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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.
On 28 February 2021, for the first time in 30 years, a meteorite fell in the UK and was later recovered by scientists. Today, there’s an international effort to study this space rock and learn more about its place in the early solar system.
This meteorite is named after Winchcombe, the town in Gloucestershire where several fragments were recovered – including a piece that landed on the driveway of a family home.
The meteorite formed 4.5 billion years ago in the distant outer solar system, beyond the orbit of Jupiter. We refer to such objects as primitive because they contain some of the earliest solid material to form in our cosmic neighbourhood, offering insights into a time when our solar system was in its infancy.
Over time, much of this solid material merged to form larger objects, which eventually led to the emergence of planets. Some of the early building blocks that avoided being consumed in this process of planetary assembly are present today as asteroids or even smaller objects. The Winchcombe meteorite is just such a celestial body.
Some of these free-roaming planetary building blocks may have been responsible for delivering water to the early Earth. Therefore, Winchcombe can provide a glimpse into the activity of water on solid bodies in the ancient solar system.
Winchcombe is a rare type of meteorite known as a CM chondrite. These meteorites are characterised by high concentrations of water and organic matter (molecules with chains of carbon atoms), both of which are essential ingredients for the emergence of life.
We know the path through space that the Winchcombe object took – its orbit – before it fell to Earth. It is one of only five primitive, water-bearing chondrites for which scientists have this information. Knowing its orbit means we can pinpoint where in the solar system it came from.
The pieces of this meteorite were recovered very rapidly – within 12 hours of arriving on Earth. This means there was little time for water from Earth’s atmosphere to react with and contaminate the meteorite. Taken together with the meteorite’s rarity, primitive characteristics and distant origin, its swift recovery makes the object an ideal candidate for studying the role of asteroids in the early solar system.
The meteorite was probably once part of a larger asteroid. But looking at pieces of the Winchcombe object under the microscope, it quickly became clear that it is not one rock but many –- a complex mix of fragments loosely held together. This structure is the result of collisions between larger asteroids in space.
The debris field created by the collision subsequently merged to form a new population of smaller second-generation asteroids referred to as rubble-pile objects because of their loose, blocky configuration. Winchcombe came from one of these rubble-pile bodies – fragmented remains of the diverse rocky objects that existed in the age before planets.
Each rock fragment that makes up the Winchcombe meteorite records a distinct history, revealing, for example, differences in the amount of water it interacted with, and implying that the parent asteroid had a complex structure.
These observations point to either variable amounts of water on that parent body, which condensed as ice as the asteroid grew, or the uneven flow of water through the asteroid. When space rocks come into contact with liquid water they begin to change, forming an unusual form of dark black, fine-grained “space mud”.
Researchers from across the world jump at the chance to study these minerals because they hold, inside their crystal structure, molecules of the original water that flowed on these asteroids.
A group of scientists accurately measured the different isotopes (or chemical forms) of the hydrogen present in Winchcombe. Along with oxygen, hydrogen is one of the two chemical elements in water. The scientists’ findings demonstrated that water contained within the meteorite is very similar to the water on Earth.
This strengthens a theory that asteroids played a critical role in delivering water to the early Earth and thereby generating the oceans we see today.
At some point, chemical reactions between water and rock were halted by the catastrophic collision with another asteroid. This event shattered the meteorite’s parent body. Most of the rock fragments in the Winchcombe meteorite are very small, less than 1mm in size. This pattern of small pieces is evidence of the high-energy collision but also the signature of a weak asteroid.
As our understanding of planetary building blocks grows, we are increasingly recognising that the types of planetary bodies represented by the Winchcombe meteorite no longer exist in their original form.
Most, if not all, small asteroids (those measuring less than 10km in diameter) are likely to be rubble-pile bodies. Winchcombe is a relic from that time and a testament to the fate of most asteroids. We can summarise their history in a few simple words: hot and wet, then smashed to rubble.
Studying Winchcombe has also helped us to understand how these types of meteorites break-up in the atmosphere and, therefore, why they are rarely found as large rocks.
Research on Winchcombe continues and there are many more science questions that we hope to answer. One particularly interesting study relates to the type and amount of organic matter within Winchcombe and whether organic matter delivered by meteorites played a role in the supply of nutrients – food, essentially – for the emerging life on Earth.
