PETER HITCHENS: Sadiq Khan wants to legalise marijuana, the drug behind so many violent horrors. He, and the rest of the liberal Ostrich class, are ignoring a national catastrophe
They know nothing about anything but they share the conventional view of what is good, so their inability to think or observe does not matter.
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Daily Mail
3 days ago
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Brothel manager reveals the wild reasons why some women pay for sex - and the exotic acts they desire: 'Very little surprises me, but that did'
Imagine the typical brothel dweller. It's a middle-aged man in an overcoat, shuffling through the red-lit doorway with his head bowed in shame. Right? But what about the women who dip their toes into the world of transactional sex?
The Guardian
6 days ago
- The Guardian
Countries urged to ‘hold the line' in Geneva plastics treaty negotiations
Talks between nations to hammer out a plastics treaty to end plastic pollution continued behind closed doors in Geneva on Thursday, the final day of negotiations, as civil society groups urged countries to 'hold the line' to secure a strong agreement. With time running out to seal a deal between 184 countries, environmental groups expressed concern that frontline communities, Indigenous people and others suffering the worst impacts of the world's growing plastic crisis were being 'sold out' in an effort to secure a treaty, without meaningful or legally binding measures that would address the scale of the problem, 'at any cost'. This week's negotiations towards a legally binding agreement to tackle plastic pollution are the latest in five rounds of talks over the past two and a half years, which have so far failed to seal a deal. Talks at the UN offices stalled on Wednesday after a consensus draft treaty, presented by the chair of the event, Luis Vayas Valdivieso, was rejected by 80 countries. The ambitious countries – who want curbs on production – described it as 'unacceptable', a 'lowest common denominator' and a toothless waste management instrument, because it did not include production caps nor address the chemicals used in plastic products. Countries from the 'like minded' group, chiefly oil-producing countries and including Saudi Arabia, who want the treaty to focus on recycling and voluntary measures, said it crossed too many of their red lines and did not do enough to pare down the scope of the treaty. Graham Forbes, Greenpeace's head of delegation, said: 'The entire day has been behind closed doors. All of civil society is on edge, waiting to see what the next move is going to be from the chair and from the secretariat. We are nervous, we are anticipating, and we're concerned that we're going to be sold out in an effort to get a treaty at any cost. 'Civil society, frontline communities, Indigenous peoples, everyone is united in wanting to see something meaningful here. And we're praying that these governments are going to do the right thing and put our collective health before short term profits for the petrochemical sector.' A rush for a weak treaty in Geneva, Forbes said, 'would be a disaster'. Some NGOs said they had 'lost faith' in a process with the need for consensus between a majority of countries who want production caps versus a small but powerful minority of oil- and plastic-producing nations who continue to reject production limits. Christina Dixon, a campaign lead at the Environmental Investigation Agency, said the need for consensus was being 'weaponised'. 'A lot of civil society have lost faith in the process, because we've consistently seen a majority of countries aligning around a vision for the type of treaty that we'd be happy with. Yet, because of the way that this is being weaponised, we're constantly bowing to a small but vocal minority who are holding it hostage,' she said. This system was allowing a majority of countries to be 'drowned out', Dixon said. She urged: 'What we need to see tonight is that the views of that majority reflected fairly.' Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion Earlier on Thursday, Camila Zepeda, the director general for global affairs at Mexico's ministry of foreign affairs and a negotiator at the talks, said: 'If [the next treaty draft] is exactly the status quo, then we'll need to assess if it's better to then keep working and trying to find a better environment for this topic, but it's too early to tell … 'We understand it will be a very simple treaty at this stage. But if the key components are there and we can build it in time, then we will be signing. By now, we've given up bans, we've given up production limits. We've given up so much, so much. 'As ambitious countries, we want an outcome, and we see that if we don't get an outcome, we're risking a lot. But at the same time, we won't take just anything.' Ahead of this week's talks, an expert review published in the Lancet described plastics as 'a grave, growing and under-recognised danger to human and planetary health'. It estimated health-related damages globally added up to £1.1tn annually, with infants and children particularly vulnerable. However, some delegates were still hopeful. Sivendra Michael, the Fiji government's permanent secretary for the ministry of environment and climate change, said: 'There is still time. There are still processes that the chair can explore. There are many other innovative processes that have worked in other multilateral settings that can be explored. 'It's important for us to take a step back and reflect that we are negotiating at the edge of a planetary emergency.' The talks continue.
