By Richard Lambert

“A graduate generation trapped and betrayed”. “The great graduate job drought”. “Will student loans be the next mis-selling scandal?” “700k graduates on benefits”. These are just a few of the many scary newspaper headlines published in the past month or two that, taken together, prompt the question: is university worth it any more?

What’s for certain is that the calculation has changed almost beyond recognition in the past two decades. It used to be a no-brainer. You got decent A levels. You went to university, preferably a long way from home. You had three enjoyable years, largely at the taxpayer’s expense. And you looked forward to a career where it was reasonable to expect that your pay would be significantly higher than it would have been without your degree.

The change began in the Blair years and accelerated dramatically during the long period of Conservative government. Over that time, tuition fees in England largely replaced state funding for university teaching and maintenance grants were replaced by loans, funded in both cases by the government-subsidised student loans scheme.

Taking both sets of support together the result was that students graduating in England in 2024 had on average outstanding loans of around £53,000 – more than double the level in 2014-15, before maintenance grants were removed. The repayment terms will be determined by how much money they make each year, and will for many students be spread out over most of their working lives.

This has had two major effects on the way students approach their university choices. One has been a very big switch in applications to courses that might lead to well-paid jobs like medicine or business and away from the humanities, the aim being to ease the repayment burden.

The other has been a much heavier demand for places in institutions that are thought to be in favour with employers – some, though not all, of the research-intensive Russell Group, or other universities with a strong record in areas like engineering.

In this changed environment, going to university is no longer the default option for students with the necessary qualifications, and the choice requires a lot more research and thought than ever before. Here are the eight questions that need to be addressed before making a decision.

Do you aspire to a job that requires a degree?

Medicine is an obvious example but there are others, for example in areas of finance, engineering or teaching. Such careers can be well paid, making loan repayments less onerous.

Are you enthusiastic enough about a particular subject to commit to studying it hard for three years?

It’s become a lot easier to get into prestigious universities by applying for the less popular courses. But that can’t be a sensible way of making such a big decision. Tuition fees now amount to £9,535 a year, and in future are set to rise at a pace to offset inflation. You must be studying a subject that you find stimulating and interesting to justify that kind of investment. All the evidence shows that the choice of the course is at least as important as the choice of the university as a pathway to future success.

Will your degree bring you economic benefit?

The answer is: it depends. Taken as a whole, graduates still earn significantly more than non-graduates over their working lives, although the size of that premium has been shrinking in recent years with the rapid growth of the graduate population.

But the average figure hides a wide range of potential outcomes. On one analysis, you were pretty well certain of getting a positive net return on your undergraduate degree in England if you studied medicine, computing or economics. By contrast, only a minority of male students gained economically from a degree in the creative arts.

This is where you need to understand how student loans in England work. If you started university in 2023 or later, you will come into what’s called Plan 5 of the repayment scheme. Under this, payments start once you earn more than £25,000 a year, and you pay 9% of your income above that threshold. Interest starts accruing from the day you start taking out a loan and is set every year on the basis of the retail price index of inflation. This year, that runs at 3.2%.

For reference, the median gross annual earnings for full-time employees in the UK last year were just over £39,000. If your earnings were much less than this, say £30,000, then under Plan Five your annual repayment would only amount to around £450 whereas accrued interest on a £50,000 loan would add roughly about £1,600 to your outstanding debt. On that basis, you would never pay off the loan, and under the Plan 5 scheme it would be cancelled after 40 years.

Things start to get much more uncomfortable for what you might call middle-income earners: somewhere between the median and, say, £55,000 a year. Your annual repayment would be much higher, but still not enough to clear the outstanding debt. So you would be paying back what amounts to a sizeable chunk of your income almost until retirement was in sight.

Once you get above that earnings figure the picture starts to look very different. Annual repayments are high, but the debt is paid off more quickly so the interest costs don’t roll up.

The bottom line is that for high earners, the student loan scheme is a reasonably helpful form of subsidised debt. For low earners, it’s the equivalent of a graduate tax. For people in the middle, it can be a heavy burden.

So that’s why the choice of course matters so much to so many students. It’s one reason why the number of undergraduates studying business and management in the UK had risen last year to 587,000, up by four-fifths since 2014-15. And it explains the steady decline in the take-up of humanities over the same period.

It’s the sad but inevitable result of ham-fisted government policy.

Which university offers you the best chance of a good career?

Once you’ve decided on the course, the next step is to choose where to study it. This isn’t just a question of going to the most prestigious institution: the best-ranked teaching in a particular course is not always to be found in the grandest universities. Employers use universities as a filtering tool in recruitment: their views matter and can easily be tracked online.

A point to consider is that according to the Office for Students 45% of English higher education providers will be losing money this year unless they take mitigating action. Some are already laying off large numbers of faculty members. Better to go to somewhere that’s thriving rather than somewhere that isn’t.

You can judge the way students are working all this out by looking at the way student numbers are changing in particular institutions. Overall acceptances this year rose by 2%. The Russell Group had a 9% increase, but this was heavily concentrated in half a dozen universities – UCL, York, Queen Mary, Durham, Warwick and Exeter, all of which had increases of 20% or more.

Elsewhere, places like Bath Spa and Wolverhampton saw big increases. But several other less-favoured institutions registered steep declines in acceptance rates.

How will you pay for your living expenses?

The best answer is to have well-off parents. But if they are not available, you have to turn to student maintenance loans. Under the government scheme, most students can borrow an amount each year which is based on their family household income, whether they live at home, and whether they study in expensive London. For someone living away from home and at a university outside London, the maximum entitlement this year is just short of £11,000.