Dr Martin D. Suttle has received funding from UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
Music has a powerful effect on the listener. It is linked to better mental health, and it has been shown to alleviate loneliness, pain, anxiety and depression.
For this reason, it is increasingly being prescribed by doctors as a form of medicine. This practice – where patients are referred to various activities such as running groups, art classes and choirs – is known as social prescribing.
Music-based activities may be prescribed to help support patients’ mental health, combat isolation, encourage physical activity, and keep an active brain.
While social prescribing is a relatively new practice, the use of music as a therapeutic tool is not. The first widespread use of music as a therapeutic tool can be traced back to the 19th century, where it was used in Victorian asylums to support patients’ treatment.
Victorian asylums are usually associated with poor sanitation, overcrowding, danger and patients held against their will. Indeed, the Victorians had little understanding of mental illness and the brain, which meant many treatments considered barbaric today were used on patients – including bleeding, leeching, shaving the head and bathing in ice.
From the end of the 18th century, however, practitioners moved away from the worst types of physical restraint. A new practice emerged, known as “moral management”, which placed a focus on using employment, diet, surroundings and recreational activities as forms of therapy.
When state-run asylums were first introduced in Britain in the early 19th century, music soon became included as a form of moral management to distract patients outside of working hours and keep them occupied. Both music and dance were efficient ways of entertaining large numbers of patients.
By the middle of the 19th century, almost all the larger asylums in the UK had their own band and would often organise dances, attended by over a hundred patients. Asylums also hosted concerts by travelling performers, from comic sketches to solo singers and amateur choirs. Dances and concerts were usually the only opportunities for patients to meet in a large group, providing important social interaction.
Among the smaller asylums, chiefly catering for wealthier patients, patients had more options to create music as part of their treatment. They would often bring instruments with them. And small concerts put on by patients and staff were common.
Much of the therapeutic value of music was attached to its social function. Accounts suggest that patients benefited from the anticipation of these social engagements and that events were used to reward good behaviour. Music was also used to break up the monotony of asylum life.
For example, at one private asylum, Dr Alfred Wood, wrote:
These entertainments involved a great amount of trouble in their preparation and arrangement and, I may add, considerable expense; but they are invaluable as a relief to the monotony of life in an Asylum. The pleasure they afford as well in anticipation as in reality, is ample to compensate for the efforts made to present them …
Dances, in particular, offered exercise and enjoyment, and even patients who were unable to dance enjoyed the music and watching fellow patients.
Musical events also carried strict expectations of behaviour. Patients needed a good deal of self-control to participate and behave appropriately. It was this process of conforming to expectations that formed an important part of rehabilitation. William A.F. Browne, one of the most noteworthy asylum doctors of the era, wrote in 1841 about the self-control needed before, during and after amusements.
Others suggested that music would help remind patients of happier days and give them hope and pleasure during their treatment. Browne also cited the “powers of music to soothe, enliven, rouse, or melt”. He suggested that even difficult patients may benefit from music, writing: “There is or may be a hidden life within him which may be reached by harmony.”
The writer James Webster recorded in 1842 that: “In many, the effect produced by the music upon their countenances and behaviour was often quite apparent.” Records include many stories of patients seemingly cured by music.
Webster cites the example of a young girl, previously “morose” and “stupefied”, who under the influence of music, seemed “pleased” and “cheerful” – appearing “altogether a changed creature”. Browne also wrote in one of his books of the miraculous effect music had on one patient who awoke, cured, the morning after listening to a performance of Scottish traditional melodies.
In the 1890s, many doctors carried out experiments on the relationship between music and mental illness. Herbert Hayes Newington, medical superintendent of one of the era’s most prestigious asylums, used music to diagnose patients and help develop theories on how the brain works. Reverend Frederick Kill Harford, who campaigned to provide music in public hospitals during the early 1890s, believed music could treat depression, alleviate physical pain and help with sleep.
Although music remained in asylums as a form of therapy, interest in it as a large-scale treatment waned as innovations such as electroconvulsive therapy emerged in the 20th century.
For patients in Victorian asylums, therefore, music was an important part of mental health treatment – not only providing an opportunity for creative engagement but also fulfilling a range of social, emotional and intellectual needs. Given what we know now about the benefit of music on mental health, it’s no wonder doctors are making use of it again.
