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Scottish Sun
28-06-2025
- Politics
- Scottish Sun
Most women don't feel safe walking alone at night, damning poll finds
Experts said the results are 'extremely concerning' NIGHT TERROR Most women don't feel safe walking alone at night, damning poll finds MOST women do not feel safe walking alone at night, a damning poll has found. 75 per cent said they feel unsafe at night, while 27 per cent said they do not feel safe walking along in the day. Advertisement Only a third of women feel safe using public transport at night, compared to nearly 60 per cent of men who feel safe. Half of Londoners feel unsafe using public transport at night, according to the poll by Merlin Strategy. The survey of 2,000 adults last week also found 23 per cent of Brits say Nigel Farage's Reform UK would be the best party at handling crime. 20 per cent say the Conservatives and 19 per cent say Labour. Advertisement READ MORE UK NEWS HIGH-LIGHT I spent the night in the UK's biggest National Park with amazing stargazing Although the Tories were the preferred party to deal with the issue among women. Dr Lawrence Newport, director of campaign group Crush Crime which commissioned the poll, said: 'These results are extremely concerning. 'Governments have given up on voters - they've given up on capturing and prosecuting the criminals that harass and ruin our public spaces. 'When only six per cent of women feel safe walking home at night, government needs to react. Advertisement 'No one should feel unsafe in their local areas - the streets should be owned by the people of this country, not by criminals.' I'm a car expert - my little-known car key trick will help keep women safe while driving
The Irish Sun
28-06-2025
- Politics
- The Irish Sun
Most women don't feel safe walking alone at night, damning poll finds
MOST women do not feel safe walking alone at night, a damning poll has found. 75 per cent said they feel unsafe at night, while 27 per cent said they do not feel safe walking along in the day. Advertisement Only a third of women feel safe using public transport at night, compared to nearly 60 per cent of men who feel safe. Half of Londoners feel unsafe using public transport at night, according to the poll by Merlin Strategy. The survey of 2,000 adults last week also found 23 per cent of Brits say Nigel Farage's Reform UK would be the best party at handling crime. 20 per cent say the Conservatives and 19 per cent say Labour. Advertisement READ MORE UK NEWS Although the Tories were the preferred party to deal with the issue among women. Dr Lawrence Newport, director of campaign group Crush Crime which commissioned the poll, said: 'These results are extremely concerning. 'Governments have given up on voters - they've given up on capturing and prosecuting the criminals that harass and ruin our public spaces. 'When only six per cent of women feel safe walking home at night, government needs to react. Advertisement Most read in The Sun 'No one should feel unsafe in their local areas - the streets should be owned by the people of this country , not by criminals.' I'm a car expert - my little-known car key trick will help keep women safe while driving 1 Most women do not feel safe walking alone at night
The Guardian
27-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
If Britain is broken, what is to blame – big money and big tech, or graffiti on your train?
Britain, let's face it, is crap. Crap, I mean, in quite a specific sense: we might not be teetering on the brink of civilisational destruction, as the post-Brexit right can often seem to think. But there nonetheless remains a vast, ambient sense of rubbishness. Everything is expensive but nothing works. Our streets are full of potholes; our houses are full of mould. All the shops are shut, except for a Tesco Express, where there are security tags on the eggs. It takes about a million years to build a railway line. Up to now, the response to Britain's enshittification has, by and large, seemed remarkably fatalistic: Keir Starmer spent the first year in government repeatedly insisting that there just wasn't any money, and so really nothing could be done. Thank God then, one might think, for Looking for Growth, a new campaign group led by young (well, late 20s, early 30s) Londoners Lawrence Newport and Joe Reeve, who have reportedly been advised by Dominic Cummings, and who have taken it on themselves to rid the tube of the scourge of graffiti. You might have seen the video: riding the Bakerloo line, wearing hi-vis jackets that proclaim they are 'Doing What Sadiq Khant' and accompanied by the GB News presenter Tom Harwood, for some reason, Looking for Growth perform a task that looks so simple only a government might fail to achieve it – apply a bit of spray and a bit of elbow grease – to rid some rolling stock of a litany of ugly tags and scrawls ('It's not even good graffiti!', Harwood exclaims). 