In real terms, this figure has declined significantly in the past decade, partly because of higher-than-expected inflation and partly because the government has frozen the threshold for household incomes that determines how much can be borrowed.

This explains why large numbers of students now live at home, rather than study in distant cities, and why so many students have had to take up part-time jobs in order to make ends meet. A recent analysis by the Higher Education Policy Institute found that, in a study of four universities, two-thirds of students were working part time to cover their living costs, and on average were doing 50-hour weeks when study and travel time were also taken into account.

That’s a long way from Brideshead Revisited.

The government has promised to restore maintenance grants to students from disadvantaged backgrounds in as yet unnamed priority subjects. But these are unlikely to be on a scale to be game changers.

What if you really want to study a subject that seems unlikely to lead to a well-paid job?

Go for it – but do so with your eyes open. Get to understand the fine detail of the loan scheme. Do all the homework you possibly can.

Where you want to live after university will make a difference: life is a lot cheaper outside London. And no-one – least of all the government – knows where the jobs of the future lie. AI firms are hiring philosophers to help them grapple with the ethical issues thrown up by their technology. Software companies need anthropologists to understand how their kit might be used. We’ll always need poets.

What are the realistic alternatives to a university degree?

There are quite a few, but they are fragmented and depend in some measure on where you live. Higher and degree-level apprenticeships are an attractive option for people who want practical paid-for learning, but they are not available in huge numbers. Some of the big accounting firms are taking on school leavers and teaching them the tools of the profession. More employers are saying that what matters to them is attitude, rather than degree qualifications.

But it can be a risky path. Unemployment rates are lower for graduates. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, women without a degree find it harder to get a well-paid job than do men. And people from disadvantaged backgrounds find it much harder to get a good income if they don’t have a degree.

Will AI destroy the value of your degree?

That’s been a popular newspaper scare story in recent months as early-career employment has been squeezed at the same time as AI has taken off. In fact, this correlation looks dodgy: the pressure is more likely to have come from interest rate changes and economic uncertainty than from ChatGPT.

Consultancy firms have a happy time forecasting massive disruption in the labour market, but the reality is that no one knows when, whether, or how AI will have a real impact. The best bet surely is to assume that in a knowledge-intensive society an ability to think critically will be more important, not less.

The bottom line is that even in today’s very different environment, the student experience is about much more than building economic value. It’s also a time for developing intellectual and social capital, for learning new ideas and making new friends. Despite all the gloomy headlines, few graduates regret going to university – around 8% in a recent survey. And far fewer students drop out of their course in the UK than is the case in other developed countries.

So yes. Provided you go in with your eyes open and understand that the university world has changed dramatically in recent decades: provided you choose the right course in the right university: provided you recognise that one way or another you are going to have to pay for most of the benefits of your education – then university is still well worth it.

Richard Lambert is former editor of the Financial Times and chancellor of the University of Warwick

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By Peter Trudgill

The word folklore is a relatively recent arrival in the English language, having first occurred in print in 1846. Its earliest citations appear as “folk-lore” or “folk lore”.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, folklore means “the traditional legends, beliefs, culture, etc, shared by a group of people, especially a rural or pre-industrial society; the study of these”. This can include stories, myths and proverbs which are passed down orally, as well as other traditions such as material culture, customs, rituals, songs and dances. The term is often modified by a word indicating the relevant group.

The etymological origin of the word lore lies in Old English lar “learning, what is taught, knowledge, science, doctrine; art or act of teaching”, which is related to Modern German Lehre “teaching”.

The newer word fakelore, which is clearly intended as a humorous derivation from folklore, dates from 1946 when it appeared in the Journal of American Folklore. Its basic meaning is pseudo-folklore – phoney, specious folkloristic stories and songs containing stereotypically folkloric elements which are presented as being part of a genuine folk tradition but which are not.

An often cited North American example of fakelore concerns tall stories involving Paul Bunyan, a mythical giant lumberjack (accompanied by a blue ox) who is a well-known although fictitious American and Canadian folk hero.

One of our interests in fakelore in this language column concerns the extent to which such stories and songs can introduce spurious, invented dialect words into more widespread circulation.

A classic example from my own experience can be found in the name of the supposedly traditional East Anglian sport or pub game called “dwile flonking”. I first read about this activity in the 1960s in the Eastern Evening News, a newspaper published in Norwich, but in spite of having grown up in the region, I had never heard of dwile flonking, nor had anyone else I asked.

I did know the word dwile “floor cloth, dish cloth” very well, as both my grandmothers had one. Dwile is a genuine East Anglian dialect word – the English Dialect Dictionary shows it as being confined to the dialects of Norfolk and Suffolk, apart from a solitary example from neighbouring Cambridgeshire.

The word dwile is not recorded in English until the late 1700s. The OED suggests a derivation from Dutch dweil “mop, floorcloth”, which makes extremely good sense to me: in the early years of the 17th century, approximately 20% of the population of Norwich were Dutch speakers, comprising Protestant refugees who fled Catholic persecution in the Low Countries and found refuge in Norwich in the early 1600s. It seems perfectly possible that the word arrived in East Anglia with these Dutch-speaking immigrants.

