herring, cod and whiting increase, they exploit this too.
Grey seals, and other pinnipeds, inhabit a dynamic environment and the threats they face are changing rapidly. Climate change, for example, is affecting local food composition and abundance.
One of the main ways this occurs is through a process called “tropicalisation”, where rising sea temperatures cause warm water species to replace species that live in cooler waters. On average, marine species are shifting polewards at a rate of 72km per decade.
Seals are also vulnerable to population shocks. Pinnipeds have a long lifespan and tend to have small numbers of offspring – usually only one pup per year. Any environmental change that is short-lived can be buffered by seals’ longevity. If they don’t successfully pup one year, then they are likely to do so the next.
But any increase in adult mortality can quickly affect a population. Seal populations are therefore particularly vulnerable to diseases and other sources of adult mortality.
Respiratory diseases have a particularly acute impact on the foraging ability of diving animals such as seals. What could be a relatively minor threat to an animal that lives on land, could be life-threatening to one that dives. For example, more than 3,000 sea lions were found dead or dying on Peru’s coast following an outbreak of influenza in January 2023. Over 1,000 sea lions died on just one island, Isla San Gallan.
Climate change is likely to increase the risk of disease in the future. Research finds that warmer conditions favour pathogen development, survival and spread.
The way that humans use the sea is also changing. Offshore wind, for example, is projected to supply around one-third of the UK’s electricity generation by 2030. But, the construction, operation and maintenance of offshore wind farms causes noise disturbance and may change the behaviour of marine animals.
Research on harbour seals found that they tend to avoid areas where piling activity (the process of driving foundations into the seabed) is ongoing. Where piling is occurring, seals use of the area was found to decrease by 83%.
But offshore wind infrastructure can also lead to the development of artificial reefs. These reefs may result in an increased density of prey in the surrounding area and could improve foraging opportunities. Whether ocean infrastructure such as this will benefit seals depends on if it supports an increase in prey populations across a region – or simply concentrates existing populations in a smaller area.
Grey seals are the top marine predator in UK waters and seem to have become more common since the 1980s. But their situation remains precarious and they have little buffer should conditions change. This vulnerability highlights the importance of understanding the impact of future threats including climate change, more renewable energy infrastructure and disease outbreak.
Katrina Davis receives funding from the John Fell Oxford University Press Research Fund.
Richard Bevan 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 government has decided to go ahead with a rise in corporation tax in April 2023. The move is a clear reversal of the tax reduction which previous chancellors hoped would encourage output and innovation.
The idea of lowering corporation tax to boost growth (and ultimately tax revenue) failed spectacularly under Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership. And as the current chancellor Jeremy Hunt explained in his recent budget: “Even at 19%, our corporation tax regime did not incentivise investment as effectively as countries with higher headline rates.”
In raising corporation tax to 25%, the government has conceded that companies have not been investing productively. Despite corporation tax rates falling to 19% from 28% in 2010, and historically low borrowing costs (with interest rates close to zero to help businesses recover from the 2008 global financial crisis), business investment took until 2016 to recover to its pre-crisis share of GDP, which was already low in comparison to the EU.
Corporate Britain preferred to either save its profits, or pay out dividends to shareholders, revealing four deep rooted structural problems behind the UK’s growth problem.
Research shows that larger firms in the UK are more cautious about any boost in profits, compared to their counterparts in the EU. It takes an unusually large profit boost to give them an incentive to invest.
Investment may also be depressed by the increase in the number of firms whose profit relies on securing intellectual property rights, particularly in sectors like pharmaceuticals and software, where these are strongly protected. As these rights raise profits by restricting access to the market to new products, they can lessen the incentive for companies to invest in more production.
It is an extension of what’s known as the “innovators’ dilemma”, where market leaders hesitate over developing new products that could take away sales and profits from their current range.