'This is shameful. This is not OK. We're done waiting for @MayorofLondon to pull his finger out,' a tweet by Reeve explained. It's certainly proved an effective publicity stunt, but what exactly are Looking for Growth, and its backers, attempting to drum up publicity for? The campaigners would like to be known as a 'pro-growth' and 'anti-crime'group who defy the traditional left-right political spectrum. However, as a London Centric piece about the group claims, they often reference the French political meme 'Nicolas, 30 ans' that depicts a young professional struggling as he pays taxes toward an older bourgeois couple and a younger is quoted as saying, 'That probably does describe quite a lot of our members.' Looking for Growth members appear to balance their pessimism about the present state of things with an optimism about what we might broadly call 'tech-driven' solutions: the video displayed on the front page of their website features an image of Michelangelo's God from The Creation of Adam, touching a robot arm. Londoncentric describes many of Looking for Growth's members as 'tech sector-adjacent'; predictably perhaps, their tube clean-up video was retweeted by Elon Musk. What might we say about all this? Certainly there is a powerful vision here. Britain is crap – and people know it. Mainstream politicians really don't seem to be able to do anything about it: hence why there is clearly so much electoral space for parties not called 'Labour' or 'the Conservatives' to exploit. But the likes of Looking for Growth seem to be entirely mistaken about the nature of Britain's enshittification. Take graffiti, for instance. TfL has claimed that it's unable to hold back carriages for cleaning and replace them with backups due to government budget cuts, but even if graffiti really were some sort of permanent, intractable problem on the tube – would the mere existence of graffiti be what's making Britain crap? Granted: part of how we know Britain is crap is because it looks crap. Still more profound, surely, is what we might call our sense of institutional crappiness manifested in the fact that all of our transactions are mediated through apps, but then if anything goes wrong you're only able to 'talk to' an AI, never an actual human being. It's expensive and shoddy housing. Crappiness is an elevated utilities bill; crappiness is shrinkflation. In short, the more we think about how Britain is actually crap, the more we can think about who is actually responsible for its decline. This is stuff being done to us by the venture capitalists who seem to own all our strategic assets; the private landlords we decided to sell all our social housing stock to. It is stuff being done to us by big tech. If anyone actually wants to make anything better, it's those much grander forces we're going to need to find a way of scrubbing off our metaphorical walls. Tom Whyman is an academic philosopher and a writer
The Guardian
27-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
If Britain is broken, what is to blame – big money and big tech, or graffiti on your train?
Britain, let's face it, is crap. Crap, I mean, in quite a specific sense: we might not be teetering on the brink of civilisational destruction, as the post-Brexit right can often seem to think. But there nonetheless remains a vast, ambient sense of rubbishness. Everything is expensive but nothing works. Our streets are full of potholes; our houses are full of mould. All the shops are shut, except for a Tesco Express, where there are security tags on the eggs. It takes about a million years to build a railway line. Up to now, the response to Britain's enshittification has, by and large, seemed remarkably fatalistic: Keir Starmer spent the first year in government repeatedly insisting that there just wasn't any money, and so really nothing could be done. Thank God then, one might think, for Looking for Growth, a new campaign group led by young (well, late 20s, early 30s) Londoners Lawrence Newport and Joe Reeve, who have reportedly been advised by Dominic Cummings, and who have taken it on themselves to rid the tube of the scourge of graffiti. You might have seen the video: riding the Bakerloo line, wearing hi-vis jackets that proclaim they are 'Doing What Sadiq Khant' and accompanied by the GB News presenter Tom Harwood, for some reason, Looking for Growth perform a task that looks so simple only a government might fail to achieve it – apply a bit of spray and a bit of elbow grease – to rid some rolling stock of a litany of ugly tags and scrawls ('It's not even good graffiti!', Harwood exclaims). 'This is shameful. This is not OK. We're done waiting for @MayorofLondon to pull his finger out,' a tweet by Reeve explained. It's certainly proved an effective publicity stunt, but what exactly are Looking for Growth, and its backers, attempting to drum up publicity for? The campaigners would like to be known as a 'pro-growth' and 'anti-crime'group who defy the traditional left-right political spectrum. However, as a London Centric piece about the group claims, they often reference the French political meme 'Nicolas, 30 ans' that depicts a young professional struggling as he pays taxes toward an older bourgeois couple and a younger is quoted as saying, 'That probably does describe quite a lot of our members.' Looking for Growth members appear to balance their pessimism about the present state of things with an optimism about what we might broadly call 'tech-driven' solutions: the video displayed on the front page of their website features an image of Michelangelo's God from The Creation of Adam, touching a robot arm. Londoncentric describes many of Looking for Growth's members as 'tech sector-adjacent'; predictably perhaps, their tube clean-up video was retweeted by Elon Musk. What might we say about