Suicide is pernicious. It is a tragedy that passes unbearable grief to loved ones forevermore. The unanswered questions torment those left behind because no one is ever truly sure what happened. We need to know what happened – it allows us to make sense of things. But suicide withholds this.
In many ways, suicide passes the pain on to other people. One suicide begets more suicides. It’s an extremely contagious event. Perhaps because it offers a false escape hatch for people who are in mental pain, when one person takes it, the idea is somehow vindicated and others follow.
None of this is new. We have known for centuries that suicide can be contagious. After Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, reports emerged of young men imitating his suicidal hero. It became known as the Werther effect.
The removal of the shame and secrecy that once surrounded suicide was welcome. But it created another problem: how do you talk openly and compassionately about suicide without encouraging contagion?
That is why, back in 1989, suicidologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, public-health officials and journalists gathered in the United States to establish recommendations to reduce suicide contagion. Their conclusions were explicit. They warned against glorifying people who died by suicide and against presenting suicide as a means of accomplishing an end. They also cautioned against public eulogies and memorials that might give vulnerable people the impression that society was honouring the suicide, rather than mourning the death.
For these reasons, the vigil for Jason Arday in Trafalgar Square last week should never have taken place. Stand Up To Racism organised this vigil in order to remember Arday and, presumably, to highlight the dangers of racism. But in doing so, it risked encouraging copycat suicides.
Thousands of people gathered beneath Nelson’s Column for the Arday vigil. There were flowers, speeches and placards reading ‘Rest in Power Professor Jason Arday’. Speakers presented Arday not simply as a man whose death was desperately sad, but as a victim and even a martyr. A villain was identified – Nathan Cofnas, one of the researchers who drew attention to Arday’s plagiarism – and he was booed by the crowd.
The irresponsibility of this is almost impossible to overstate. People who are suicidal fantasise about exactly this kind of overblown romanticisation of how they will be mourned, appreciated and valorised after death. They imagine everyone crying their eyes out at their funeral.
We all do this a little. Most of us know what it’s like to indulge ourselves with the idea that one day our very worst enemies will be publicly forced into regretting their harsh words to us. We daydream that one day we will be understood as heroes to everyone we know. This fantasy should never have been staged in Trafalgar Square.
In 1994, five years after the release of the media guidelines on suicide, Kurt Cobain killed himself. There were enormous fears about what would happen. Cobain was almost the perfect candidate for romanticisation – young, beautiful, troubled, world-famous and an icon of alienated youth.
Yet the response was remarkably restrained. Researchers subsequently found that the expected rise in suicides did not occur, although calls to crisis lines increased substantially, especially in Seattle, where he died. It is believed that the unusually responsible media and public-health response may have helped. The response deliberately worked against making his suicide heroic.
Twenty years later, when Robin Williams died by suicide in 2014, the media environment had changed. Social media had ridden roughshod over the old media guidelines. Researchers subsequently found 1,841 more suicides in the United States between August and December 2014 than their statistical model predicted, an increase of almost 10 per cent. We cannot say that Williams’s death caused those deaths. But the association is precisely why suicide researchers take contagion so seriously.
Arday’s treatment was not unique. Others have come through similar public maulings. James Frey endured an onslaught after parts of his supposedly autobiographical A Million Little Pieces were exposed as invented. Rachel Dolezal and Belle Gibson became international objects of ridicule when their fabrications came to light. More recently, The Salt Path controversy had many of us glued to our screens as another inspirational life story was ripped apart.
Arday’s story had all the ingredients of an irresistible scandal. The combination of the silly season, Arday’s good looks and his outlandish claims, coupled with the nerdy intensity of Cofnas – with his controversial views and mad-scientist vibe – made the story impossible to ignore.
The response to Arday’s death was depressingly predictable. The academics went to war against the journalists. The journalists retaliated and turned on academia. The right blamed DEI while the left blamed the right.
Arday was in the middle of it all. But in choosing suicide, he left behind grieving friends, a family and two fatherless children. We cannot know what happened in his final moments. Whatever Cambridge University did to fulfil its duty of care, it wasn’t enough to save his life. Yet people choose suicide for a whole raft of reasons – typically, many different issues have converged. It is therefore not only dangerous but also inaccurate to reduce his death to a simple morality tale in which journalists criticised him and he died as a consequence.
Jason Arday is dead. What should have brought sobriety instead brought a vigil. For a person already experiencing suicidal ideation and in a state of high emotion, what exactly is the message here?
If the saddest story in the world unfolds tomorrow and another famous figure dies by suicide, we should mourn him, grieve him and talk about his life. Talk about the complexity of suicide. Talk, above all, about the possibility of surviving unbearable distress. But we should never turn his suicide into his apotheosis. We should never give suicidal people reason to believe that death is the moment when the world will finally love them.
Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist. She is also the director and founder of Genspect.
Someone threatened to put a bullet in my head last weekend. My offence? Questioning whether a local Pride event was suitable for children.
At Medway Pride in north Kent, I saw photographs of men in leather fetish gear, a placard reading ‘Trans rights or I bite’, and a young child posing beside an inflatable shark carrying a Progress Pride flag. The shark has become an unofficial mascot of the trans community, while the Progress Pride flag incorporates colours representing trans and nonbinary identities, alongside the traditional rainbow. Most parents I know want their kids to be kids – not introduced to bonkers ideas like there are 100 genders or that some people are ‘born in the wrong body’.
