Labour ‘sabotaging' bin strike peace talks
Labour has been accused of 'sabotaging' talks to end the bin strikes in Birmingham.
The Unite union claimed that an offer was 'being blocked' by Government-appointed commissioners who were responsible for the lack of progress in ending the crisis.
The second-biggest union in the country alleged that the 'fair and reasonable' offer being quoted by Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner 'does not exist'.
Its members have now been on an all-out bin strike for more than two months with no signs of an agreement being reached, leading to rubbish piling high across the West Midlands city.
The conciliation service Acas has been involved in talks since the start of the month, but the dispute remains deadlocked.
Unite said the talks set out a clear timeline for a discussed offer to be tabled by the council, but it claimed no offer has been made.
Commissioners were brought in by the previous Conservative government after the council declared itself effectively bankrupt in September 2023.
'Workers turning away from Labour'
Unite said: 'What has become increasingly clear is that the offer is now being blocked by the Government commissions and the leader of the council, none of whom have ever been in the negotiating room.
'At the Acas talks, the council side was headed up for the first time by Birmingham council managing director Joanne Roney. She assured the meeting that she was the decision maker and at the table to negotiate. Discussions then took place in good faith.
'This latest debacle comes after it was confirmed that the 'fair and reasonable offer' that the Prime Minister, deputy prime minister and the leader of the council had been briefing to the press, urging Unite to accept, did not exist.'
Unite said it had been asking for a copy of the offer since the start of the Acas talks, but was still waiting.
Sharon Graham, Unite's general secretary, accused Labour of 'lying' to 'bin workers, residents and the public at large', and claimed that comments made by Cabinet minister Steve Reed that the union was 'playing politics' showed 'why there are workers turning away from Labour in their droves'.
Ms Graham said the Government had said for 'weeks and weeks and weeks' that there was a fair and reasonable deal on the table to settle the Birmingham bin workers dispute.
She told Sky News: 'That offer does not exist. I have been in Acas talks and I have asked for that offer to be given to me so I can see it and it does not exist.
'They are now scrambling to put an offer together but that now has to go through the Government commissioners. It's a total and utter shambles.'
'This is not the way you do negotiation'
On Wednesday she told Sky News: Sky News: 'The issue here is that these workers are the scapegoats for bad decisions by the council. They are trying to push down pay of these workers so that they can deal with their huge debt.
'It's totally and utterly unacceptable. They need to give this deal to the union so that we can see whether it's good enough for our members.
'When you hear a Deputy Prime Minister say, when you hear a leader of a council say there's a fair and reasonable offer on the table, the assumption is that we have that offer in writing. We don't have that offer in writing.
'This is not the way you do negotiation. I have negotiated for 35 years with CEOs across multiple companies. When you are in a negotiation you have the decision-makers in the room. They give a deal and an offer to us and we take it back to our members in writing.
'The clear situation here is that we have not had an offer in writing from the council - and now additionally it's going to have to go through the Government commissioners.'
She added: 'Unite deals with thousands of negotiations every year. From the council side, the negotiations in this dispute have been a shambles, with the government right at the heart of it.
'The offer briefed to the press for all affected workers simply never existed and the new ballpark offer discussed at Acas has now been blocked by Government commissioners. Instead of trying to injunct picket lines and attack workers, the council leader should stop playing games, get in the room and solve this dispute.
'Birmingham city council's bin workers, residents and the public at large have all been lied to.
'The bottom line is that our members can't afford to have savage pay cuts of up to £8,000 with no mitigation. Until that issue is addressed the strikes will continue.
'If Labour is truly the party for workers, how can this Government be aiding and abetting these cuts and once again allowing workers and communities to pay the price?'
'Fair and reasonable offer'
Unite said in a statement: 'Talks aimed at resolving the Birmingham bin strike have been sabotaged by government commissioners.'
A ministry of housing, communities and local government spokesman said: 'It is simply false to suggest the commissioners, or the leader of the council have blocked attempts to resolve this deal, and we continue to urge Unite to suspend its strike action and both parties to reach agreement on a fair and reasonable offer.'