Rosemary Golding has received funding from The Wellcome Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
How can you hold the intelligence and security services accountable, when what they do is secret? The third and final report from the public inquiry into the 2017 Manchester arena bombing is a useful guide.
Sir John Saunders, the retired judge in charge of the inquiry, has given a damning verdict on how government agencies handled the case of Salman Abedi, the man who set off a bomb at an Ariana Grande concert. His conclusions differed significantly from earlier reviews and the reasons why are important.
Abedi had been known to the authorities for years before he went on to kill 22 people and injure over 800 more. So the question must be why he was not prevented from carrying out the atrocity. Saunders highlighted individual failings that other reviews appear to have missed.
There have been multiple investigations into the Manchester attack. The security service (MI5) and counter-terrorism police reviewed their own work soon after the atrocity. Further investigations were carried out by David Anderson, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, and parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee.
These reports noted that officials could have made different decisions and recommended various actions to change future practice. The Intelligence and Security Committee argued that Abedi should have been referred to Prevent, the government’s deradicalisation programme.
Anderson suggested the decision to end his designation as a “subject of interest” – which would have involved more intense investigation – was wrong but ultimately concluded the mistake was understandable. The failure to thwart the attack was portrayed as a matter of bad luck. Anderson concluded: “MI5 and CT [counter-terrorism] Policing got a great deal right … they could have succeeded had the cards fallen differently.”
Such conclusions are typical of many reviews of the intelligence and security agencies. Too often, failures are portrayed as largely down to chance, the difficulties of intelligence gathering are emphasised, and individual mistakes are glossed over.
Saunders gives a very different version of events and it’s important to understand how that came about. A key difference lies in the evidence Saunders gathered. Previous reviews relied upon accounts from senior figures, summarising the position of their organisations from a high level. By contrast, the Saunders inquiry interviewed junior officers, the people actually making decisions on the ground. Their perspective differed significantly.
In his 2017 review, Anderson had accepted MI5’s narrative that intelligence related to Abedi was mistakenly “interpreted … as to do probably with drugs or organised crime and not something to do with terrorism or national security”. After interviewing the relevant officers, Saunders disagreed, saying: “I do not consider that these statements present an accurate picture.”
He found that officers had identified two pieces of intelligence about Abedi which were of concern on national security grounds. The first was not shared with counter-terrorism police. The second was not dealt with promptly.
As Saunders puts it, the officer reviewing the intelligence “should have discussed it with other Security Service officers straight away. Moreover, s/he should have written the report on the same day, but in fact did not do so.” Furthermore, the report the officer produced on the second piece of intelligence was said to lack sufficient context.
Meanwhile, Abedi had collected material for the bomb and stored it in a car, where it sat for over a month while he travelled to Libya (presumably for training on preparing the device). Although there is no certainty about what difference these errors made, Saunders argues that had security services followed Abedi to the car, the bombing might have been prevented.
As such, individual as well as systemic failings were in play. What this underscores is the need to speak to officials at all levels of these agencies.
Senior officials can give a useful sense of the overall environment in which decisions are made. One witness for the inquiry notes that at the time they were running around 500 investigations into Islamist terrorism, about 3,000 people were designated subjects of interest and 40,000 were closed subjects. This context should be borne in mind but we now know that errors of judgement were made by individuals and addressing these is important.
Organisations can learn from individual mistakes. Was the officer who failed to share vital information underperforming across the board and it wasn’t picked up? Did they wrongly interpret guidance? Were there personal or interpersonal issues affecting their decisions? Were they overstretched? How did the individual and their managers respond when errors came to light? The answers to these questions could have vital implications for recruitment, training, operational decision making and management.
For too long apportioning blame has been associated with scapegoating. In reality, people doing immensely challenging jobs will make errors. GPs, surgeons, social workers, police officers, regularly have to make decisions with potentially life-changing consequences. Intelligence and security agencies are no different.
The Saunders inquiry underscores the need for oversight bodies like the Intelligence and Security Committee, as well as ad-hoc reviews, to be able to speak freely with all those involved, including frontline officers, so as to gain a full picture of what happened and how they can learn for the future.
Jamie Gaskarth received funding from the British Academy Small Research Grants scheme which resulted in his book, Secrets and Spies: UK Intelligence Accountability after Iraq and Snowdon (Chatham House, 2020).
The Russian state has a long history of using its information operations to try and shore up its military plans overseas. Of course all states try to win over the hearts and minds of the population either at home or where they are fighting. But Russia’s approach is a bit different.