Medway Pride looked relatively tame compared with some. I’ve seen photographs from Pride events of adults wearing puppy-play masks, collars, chains and harnesses. It’s not uncommon to see stalls selling sex toys. Or hear of sex acts being performed in public. Adults are free to do what they like consensually, of course. But surely adult sexual subcultures don’t belong at daytime events marketed as family-friendly.
I posed a reasonable question on X: ‘Do men in fetish gear belong at Medway Pride?’ I tagged in local Labour MP Tris Osborne, who had been raving about the event on his socials. Osborne responded to suggest that if I was making an ‘allegation’, I should contact the police, before wishing me a ‘relaxing weekend’.
When a gay friend asked whether Medway Pride actually recognised homosexuality, Osborne was similarly dismissive. And when another constituent objected to the Progress Pride flag being flown from Rochester Castle, the MP replied: ‘Sure they’ll miss you’, before suggesting he move to North Korea.
Meanwhile, among the online responses to my tweet were ‘cunt’, ‘Nazi’, ‘dangerous nut job’ and ‘don’t breed’. One man called me a ‘fucking bitch with zero brain cells’ who needed a ‘bullet in my head’.
Osborne is far from a one-off. Plenty of politicians seem determined not to look too closely at Pride. Take Sadiq Khan, whose City Hall positively embraces Pride. In July, central London streets were eerily lined with neat rows of giant Progress Pride flags. Luke Pollard, Plymouth’s first openly gay MP, recently celebrated Pride with a video warning that ‘hate is growing in our society’ and that people are trying to ‘turn our community on each other’. Southend MP David Burton-Sampson has meanwhile attacked Reform UK’s moves to stop Progress Pride flags being flown from council buildings in Essex. Local women tell me he is far less willing to discuss women’s rights – dismissing that debate as a ‘toxic culture war’.
I can’t decide whether MPs who reject the idea that anything could be wrong with Pride are actually ignorant – or just pretending to be. Osborne, Pollard and Burton-Sampson are openly gay and might be expected to understand better than most how much Pride has changed.
Over the past few years, a number of people with organisational links to Pride groups have been convicted of, have pleaded guilty to or have been charged with serious child-sex offences. The most notorious was Stephen Ireland, co-founder of Pride in Surrey, jailed for 24 years for raping a 12-year-old boy and other serious offences. He was no fringe figure: he was reportedly described by a former chief constable as ‘a friend of Surrey Police’ and accompanied officers into schools for Pride engagement work.
But even without those cases, surely it’s clear to anyone with eyes that Pride is no longer simply about acceptance of gay and bisexual people. It now also encompasses gender identities and the wider QTIA+ umbrella, which is a different set of ideas altogether. And once Pride becomes a vehicle not just for gay rights but for broader ideological and sexual subcultures, you get a blurring of boundaries.
This is how you end up with men in fetish gear, on leashes and wearing gimp masks, marching through high streets on a Saturday afternoon alongside the cashiers from Tesco or nurses from the local hospital. But if you object to men in fetish gear hanging around your kids, you’ll be accused of hatred or bigotry – rather than seen as an adult concerned about child safeguarding.
Acknowledging Pride has a problem is not the same as saying Pride causes paedophilia, nor that everyone involved in Pride should be regarded with suspicion. It means organisations that actively involve children and families should expect safeguarding scrutiny – just like everybody else.
Ofcom is currently investigating GB News after more than 12,000 complaints about comments made by Caroline Farrow linking Pride with paedophilia, bestiality and other sexual subcultures. Her comments were challenged on air by the presenter – but apparently that still wasn’t enough for those who believe Pride should be beyond criticism.
Whatever you think of Farrow’s formulation, Pride clearly deserves scrutiny. The photographs exist. The videos exist. Anyone can look. Yet our political class appears strangely incapable of saying that perhaps not everything conducted under the banner of Pride is suitable for children.
So what exactly are they afraid of? Being called homophobic? Or transphobic? Losing the approval of activists? Admitting that a movement they have spent years enthusiastically endorsing may have developed serious problems? Pretending not to see them won’t make them disappear.
Tim Curry was a shapeshifter. Notoriously media shy, he let his fans delight in his wild array of acting roles without really ever knowing him at all. When his more persistent admirers formed an emotional bond with the Tim Curry of their imaginations, he would sometimes be forced to set them straight. ‘I’m just a person’, he would say, ‘and I’m not your person’.
One of the joys of watching Curry on screen was that he was often unrecognisable from one role to the next. I have a childhood memory of the moment I learned that the demon in Legend (1985), the villain in Annie (1982), the butler in Clue (1985) and the cross-dressing alien scientist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) were all played by the same man. It was quite the revelation.
Curry died this week aged 80. The publication last year of his memoir, Vagabond, gave fans a tantalising glimpse of the real man, but even there he was determined to retain an air of mystery. Those who were hoping for salacious anecdotes about his love life were disappointed, because, as he rightly pointed out, ‘specifics about my affairs of the heart or the bedroom are – respectfully – none of your fucking business’.
