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The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Automotive
- The Guardian
The Observer view on SUVs: they are too dangerous and too big, their drivers should be made to pay
Britain is facing an unusual crisis: carspreading. Our road vehicles are getting bigger as people buy more and more SUVs of increasing dimensions and weight. At the same time, our streets and parking places remain the same size. The consequences of this uncontrolled vehicular expansion have become profound. Potholes are being created in greater numbers as our roads are pounded by heavier vehicles; multiple parking spaces are being taken over by single, giant cars; and road accidents are now producing more severe injuries to drivers and passengers of other vehicles. This last issue is of particular concern. A study by the European Transport Safety Council found that in a collision between a modest-size SUV (sports utility vehicle) weighing 1,600kg and a lighter car weighing 1,300kg, the risk of fatal injury decreases by 50% for the occupants of the heavier car but increases by almost 80% for the occupants of the lighter car. Similarly, pedestrians and cyclists are more likely to be killed if the car that strikes them has a bonnet that is higher off the road than average, a typical feature of an SUV. The trouble is that sales of these vehicles are booming. In 2024, they accounted for 33% of all registrations, compared with a figure of only 12% a decade earlier. This dramatic change in the use of our roads has led organisations such as the campaign group Clean Cities to call for strict measures to be imposed on car owners. Their argument is straightforward. If a car generates more potholes in our roads, takes up more parking space and poses more danger to pedestrians, cyclists and other car occupants compared with smaller vehicles, then it is only fair that its owner pays more for driving that vehicle. Paris has already introduced specific parking charges for SUVs. Drivers of these vehicles now have to pay triple the amount of those who drive regular cars. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has indicated that he would support such a scheme for the capital and should be encouraged to pursue the idea with rigour. However, attempts to tackle the problem should not be confined merely to parking. At present, the owners of polluting vehicles have to pay more road tax, based on the carbon dioxide they emit, and drivers of more expensive cars, including electric ones, are also hit with an extra tax. It may be that these measures will have to be expanded in future, with similar levies being imposed on the owners of SUVs and other vehicles whose sizes exceed specific dimensions. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion Avoiding such measures could allow a transport problem that has already reached significant levels to become a major crisis. It is an issue that now needs to be considered as a matter of urgency.
The Guardian
16-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Many MPs think it immoral to slash disability benefits – and they're right
Ask me what a Labour prime minister should feel a moral obligation to deliver and I'd put reducing child poverty at the top of the list. Sorting out our broken social care system would be up there too. One thing that wouldn't feature: cutting disability benefits. Yet last week Keir Starmer attempted to frame cutting the disability benefits bill as a moral, not just economic, imperative – that Labour is 'the party of work' and has a duty to reduce welfare costs. To be clear: there is a broad consensus that the welfare system is working badly for disabled people and many are not getting the support they need to move into work, but that's a world away from the £6bn of welfare cuts being considered by the government. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion Since the pandemic, the number of working-age people out of work as a result of long-term illness has swelled by more than 750,000. There are also more people claiming health-related benefits – both means-tested out-of-work benefits, and the personal independence payment (Pip) that helps meet the additional costs of disability, which isn't means-tested and is paid regardless of someone's work status. One in 10 working-age adults now receive health-related benefits, up from one in 14 before the pandemic. While most new claims still come from those aged 40-64, the rate of growth has been fastest for the under-40s, and there has been an increase in mental health claims across all ages: 37% of new claims, compared with 28% in 2019. Some people have superimposed their own pet theory on to these figures: this is about 20-something snowflakes identifying as depressed, or the legacy of long Covid, for example. The truth is a lot more complex, and the consensus among policy wonks is that we don't fully understand it. No other wealthy country has experienced a trend as marked as this, suggesting it's not purely about Covid or the cost of living (though it's worth noting the UK is only now spending roughly the average for comparable countries on disability benefits). It's more likely to be a product of how these have interacted with the UK's public services and welfare system. Higher mortality rates, including more deaths as a result of alcohol, suicide and drugs, provide objective evidence that Britain has got physically and