This supposedly traditional game of dwile flonking involves one person (the flonker) flinging a wet (often beer-soaked) dwile from the end of a pole at other participants. But although dwile is a genuine dialect word, flonk is a totally spurious pseudo-dialect word – just as “dwile flonking” itself is totally spurious as a traditional pastime. The whole thing is complete nonsense or, if you wish to be more charitable, a rather recently invented excuse for having a bit of harmless fun and getting some publicity for your local pub.

Specious
Specious is a word with an interesting and chastening history. It comes from Latin speciosus “good-looking”, and in 14th-century English it meant “beautiful, fair, desirable”. By the 17th century, however, the predominant meaning had deteriorated to “seemingly desirable, reasonable or probable, but not really so”. Semanticists call this process pejoration. And by the 20th century its common meaning had come to be “fallacious, baseless; false, sham, spurious”.

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By Nigel Warburton

North London is in the middle of a crime wave of car back-shelf theft. Residents of Hampstead, Highgate, Kentish Town and Primrose Hill are waking up to find their rear windscreens smashed and their shelves missing. Thieves shift these on eBay and other sites, where they fetch up to £150 each depending on the make and model.

According to a BBC report, one victim, Sam Phipps, went online to track hers, and discovered an identical shelf for sale the morning after it was stolen. Using Instagram, she located the seller’s address in nearby Caledonian Road. Asked whether she then took further action, she replied: “I just left it to karma.”

This set me thinking. Did Sam really think the universe left to itself would right the wrong?

In Buddhism, karma is linked with the idea of rebirth and the notion that our present actions affect our future reincarnation. A thief might return as a factory-farmed chicken or worse. In Hinduism, too, karma is linked with divine justice and rebirth. People get what they deserve. Eventually.

Some Christians believe that God judges each one of us, and sinners run the risk of eternity in hell. Indeed, that risk is what led Blaise Pascal to make his famous “wager” that a rational agnostic gambler would bet on God’s existence as a kind of existential safety net, as this would maximise possible winnings (eternal bliss at best) and minimise personal risk of loss (which could include everlasting suffering, the worst imaginable outcome).

Our actions may have very long-lasting consequences. Car-shelf thieves and others beware!

In secular terms, though, karma is the idea that what goes around comes around. Do bad things and bad things will happen to you, perhaps materially, perhaps psychologically.

Behind both religious and non-religious uses of this concept of eventual payback is a belief in a system of justice that operates behind the scenes, balancing out good and bad acts – despite appearances to the contrary. Do something evil and it could cost you dear. Not necessarily today or tomorrow. Perhaps in this life, perhaps in a future one.

The tendency to believe that the world is fair, and that the best actions get rewarded and the worst punished is known as the just world hypothesis or the just world delusion, depending on where you stand on the question of whether it’s a description of how things might well be, or a widespread cognitive bias. The psychologist Melvin J Lerner coined the term “Just World Hypothesis” back in the 1960s, but this stance on reality has been around for millennia. It leads some true believers to victim-blame others for having illnesses, disabilities, poverty or other perceived shortcomings. There are important secular versions of it, too.

In a public lecture that became the book Illness as Metaphor (1978), Susan Sontag (who at the time secretly had breast cancer) spoke of how cancer was described in militaristic terms as an invasion of the body that should be met with a rousing call to arms, a fight against the invader that legitimised using modern technological means at any cost to the body, one that might even risk destroying the patient in the process. In contrast, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, tuberculosis was portrayed as arising from an excess of passion, the disease of poets, composers, and novelists.

Cancer patients were said to have a “cancer personality”, repressing their emotions in ways that led to their condition. This attitude made (and still makes) many cancer patients consciously or unconsciously feel guilty for being ill, ashamed about their disease. In other words, the metaphors around cancer Sontag identified implied that it was a judgment, karma even, with the corollary that not “defeating” it was a moral failing. But disease certainly isn’t a just universe punishing individuals for moral failings.

As a non-religious humanist, I’m convinced the just world hypothesis is misguided: a rationalisation, a surprisingly common form of wishful thinking. The evidence implies something quite different.

Evil people sometimes flourish, and the best sometimes die young. Meaningless suffering is all around us. We should count ourselves very lucky when we aren’t experiencing pain, grief, illness or poverty.

Lucky, that’s all. Not rewarded for good deeds. There’s no guarantee everything will balance out in the long run, none whatsoever. That’s why it’s so important we try and do the best we can, here and now.

Sorry, but there’s no guarantee of karma. A benign universe is unlikely to sort this all out for us.

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By Eleanor Longman-Rood

I was 14 when I was first catcalled. It was the summer holidays and I was in Nottingham, visiting a school friend who had moved there a few years earlier.

The whole trip had been full of excitement. I grew up in a hamlet where the nearest shop was a 15 minute drive away, and there was a running joke that the local bus service was a myth. The independence that city life offered for a few days was intoxicating. I almost felt drunk on it.

Then two men harassed us as we were leaving the corner shop one afternoon.

I’d heard them before my brain had registered them. “I’d have a go on you,” one of the men leered, jerking his head towards us as the words left his mouth, as if to signify where his targets were. He turned to his friend, who grinned and offered a nod in agreement, a silent conspiratorial sign of approval. They were easily ten years older than us and, judging by the gossip magazines and chocolates we were carrying, they knew that.

For a split second, I remember, naively, hearing an “at” instead of an “on” (“I’d have a go at you”) and started to wonder what I had done wrong. My friend, my senior in age and street-smarts, was knocked but shook it off. We kept walking but when we got home, I locked myself in the bathroom and scrubbed my face with make-up wipes until it was red raw.