His vagabond status was well earned. As the child of a military father, he was forever on the move, and it is easy to see how these early experiences shaped his capacity to embody such a range of characters. His first accolade came early when he was awarded the prize for the ‘Most Beautiful Baby in Hong Kong’. His family relocated roughly every 18 months for the first 11 years of his life, meaning that he was continually exposed to new people and environments.
Little wonder that Curry saw mutability as the essence of his vocation. As he put it: ‘How can you trust somebody, or truly know somebody, who appears as a king one day and a jester the next? What does it mean when neither role is the true identity of the person, and when that very person might be gone the next day?’ In this, he might have been paraphrasing William Hazlitt’s essay on actors, in which he described them as ‘today kings, tomorrow beggars’ and wrote that ‘it is only when they are themselves, that they are nothing’.
Curry’s key philosophy in life struck him during a gap year of travelling across Europe and north-west Africa with his schoolfriend, Richard Cork (later the art critic for The Times). Drunk on brandy one night in Marrakesh, the two friends made a pact to thoroughly explore all their contradictions and ‘see them through to their conclusion’. It proved to be Curry’s guiding principle throughout his life and career.
As he explained in his memoir: ‘Professionally, the lure of pursuing contradictions has drawn me toward complex characters or compelled me to make them more complex and nuanced: so, for example, a scoundrel who is also charming, or somebody rather abhorrent whom I can also play out as being quite irresistible. Those are the roles that have enticed me the most.’
Few roles better embodied this combination of the abhorrent and the irresistible than Dr Frank-N-Furter in the West End musical, The Rocky Horror Show. This anarchic rock’n’roll homage to science fiction and horror B-movies enjoyed an immediate success when it opened on 19 June 1973 at the small venue upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre, on a night that was suitably stormy and lightning-streaked. When adapted into a film in 1975, Frank-N-Furter was his breakthrough role. In spite of the movie’s initial failure at the box office, its subsequent cult status has ensured his legacy.
When I interviewed the show’s creator, Richard O’Brien, in 2013, he described Curry’s portrayal of Frank-N-Furter as ‘definitive’. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how his performance in the movie version, with its delirious energy and lip-smacking abandon, could possibly be bettered. As O’Brien told me: ‘We had one actor 20 or 30 years ago who said to me: “I hope you know, Richard, I’m stealing everything off Tim Curry.” And I thought that was an honest way to approach it.’
Curry later gave the very best advice on how to approach the role. ‘None of the characters in the show are in drag’, he said. ‘We’re all wearing what people normally wear in Transylvania.’ Most importantly, Frank doesn’t ‘camp around’ or pretend to be a woman. ‘He is a very strong, aggressive man… In other words, if you’re going to attempt to truly enter the character, wear your high heels like a man.’
To make his feature-film debut in such an extreme part carried risks of future typecasting, yet the astonishing variety of roles that followed proves that he successfully manoeuvred his way through that minefield. He played Mozart in the Broadway production of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus (1980-1981) and was nominated for a Tony Award. Other Tony nominations were to follow for his performances as Bill Snibson in Me and My Girl (1987-1988) and as King Arthur in Spamalot (2004-2007). It was quite the leap from such theatrical turns to his famous on-screen villains – Pennywise the Clown in the miniseries It (1990) and Cardinal Richelieu in The Three Musketeers (1993) – but he made it seem effortless.
Even in these most diabolical of guises, Curry insisted that he was able to draw on his own life experience. Of Pennywise and Richelieu, he acknowledged that his ‘terrifying childhood memories’ of his mother – who possibly suffered from an undiagnosed form of bipolar disorder – informed his approach. And might it even be the case that he was thinking of his mother during his brutal axe murder of Meat Loaf’s Eddie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show? ‘Well, between us, yes’, he confessed in his memoir. ‘Yes, perhaps I was.’
Those who tried to pigeonhole Curry were attempting the impossible; shapeshifters are not so easily categorised. It seems appropriate that one so protean and elusive was, at an early screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, mistaken for an imposter. A cinema manager tried to have him ejected for impersonating Tim Curry.
In his essay on actors, Hazlitt quotes Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well: ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’ This could serve as a fitting maxim for any actor, for whom even the most traumatic experiences can provide material for the craft. The body of work Curry leaves behind is testament to how successfully he wove his many disguises from the mingled yarn of his own extraordinary life.
Gone are the days when the Green Party of England and Wales was full of hippie tree-huggers singing ‘Kumbaya’ around a campfire. Today, the party is unrecognisable – and far more sinister. It has been intolerant of dissent in its own ranks for a few years. Now, it is turning that intolerance against the media.
The recent death of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday has provided Green Party leader Zack Polanski with his latest pretext for going after the media. Speaking last week, he blamed Arday’s seeming suicide on the media’s reporting of Arday’s plagiarism, academic fraud and rampant fabulism. He called on the government to ‘ensure a responsible [media]’, by holding an inquiry into its ‘culture and behaviour’.