What we see in Russia is a strange sort of intermeshing between official statements, interventions from people who are clearly on the Russian state’s payroll and the pronouncements of supposedly neutral but Kremlin-aligned commentators. It’s not for nothing that Margarita Simonyan – a close associate of Vladimir Putin and the editor-in-chief of Russia’s international broadcaster, RT – once infamously said that Russia needed RT for “the same reason the country needs a defence ministry”.
The Russian state and its representatives frequently use lies to create cover for their military operations. And some are believed, at least, temporarily or in part. Back in 2014, Putin personally denied the involvement of Russian special forces in the annexation of Crimea, claiming that the military equipment sported by the “little green men” on the peninsula could be bought from any local shop. Following the 2018 poisoning of two Russian nationals in Salisbury, England, three Russian suspects were charged. Putin stated that the suspects were private citizens, even though later open-source investigations proved them to be senior members of Russian military intelligence.
Since Vladimir Putin sent his war machine into Ukraine on February 24 2022, The Conversation has called upon some of the leading experts in international security, geopolitics and military tactics to help our readers understand the big issues. You can also subscribe to our weekly recap of expert analysis of the conflict in Ukraine.
Since then, western nations have learned the value of preempting Russia’s disinformation attempts. If we look back to a year ago, Russian officials kept insisting that no invasion of Ukraine was planned, even as Russian tanks continued to mass on Ukraine’s borders. Indeed, RT’s commentators were dismissing all such concerns as “Russophobia” right up to the day of the invasion. Incidentally, RT’s broadcast rights in the UK were revoked by regulator Ofcom shortly after the invasion just as they were banned across the EU.
The key difference between the invasion of Ukraine and earlier Russian provocations is not only that the intelligence reports had been clear about the Kremlin’s intent all along, but that western governments had taken the unusual step of publicising them. This meant Russia’s political elite was unable to pass the invasion off as a response to some unanticipated provocation when it had so clearly been pre-planned.
The Kremlin’s narratives have shifted throughout the conflict. The initial pretext for Russian involvement in Donbas was supposedly to protect Russian-speakers from “genocide”. The Kremlin has consistently tried to portray Ukraine as “institutionally Nazi” – ignoring that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and that Russia’s Wagner group of military mercenaries itself has clear ultra-nationalist links. Russia habitually uses such mirroring techniques to project its worst attributes onto others.
A few months into the conflict, Russia extended its stated goals from “de-Nazification”, to “de-Ukrainisation”. It ramped up unambiguous propaganda about Ukrainians being Russians by another name, and suggested that Ukrainian nationhood is made up. In this narrative, the Ukrainian state is in itself neo-Nazi and, for that reason it must be liquidated, as were the Nazis themselves by the Red Army in 1945.
Whenever evidence of Russian war crimes has emerged, the familiar playbook of Russian information operations has kicked in. For instance, when civilian mass graves were left behind by Russian forces in Bucha and Irpin, Russian politicians dismissed the evidence as fake and state-controlled domestic television aired hours’ worth of conspiracy theories.
The Kremlin even tried to get the UN to discuss what had happened in Bucha as a Ukrainian deception operation. The UK – which had previously alleged that Russia uses the UN security council to spread false information – was at that point the security council’s chair. It refused to convene the council, so this time the Kremlin’s well-rehearsed mirroring technique came to nothing.
Public service broadcasters including the BBC and Deutsche Welle have comprehensively debunked many Kremlin falsehoods. But – as with all disinformation – their power comes not from their factual accuracy but from how believable audiences feel them to be. This helps explain why Kremlin narratives about the west using Ukraine to undermine Russia ring true for many beyond the Euro-Atlantic bubble. It is a plausible line in many countries still grappling with the legacies of colonialism.
What is more, though Russian media operations have been disrupted in the US and Europe, they’ve been less affected elsewhere in the world. Over the past year, for example, RT has given a high profile to its Indian telegram channel on its international Twitter feed. Its website remains accessible via a mirror site in the UK and it has expanded with the new RT Balkans web service.
Western unity in the face of Russian aggression is an important factor in Ukraine’s fight for its sovereignty. Improved understanding of how Russian disinformation works – and how to preempt and resist it – has been important in cultivating this unity. But that unity doesn’t necessarily extend to the rest of the world.