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In Australia, where a ban on social media for under-16s will take effect later this year, his work has changed the law. The wife of the politician who helped design the legislation was reading The Anxious Generation in bed, Haidt told one interviewer, 'and she turns to him and says: 'You've got to read this book, and then you've got to effing do something about it.'' The day before we meet, he attended a session in parliament organised by the crossbench peer Beeban Kidron, whose rules to protect children's privacy on social media became part of the 2018 Data Protection Act ('she has been a force of nature'). And he's in touch with UK government ministers as well: 'I won't mention names. I will be talking to a couple by Zoom.' So what is his prescription to reverse, or at least treat, what he calls the Great Rewiring of children's lives? He sets out 'four norms' that parents, and society at large, should adopt: no smartphones before the age of 14; no social media until 16; phone-free schools; and far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. Although The Anxious Generation has largely been seen as a book about digital devices, it's as emphatic about that last point. Boomers, gen Xers and even millennials enjoyed plenty of free play outside when crime rates were much higher than they are now. Modern parents, exposed to a diet of constant bad news, are more paranoid. This stunts development, reducing the opportunity to learn skills such as cooperation and conflict resolution, to overcome fears and, well, to have fun. Essentially, he argues, we're guilty of overprotection in one place (the real world) and underprotection in another (online). 'I think that was one of the important points of Adolescence,' he says, referencing the Netflix show that dramatised the influence of the 'manosphere' on teenage boys. 'We all freaked out in the 90s about the outside world. We all thought our kids are in danger if they're not in our sight, and so we've stopped letting them out, and we thought: well, as long as they're on computers, that's good. They'll learn to program. They'll start a company. One of the poignant moments in [the show] was when the parents said: 'We thought he was safe. He was just up in his room.'' The four norms look simple enough on paper. But what about the fiendish reality of enforcing them, particularly if your children are already extremely online? 'What I found in the year since the book came out is that parents with young children love it,' Haidt says. 'They're excited, like: yes, we're going to do this. Whereas parents of teenagers have more mixed reactions, for exactly the reason that all of us are already so deeply into this.' Haidt has two children of his own with artist and photographer Jayne Riew: a girl of 15 and a boy of 18. 'The advice that I give to parents of teenagers is, if you recently gave your child a smartphone or social media, you can take it back. Give them a flip phone, a brick phone, a dumb phone. The key is you want your kids to be able to communicate with their friends, but you don't want to give them over to for-profit companies [whose] goal is to hook your child.' 'Now, if your kids are 15 or 16 and their entire social lives are on Instagram and Snapchat, it would be very painful to cut them off,' he says, 'because they'll experience that as social death. So the key strategy … is to help them take back their attention by creating large parts of the day where they're not on it.' Ban devices in the bedroom, push for phone-free schools, do everything you can to expand the window of time spent away from addictive tech. Back in 2019, when he was laying down ground rules for his own children, the evidence pointed to social media as the greater evil, particularly for girls. So he banned that, rather than phones per se. 'My daughter says she's the only person in her high school who doesn't have Snapchat.' Isn't he worried about her being left out? 'Her friends have compensated for it. They say when there's something important going on that she needs to know about, they'll text her so she's not entirely out of the loop, and it's been great, because she is really involved in the real world. She runs track, she does sewing and makes clothing.' Even so, he would do things slightly differently now: 'The rule I wish I had followed was no screens in the bedroom, ever. My kids seem to need their computers and their phones more than they would have if I'd had a better policy.' Haidt clearly loves his job, and sets great store by what he regards as the truth-telling function of academic research. But with the book's success, is there a risk he morphs into a kind of activist? Yes, he concedes, though he doesn't seem unhappy about it. 'Once I came to realise the full extent of what is happening to literally hundreds of millions of children – I mean, human consciousness is being changed at an industrial scale – and the fact that AI is not yet entangled in our world, but in two years it will be very hard to do anything – I [felt] a kind of a campaigner's zeal to get this done, to get the norms changed this year.' When I mention a colleague who hears from her kids that 'everyone does their homework using ChatGPT' he nods, and says 'this is a potentially unsolvable problem for education. Like all teachers, we're struggling to figure out what to do. It makes it easy for everyone to do their homework, but students need to learn how to do hard things.' Does his newfound zeal mean it's harder for him to admit he might be wrong? To give counterarguments their due? 