This came just days after he’d made a similar demand in response to some newspapers’ refusal to toe the ‘climate emergency’ line in their coverage of the heatwave. ‘It’s time we sorted out the press’, Polanski posted on X. ‘Constant misinformation to protect their donors and fossil fuels is destroying lives and our planet. The government must step up and stop being cowardly.’
If you think the talk of ‘sorting out’ and changing the ‘culture and behaviour’ of the press sounds ominous, that is because it is. It is also deeply authoritarian.
In the comments to his X post, Polanski posted two links that he encouraged his followers to sign. The first was a petition to parliament calling for a ban on foreign media ownership, the establishment of a social media levy and restrictive regulation. The second link directed followers to Hacked Off’s website, and a petition demanding that the government launch an inquiry into the British press.
Polanski has since doubled down on these comments. He has claimed that ‘freedom of the press should never have been freedom to own and dominate the press’. He has insisted that the UK regulate its media ‘now’. He is particularly obsessed with a ‘tiny number of billionaire firms’, which Polanski seems to believe control the media like a sinister cartel.
It should surprise nobody, in fact, that behind that gap-toothed grin, Polanski does not like the media much at all. And that’s because he doesn’t like to be challenged or scrutinised. After all, columnists have ridiculed him for his claim, made over a decade ago, that he could enlarge the size of a woman’s breasts through hypnotherapy. Reporters also exposed the fact that he failed to pay council tax on his houseboat, and that he dishonestly claimed to have worked as a spokesperson for the Red Cross.
It’s not just the thin-skinned Polanski who wants to muzzle the press. It seems to be a widely held desire throughout the Green Party. Last week, the Spectator revealed that 89 members had endorsed a motion, submitted ahead of the party’s Autumn conference, with the title: ‘Justice for Jason Arday: Stopping Racist Smear Campaigns and Reforming Media Power.’
This censorial motion calls for two state regulators to ‘map and address racism’ and ‘ableism’ in the media. It also wants a regulator to have the power to clamp down on ‘harassment’, which is the term Green supporters have used for press scrutiny.
The Greens’ ultimate aim would be to force every major national newspaper to join a state press regulator. And the already overpowered media regulator, Ofcom, would be given powers to force large social-media platforms to remove ‘hateful, discriminatory and conspiratorial’ material, seemingly even where it falls within the bounds of lawful speech.
Recently, we witnessed just how menacing Green Party supporters can be. Writing in the Spectator earlier this month, Jonathan Sacerdoti revealed an attempt by activists to have him silenced by the police. After a disagreement with a canvasser who visited his home in April, Sacerdoti was told that an allegation of ‘harassment’ had been made against him. Conceding that there was no evidence for the complaint, the police eventually closed the investigation. But it was another telling insight into how these people operate.
The current militancy of the Greens has been a few years in the making. In 2022, Shahrar Ali was sacked as the party’s policing and justice spokesperson – and later expelled from the party – for expressing his gender-critical beliefs. This censorial trend has accelerated under Polanski.
The Green Party is no longer a benign force in British politics. It seems to have jettisoned its old environmental concerns to pursue a string of culture-war issues, championing trans rights (at the expense of women) and demonising Israel. And now it’s coming after press freedom.
The Greens have now shown their true, authoritarian colours.
‘When I was young, I had no sense, I bought a flute for 50 pence / The only song that I could play was fuck the Pope and the IRA.’
So went the chant that emerged from the away section following Chelsea’s Monday night clash with Fulham FC at Craven Cottage. The impromptu chorus of ‘Flute for 50 Pence’, an infamous sectarian football song that was historically deployed by sections of Rangers FC supporters, appears to have sent Chelsea officials into a nervous tailspin.
‘We would like to strongly remind all supporters that the club does not condone any chants which discriminate against a protected characteristic’, read the email sent out to Chelsea’s fanbase earlier this week. ‘Any supporter found guilty of this will face the strongest possible action, which could include indefinite suspension from attending all Chelsea matches and ejection from the stadium.’
The public-service announcement concluded by emphasising the club’s commitment to ensuring ‘a welcoming matchday experience for all’, and asked supporters ‘to take collective responsibility and remain vigilant in helping us tackle discriminatory chanting’.
Crackdowns on football chants are nothing new. Chelsea, like many Premier League clubs, currently has extraordinarily broad conditions on prohibited chants. It reserves the right to sanction supporters for any language of an ‘offensive, immoral, obscene, abusive, indecent, political or discriminatory nature’, with the framework stating discriminatory language can attract a 36-month ban. Indeed, over the past few years, the list of ditties that might lose you a season ticket has been growing. But there’s something especially silly about this latest addition – not least because ‘Flute for 50 Pence’ takes aim at a public religious figure and a terrorist organisation. However vulgar, indecent or ugly the historical sentiment, the idea that fans should be ousted for singing it shows just how institutionally micromanaged the nation’s favourite sport has become.
English football has been in this censorial quagmire for a while now. What began with the Football (Offences) Act 1991, which criminalised ‘racialist’ and ‘indecent’ chanting at designated matches, has expanded into an ever-growing regime of policing what supporters say and sing. More recently, the CPS has taken a hard line against so-called tragedy chanting: references to Hillsborough, the Munich air crash and other football-related disasters, even in jest, can lead to prosecution under public-order legislation. While nobody wants football grounds to become arenas for racism, intimidation or threats, somewhere along the way, the principle that fans should not be subjected to abuse has become entangled with a rather different one: that fans should never be allowed to say anything that could conceivably wind someone up.