It was one of the first times I had worn make-up, but now the foundation and mascara I’d bought the day before at Superdrug felt nauseatingly heavy on my face. If this was womanhood, I didn’t want it.

But at 14, I was yet to learn that my experience was not unique. In 2021, UN Women UK found that 71% of women had experienced sexual harassment, including catcalling, in a public place. In 2024, a YouGov poll found that 68% of women who had experienced such harassment in South Africa, India, Brazil and the UK did not officially report it to the police, with over half of those women explaining that they believed it would be “pointless”. When I discuss this with Sophie Sandberg, gender justice activist, One Young World ambassador and founder of CatCalls of NYC, a grassroots initiative combating street harassment she remembers a similar feeling.

“It’s funny. I talk about my first experience at 15. But when I look back, it was actually more like 12. I just didn’t understand what it was yet,” Sandberg tells me.

“I had a summer job downtown and I hadn’t navigated New York on my own before. I had a long walk from the subway to my job and every block there was a new catcall,” she adds, recounting how overnight she began to sense this new feeling of being both objectified and sexualised. When she later shared her concerns with her parents, they offered advice that put the onus on her rather than on challenging and changing the men’s behaviour: don’t go out late, cover up more, just ignore it. Sandberg did the opposite.

In 2016, in her first year as a student at NYU, CatCalls of NYC was born out of her sense of frustration and isolation that this behaviour had become normalised. “I just wanted to do something to speak about my experiences,” she says. “Then slowly it just kind of began turning into a bigger thing,” she adds.

Sandberg’s concept was simple yet effective: visit the location where she or her friends had heard the insults and write it down, word for word, on the pavement in coloured chalk. The more Sandberg did, the more passers-by started to pay attention.

Today, individuals send the initiative their stories of harassment and their locations across the city. One of Sandberg’s team will then head to the area, write out the comments with the #stopstreetharassment, and post the images on social media.

Now in its 10th year, the page has amassed a following on Instagram of 150K, has offshoot groups in London, Nigeria and Vienna and has interviewed some of activism’s famous faces, including Malala Yousafzai. It also makes up Chalk Back, a global youth-led movement against gender-based harassment.

“The majority of people who message us are under the age of 18, but we hear from many under the age of 16 or 15. It’s very common for people to share that they’re in a school uniform with their backpack being harassed by a grown adult man,” says Sandberg.

These are just a few submissions CatCalls of NYC has received:

“Are you legal yet? Hell yeah, you are! Run faster!”

“Goddam, she can’t be too young, right?”

“You give off a real innocent schoolgirl vibe, but I bet you’re into some kinky shit.”

Unfortunately, these are far from the most sinister stories Sandberg has heard. She says: “I received a story recently from a woman who was at a pro-Palestine protest in New York. She was harassed by a counter-protester who said to her: ‘I’m going to rape you.’”

At the height of the #MeToo movement, they also received submissions of catcallers telling women they wanted to be their Harvey Weinstein and, in 2023, after a jury found Donald Trump sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll, that if Trump could do it, then so could they.

I joke with Sandberg that in the utopia they’re trying to achieve where street harassment ends, she would be making her own initiative redundant and she laughs, admitting that this is often what success looks like for activism. “We want to see a world without harassment, but in the meantime we want to be able to provide people with tools to fight it. I would also say that the second election of Trump, a lot of folks are feeling discouraged and a lot of people are also feeling censored in their activism.”

Recalling my conversation with Sandberg, I can’t help but think about my journey home a few weeks ago. Leaving my local tube station, a man, drunkenly clutching a can of Fosters and ambling in the opposite direction, clocked me. He presented a smile that churned my stomach.

“Corrrr, I like the look of you,” he slurred, and when I offered no reply, he physically snarled at me before meandering off into the distance.

I altered my route home but arrived unscathed and mostly unbothered. Unlike my 14-year-old self, I have become accustomed to this particular perk of womanhood.

Sophie Sandberg is a gender justice activist, artist, and speaker. She founded Catcalls of NYC and the global youth-led movement Chalk Back, mobilizing over 1,000 activists worldwide. A winner of the PACT! Break the Hate Challenge, her work was recognised globally at the One Young World Summit in Munich with a £5,000 grant to support her work

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By Nigel Warburton

Ludwig Wittgenstein once claimed that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes. What could he have meant by that?

His own jokes weren’t particularly funny. Once when out for a walk in Cambridge with his friend Norman Malcolm, for example, he “gave’” Malcolm every tree they passed on the condition that he didn’t chop it down or prevent its previous owners from doing anything with it. So long as he was prepared to accept those terms, Wittgenstein declared, the tree was Malcolm’s. GSOH?

But what was it about jokes that made Wittgenstein think they could be of philosophical relevance? A detour into the philosophy of humour might help answer that.

Philosophers haven’t written much on the topic. There are broadly three approaches: humour arises from a feeling of superiority, from a relief of pent-up energy, or as a reaction to certain types of incongruity.

Thomas Hobbes took the superiority line. He wrote in Leviathan that:

“Sudden glory, is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.”

Humour on this account is about feeling (not necessarily being) better than other people. Hobbes thought those with the fewest abilities were prone to focus on others’ imperfections to maintain their own self-image, laughing at their perceived weaknesses.

This theory might explain why, back in 2015, Donald Trump found it amusing to mock New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from a chronic condition that impedes his arm movement. It also explains something about those who find racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-trans jokes hilarious.

Self-deprecating humour could be seen as one part of the individual delighting in its superiority over another part of that same person. But there must be more to humour than this approach suggests. It can’t all be put-downs.