Russia is actively courting public and political opinion in the wider world – and it’s efforts have met with some success. It’s no surprise that states such as Iran and North Korea have has no problem supplying arms to Russia, or that allies such as Belarus and Syria have refused to condemn it at the UN. But even democratic India declined to comdemn the Russian invasion, instead abstaining from the UN vote. This speaks to the wider resonance of Russia’s “counter-hegemonic” propaganda push and – in a protracted conflict – we ignore this wider context at our peril.
Precious Chatterje-Doody ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
Long-running talks between the UK government and the EU over Northern Ireland may be coming to an end. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently travelled to Belfast in hope of reaching a deal to ensure smoother trade between Northern Ireland and its British and European neighbours.
But a deal has yet to be announced. And Sunak’s plans could yet be disrupted by Tory backbenchers, who are sceptical of any arrangement that could be seen as a concession to the EU.
The details of the deal remain private, but the general outline is known, including simplified border checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from the UK and a clearer delineation of the role of the EU’s court of justice.
The latter is a key source of disquiet among some MPs. The protocol, which sets out how trade happens between Northern Ireland, Great Britain and Europe, gives the court jurisdiction over trade disputes in Northern Ireland.
Last year, the UK government proposed removing this power through the Northern Ireland protocol bill. This controversial piece of legislation would mean the UK unilaterally rewriting the protocol. This would violate the UK’s obligations under international law, but it has significant support on Tory backbenches.
We might start by asking how much of this opposition is about substantive policy and how much is about optics. For example, many Tory MPs only expressed fundamental concerns with the detailed provisions of the 2020 withdrawal agreement that contains the protocol after they had agreed to it, suggesting that detailed work had not kept pace with rhetoric.
Rather than review the withdrawal agreement here, we can simply note that the new deal is being made within the confines of the existing text, not a renegotiation of the protocol. If an MP was ill-disposed towards the protocol before now, they might assume that the deal is more of the same.
Former prime minister Boris Johnson sold the agreement (and protocol) as an “oven-ready deal” at the 2019 general election. Just a few years later, he was pushing to unilaterally disapply much of the protocol through the Northern Ireland protocol bill. And now, he is making known from the sidelines that he is opposed to Sunak’s plans to abandon the bill in favour of a new deal.
Sunak’s deal therefore looks like something of a concession to the EU, which backbenchers might consider a poor return, especially with Johnson talking up how he could get a much better result.
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in Northern Ireland provides useful cover here for those MPs. The DUP is also ambivalent about a deal, and has set out a series of seven “tests” that any proposal must meet.
Key to the current tensions is the DUP’s refusal to allow the formation of a Northern Ireland government while the protocol is in effect. If they will not bend on this, then there is little point in heading down the road of tweaking a treaty that the DUP want denounced in full.
The notion that the only safe way to pursue Brexit is to break off all relations with the EU has traction in some parts of the party, making even the smallest concession intolerable.
Sunak himself has also contributed to this rebellion. His premiership to date has been marked by a distinct unwillingness to take on the different factions in his party. Indeed, this protocol deal is the only example of where he has taken some initiative on policy.
His efforts to keep everyone on board might have righted the ship after Truss’ brief time in Number 10. But it has also made it very easy for his MPs to push back on any policy point they dislike, let alone one of the most high-profile policy platforms of the party.
And lurking in the background is the coming general election. Labour’s strong polling suggests that another change of Tory leadership is on the horizon, so some backbenchers might be thinking ahead.
For Conservative MPs, loudly proclaiming their Brexit credentials is now a rather mainstream position, especially with the departure of many (EU) moderate MPs in the run-up to the 2019 general election. If Labour decides to seek more agreements with the EU, then having set out one’s stall now on the matter is an understandable move.
Of course, there is an irony that despite all this unhappiness, MPs do not need to be given a vote in the Commons about this deal: it can be simply approved by the withdrawal agreement’s internal management structures.
If Tory MPs do want to follow through on this, then they are going to have to take much more decisive action, such as getting ministerial resignations or forcing a fourth leadership contest within a year. Whether either side has the appetite to push it that far is unclear.
Simon Usherwood receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, as a Senior Fellow of the "UK in a Changing Europe" initiative. The views expressed in this article do not reflect those of the research councils.