For better or worse, football was once one of the few places in British public life where people were permitted to be spectacularly obnoxious. The terraces were partisan, profane and deliberately antagonistic. Nobody pretended otherwise – and no one with a brain mistook a football chant for a peer-reviewed contribution to public discourse. The modern game, by contrast, increasingly treats supporters as the nasty, rough edge of English football that safeguarding departments can’t sand away fast enough. It is yet another example of a proletarian pastime being neutered for the comfortable enjoyment of the middle classes.
There is a world of difference between protecting supporters from threats and intimidation and protecting them from words they find objectionable. The world will keep turning if football culture stays a little unruly. As a Catholic, I’m unlikely to join in with a chant that effs and jeffs about the pontiff. Then again – who am I to cancel the Rent Boys’ fun?
Georgina Mumford is a London-based writer.
The post Birmingham has declared the England flag haram appeared first on spiked.
Dr Helen Millman is a climate scientist and glaciologist based at the University of Exeter. She writes in a personal capacity.
The UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050 was introduced by a Conservative government and supported across Parliament because the scientific evidence shows that limiting warming to 1.5°C requires global CO₂ emissions to fall rapidly this decade and reach net zero by the middle of the century.
This is the consensus reflected by the IPCC and, like all IPCC reports, was approved by the governments of its 195 member countries. Even Saudi Arabia, a nation not known for its eco-zealotry, couldn’t change the scientific assessment to suit its interests. It is, therefore, surprising to see Kemi Badenoch dismiss our 2050 net zero target as “arbitrary” and a “political programme.”
Accepting the target and delivering it are different things, but the target itself is scientifically grounded. As long as greenhouse gas emissions remain above net zero, global temperatures will continue to rise, increasing the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, wildfires and other climate extremes. This summer, in a 1.4°C warmer world, we have seen people lose everything to wildfires and our infrastructure fail in unnaturally hot weather. A&Es have experienced their busiest period on record, with excess deaths from heatwaves running into the thousands in England alone. As UK temperature records continue to be broken, farmers have raised concerns about food shortages amid what’s expected to be the worst harvest on record.
Against this backdrop, the party leadership has made a series of dubious claims about net zero. Badenoch has claimed that net zero by 2050 is “impossible”. In reality, the transition is achievable for around 1 per cent of GDP, far less than the costs of not reaching net zero by 2050.
She has suggested that the UK’s net zero commitment has caused emissions to increase. In fact, since our net zero target became legally binding in 2019, our consumption-based CO2 emissions figures – which include offshored emissions – have fallen from 23 per cent below 1990 levels to 27 per cent below 1990 levels. In contrast, the party’s proposals of more North Sea drilling, removing emissions targets and cutting carbon taxes would put the UK on a higher-emissions pathway than current plans and keep the UK tied to a more expensive energy model for longer.
Just recently, Claire Coutinho was forced to defend a report which she’d hailed as “the most detailed energy analysis ever.” When it was found that those details were questionable, she doubled-down in a Trumpian style rebuttal with further inconsistencies and attacks on her critics.
Coutinho and Badenoch are right that British industry faces exceptionally high electricity prices, but they are wrong to blame carbon taxes and renewables. The steel industry, for instance, is largely exempt from environmental levies and receives network cost relief through the Supercharger scheme.
Yet British steelmakers still pay more for electricity than their French and German counterparts because UK wholesale electricity prices remain tied to the price of gas. In the latest auction, contracts for onshore wind and solar were awarded at around £72 and £65 per megawatt hour respectively, compared with more than £147 per megawatt hour for new gas generation. Renewables are not cost-free, requiring investment in networks, storage and flexibility, but clinging to an outdated system dominated by expensive gas is not the cheaper route.
Until the world reaches net zero, warming will continue, making climate impacts harder, more costly and, in many cases, beyond our ability to adapt to. This year’s poor harvest points to what more frequent and severe droughts will mean for crop yields and food security. Rising sea levels will make low-lying coastal communities increasingly difficult or impossible to defend, threatening homes, infrastructure and farmland. More properties will become uninsurable due to extreme weather, wildfires and flooding, while investment will be diverted towards repairing damage and adapting existing assets rather than raising productivity and living standards. A slower transition for Britain carries severe economic, diplomatic and physical challenges, but the party leadership has yet to acknowledge them.
Yes, the UK only makes a small contribution to global emissions, but so does almost every other country on Earth. Countries that each account for less than 1 per cent of global emissions collectively produce more than a fifth of global emissions – more than the USA and India combined. It also doesn’t take a diplomat to realise that a country which refuses to meet the 2050 target will struggle to persuade others to do so.
We were the first to commit to net zero, and 144 countries have followed our lead. Before the 2015 Paris Agreement at COP21, the world was on course for 4°C of warming, but due to net zero policies and the falling cost of green technology, we are now on course for 2.8°C of warming. This is still well beyond the 1.5°C limit, but we have helped to lead the world in the right direction and should continue to do so.