The Guardian
11-08-2025
- The Guardian
Rightwingers warn of another blaze of summer riots in Britain – but they're the ones striking the match
A last stretch of this strange, uneasy summer remains. Between now and September, there could conceivably be further outbreaks of the kind of violence that rightwing politicians and their media allies have been frantically predicting. But for now, behold a fascinating spectacle: a country quietly refusing to chaotically combust, despite being endlessly encouraged to do so. One word in particular symbolises the gap between hyped-up rhetoric and everyday reality. 'Tinderbox' was first used in the mid-16th century, to describe a crude instrument for starting fires: a container that carried a piece of either flint or steel, and a pocketful of the dry, flammable material that gave the device its name. With the invention of matches, the use of such implements fell away, and the word began its passage to how it is used today: as political shorthand for any situation supposedly on the brink of explosion. And here we are: over the past few weeks, 'tinderbox' has become an inescapable cliche. At the end of July, the Institute for Public Policy Research published a report to mark the first anniversary of 2024's riots, which claimed that the loss of communities' shared spaces – pubs, youth clubs, community centres – can create 'tinderbox conditions for violence'. At around the same time, the protests and violence outside hotels used for people seeking asylum began to attract the self-same description. 'We need an emergency cross-party cabinet to stop tinderbox Britain exploding,' wrote a columnist in the Daily Telegraph. The former home secretary Sajid Javid warned that the UK is 'sitting on a tinderbox of disconnection and division'. And not long after, his one-time colleague Robert Jenrick – now the shadow justice secretary, and a man on constant manoeuvres – told the Today programme that 'the country is like a tinderbox right now'. All this noise is part of a much bigger political development: a ballooning narrative about complete social breakdown. Just as people on the left have been predicting for at least 150 years that capitalism is about to chaotically implode under the weight of its own contradictions, so some of the loudest voices on the post-Brexit right have come up with their own version of a similarly historic meltdown: a vision of the immediate future in which rampant wokery, crime, failed immigration policy, weak policing and general establishment decay and corruption will lead inexorably to what Nigel Farage calls 'societal collapse'. The Reform UK leader is now well into his summer of crime campaign, a breakneck run of pronouncements dispensed from behind a lectern adorned with the slogan 'Britain is lawless'. He says that 'the social contract between the governed and the government is on the edge of breaking down'. And for months – if not years – helpful mood music has been provided by elements of the rightwing media. Again, the comment section of the Telegraph offers no end of examples: a newspaper that was once a byword for the political stiff upper lip now constantly offers such warnings as 'Britain is lurching towards civil war, and nobody knows how to stop it'. All this echoes the kind of con trick used by reactionaries and authoritarians down the ages: warning of the country's supposedly likely collapse in the hope that the rest of us support all the hardline policies they say would stop the rot. In Farage's case, apocalyptic rhetoric feeds the idea that now things are so bad, the public ought to take a chance on his completely untested party. But also, the warnings of imminent social breakdown from Tory and Reform UK politicians often sound quietly gleeful, as if they believe that some great moment of rupture is exactly what Britain needs, to wake up from its slumber. Their talk always comes with caveats: Farage, for example, follows 'Goodness knows what may happen over the course of the summer' with 'We would encourage people to protest quietly and sensibly.' But, like Jenrick, he still sounds like someone with an alarmingly ambivalent view of unrest and chaos. Both of them make hyped-up claims of 'two-tier justice' and draw questionable connections between migration and crime, which are much easier to popularise online than the comparatively complex reasons why they are specious. Put simply, they warn of disorder while recklessly rattling the tinderbox. Over the weekend, all this hit a new low. Friday and Saturday saw another spate of hotel protests, in locations including Portsmouth, Bristol, Nuneaton and Norwich. Compared with predictions of massed disorder, not much happened: a much bigger story, in fact, was the arrest of more than 400 people at demonstrations against the proscribing of Palestine Action. So, for want of a better story, the Mail on Sunday gave Jenrick – as ever, with the air of a callow opportunist flirting with mob politics – its front-page splash. 'I certainly don't want my children to share a neighbourhood with men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally, and about whom we know next to nothing,' he said. The accompanying messaging was less than subtle: an inside spread put a picture of Jenrick and his three daughters at what looked like a middle-English fete, next to an image of smiling young men 'aboard a boat in France yesterday'. Just to be clear, the grim scenes that have materialised at those hotels are the signs not just of far-right activism and provocation, but broken policy. No one should underestimate how much the grooming gangs scandal has given many people a deep fear about the safety of women and girls, not least in places that have long felt ignored and neglected. But it is perfectly possible to acknowledge those plain facts while also highlighting something equally obvious: that the spectacle of politicians knowingly peddling inflammatory narratives is nauseating – and that, in the absence of the kind of countrywide immolation we were warned about, they are starting to look like desperate people throwing matches on kindling that refuses to ignite. That is a remarkable way for self-styled patriots to behave, and it would be nice to see a few Labour politicians loudly making such an obvious point. But we probably shouldn't get our hopes up. Out in the real world, a lot of places suggest a social condition much more complicated than we hear from the prophets of British armageddon. The other week, I spent 36 hours in Pontefract, a classically post-industrial northern town that is part of the constituency represented by Yvette Cooper, the home secretary. Rather than a picture of incipient chaos and seething rage, it presents something much less dramatic: the feeling of a place that remains reluctantly locked into decline, but that also has a palpable and defiant community spirit. Its local council faces an £88m budget deficit over the next five years, and is in the midst of even more cuts; the everyday scene on its main streets suggests a quiet stoicism that the forces responsible for its predicament really don't deserve. Neither Farage nor Jenrick's parties offer anything that would assist its renewal and revival. The people who live there, in fact, deserve something a lot better than warnings that they are about to be plunged into civil war and social meltdown – issued, as ever, by the kind of privileged and cynical politicians who follow a time-honoured script: warning of apocalypse while keeping a very safe distance from the places they say are about to go up in flames. John Harris is a Guardian columnist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