Dungeons & Dragons has a longstanding appeal as a role-playing game – or as some players prefer to call it, a storytelling medium. But retaining users in the face of competition is far from easy, despite a recent resurgence thanks to Netflix hit Stranger Things, the uptake in remote activities sparked by COVID lockdowns and an upcoming film adaptation.
To maintain its competitive edge, the owner of Dungeons & Dragons – Wizards of the Coast – is proposing changes to the ownership of the game’s intellectual property and the way it makes money.
The original Dungeons & Dragons gaming licence meant that players could create unique content, such as story lines or maps, which would be developed over several sessions (sometimes years) of play.
The original licence encouraged “dungeon masters” (the players responsible for guiding groups through Dungeons & Dragons sessions) to lead players on creative adventures and to share their story lines with a wider community.
The enduring appeal of Dungeons & Dragons has been the ability to pick up adventures written decades ago and play them while adding unique twists. This could mean a steampunk take on an official story line, for example, or changing the setting from a medieval fantasy to outer space.
Any time these creative versions of the game were shared or produced for profit under the original licence, Wizards of the Coast went uncompensated.
Its original Open Gaming License, published in 2000, ran to around 900 words, and is basic compared to most other game licences.
The new, leaked Open Gaming License Version 1.0a in contrast, runs to 398 pages, and seeks to introduce a set of rules controlling – in the words of Dungeons & Dragons staff – the way large businesses “exploit” the company’s intellectual property.
The owner of Dungeons & Dragons first made changes to the Open Gaming License in late December 2022. This proved hugely controversial, driving some players to leave the game entirely, objecting to this attempt to generate greater revenues by claiming rights over the creativity of Dungeons & Dragons players.
Under the terms of the revised Open Gaming License, the characters developed and storylines created by players could become the property of the game, rather than the community who made them.
Players who have particularly lucrative content creation activities could also now be responsible for compensating Wizards of the Coast for a share of their profits.
Worse still, the new Open Gaming License limits the creation of new content, restricting both play and profit. Players who want to add their own characters and stories have a lot less incentive under the new licence. While the licence lets players create their own storylines and characters, it also renders them responsible for reporting any revenue they make off them.
The new licence imposes “sharing” requirements – what is created by a player becomes licensed to Wizards of the Coast to profit from too. If you created a new dwarf character, for example, it would no longer be yours. You agree by playing the game that Wizards of the Coast can both use it and commercialise it for profit.
This is especially worrying for players who rely on their creations for a revenue stream, such as Dungeons & Dragons influencers.
While these changes may sound restrictive, Wizards of the Coast is clear that little is changing for most players. The reality is that the alterations to revenue reporting will affect only those making over US$750,000 (£613,000) a year from the game. This clarification highlights the distinction between when Dungeons & Dragons is “just” a game, and when it is not.
While controversial, this move aligns Dungeons & Dragons more closely with other interactive games.
For most games, End User Licence Agreements (EULAs) include clauses outlining that users and players have no rights to any of the intellectual property. Commercialisation of game-related content is therefore usually quite difficult.
The changes also reinforce that Wizards of the Coast is stepping up commercialisation and seeking to protect its intellectual property – steps likely to be reflected in developments elsewhere, including a forthcoming Dungeons & Dragons-themed Lego set.
With films and a TV series to follow, it seems that the Open Gaming License revision is the first step in taking control of revenue streams.
Gamers often invest heavily in the titles they play without realising that the companies who develop the games are the ultimate owners. Licence agreements are rarely read.
Game licences are hard to read, easy to ignore and often painful for those they seek to control. Handled badly, they can cause more harm than good and destroy the relationship a game owner has with the community it relies upon.
Without the Open Gaming License first published in 2000, Dungeons & Dragons would probably not have experienced the loyal following of its player community. The attraction of the game – and the licence – lies in the ability to experience it through your own imagination.
The unprecedented alteration in the Open Gaming License signifies that Wizards of the Coast has put profits before players. The owner of Dungeons & Dragons acted to protect its own interests, but in doing so has damaged – perhaps irreparably – the relationship it has enjoyed with its player community.
Kim Barker receives funding from UKRI (ESRC and EPSRC), and the British & Irish Law, Education & Technology Association (BILETA). Kim Barker is a Visiting Professor at the CTS-FGV Law School and think tank, Rio De Janeiro.