Conservatism has traditionally understood that facts cannot be negotiated with. Markets, public finances, demographics and geopolitics impose constraints that governments ignore at their peril. Climate change belongs to this same class of realities, governed by atmospheric physics rather than political beliefs. When the truth is inconvenient, it’s best to work towards solving the problem, not to imagine a different reality to suit the argument you would rather be making.
Barring Conservative candidates who support net zero by 2050, including former Government Ministers, puts compliance with a populist ideology ahead of the national interest. It risks excluding the people with the knowledge and expertise the party needs to navigate one of the most serious challenges the country faces. Treating knowledge as a tribal marker rather than a basis for decision-making might be popular in the online world, but it leads to bad policy and poor outcomes in the real world.
There are serious debates to be had about how we decarbonise more rapidly, how the costs are distributed, and how we strengthen economic competitiveness while doing so. But by treating the net zero target itself as heresy, Badenoch’s approach has opened a void where constructive debate should be. Ignoring scientific evidence doesn’t form a strong foundation for winning political arguments or for tackling the problems we face. For a party that once prided itself on governing through competence, this is a deeply damaging direction to take.
The post Helen Millman: Kemi, it’s time to get real about climate change appeared first on Conservative Home.
Ali Ahmadi, Catherine Barnard and Fiona Costello argue that, contrary to common media narratives, there is no clear link between increased migration and higher crime rates.
The media often associates migrants, particularly asylum seekers and refugees, with criminality. A study of news coverage in Canada, the UK, and the US found recurring negative themes, including describing migrants as ‘rapists and criminals,’ and linking migrants with ‘terrorism’.
But what does evidence say? Are asylum seekers and refugees really more likely to commit crimes? And, if they are, will a government leaflet, setting out the basic rules, deter them?
Research does not show a consistent link between migration and crime. In fact, across OECD countries, an increase in immigration has not seen an increase in the crime rate (particularly property, violent, and drug crime). However, a closer look at the figures reveals significant variation, depending on immigration policies, immigrants’ backgrounds, and the post-arrival conditions. For instance, a study of 128 countries found that while migration was positively associated with crime in countries such as Iran and Ukraine, it was associated with lower crime indices in Egypt, Mauritius and the United States. Similarly, in the UK, the proportion of non-citizens among people convicted or incarcerated is similar to that of the adult population (about 12%), or lower once age is taken into account (non-citizens tend to be younger, and young men are more likely to commit crimes).
Crime rates also vary by nationality and offence type. For instance, Afghans are over-represented in sexual offences and Albanians are over-represented in drug offences (although the available data do not allow for a reliable measurement of this over-representation). More broadly, high-income countries (e.g., China, France) are less represented in convictions and low-income countries (e.g., Afghanistan, Iraq) are over-represented. This can be explained by socio-economic and family circumstances, which is also in line with research within the British population. For example, young adults who had spent time in care were roughly ten times more likely to have been found guilty of an offence than those who had never been in care.
Crime rates also differ according to how people enter a country and their post-arrival conditions. For example, immigrants who come for study and work (generally those with more affluent socio-economic backgrounds) are less likely to commit crime. On the other hand, asylum seekers and refugees are more likely to be convicted or incarcerated. A study in the UK found that the large arrival of asylum seekers in the late 1990s led to a small but statistically significant increase in property crime. Similarly, a study in Germany found a small increase in property and violent crime one year after refugees arrived. This could be explained by the limbo these individuals face in their host countries post-arrival. A prolonged period of uncertainty can create financial and social pressures. In the UK, over 36% (17,668 people) of those claiming asylum wait for more than a year for an initial decision and the average time for an appeal for asylum applicants is 67 weeks. This limbo may, in some cases, increase the risk of involvement in crime.
However, even this increase should be interpreted carefully. Researchers have identified an ‘over-reporting bias,’ where people may report or attribute crimes to refugees more often in areas with large refugee populations because of prejudice, heightened public attention, and/or increased police alertness.
Government policies, particularly rules on employment and legal status, can either increase or reduce crime among asylum seekers. People who cannot work legally have fewer opportunities to earn a legitimate income, which creates financial pressures that may lead to them engaging in illegal activity. For instance, although crime increased among asylum seekers in the UK, no such effect was observed following the arrival of a large number of EU labour migrants after 2004, who had immediate access to employment. Similarly, in Italy, migrants with legal work permits showed a similar or lower propensity for committing crime compared to natives. And those whose status had been legalised were significantly less likely to commit serious crimes in the following year.
Similarly, in Türkiye, which hosts the world’s largest Syrian refugee population, crime rates fell following the arrival of refugees. Researchers suggested that the risk of deportation, combined with humanitarian cash-transfer programmes such as the Emergency Social Safety Net, may have discouraged illegal activity.
A study from Denmark showed that a more expansive integration support such as employment and language training for adult refugees also has significant intergenerational effect in terms of, among other things, lowering juvenile crime.