'Oh, yeah, I suffer from confirmation bias like everyone else. I have a whole book on confirmation bias, practically [2012's The Righteous Mind]. And so that's why one thing that we've done from the very beginning is seek out contradictory views, talk to our critics, have them publish on the Substack.' Haidt, with researcher Zach Rausch, maintains a running commentary on the evidence base for the Great Rewiring at There, he posts 'responses to sceptics' who question the link between screens and declining mental health. Some claim there are better explanations, such as Covid (though indicators of wellbeing started declining in 2010) or the climate crisis (though preteens, rather than more politically aware adolescents, seem to be particularly affected – the opposite of what you'd expect if climate worries were responsible). In March 2024, psychologist Candice Odgers wrote a review of The Anxious Generation in Nature. She said: 'Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations,' adding that 'most data are correlative'. In other words: the problem may have coincided with the introduction of smartphones, but we can't say that there's a causal link. Odgers instead leans towards the idea that people with pre-existing problems use social media more, or in more destructive ways. Haidt comes out fighting, though, citing 'dozens' of papers, including, for example, a meta-analysis of 26 studies that found the risk of depression increased by 13% for each extra hour spent on social media. 'She accused me of not knowing the difference between correlation and causation. That has structured the debate ever since. And the strange thing about that review, I just looked back at it the other day, what I realised is there's not a single word that indicates that she read past chapter one.' This seems hard to believe, but, Haidt says, 'I had a long section in chapter six specifically titled 'correlation versus causation''. When I asked her to respond to this later, Odgers said: 'The issue is not a failure to understand the distinction between correlation versus causation, it is the failure to apply this understanding when making causal, and frankly damaging, claims about young people that will be heard by millions of people.' Our conversation starts to go down a rabbit hole as Haid attempts to show me a long rebuttal document he's writing on the five kinds of evidence of harm, with multiple subheadings, sections labelled 'Exhibit A' etc. 'I love debating and arguing, and that's what drew me to academic life … but the accusation that I don't understand the difference in correlation and causation, I guess that did get to me.' One important part of the puzzle, he says, is that companies have acknowledged that children are vulnerable in internal reports never intended for public consumption. He cites one by TikTok, for example, admitting that the app was 'popular with younger users who are particularly sensitive to reinforcement in the form of social reward and have minimal ability to self-regulate effectively'. When contacted by the Guardian, TikTok declined to comment. If the evidence is so strong, what does he think drives his critics? 'I think some of them seem to be motivated by an admirable desire to defend the kids, to say, 'Look, if this is what the kids are doing, we adults shouldn't criticise'.' He claims that 'some of the researchers are deep video gamers, and they went through this whole thing about 'Do violent video games cause violence?'. So they seem especially primed to see everything as just a replay of previous moral panics.' I also wonder whether he's got people's backs up through his interventions in academic life, railing against what he sees as progressive overreach. His 2018 book with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, was based on an Atlantic piece of the same name, though it's more careful and caveated than the title makes it seem (editor Don Peck zhuzhed it up from Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions). The idea is that colleges have become highly risk-averse places, where students expect to be shielded from difficult ideas, and faculty and administrators live in fear of career-wrecking complaints based on offended sensibilities. There are many reasons for this turn, Haidt argues, some of which overlap with those set out in The Anxious Generation: overprotective parenting raising a generation of fragile, nervous kids, for one. He cites the expectation of good 'customer service' driven by high tuition fees, and an administrative culture of 'CYA' (cover your ass). But he also blames a lack of 'viewpoint diversity' among faculty, leading to a moribund, timid intellectual environment and a failure to push back against overly empowered students. This argument hits a little differently in 2025, with the Trump administration carrying out an unprecedented assault on universities, and using 'woke' culture on campus as its primary justification. A letter sent by officials menacing Harvard specifically demands 'viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring'. Is it a case of be careful what you wish for? Or, more directly, did Haidt's championing of this issue provide ammunition for the current war against academic independence? 