Business strategists often advise that when capital costs are unusually low – as in the UK’s low interest rate phase from 2008 to 2020 – it’s best to lessen the focus on profit and instead go for growth. But with interest rates now rising, much of UK plc has left it too late.
In 2016, when UK business investment finally recovered to levels similar to those before the 2008 financial crisis (around 10% of GDP), growth didn’t pick up as conventional forecast models had expected.
Trends are worsening further as the recovery from the devastating impact of COVID stalls. One cause appears to be what’s referred to as “financialisation”: when non-financial firms chase profit through financial and real estate investment, instead of spending on more productive new equipment and innovation. But this is often risky when interest rates rise or asset prices fall.
Ministers and the Bank of England have urged employees to keep pay rises below inflation, to avoid a “wage push” that might keep inflation high. Though many protested in an ongoing strike wave, on the whole, wages have not matched inflation. In the year to January employees got an average wage rise of 7% in the private sector and just 4.8% in the public, compared to consumer price inflation of 10.1%.
In contrast, the speed with which companies raised prices to match (or even exceed) their rise in costs, suggests the “profit push” has been stronger than any wage push in driving inflation upwards.
UK firms have done better than their employees at protecting income against the rising cost of living. But because they won’t return the favour, and invest to improve productivity and let wages rise, the chancellor has chosen to tax those profits more and spend the proceeds himself.
Chancellors since 2014 have done well to avoid the mistake of letting public investment fall when private investment is still subdued after a crisis.
But current fiscal targets designed to stabilise UK public debt inevitably mean a squeeze on public projects (outside healthcare and defence where increases have been pledged). The latest OBR forecasts show general government fixed investment slowing from 12.3% growth this year to just 0.4% in 2024, followed by falls of 3.3%, 1.1% and 1.4% in the years that follow.
This squeeze is being worsened by the runaway costs of HS2, now more than twice its original £33 billion projection, and other over-budget mega-projects such as Hinckley Point C, which take funds from more prosaic outlays on crumbling transport, energy, education and healthcare infrastructure.
The government’s spring budget envisages central government co-investing in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, carbon capture and small nuclear reactors. But under its self-imposed investment restrictions, the state will struggle to fund its new entrepreneurial role. And the current government’s desire to be seen as “pro-business” cannot hide its profound irritation that the private sector didn’t step up its investment performance while the funds were still flowing freely.
Alan Shipman 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.
If you hate Mondays, you’re most certainly in good company. After a couple of days off, many of us have difficulty settling back into our routines and work duties. You may even have dread and anxiety that seeps into the weekend in the form of “Sunday scaries”.
You can’t always change your schedule or obligations to make Mondays more appealing, but you may be able to “reprogram” your brain to think about the week differently.
Our brains love predictability and routine. Research has shown that lack of routine is associated with decline in wellbeing and psychological distress. Even though the weekend heralds a leisurely and pleasant time, our brain works hard to adjust to this sudden change to a routine.
This article is part of Quarter Life, a series about issues affecting those of us in our twenties and thirties. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.
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The good news is that the brain does not need to make too much effort when adjusting to the weekend’s freedom and lack of routine. However, it’s a different story when coming back to the less pleasant activities, such as a to-do list on Monday morning.
One way to adjust to post-weekend change is introducing routines that last the whole week and have the power to make our lives more meaningful. These may include watching your favourite TV programme, gardening or going to the gym. It is helpful to do these things at the same time every day.
Routines improve our sense of coherence, a process that allows us to make sense of the jigsaw of life events. When we have an established routine, be it the routine of working five days and taking two days off or engaging in a set of actions every day, our lives become more meaningful.
Another important routine to establish is your sleep routine. Research shows that keeping consistent sleep time may be as important for enjoying Mondays as how long your sleep lasts or its quality.
Changes in sleep patterns during weekends trigger social jetlag. For instance, sleeping in later than usual and for longer on free days may trigger a discrepancy between your body clock and socially-imposed responsibilities. This is linked to higher stress levels on Monday morning.