all this? Certainly there is a powerful vision here. Britain is crap – and people know it. Mainstream politicians really don't seem to be able to do anything about it: hence why there is clearly so much electoral space for parties not called 'Labour' or 'the Conservatives' to exploit. But the likes of Looking for Growth seem to be entirely mistaken about the nature of Britain's enshittification. Take graffiti, for instance. TfL has claimed that it's unable to hold back carriages for cleaning and replace them with backups due to government budget cuts, but even if graffiti really were some sort of permanent, intractable problem on the tube – would the mere existence of graffiti be what's making Britain crap? Granted: part of how we know Britain is crap is because it looks crap. Still more profound, surely, is what we might call our sense of institutional crappiness manifested in the fact that all of our transactions are mediated through apps, but then if anything goes wrong you're only able to 'talk to' an AI, never an actual human being. It's expensive and shoddy housing. Crappiness is an elevated utilities bill; crappiness is shrinkflation. In short, the more we think about how Britain is actually crap, the more we can think about who is actually responsible for its decline. This is stuff being done to us by the venture capitalists who seem to own all our strategic assets; the private landlords we decided to sell all our social housing stock to. It is stuff being done to us by big tech. If anyone actually wants to make anything better, it's those much grander forces we're going to need to find a way of scrubbing off our metaphorical walls. Tom Whyman is an academic philosopher and a writer
Times
24-06-2025
- Times
Drink-driving ‘effectively legalised' as number of breath tests falls
Drink-driving has effectively been legalised due to plummeting rates of breathalyser tests and light punishments for offenders, campaigners have warned. The number of breath tests conducted by police has fallen by more than 62 per cent over the past decade as dangerously inebriated drivers receive short bans. In 2009, police carried out 647,380 breath tests, but by 2023, that figure had fallen to just 240,322. The number of positive tests has remained stagnant, and campaigners argue that it reflects a lack of enforcement. In 2002, 18 per cent of breath tests were positive, compared to 16 per cent in 2023, while the number of drivers prosecuted for drink-driving offences has significantly decreased. Convictions for drink-driving fell from 55,300 in 2012 to 40,292 in 2023, coinciding with the sharp decline in breath testing. Lawrence Newport, of the campaign group Crush Crime said: 'Driving is not a right — we require licences for a reason. 'We expect minimum safety standards from drivers. The fact that repeat drink-drivers face such short driving bans is completely unjustifiable. It is beyond unacceptable that drink-drivers who have killed someone are ever allowed back on Britain's roads.' Crush Crime has highlighted cases where drink and drug drivers responsible for serious or fatal incidents have received minimal driving bans. In some instances, repeat offenders are back behind the wheel within a few years, even after causing fatalities. Lifetime bans are rarely issued, even for the most egregious cases of dangerous driving. • I lost my son to a car crash. Teen driving laws must get tough One such case is mum-of-three Charlotte Shipley, who struck a taxi during a police chase with her baby in the front seat while high on cannabis. Shipley, who was uninsured, had been convicted five days before the offence for dangerous driving. In February she was given a ten-month prison sentence and banned from driving for two years and five months. Stuart Lithgow collided with a motorcyclist while more than twice the drink-driving limit. The motorcyclist later died from his injuries. Lithgow was jailed last October for six years and was disqualified from driving for six years after his release — a punishment campaigners describe as grossly inadequate. Shane Oliver, who led police on a high-speed chase while over three times the legal cannabis limit, received a one-year prison sentence and an 18-month driving ban in April last year, despite having multiple previous convictions. Crush Crime is calling for sweeping changes to sentencing guidelines and legislation. They want to see a minimum six-year driving ban for drink driving, lifetime bans for repeat offenders, and mandatory lifetime bans for those who kill due to drink or drug driving. Newport said: 'It is not the responsibility of the public to shoulder the risk. Repeat offenders must be banned from driving before it's too late'. • Man who helped design breathalysers is banned for drink-driving Campaigners insist that urgent action is needed to prevent further tragedies and restore public trust in the justice system. Sarah Coombes, Labour MP for West Bromwich, said: 'The effects of drink and drug driving are appalling. As an MP I've seen too many families ripped apart by this and other kinds of unacceptable dangerous driving. 'Repeat offenders should have their licences taken away for good. The government is doing the first road safety strategy for ten years which is the perfect opportunity to crack down on this kind of selfish, dangerous driving that puts other road users at risk.'