The UK government recently decided against providing special protection for menopausal employees under the Equality Act (2010), rejecting recommendations from the UK parliament’s Women and Equalities Committee.
Nine characteristics are already protected from discrimination by UK law: sex, age, disability, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, gender reassignment, religion or belief, marriage and civil partnership, and sexual orientation.
It has already been proven in five successful employment tribunals that employers can and do discriminate against cis women because of their menopausal status. And, unlike pregnancy and maternity, menopause is something that practically everyone with ovaries experiences. But the government has refused to consider protecting it in the same way.
Efforts made by many UK workplaces in recent years show a growing understanding of how and why employers should support people at this stage of life. But many more workplaces could do with support in this area. This makes the government’s decision on menopause protections all the more frustrating for women and people with ovaries.
In addition to declining to make menopause a protected characteristic, the government also rejected a number of the committee’s other recommendations, including:
On the other hand, the government did accept recommendations to allow flexible working requests from day one of a job, and to make such requests easier to undertake and harder to refuse. It should be noted, though, that it had already committed to these actions in December 2022 as part of a response to a separate consultation.
It is now five and a half years since I last wrote for The Conversation on menopause as a workplace issue, when my co-authors and I argued that employers needed to take account of this reproductive life-stage for compelling social responsibility, legal and economic reasons. We said then:
Very few menopause-specific health and well-being policies exist in UK organisations. Little training or information about the menopause is provided for managers or any other employees.
So it is a real pleasure to be able to report that things have moved on considerably in the interim. Not only has menopause become a topic of public conversation due to efforts from women in the public eye like Davina McCall, Louise Minchin, Meg Mathews and Mariella Frostrup, but there has been a lot of really positive action among UK workplaces as well.
For example, 10% of organisations had support for menopausal staff in place in summer 2018, but 2022 data from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development indicates that 30% now offer some kind of awareness raising, guidance, training for managers or a policy.
Efforts to support those going through the menopause at work are so important. Not least because there are now some 4.5 million cis women of menopausal age in the UK workforce, according to the Office for National Statistics. And, as psychotherapist and writer Tania Glyde rightly points out, some transgender men and non-binary people will also experience menopause.
Read more: Menopause can affect every workplace – here’s how to start supporting every worker experiencing it
Symptoms typically start in the late 40s, the so-called perimenopause, and often endure past menopause itself (12 months after the last period), sometimes for several years. These symptoms can be physical: menstrual flooding, insomnia, migraines, hot flushes and night sweats. But there are also psychological symptoms like anxiety and depression, memory lapses, poor concentration and brain fog.
We know that 53.5% of cis women experience at least one severe menopausal symptom. They are 43% more likely to leave their jobs than their counterparts who aren’t experiencing such symptoms, for whatever reason.
The workplace can also make symptoms worse. In a forthcoming chapter in a book about menopause and the workplace, I discuss the challenges that both physical organisational environments and colleagues’ attitudes can present for those experiencing hot flushes. A respondent to a survey we conducted as part of our research provided this account of trying to deal with such symptoms in an office, alongside co-workers:
The temperature in my office is 26 degrees. There are 11 desks, 11 PCs and a photocopier. Main server, fridge freezer, low ceiling, horrendous lighting. Two windows. Three double radiators. And the selfish staff that I share this hell hole with. 26 degrees and two members of staff want the windows closed … sitting at their desks with their fleeces on. Oh and electric fan heaters under the desks.
There is plenty of advice available for employers who would like to start supporting their employees at this life stage. Those recognised by the Menopause Friendly Accreditation scheme offer helpful guidelines around what employers, HR, line managers and other staff can do to support menopausal colleagues.
Two evidence-based parliamentary reports have also been released in the last few months from the Women and Equalities Committee and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Menopause, chaired by MPs Caroline Nokes and Carolyn Harris respectively. These reports make well-thought out recommendations as to how the UK government can intervene to support and extend the efforts already being made by thousands of organisations in this area.
Overall then it appears that, while UK employers across all three sectors are stepping up to provide support for their menopausal staff, our government remains unwilling to make any kind of substantive change to do the same. Any hopes I had prior to the government’s response to the Women and Equalities Committee report that they would finally take the issue of menopause at work seriously have certainly not been borne out.
Jo Brewis is an Independent Panel member for Menopause Friendly Accreditation. She has also received funding from the Department for Education.
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