Try to keep a set time for going to bed and waking up, avoid naps. You might also want to create a 30 minute “wind-down” routine before sleep, by turning off or putting away your digital devices and practising relaxation techniques.
Hormones can also play a role in how we feel about Mondays. For instance, cortisol is a very important multifunction hormone. It helps our bodies to control our metabolism, regulate our sleep-wake cycle and our response to stress, among other things. It is usually released about an hour before we wake up (it helps us feel awake) and then its levels lower until the next morning, unless we’re under stress.
Under acute stress, our bodies release not only cortisol, but also adrenaline in preparation for fight or flight. This is when the heart beats fast, we get sweaty palms and may react impulsively. This is our amygdala (a small almond-shaped area in the base of our brains) hijacking our brains. It creates a super fast emotional response to stress even before our brains can process and think whether it was needed.
But as soon we can think – activating the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the area for our reason and executive thinking – this response will be mitigated, if there is no real threat. It is a constant battle between our emotions and reason. This might wake us up in the middle of the night when we’re too stressed or anxious.
It shouldn’t be surprising then that cortisol levels, measured in saliva samples of full-time working individuals, tend to be higher on Mondays and Tuesdays, with the lowest levels reported on Sundays.
As a stress hormone, cortisol fluctuates daily, but not consistently. On weekdays, as soon as we wake up, cortisol levels soar and variations tend to be higher than on weekends.
To combat this, we need to trick the amygdala by training the brain to only recognise actual threats. In other words, we need to activate our prefrontal cortex as fast as possible.
One of the best ways to achieve this and lower overall stress is through relaxation activities, especially on Mondays. One possibility is mindfulness, which is associated with a reduction in cortisol. Spending time in nature is another method – going outside first thing on Monday or even during your lunch hour can make a significant difference to how you perceive the beginning of the week.
Give yourself time before checking your phone, social media and the news. It’s good to wait for cortisol peak to decrease naturally, which happens approximately one hour after waking up, before you expose yourself to external stressors.
By following these simple tips, you can train your brain to believe that the weekdays can be (nearly) as good as the weekend.
Cristina receives funding from CURE Epilepsy, Irish Research Council and Epilepsy Ireland. She is Funded Investigator within FutureNeuro the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Chronic and Rare Neurological Diseases.
Jolanta Burke 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.
Whiteness is an invention of the modern, colonial age. It refers to the racialisation of white people and the disproportionate privilege – social, linguistic, economic, political – that comes with this. Crucially, as an invention, whiteness is not innate – it is taught.
As an educational project, whiteness is designed to maintain racial hierarchies. Whether or not that intention remains or is recognised in modern schools, the racism underpinning that educational project continues to shape education in England.
Black children are more likely to face disproportionate disciplinary procedures and be excluded. They face discriminatory hair policies, and, when their speech is deemed to differ from “standard” or “academic” English, they face anti-black linguistic racism.
And in recent years, whiteness and anti-black linguistic racism have become further normalised under the so-called “what works” agenda of education policy.
The UK government launched the What Works network in 2013, in order to design policies, and how they are delivered, on the basis of what they called “the best” research evidence available.
In education, this claim that policymaking is scientifically objective and evidence-led is used to bolster the idea that the resulting policies will effectively do what they say, namely tackle inequality. However, my work shows how what-works-based education policy is not objective or neutral. It normalises white, middle-class language and can result in the use of non-standard, non-academic language being disciplined in schools.
Between 2021 and 2022, I conducted research in two different secondary schools in London. I observed classrooms, did interviews and analysed policies and lesson materials.
Both schools had majority white staff, serving mostly black children from low-income families. Both schools had subscribed to a “what works” approach to language teaching.
The first school had introduced “evidence-led” curriculum materials, entitled English Mastery. Teachers I collaborated with reported how these materials encouraged them to correct how their pupils spoke, avoiding language deemed to deviate from standard norms.