A different theory explains humour as a relief from a build-up of psychic steam. Jokes further increase the psychological pressure and then release it with a punchline or moment of revelation. In Sigmund Freud’s version, the steam comes from sexual repression in the unconscious. This builds up and is then dissipated. It’s like the sudden hiss when you bleed a radiator.

Take the joke (which only works when spoken aloud and if you know some basic German and that Freud was Austrian): For Freud, what came between fear and sex? Until I reveal the punchline you’ll be in a state of tension, perhaps exacerbated by the potentially risque revelation that you anticipate me making, a state intensified by your repressed and taboo unconscious desires to…

The answer is “fünf”. Think about it, about the sound of the words: “vier, fünf, sechs” (German for “four, five, six”). If the joke worked, despite my labouring it, you should’ve experienced release at the punchline.

A third approach to humour, the incongruity theory, is more promising. When two things don’t quite go together, we find this amusing and relish the absurdity of the mismatch. A toddler picks up Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and seems immersed in it. Sometimes the set-up of a joke plays on our expectations about what is to follow, and we misread the context (as in the fünf joke); we then have a moment of delight in the mix-up of categories when we appreciate what the real context is.

I suspect Wittgenstein was thinking of this kind of humour, the kind that comes from absurd mismatches, when he imagined a philosophically serious joke book. That fits with his account of aspect-seeing. He used the duck-rabbit line drawing – which can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit – to explain that.

When you see it as a duck, you have the same retinal image as when you see it as a rabbit. Flip between them and a Gestalt shift occurs. The resolution of jokes are “Aha!” moments like this. Perhaps each joke in Wittgenstein’s book would show how language falters when we use words beyond their meaningful contexts, when language “goes on holiday”.

Unfortunately, such a book of philosophically deep jokes would probably also demonstrate that “joke” is a “family resemblance term” (a group of things described by one word which only have overlapping resemblances between each other, not some essential defining feature). There are many different things we call jokes, but they’re not necessarily all funny.

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By Graham Keeley

Doubt and morality are words not readily associated with the Condor Legion, the Wehrmacht unit responsible for the bombing of Guernica and the birth of the concept of ‘total war’. Yet the family of one of its members believe that he expressed both – and that it may have cost him his life.

The destruction of the Basque town on April 26, 1937 – a market day, when thousands of visitors had flocked in, and up to 300 were killed – outraged the world and inspired Picasso’s masterpiece, an enduring and still shocking symbol of the horrors of war. Two hours of bombing by German planes, supported by aircraft from fascist Italy, showed that Adolf Hitler had betrayed his promise not to intervene in the Spanish civil war on behalf of General Francisco Franco, a fact confirmed when British journalist George Steer found bomb casings inscribed with the German eagle insignia amid the rubble.

This early example of ‘strategic bombing’, in which wave upon wave of attacks devastated military targets but also brought terror to civilians by destroying landmarks and homes, helped to set a pattern for the war years to follow. But nearly 90 years after the 1937 attack, it has emerged that not all the members of the German unit were die-hard Nazis.

Tender letters from a Condor Legion lieutenant to his girlfriend reveal a man who – perhaps like many others – bitterly opposed Hitler, even turning down an opportunity to become the Führer’s chauffeur.

Gustav Trippe, however, had the courage to speak out, even in the knowledge that his letters home were being censored. Today, his family believe that Trippe’s honesty – and bravery – might have cost him his life.

They were informed by the Wehrmacht that Trippe had died in the line of duty in 1938. He was 29. However, shortly after his death, they say a man who had fought alongside Trippe in the Spanish civil war visited the family in Germany to make a shocking confession.

He told Trippe’s family that he had been ordered to kill the lieutenant and asked for their forgiveness. The man, who did not give his name, did not explain why he had murdered another German.

Markus Stange, Trippe’s nephew, said the story had been a closely guarded family secret but his mother, who is now 100 years old, had told him it was time to speak out.

Stange, 70, a piano teacher who works at a university in Karlsruhe, Germany, said his uncle had joined the army before the Nazis came to power in 1933. A keen motorcyclist, he then became a tank instructor in the Condor Legion, which was composed of bombers and army units.

From Spain, he wrote to his girlfriend Trude Hühn in Berlin, correspondence she shared with the family after his death. “In these letters he wrote under another name, Peter. Maybe it was a nickname or a codename,” Stange said.

The pair had intended to marry on his return from the front, so the letters were filled with domestic matters. But Trippe also told her about the situation in Spain.

“Of course, he knew (the letters) were all read by the censors. He said (the situation) was ‘other’, in other words ‘other than you think’. He starts describing how there was no water, there was extreme heat, they only had sardines to eat and it was 400km to the nearest cigarette.”

Stange says his uncle then wrote what appears to be a comment, condemning the Francoist forces. “On October 15, 1938, in his last letter, he wrote that he didn’t understand. ‘Spain is such a big country, they have everything on the earth, fruit, meat and they are strong people, but slaves in their thinking’. This was his description of the Francoists around him.”

Stange says he believes his uncle opposed Franco’s conservative Catholicism. A proud military man, he did not support the Nazis either, passing up a chance to drive for Hitler.

He had to train SS soldiers at one point, but in one diary, Stange says he wrote the SS were “insensitive and arrogant” and that he took delight in training these men “as hard as possible”.