Recently, the UK government distributed a short guide for asylum seekers covering public behaviour, sex and consent, domestic abuse, and gender equality, and highlighted the legal consequences of non-compliance. We are not aware of any evidence that pamphlets of this kind, on their own, produce a substantial reduction in criminal behaviour. A study of North Korean refugees in South Korea found that greater familiarity with the law was associated with lower offending rates, indicating that legal awareness may have some preventive value. The guide could therefore be beneficial if combined with in-person orientation and ‘psycho-education’ programmes such as anger management and violence prevention, particularly for adolescent and young adult refugees. These could build a better understanding of the law and address wider barriers to integration. This may be particularly important for asylum seekers given that trauma and exposure to conflict significantly increase an individual’s propensity to commit violent crime.
To conclude, the evidence is mixed on whether migration increases or decreases crime. It varies across countries and groups and depends on factors such as migrants’ backgrounds (e.g. socio-economic factors, family, etc.), their route of arrival, their legal status and their access to employment. Also, the propensity for crime among migrant populations is highly responsive to government policies. Policies that restrict employment and leave people in prolonged legal uncertainty can create economic pressures. Conversely, policies that provide access to work, social support and secure legal status may reduce these pressures and see crime risks minimised or even reversed. Therefore, reducing prolonged periods of unemployment and legal uncertainty may help people establish more stable lives and could, in turn, reduce the conditions associated with some forms of offending.
By Ali Ahmadi, Research Associate, University of Cambridge and PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University, Catherine Barnard, Senior Fellow, UK in a Changing Europe & Professor of EU Law and Employment Law, University of Cambridge and Fiona Costello, Assistant Professor, University of Birmingham.
See if you can identify why this isn’t an ideal way to run a justice system.
We’ve put a couple of clues in for the slower folk. Answer below.
Still, the Crown Office IS at least theoretically accountable to Parliament, so as long as the governing party is full of strong, independent, fair-minded MSPs willing to stand up for justice even against their own party leadership then everything will be oh wait right yeah we remember now.
The “AI boom” has caused a surge in tech companies proposing to build massive data centres across the UK. Concerned about the resource use, disruption, noise, environmental impacts and the lack of public consent, local communities are pushing back.
As the digital world expands so too does the amount of data that’s processed and stored. Data centres have become a key part of the physical infrastructure that enables this: they’re large – often huge – buildings that house arrays of servers, storage drives, cables, batteries and cooling systems.
Around 500 data centres have been built in the UK since the 1990s. But AI adoption is now driving a massive expansion, with the government expecting data centre capacity to double or even quadruple within the next few years. There are thought to be at least 100 proposed data centres angling to be given the go-ahead, and some of them are absolutely enormous ‘hyperscale’ developments.
It’s hard to overstate the demand AI expansion – and the data centres needed for it – is imposing on global resources: tech companies are sidelining their sustainability goals and using far more energy than ever before; drinkable water is being drained from places that desperately need it; hunger for minerals is driving yet more toxic and exploitative conditions for the people who mine them.
Communities living near proposed data centres are increasingly worried about the noise, pollution and water stress their new neighbours would bring. They’re also seeing data centres consume space at the cost of agricultural land, local wildlife, housing and other valued infrastructure.
Nick Richards, who lives in east Cardiff where plans for a new data centre threaten a local hospital park and ride service, tells me:
The data centre will harm the community in many different ways. Staff and patients will have to spend up to an hour finding a parking space at the hospital. The gas turbines will have people living within a few miles breathing pollutants. Residents will be subjected to an intense humming noise continuously. My housing estate was only completed this year and most residents now fear they will never be able to sell their homes if the data centre goes ahead.
He also fears for how the community will fare as climate impacts intensify. He continues:
Then there’s the ‘heat island’ effect, where it’s understood that gas-powered data centres can raise the temperature of their surroundings by up to nine degrees. We’ve had a number of wildfires in that area this summer, and with 2027 set to be the hottest in a thousand years, I can’t picture things getting any better.
In Cardiff and beyond – including in London, Devon, Slough, Havering, Leeds, Selby and across Scotland – local people are organising their opposition to new data centres via campaigns and protests.
Local authorities are meant to inform residents who stand to be impacted by planning decisions and give them a chance to have their views considered. But campaigners are having to take on a lot of this work themselves, as Richards tells me:
I’ve spent two days walking door to door notifying the residents of the development; only 15% of them knew about it. The Local Authority’s public consultation consisted of four A4 notices on lampposts and three classifieds on page 38 of the Western Mail newspaper.
Communities have a huge challenge on their hands, especially as the government seems determined to fasttrack developments in the hope of becoming an AI ‘superpower’. Even when councils take positions against new data centres – for example, in Buckinghamshire, Slough and Tower Hamlets – they can find themselves overruled by ministers.
Despite the hurdles, campaigners are buoyed by the groundswell in the USA where opposition to data centre expansion is becoming mainstream. Backlash there has blocked or delayed at least 75 major projects within a three-month window. New York and Texas now have temporary bans on new data centre approvals, with more than a dozen states considering similar action.
But could the grassroots organising and legal challenges we are seeing here in the UK replicate this momentum? All the campaigners I’ve spoken to hope it will, but also acknowledge how much effort it will take. According to Richards:
You can’t get disheartened… if you keep speaking to people, things will start to happen.