'I don't think the fact that I've been calling for reform since 2011 should be used against me when the fact that there wasn't reform became a trigger for Donald Trump,' he says. Haidt believes the progressive monoculture that produced calls to, among other things, defund the police and abolish standardised tests alienated 'normies' to the extent that Trump rode into office 'on a wave of revulsion about what's happening on campus and more broadly in society'. Surely inflation, the cost of living, played a larger role in voters' rejection of the Democratic candidate? Haidt concedes that 'it contributed', but otherwise sticks to his guns in a way that, to me, suggests he's a little too immersed in this particular debate to see the bigger picture. Which is not to say he isn't outraged by the way things have unfolded. Still speaking softly and precisely, he unleashes the Haidtian version of a tirade. 'Trump is a deeply unstable, narcissistic man who has a zero sum view of the world and a strong sense of vengeance. And now [he's] using the power of the federal government and the department of justice to harass and harm his enemies … this is the most shocking transformation of America I've ever heard of. So while I have been a critic of schools like Harvard that, you know, was ranked as the worst university for free speech in the country … now everything is reversed.' He adds that '[Trump] is especially using antisemitism as a cudgel. I don't think that's his real motivation. And while I have always stood for the value of viewpoint diversity, so I think President Trump is not wrong to call for it, I've also always stood against government micromanaging what universities do.' In The Coddling … Haidt declared himself 'a centrist who sides with the Democratic party on the great majority of issues' and said that he had never voted Republican for Congress or the presidency. More recently, he stated: 'I was always on the left. Now, I'm nothing. I'm not on any team.' Either way, he has undoubtedly annoyed progressives who take a more instinctively tribal approach. A contrarian by nature, he also sees that instinct as an essential part of any intellectual's toolkit. His postdoc supervisor, cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder, modelled 'an incredible playfulness with ideas and a joy in intellectual perversity, which means his dictum was: if someone asserts it, deny it and see how that goes. And if someone denies it, assert it and see how that goes.' Does that make him a bit irritating? 'Oh, yes, it does,' he says, without a trace of offence. That's the point: 'The founding story of the academic world is Socrates being a gadfly.' Does it ever bleed into his personal life? 'My wife and I have long had a conflict of truth versus beauty, and in my view, she is willing to sacrifice truth for beauty. I have to have a footnote for everything. There has to be a source for everything. And that sometimes makes me annoying to her.' 'Carried to excess it [has] the risk of know-it-allism, and I've been accused of that by my wife – and several ex-girlfriends. So yeah, I think my strengths are also my weaknesses. The same is true for everyone.' The Anxious Generation started life as a different book about the corrupting effects of social media on democracy. After he'd written one chapter, Haidt realised that the scale and urgency of the problem faced by children and teens meant it would have to be about them instead. He still has plans to go back to the first idea, but given everything that's happened, he's taking two or three years 'off' to support the movement he's started ('I don't have to drive it, I just have to help it along'). He says he's optimistic – 'very optimistic that we're going to, if not fully solve it, make enormous progress – we already are.' This is energising, but I note that, when discussing 'green shoots' of hope back in 2018, he welcomed the new, socially responsible approach taken by Facebook and Twitter, including the latter's commitment to 'increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation'. 'Yeah, that died. That green shoot did not go very far,' he sighs. And in a follow-up exchange, he strikes an even darker note. I ask about the broader picture – as a student of societies, is he concerned about … the end of civilisation as we know it? Somewhat alarmingly for a man who first made his name in the Pollyanna-ish field of positive psychology, he really is. 'I am extremely worried about social collapse,' he emails. 'Technology always changes societies, and we are just beginning the biggest technological change in history. It will only speed up as AI becomes entangled in everything. So we are headed into very dangerous times, especially for liberal democracies that require some degree of shared facts, shared stories and trusted institutions. 'This is part of the reason I feel such urgency to protect kids now, this year, 2025. The next two generations may face challenges beyond anything we can imagine. They need to be strong, competent and in control of their attention.' The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt is published by Penguin. To support the Guardian order your copy from Delivery charges may apply.
