Inquest to resume into death of teenager Jay Slater in Tenerife
The 19-year-old, from Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, was holidaying on the Spanish island and had been to the NRG music festival with friends at the Papagayo nightclub in the resort of Playa de las Americas on 16 June last year.
He is believed to have gone to a holiday rental apartment in the early hours of the next morning before vanishing, and was reported missing on 18 June.
Evidence suggests he left the flat hours later, attempted to walk back to his own apartment and fell into a ravine.
A huge search was launched before his body was found in a steep and inaccessible area by a mountain rescue team from the Spanish Civil Guard near the village of Masca on 15 July.
A number of witnesses who were with him on the night he disappeared or at the rental apartment did not attend the inquest when it started at Preston Coroner's Court in May.
The court heard they could not be traced or were unavailable, despite extensive efforts to get them to come as witnesses.
Debbie Duncan, Mr Slater's mother, tearfully asked the coroner to adjourn as the family still had questions for the last people to see him alive.
Dr James Adeley, senior coroner for Lancashire and Blackburn with Darwen, agreed to adjourn to Thursday 24 July to make a final attempt to trace the witnesses.
The hearing in May heard from witnesses including toxicology expert Dr Stephanie Martin.
The court heard that analysis showed traces of drugs – including cocaine, ketamine and ecstasy – and alcohol in Mr Slater's body.
Home Office pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd said his post-mortem examination gave cause of death as head injuries and Mr Slater's body showed no evidence of restraint or assault, with the pattern of injuries consistent with a fall from height.
Detective Chief Inspector Rachel Higson, from Lancashire Constabulary, said police had analysed Mr Slater's phone data.
On the night out he had received phone messages from friends telling him to go home as he was 'off his head'.
Phone location data suggested he travelled to the holiday flat then left the property at around 7.45am the next day.
Statements from local Spanish witnesses said they were approached and asked by Mr Slater about buses or taxis to take him home.
More messages from friends warned him about the 'boiling' heat of the day but activity data on his phone stopped at 8.51am, suggesting the battery had died.
Marieke Krans from Dutch rescue charity Signi Zoekhonden helped in the search.
She said the area where the body was found was about a three and a half-hour walk from the holiday apartment and was 'really steep, really dangerous', and it was 'easy' to lose your footing.
The coroner told the hearing that one explanation for Mr Slater's death could be 'he has walked into the middle of nowhere and fallen off a cliff'.
The inquest is scheduled to conclude on Friday.
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New Statesman
41 minutes ago
- New Statesman
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Riot police hold back protesters near a burning police vehicle after disorder broke out on 30 July 2024 in Southport. Photo byOne year ago, as the riots that started in Southport spread across the country, people in the old coalfields started to join in the action. In Wath upon Dearne, a former pit area in the metropolitan borough of Rotherham, rioters clashed with police outside a Holiday Inn Express, leading to some of the most appalling violence of that summer. The hotel's residents, housed there by the Home Office while it processed their asylum claims, said they felt a deep terror when they saw the mob set bins alight and storm the building. It was the event that produced some of the most memorable images of the riots. For all the distinct 2020s character of the livestreamed disturbances, the clashes invoked the past too. Not only was the hotel built on former colliery land, but to some former miners, the violence was reminiscent of the battle between police and picketers at nearby Orgreave 40 years earlier. Back then, protesters also claimed to be defending their way of life, though from deindustrialisation rather than immigration. Britain's former coalfields have become deeply disenchanted with politics. When I conducted ethnographic research in mining areas in Nottinghamshire back in 2021 and 2022, long before the events at Southport and beyond, people predicted social unrest. Millie, a care worker and mother of four, told me then that she was done with mainstream politics. 'Don't like Labour much, don't like the Tories at all. They come in, 'You will do as we say.' Don't have much of a chance of standing up to them.' In her view, the media was complicit and ordinary people were kept in the dark. She told me: 'I've been predicting there will be riots soon.' On recent returns to Mansfield and its surrounding villages, the prospect of further rioting has become more urgent. Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner have also spoken of the risk of renewed unrest. Only last month protesters from north Nottinghamshire mining communities marched against asylum hotels, spurred on by the comments of local Reform MP Lee Anderson about an ongoing rape trial. Some locals are animated principally by anger at immigration. In their apocalyptic visions, they are defending not just women and girls but their whiteness, too. For others, however, these concerns are secondary to a wider sense of political voicelessness and apathy in national decline. Millie was among this latter group, which feels that politicians had done nothing and that all they did was tell lies. I asked her why that was. 'Money,' Millie said. 'It's always money. Money and greed. You're not telling me they're not having their pockets lined.' Millie's anger was driven by the loss of sports facilities, the disappearance of the Sure Start centres, and the loss of the shared spaces she held dear. Everything had been 'taken away'. Even simple activities such as a family cinema trip or roller-skating at one of the few remaining leisure centres set her back more than she could afford. She would love to be able to drop her kids off to play with the pit band, as her father, a miner, had done with her. But the facilities had shut. 'When the pits started closing, they lost funding and stuff. I mean, it's still about, don't get me wrong. But it's not as rife as it used to be… My kids don't understand it because they never had it. But it hurts me, because what am I to do?' [See also: One year on, tensions still circle Britain's asylum-seeker hotels] To understand the anger of the mining towns, we need to understand the history of miners' welfare. 