In 1937, Trippe announced he had ‘volunteered’ to fight in Spain, though his family had doubts that he had asked to serve abroad, rather than being told to go. At that point, Hitler was keen not to provoke a wider European war – he wanted to build up the Nazi war machine first – so the Condor Legion was secretly sent to Spain to support Franco’s coup.

The mission became known as Operation Magic Fire, with a dummy company created to hide the purpose of the transfer of Junker Ju-52s bombers.

Stange believes that all this set in motion the murder of his uncle. “He disliked the personality of Adolf Hitler. We still don’t know the real reason he was killed. It could be that he was killed because he refused the order to become a chauffeur of Hitler. Maybe these letters could be the reason,” Stange said.

“I think he must have seen what the Francoists did in Spain. There were mass killings in villages. He disagreed with such a thing.”

Stange said he did not know if his uncle was aware of the bomb attack on Guernica, but one entry from his diary, long before he was sent to Spain, points to a soldier for whom morality was his guiding light.

“Conscience is my everything,” Trippe wrote in his diary in 1931. Stange says: “He was a passionate soldier, but he could not act against his conscience even if it meant dying.”

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By Jonn Elledge

1. Patriotic Scots, and also people who just like haggis or whisky, commemorate Burns Night every January 25. In honour of Scotland’s national poet – at what is, let’s be frank, otherwise a low point of the year – they gather with friends to eat a traditional supper of haggis, neeps and tatties while reciting the great man’s work.

2. Robert Burns – or “Rabbie Burns”, as he’s sometimes known in the Scots dialect which he favoured – was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, in 1759. Although he’s remembered as a poet, lyricist, and mainstay of the Scottish Romantic movement, he also tried his hand as a farmer (it didn’t go well), as a “flax-dresser” (something in the linen industry), and as an exciseman (which is at least slightly ironic, since it would have meant taxing the sort of stuff people now drink in his memory).

3. In 1786, Burns also accepted a job helping to manage a slave-run sugar plantation in Jamaica which, hmmm. Thankfully for his modern reputation, he changed his plans after publication of his first collection – Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect – made him a literary superstar, aged just 27.

4. There’s one example of his work you’re familiar with, even if you don’t realise it: Auld Lang Syne, which the Guinness Book of World Records recognises as one of the three most frequently sung songs in the entire English language. (The others are For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow and Happy Birthday.)

5. It’s not just popular in English, either. 友谊地久天长 – which as you don’t need me to tell you, is pronounced “Youyì dì jiu tiāncháng” and means “Friendship Lasts Forever” – is a mainstay of Chinese New Year’s Eve parties, graduation ceremonies and other celebrations.

6. Other examples of Burns’s influence include the title of John Steinbeck’s classic 1937 novel, Of Mice and Men, from a line in the poem To a Mouse (“The best laid schemes o’ mice an men / Gang aft agley”); and that of JD Salinger’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye (from another poem, Comin’ Thro’ the Rye). Bob Dylan, meanwhile, has claimed his greatest source of inspiration was Burns’s A Red, Red Rose.

7. The work you’re most likely to hear over the Burns Night Supper though is the Address to the Haggis, spoken directly to the savoury pudding of sheep’s innards (don’t ask), minced with onion, oatmeal and seasonings, traditionally – though not so often these days – encased in the animal’s stomach. It is, despite these unpromising ingredients, delicious, and should ideally be served alongside neeps (known down south as turnips or swedes) and tatties (potatoes), both mashed.

8. A stuffed wild haggis can be seen in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum, a cuddly, but unfortunately mythical, highland beastie with long brown hair. Some tellings suggest such creatures have legs longer on one side than the other, to enable them to move faster round mountains – which I’m sure they would, if they were real.

9. Finally, the first Burns Night was held by a small group in Greenock in July 1801, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the great man’s death. The following year, it was moved to January 29, four days after his birthday, which surely raises questions about quite how good these so-called friends really were. But the tradition then established caught on nonetheless – and the Greenock Burns Club calls itself the Mother Club to this day.

January 25, 1759
Robert ‘Rabbie’ Burns born in Alloway, just south of Ayr

July 21, 1796
His death at the tender age of 37

Jul 21, 1801
First Burns night supper held in Greenock

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By Shuab Gamote

I was on a packed train back from Northumberland, balancing my laptop on a narrow table, fighting the wifi that turns even the simplest task into a test of character (please fix this, Great British Railways). The carriage had that sombre end-of-day feel.

I had just spent the day in two schools, talking to students about their hopes, their plans and their fears. On the journey home, as I scrolled through survey data from months of fieldwork with 16- to 18-year-olds, one piece of data stood out.

I had asked students whether they agreed with the statement: “I believe I will have better opportunities than my parents had.” More than 80% said they agreed or strongly agreed.

I remember staring at the screen and thinking: really?

Then, almost immediately, I caught myself thinking something worse: isn’t that a bit naive? And that was the real shock. Not their level of optimism. Mine.

I’m Gen Z as well, just at the older end of the cohort. I went to school during the financial crisis and its long, grey aftermath. Coming from a very working-class school and area in Moss Side, Manchester, I was raised on a steady diet of well-meaning realism. Be sensible. Be careful. Don’t take risks you can’t afford. The world is uncertain. Better not aim too high.

Caution won. I became more risk-aware, but also less ambitious. When it came time to choose a degree, I didn’t pick what I was passionate about. I picked accounting and finance. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with a career in those. I didn’t choose it because I was curious about it, but because Google told me it was a “secure” industry with “good prospects”. At that point, my main aspiration was simple: to be middle class one day.