mentally sicker since 2020. The low rates of out-of-work benefits for those who lose their jobs – eroded since 2010 – have probably pushed more people towards applying for disability benefits than in other countries. Long NHS waiting lists, including for pain-relieving operations and mental health therapies, suggest many people's spells out of work will be significantly extended because they can't get the treatment they need, with terrible consequences for their long-term employment prospects. Employers are often not flexible enough about making adjustments to allow people to return to work after a period of absence. There's no question this needs addressing. But there are two versions of welfare reform. The first is premised on the assumption most people don't want to be stuck at home on benefits, but are being consigned to the statistical category of 'long-term sick' through poor public services and a lack of employment support. The second takes as its starting point the idea that people on disability benefits are more likely to be feckless scroungers who need to be pushed to work through benefits cuts and sanctions. Of course you will always be able to find some people who take liberties with work. But the idea this is the main issue is plain wrong; evidence suggests it is very difficult to qualify for Pip, for example: whistleblower assessors who worked for the private companies administering it flagged how much pressure they were under to limit successful claims; and almost a third of children with disabilities serious enough to qualify for disability benefits in childhood find themselves ineligible for Pip when they turn 16. Much of what Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, has said recognises the lack of flexibility and support in the labour market for people with health issues. Some, for example, may be scared of trialling going back to work in case it's used as evidence to strip them of Pip even if it doesn't work out. Fixing this would deliver long-term savings but requires upfront investment. And in the absence of a clear set of governing values, this is a government overwhelmingly being driven by Treasury thinking: slashing back the state to boost defence spending and avoid putting up taxes. The suggestion has been that the government will cut an eye-watering £6bn from the annual welfare bill, making Pip even harder to claim, and axing the health-related elements of universal credit, while investing just £1bn in employment support programmes. All this will do is push up already-high rates of disability poverty. Starmer aides have been busy briefing that cutting these benefits will resonate with swing voters. That seems unlikely to placate the Labour MPs – including frontbenchers and the normally loyal – who are angry about this not because they think it's a vote loser, but because they think it's immoral. Benefits have been pared to the bone since 2010 by successive Conservative chancellors – the poorest decile of families with children lost an astounding £6,000 a year on average between 2010 and 2024 as a result of changes to the tax-benefit system. Unless chancellor Rachel Reeves finds a way of channelling more support to low-income parents, child poverty is predicted to increase by 400,000 by the end of Labour's first term. If these welfare cuts get pushed through, that figure will be even higher. How on earth are Labour MPs supposed to defend that kind of record? In the wake of a backlash that has spanned cabinet ministers, former chancellor Ed Balls, disability charities and thinktanks such as the Resolution Foundation, there are signs that the government may be resiling from cutting the levels of Pip. But it appears to be standing firm on making it harder to claim in the first place and reducing other disability benefits. Which makes it very hard to take at face value the government's claim that this is about helping more disabled people back into work. It appears to be driven more by saving money in a way that hits some of society's most vulnerable, but isn't too politically painful. Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
The Guardian
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
OpenAI's story about grief nearly had me in tears, but for all the wrong reasons
Like all parents who pretend to be impressed by their children's terrible art, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proudly announced to the world that the company's new AI model is gifted at creative writing. 'This is the first time I have been really struck by something written by AI,' he enthused on X. The prompt was to write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief. The story closely follows the instructions. The individual sentences mostly make sense. But – with the greatest respect to Jeanette Winterson, who called the story 'beautiful and moving' – it is an atrocious piece of writing. The AI captures the tone of some of the worst writing around: pompous and self-satisfied, while using sentimental imagery ('a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box') and dull similes ('like a stone dropped into a well'). There is repetition without development, poor structure, an over-reliance on jargon and, crucially, a lack of that slight breath of madness that makes writing human. If this were a first-year creative writing student, you'd give them feedback to help them improve, but you probably wouldn't discourage them from pursuing other job prospects. It is in the gaps between what the author has written and what the reader imagines that writing comes to life. Readers will project meaning on to words on a page, but if those gaps are created by algorithms and chance, the act of creation on the reader's part becomes onanistic; the death of the author requires the author to have been alive at one stage. I asked another AI model to critically evaluate the story, and it found it 'compelling' and 'self-aware', employing 'evocative language and imagery'. Perhaps it was not written for human eyes at all. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion In the furore surrounding the Labour party's devastating welfare cuts – which are estimated to plunge 700,000 households into poverty and have led to widespread rebellion among MPs – we are at risk of overlooking a short video recently released by the Department for Work and Pensions, which exhorts disabled people to get back into the workforce. 'The welfare system we inherited is broken,' a voice intones grimly over footage of a man and a woman entering a job centre. Unfortunately, the building's even red bricks and cast iron archway carry a very specific historical connotation: the gates of Auschwitz, which bear the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei, or 'work sets you free'. During the Holocaust, an estimated 250,000 people with mental and physical disabilities were murdered, as they did not comply with the regime's vision of a master race and were considered a burden to society. The similarity in the video was unintentional. But the fact no one in the department seemed to notice the resemblance is deeply worrying. Congratulations to Whitetop, a sprightly 27-year-old who has been named by the Guinness World Records as the oldest llama in captivity (the previous record holder, Albuquerque ranch resident Dalai Llama, passed away in 2023). For nearly two decades, Whitetop has been providing comfort and support to chronically ill children at a camp in North Carolina. 'He's just a really cool dude and loves his job,' says Billie Jo Davis, the camp's barn director. Let's hope Whitetop has a long and healthy reign. Though perhaps, following the sad fate of Geronimo – the alpaca euthanised in 2021 which may or may not have had bovine TB – it might be a while before Keir Starmer is invited to visit. Kathryn Bromwich is a commissioning editor and writer on the Observer New Review
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home review – the wonder of the wireless revolution
One hundred years ago this summer, from high above Daventry in Northamptonshire, voices began to beam into the homes of 20 million people. They came from the 500ft tall Borough Hill transmitter – truly revolutionary technology in 1925 – which opened with a new work, Daventry Calling, by the poet Alfred Noyes. 'Sitting around your hearth/Ye are at one with all on earth,' the poem concluded, giving a utopian flavour that recurs often through Beaty Rubens's meticulously detailed, engaging book. Exploring how radio transformed the lives of Britons between the two world wars, it's a striking read in our smartphone-dominated world, as we witness another radical invention quickly becoming part of everyday life. A portal into other places from your own house was also an easy concept to sell. Take the cover of the first Christmas issue of Radio Times from 1923, one of many fascinating images in the book, showing a rapt family gathering around their small set. Rubens, a BBC producer for more than 35 years, is keen for her book to show how radio affected people's lives – 'the shift in household habits, the awakenings of new tastes, the alterations and adaptations of attitudes'. Evidence for this was minimal before she discovered the work of two pioneering audience researchers, Hilda Jennings and Winifred Gill, whose 1938 explorations into radio's effects on working-class people in Barton Hill, near Bristol, was published, and quickly overlooked, in the week Britain declared war on Germany. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion In a box in the Bodleian Library, Rubens found the pamphlet and Gill's original notepads, full of rare examples of early feedback. These included radio's effects on a man who was once drunk and abusive ('his wife used to tremble when he came home at night, but now he never goes out on Saturday nights even… he used to keep pigeons, now he breeds canaries'), a Welsh grocer obsessed with the news ('I've even neglected the bacon machine') and a husband who tunes the radio to foreign-language stations when he leaves for work, so his wife can't understand it, then disconnects it completely when he goes away for a conference. 