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After the First World War, the miners met at Southport again to discuss their demands, having paused strike activity for the duration of the fighting. They wanted to be put in charge of the industry – nationalisation under worker control, as well as wage increases and a reduction in the working day. They threatened to go on strike. The government baulked at their demands, but the ensuing Sankey commission did recommend that colliery owners be charged one penny per tonne of coal, to be put towards social, cultural and medical amenities. This was promptly made law in the Welfare Fund clause of the 1920 Mining Industry Act – the clause from which welfares derive their name. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Sports pitches, pithead baths and social clubs sprang up around Britain's collieries, all funded by the levy, and, after nationalisation, by the state. The welfares and other amenities were not just useful for community well-being, but also helped to forge a social tie between representatives and the represented. Bolstered by social investment, MPs could prove they cared about the communities that had elected them. In reality, the Welfare Fund investment reflected the structural power of miners over the energy source upon which industry and households depended. Nonetheless, people use the provision as an example of care and recognition. When these were lost in the ravages of deindustrialisation and austerity, it was felt like a moral injury. Politicians still claim to care, but what have their constituents got to show for it? Quantitative research by the economic geography professors Maria Abreu and Calvin Jones has shown that former coal-mining areas have lower levels of political participation, a lack of political trust and a low sense of political efficacy even compared with economically and demographically similar places. Other recent research tells us that closures of GP practices, pubs and shops are all associated with elevated support for the far right. These losses of social infrastructure are all the more impactful in former mining areas because there was more to lose. The decay of amenities won by the labour movement have become a potent symbol of decline. Today, ex-miners who were once connected to hundreds of others through a dense web of social provision tell me they live increasingly private lives in their private homes. Some end up on dubious Facebook pages and YouTube channels. They come to imagine their homes as embattled fortresses, under siege from disorder and diversity outside. The Wath Main Colliery memorial in South Yorkshire is a ten-minute walk from the Holiday Inn where everything kicked off in August 2024. Fifteen minutes' walk the other way there's a large distribution centre, which regeneration officials had hoped would provide an employment alternative. 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Private-sector-led approaches to regeneration have left mining communities with exploitative jobs and crumbling social infrastructures. Things seem only ever to get worse. Instead, the state could use a 21st-century welfare fund to revive community centres, facilitate affordable family activities and help community groups take neglected spaces into common ownership, reclaiming the mundane utopia of the sports pitch and the pit band. Memories of the affordances of the previous generation of welfare facilities speak to its understated pleasures. 'Pit bands – you really got a feel for the pit community,' Millie told me. 'Stuck together, had a laugh.' [See more: British decline is as much intellectual as it is political] Related
The Guardian
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- The Guardian
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The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
Social media ads promoting small boat crossings to UK to be banned
Ministers are to outlaw social media adverts promoting journeys on small boats across the Channel to asylum seekers. The government will create a UK-wide criminal offence that could lead to perpetrators being sentenced for up to five years in prison and a hefty fine. Though facilitating illegal immigration is already a crime, the change will make it a specific offence to create material for online publication that promotes or offers services that would lead to a breach of UK immigration law. This includes advertising small boat crossings, selling fake passports, visas and other travel documents, and promoting opportunities for illegal work in the UK. Ministers will make the change via an amendment to the border security bill, which is making its way through its final stages in the House of Lords. Eighty per cent of migrants who arrived in the UK on small boats told government officials that they had used social media during their journey, including to locate or communicate with people smugglers, according to Home Office data. The department said it wanted to crack down on smugglers selling a false narrative about life in the UK to desperate asylum seekers by criminalising those promising illegal work online. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said: 'Selling the false promise of a safe journey to the UK and a life in this country – whether on or offline – simply to make money, is nothing short of immoral. Sign up to Headlines UK Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion 'These criminals have no issue with leading migrants to life-threatening situations using brazen tactics on social media. We are determined to do everything we can to stop them – wherever they operate.' The change will also make it a crime to post online content that encourages someone to break UK immigration law in exchange for money. Rob Jones, the director general for operations at the National Crime Agency (NCA), said: 'We know many of the people-smuggling networks risking lives transporting people to the UK promote their services to migrants using social media. The majority of migrants arriving in the UK will have engaged with smugglers in this way.' The NCA has taken action against organised crime groups using social media to promote crossings, including a south Wales-based gang convicted in November 2024 after smuggling thousands of people across Europe. The gang used social media videos posted by people who had made successful crossings to promote the service. Another network operated by the Preston-based smuggler Amanj Hasan Zada, who was later jailed for 17 years, also posted videos of people thanking Zada for helping them. There have been cases of Albanian people smugglers who have used social media to promote £12,000 'package deals' to get to the UK including accommodation and employment, which will also fall under the scope of the new law.