I don’t think my story is unusual. It was the product of a system that had spent years teaching its young people to play it safe. Which is why what I saw on that train stayed with me. I was talking to young people who were still in education, still supported by schools and colleges. Maybe most young people begin with this sense of possibility. The question is how many are still allowed to keep it.

And still, every new cohort arrives to the same chorus: too online, too anxious, too radical, too fragile.

Over the past year, I have spent months in classrooms and assembly halls and with teenagers from across the country. What struck me was not how disengaged they were, but how seriously they took the idea of their future. They talked about fairness. About whether Britain was heading in the right direction. They worried about politics, but they also talked, with surprising confidence, about the lives they wanted to build.

In my research, I found far more optimism than the headlines would suggest. A clear majority still believed their own lives could be better than their parents’. That belief has survived a pandemic, political chaos, economic insecurity and an information environment that would overwhelm most adults.

The question is not whether young people have hope. It is whether we are about to waste it.

To understand why this moment is so fragile, you have to look at what we did to the last generation.

For the best part of 16 years, Gen Z grew up under a cloud of constant anxiety. Social media was rolled out at scale, untested and unregulated, turning a whole cohort into guinea pigs for the attention economy. Institutions like youth clubs that once provided structure and meaning were hollowed out during the austerity years. Then, when the consequences became impossible to ignore, we blamed young people themselves. Rising mental ill health. Falling levels of trust. Disengagement from work and politics. The story was always the same: something’s wrong with them.

And yet, despite this, Gen Z did not collapse. They adapted. Where adults failed to provide support, they built their own. They created online communities, peer networks and their own social clubs. You might call them snowflakes. I would call them the Generation of Re’Z’ilience. But resilience is not a plan.

We can see those limits now. Nearly one million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in education, employment or training. By international standards, the UK sits among the worst performers in the OECD. This is not a passing phase. It is a structural failure on a massive scale. A growing number of young people are not just detached from the labour market, but from routine, purpose and any real sense that the system still has a place for them.

That is why the government has asked Alan Milburn to lead a new independent investigation into youth inactivity, with a national call for evidence just opened. I’ve been invited to join its expert advisory group. The very fact that such a review is needed tells its own story.

This is not about a single policy or a single shock. It is about the long build-up of decisions across education, work and support that have left too many young people stranded. And it points to a harder truth we cannot keep avoiding: we will not build a better system for the next generation unless we are honest about how badly the last one was served.

And now we are at another hinge point. We are about to decide whether we repeat the same mistakes: whether we take a generation that starts out hopeful and slowly grind that hope down through neglect, anxiety and low expectations, or whether we finally learn from what we did to Gen Z.

This year, the first cohort of what some are calling Generation A will turn 16. This generation will most probably include the youngest voters Britain has ever had. That should fill the country with excitement.

How we talk about this generation now matters. Sixteen-year-olds are still forming their sense of who they are, what society is and what is possible. Headlines about young people that drip with suspicion and fear just do not describe reality.

There is another path. It starts by taking their hope and ambition seriously and doing away with moral panic and caution.

Over the past few months, I’ve been looking into the quiet rise of new social clubs built by young people. One of them is run by a young professional in London called Kai Moore. He loves board games, and last year he decided to see if he could build a community around that. “When you leave university and start work, it’s a completely different world,” he told me. “People have to go out of their way to make friends, and I just wanted to make that easier.” With little more than his own social capital, a lot of persistence and a small team of volunteers, he’s now created Board in the City, a network that brings hundreds of young people together every month in pubs and community centres across the country. The events are usually free and people are invited to donate to a chosen charity. They have already raised thousands of pounds.

These spaces work not because they are grand or well-funded, but because they are driven by passion, simple and open. They sit in the gap between home, work or education, and the online world. A soft landing. A way back into shared life.

The new National Youth Strategy is right to put connection and relationships at the centre of the picture. But a strategy will not be enough on its own. What is missing, and has been missing for a long time, is trust. A belief that young people can be a source of energy, ideas and renewal.

That principle needs to run much deeper than youth policy. If we are serious about turning audacity into opportunity, the next generation needs a new settlement: call it Next Generation Triple Lock. The basic promise should be simple – that young people will not fall behind on the three foundations of a decent start in life: housing they can afford, education or training that opens doors, and the chance to build real relationships, community and belonging.

Right now, too many feel locked out of all three.

Generation Z should be remembered as the Generation of Resilience. They endured a system that asked a lot and offered too little in return. Generation A deserves something better. They deserve to be the Generation of Ambition and Audacity.

We already know they have hope. I saw it on a train, in a chart on my screen. You hear it if you speak to anyone who works with young people. Ask them what gives them hope and they will tell you the same thing, again and again: the next generation.

The real question is whether we are brave enough to meet that hope, or whether we will once again allow it to be slowly worn down by a system too cautious to believe in the future it claims to want.

Shuab Gamote is a researcher and writer whose work explores how young people understand politics, identity and belonging. He is also a board member at One Million Mentors, a national charity connecting young people with mentors

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By Nigel Warburton

The opening of the Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou remains intensely shocking almost a century after it was made. A man sharpens a cut-throat razor. He looks up at the full moon; a cloud cuts across it. A woman stares into the camera. The man holds her left eye open. Then he slices across it with the razor, replicating the movement of the cloud across the moon. We see the eye slit open and gelatinous fluid oozing out.