As a result, black children simply kept quiet or produced minimal answers, which they were further criticised for. Being made to internalise the ideology that their language was deficient resulted in their identity being eroded, an impact which research bears out.
This ideology was further articulated by the staff I interviewed. One teacher said “what works” curriculums would “address persistent errors” and curtail the use of “colloquial” speech, thereby allowing marginalised children to “function properly in the world”. Another teacher described how management had insisted on a “standard English only” policy because they deemed classrooms to be full of what they termed “poor quality talk”.
Research has long shown that standard and academic English are not neutral categories but social and colonial constructions based on the language of the white middle classes. Yet in these schools, acquiring standard and academic English is seen as the path to social justice. Similar thinking has been shown to underpin decision-making at Ofsted, the UK schools inspectorate and national policy too.
Despite the claimed intentions around racial equity and justice with which they are marketed, “what works” materials risk reproducing anti-black prejudice. They define any student as “functioning” or “working” as one who models their language on whiteness. And they still result in working-class, black children facing language discrimination, because, as research shows, beliefs about so-called “proper language” always relate to beliefs about race and class.
In another school I studied, management had designed policies to tackle the so-called “word gap”. Since the 2010s, there has been a resurgence among education specialists in England – policy makers at Ofsted, authors of teacher textbooks and the education publishing industry at large – of this idea, which is rooted in 1960s theories of verbal deprivation and was recycled in 1990s educational psychology.
As education secretary in 2012, Michael Gove told the UK parliament that the lack of attainment in children from disadvantaged backgrounds was due to “growing up in households where they are not read to and where they do not have a rich literary heritage on which to draw”. Amanda Spielman, chief inspector at Ofsted reiterated this position in 2018: “These children arrive at school without the words they need to communicate properly.”
This reductive argument poses that the solution to systemic inequalities but in giving marginalised children more, “better” words than what their families and communities provide them with. In other words, it blames not the socioeconomic system for failing these communities but the communities themselves for not having the right language and literacy practices.
In one school, where management had subscribed to this kind of thinking, believing that it was in the best interests of marginalised children, I found that word-gap interventions meant black working-class children were much more likely to have the way they speak categorised as deficient. Rather than developing their vocabulary, this strategy too resulted in children keeping quiet in lessons, internalising the idea that their language was not academic enough.
Educational linguists have consistently pointed out that language hierarchies are not based on empirical fact but stem from institutional racism. As sociologists Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Derron Wallace put it, “speech codes and vernacular associated with black youth are seen as oppositional to, and disruptive of, academic orientations”.
To counter this, the teachers I collaborated with in my research designed new classroom materials that would, instead, affirm students’ voices. We worked with the black British writer Benjamin Zephaniah, using his 2020 novel Windrush Child and interviews he has given in which he talks about his experiences of having his language and racial identity policed.
His experiences matched many of the students we worked with. For example, when asked to complete a linguistic profile of themselves, one student Joy, who, with Nigerian heritage speaks English and Yoruba, drew a portrait of herself with her mouth clamped shut. She was able to unpick how her Yoruba, previously, had been silenced in school.
Children were encouraged to interrogate the intersections of power, class and race which sees their own language stigmatised. Their discussions were also, crucially, joyful and full of love for black language and culture.
Another teacher collaborated with parents and students on a new whole-school language policy, which insisted that black children are just as linguistically dexterous as their white peers and emphasised that there is no racial justice without linguistic justice. The first draft of the policy stated:
We do not believe in the existence of a word gap and wholly reject such deficit and racist descriptions of language. If a gap does exist, it exists in the way that people perceive language, rather than how they use it.
Beliefs about language are never just about language. They reflect institutional power dynamics. As one black teacher I collaborated with put it:
We need to stop thinking that the way children speak is the problem, and start thinking about the way that adults listen as the problem
Ian Cushing receives funding from the British Association of Applied Linguistics, the British Educational Research Association, and the Spencer Foundation.
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