Featured image via The Commons / Climate Camp Ireland
By Abi Perrin
On 26 August, Sacha Baron Cohen and Sony Pictures showed off the new Ali G sequel. The response — it’s fair to say — has not been positive. And now, campaigners are asking cinemas to not show the film, with one UK chain already confirming the following:
Just in: Picturehouse Cinemas (UK chain) has already responded to action participants, saying that they will NOT screen the new Ali G film. https://t.co/oBYVSMaY6B pic.twitter.com/4WEx1mCiMO
— NewsCord (@newscord_org) August 26, 2026
Cohen is receiving backlash for three primary reasons. The first is that the character is basically just Cohen doing blackface:
This tweet typifies the whole problem with Ali G. The character is supposed to be a white guy from Stains, Surrey who “thinks he’s black” but because his conception of blackness is inherently racist, he’s now a “swaggering London bad boy” whatever the fuck that means https://t.co/e7CkEYx877
— Steve Nyash (@yadanknow) August 25, 2026
When Ali G first came out, the joke was seemingly pastiching white guys who appropriated what they saw as Black culture in London. Whether you bought that joke or not, it’s clearly worn thin to the point of being non-existent at this point, and as such people are understandably taking the character to be Cohen’s impression of Black people.
The new Ali G is also facing pushback because of Cohen’s support for Israel – especially as the trailer literally features an Israeli government talking point:
“How dangerous is Iran?”
Sacha Baron Cohen, who lobbied TikTok for Israel during the Gaza genocide, uses his Ali G film to perpetuate the idea that the only effective state actor facing Israel is “dangerous.” https://t.co/myMbyBQn8T — Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) August 26, 2026
The comedy film is also receiving pushback for not looking very funny:
Just to confirm. I don’t think it looks bad because of politics or appropriation. I just don’t see any funny bits. Thanks.
— Elliot Eastwick’s World Famous Hot Sauce (@WorldFamousHot1) August 25, 2026
In response to all this, NewsCord have issued the following statement:
New campaign: demand cinemas worldwide refuse to screen the new Ali G film.
Sacha Baron Cohen retired Ali G in 2007. Amazon has revived him. On 23 October, Ali G: Who Iz I? opens in cinemas worldwide, and Sony Pictures is selling it to the public with the line “He iz back. We ain’t liable.”
The distributor is joking about liability. But the screens belong to the cinemas, and a booking is a choice.
In January 2000, the Guardian reported the verdict of Black British comedians under the headline “Comics find Ali G is an alibi for racism”. Felix Dexter said the act lets “the liberal middle classes laugh at black street culture” while keeping their sense of political correctness.
The catalogue behind it hurt community after community. The Kazakh American Association told Amazon that in Borat “a white person adorns a Kazakh persona” and belittles everything Kazakhs stand for. Kazakh children were bullied at school off the back of the joke.
On The Dictator, Jack Shaheen said “Arabs are being ridiculed again and again and again”, and Dean Obeidallah called it a “modern-day minstrel show”.
Studios sell films. Cinemas choose them. No film is owed a screen.
So we’ve created a campaign where you can voice your opinion to the cinemas.
One click sends up to 20 personalised letters in your name to the booking desks of Odeon, Cineworld, Regal, Vue, Everyman, Picturehouse, Showcase, Cinemark, Harkins, B&B, Landmark, Cineplex, Event, Kinepolis, VOX, Reel, Pathé, CinemaxX, Cinépolis, Cinemex and Nordisk Film.
Every address is verified on the chain’s own website.
Non-English chains get the letter in their own language.
You read every letter before it is sent. The chains decide their bookings in the next eight weeks.
The link to the email campaign can be found here.
It’s unlikely cinemas will ever put a blanket ban on movies linked to Zionists. We say this because several prominent movie producers have supported Israel throughout the genocide.
For clarity’s sake, when we say ‘Zionists’, we mean people who actively support Israel existing as an expansionist colonial state – a state which serves as America’s foothold in the Middle East. One such supporter is Larry Ellison, who owns Paramount Studios and is a major donor to the IDF (a.k.a. the ‘IOF’ or ‘Israeli Occupation Forces’). Ellison also owns Oracle – a company which has continued to provide tech solutions to Israel throughout the genocide. He was additionally involved in the US takeover of TikTok:
Many oppose Larry Ellison taking over TikTok, but do they know his firm Oracle stores data of the UK Home Office, Ministry of Defence & NHS?
He offered Netanyahu director role & employed relative of the UK PM at the same time as bidding for the contract.pic.twitter.com/mcI4ImLsB4
— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) September 19, 2025
Actor Mark Ruffalo recently spoke out against Paramount’s attempts to buy out Warner Bros, and he did so by pointing out Ellison’s links to the genocide. Paramount smeared Ruffalo as an ‘antisemite’. The response to that was an outpouring of support for Ruffalo from people who oppose the mass killings which Israel is continuing to perpetrate in Gaza.
The backlash to the new Ali G movie is a sign that support for Israel is increasingly toxic. The reason for this is that the genocide has made it completely impossible to present Israel in a favourable light.
Of course, it’s possible many cinema chains aren’t going to show the movie purely because it doesn’t look very good. At the same time, it would have needed to be Citizen Kane levels of amazing to escape the backlash that now accompanies Cohen and his increasingly dated caricature.
Featured image via the Canary
By Willem Moore
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