'She's left him now,' trills the interviewee on this subject. Rubens's findings may have been the book's impetus, but other stories around the development of radio put flesh on these bones. We learn about a forerunner, the 19th-century Electrophone, which played performances and shows over phone lines (in a gorgeous piece for the Strand magazine, children's writer Arthur Mee calls it the 'pleasure telephone'). We're also told about wireless communications more broadly: they may have saved some lives on the Titanic via an SOS call, but they also hampered them (richer passengers on board were invited to send wireless communications back to shore, which jammed the channels, meaning several ice warnings were missed). Fabulous characters crop up too, such as Nellie Melba, the Australian opera singer who gave the first live broadcast performance in 1920. She initially declined the invitation in a diva-like fashion ('my voice is not a subject for experimentation') before, Rubens notes, she was offered '£1,000 (about £45,000 today) which, even by her standards, must have seemed easy money for a 20-minute recital'. The book's most moving moments offer radio as a lifeline. A Mrs Ettery reported that there was now 'much more to talk about… there are so many interesting things on the wireless'. What a joy, too, to read about director general Lord Reith's first director of talks, Hilda Matheson, who informed the BBC's style ('she was passionately committed to the novel idea that broadcaster should not speak at listeners but make them feel that they were in the room together'). She also launched weekly discussions with female MPs and a show called Questions for Women Voters in 1928. A year later, 10 more women MPs were elected, raising the number to 14. The finest testimony, however, comes from a 1928 letter to the BBC from a 'clerk in a provincial city'. His life is 'a tram-ride to the office, lunch in a tea-shop or saloon bar, a tram-ride home' and he can't spend much money, 'because you've got your holidays to think of'. But, he adds: 'Please don't think I'm complaining. I'm only writing to say how much wireless means to me and thousands of the same sort. It's a real magic carpet.' Almost 100 years later, despite our world being so very different to his, radio, at its best, continues to be. Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home by Beaty Rubens is published by Bodleian (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
With lists and notebooks, I find that I am worryingly on the same page as Elon Musk
Watching Keir Starmer with President Trump in Washington last week was a bit like watching an indulgent grandparent deal with a miscreant child. When the prime minister produced his invitation from King Charles – 'This is unprecedented!' he said delightedly, of what will be Don's second state visit to the UK – I half expected him to follow up with a Lego model of the White House, or a special Trump Pez dispenser and a year's supply of cola-flavoured sweets for it. Alas, I'm unable to be equally scornful of Elon Musk's edict to federal employees that they tell him in an email of five things they accomplished in the last week. Oh yes, it's silly. Who'll look through these, and how will they check the enclosed bullet points aren't the work of the office satirist? But as a compulsive list-maker myself, my outrage is on the muted side. Sheepishly, I shuffle my notebooks, their closely written pages so replete with determination, wild ambition and pathos, I come off like some tragic hybrid of Adrian Mole and Martha Stewart. Oh, the striving. In terms of immediate action, I have three lists on the go at any one time: to do today; to do this week; to do at some point soon. But this is as nothing compared with my future achievement lists, of which I have dozens in play. These are floaty and nebulous, their headings along the lines of 'ideas', 'thoughts' or (how embarrassing) 'composers I should get into'. The most shaming of them is 'things I want' (a painting by Ivon Hitchens or, failing that, a little bit of Chanel). As for year end lists, they take many guises, from praise (what did I do that anyone liked?) to all the new novels I read (old novels don't count). Protestant autodidact that I am, I simply cannot function without lists: several days ago, this column began as one – 'poss items for Notebook' – and when it's complete, it'll be crossed off yet another. Living for three weeks without a boiler in a cold snap is an exercise in gratitude as well as stoicism. When the man from British Gas finally arrives to save us, I forgive him even when he accidentally smashes a favourite vase. I could kiss our fiercely hot radiators now, and may yet build some kind of household shrine in their honour. During this period of refrigeration, my fingers and toes began to burn and itch, which confused me at first. Perhaps our Captain Oates jokes were about to stop being funny. ('I'm just going outside, I may be some time,' we would say, on leaving the only heated room.) But then I remembered: I'd been here before as a teenager. Kids, it was colder then, and our parents were more stingy with the thermostat. I had chilblains, a paradoxical Dickensian ailment that only becomes the more agonising when your extremities begin to warm up. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion To the National Portrait Gallery for an exhibition celebrating The Face magazine, which makes me mournful. Many of the faces on the walls – fashion designer Alexander McQueen, singer Steve Strange – are dead now, and while a few young people are milling around, blithely taking photos of photos, mostly the crowd is grey-haired and wearing trainers chosen for comfort rather than hipness. I used to work with the late stylist Isabella Blow, and it's always slightly guilt-inducing to stumble on her work. Back then, I was obsessed with her expenses, believing them to be bigger than my salary (I may not have been wrong). But here's a dazzling photograph (Taste of Arsenic) by Sean Ellis that she helped to conjure. It pushes all thoughts of taxi receipts clean from my mind. Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