The film-makers, Luis Buñuel (who plays the man with the razor) and Salvador Dalí, used a real eye for this shot – the eye of a dead calf, not, as it seemed, of a live woman. Likewise, when William Shakespeare’s King Lear is performed and Cornwall gouges out Gloucester’s eyes, exclaiming “Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?” as he stomps on one of them, this torture is fictional (the prop is sometimes a lychee). Regan’s sadism – she instructs her servants: “Go thrust him out at gates and let him smell his way to Dover” – is fictional, too.

Our eyes make us particularly vulnerable. There is something especially repellent about damaging another person’s eyes. If they’re blinded, they’ll never see their children again, never meet their lover’s gaze.

How terrible, then, to hear news from Iran of guards shooting metal pellets into young protesters’ faces, deliberately targeting their eyes. Hospitals have been overwhelmed. Many protesters have needed eyes removed. Terrible, too, to learn of two protesters who have lost eyes after being shot in the face with “less-lethal” munitions fired by ICE officers in the US.

Deliberately blinding someone is evil. Most of us believe we would never do such a thing. But we may be wrong about that.

History is replete with ordinary people doing terrible things, particularly in times of war. Circumstance, propaganda, pressure, fear, conditioning, and coercion all play their part. But most philosophers and psychologists who have tried to explain evil acts emphasise dehumanisation as the key factor.

The philosopher David Livingstone Smith, for example, takes this line: The most straightforward way to get a group of people to do horrendous things to other people, he argues, is to get them first to think of their victims as subhuman. Once we cease to recognise victims’ humanity, and think of them as rats or cockroaches, it becomes possible and perhaps even obligatory to harm them without that weighing heavily on the conscience of the perpetrator.

There’s a kind of dual thinking that goes on here, where the aggressor knows the victim is a member of the same species, yet denies that they have any moral right to protection from harm. Whole groups of people get damned in this way.

Hannah Arendt declared that “evil comes from a failure to think”. That seems right. It’s a special kind of failure to think, an unwillingness to decentre or to see the moral enormity of the actions perpetrators are committing. Those who do evil by proxy, those who order guards to shoot at the eyes of unarmed protesters for example, are skilled at creating conditions for unthinking brutality. They minimise the chances of dissenting inner voices holding their minions back.

James Dawes’ Evil Men is the best book on this topic I know. It is based on in-depth interviews with elderly Japanese men who in their youths had tortured, raped, and mutilated captives during the second Sino-Japanese war, but who now deeply regret what they did.

In order to create monsters capable of maiming their enemies, soldiers who would bayonet a baby, Dawes suggests; take ordinary young men and erode their domestic identity, collectivise their sense of self by shaving their heads, make them wear identical uniforms, make them eat and sleep together, control the information that reaches them, separate them from family and friends, subject them to physical hardship and to arbitrary harsh punishment. In other words, foster the conditions where obedience is unquestioning. There should be no space for thought.

But the dehumanisation of victims plus a conditioned avoidance of thought by the perpetrators may not be the whole story. The psychologist Paul Bloom has argued convincingly that some perpetrators of evil, far from dehumanising their victims, know how to be particularly cruel because they are expert at imagining what it would be like to be those victims. Far from dehumanising them, they recognise them, through empathy, as fellow humans too. That’s why they know so well how to do the worst possible things to them.

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By Jonn Elledge

1. Tantalisingly little is known about the origins of human speech. Nonetheless, humanity’s unique capacity to use the mouth and respiratory system to make a range of noises complex and sophisticated enough to give us, say, Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch, or the Gettysburg address, seems to have evolved at least 100,000 years ago.

2. Anyone who has ever lived or worked with an animal could tell you that they can also communicate rather a lot. Dogs, which have been evolving alongside us for more than 20,000 years, are perhaps the best placed to understand human language: a 2022 study found that the average canine pet could understand an average of 89 words.

3. A South Carolina-based border collie named Chaser (2004-2019) has gone down in history as the smartest dog in the world, after demonstrating an understanding of over 1,000 words. And just this month researchers from the – I promise this is real – Clever Dog Lab at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna found that some particularly intellectual pups could pick up words simply by listening in on conversations.

4. Recent years have seen attempts to teach dogs to “speak”: the confusingly named Bunny, a sheepadoodle, has amassed two million Instagram followers during her participation in the University of California, San Diego’s TheyCanTalk study. Videos show her using a system of buttons to express complex “sentences” like “stranger paw ouch” (she’d trodden on a thorn).

5. Other creatures do not need buttons because of their natural talent for mimicry. Since 1995, a budgie, named Puck, has held the Guinness World Record for largest avian vocabulary, with 1,728 words. Some experts believe this to be more than shadow home secretary Chris Philp.

6. Other animal-human communication experiments have involved either sign language (with primates) or whistling (with dolphins, who have never quite got the hang of the hand gestures). One of the most famous was Washoe the chimp, who learned 350 words of American Sign Language. In one famous interaction, after a keeper explained a lengthy absence by telling her she’d had a miscarriage (“I lost my baby”), Washoe replied by tracing the path of a tear down her face – the sign for “cry”.

7. Then there was Koko the gorilla who in 1983 asked for a kitten for Christmas; on being presented with a toy, she made clear she meant a real pet kitten. Another subject of a language experiment, Nim Chimpsky (geddit?) also loved cats, although on at least one occasion documented in the 2011 film Project Nim, this was rather more literal than one would ideally hope.

8. Some linguists have dismissed the results of such experiments. Science requires replicable results and experiments that involve working with individual animals for years, even decades, and are by their nature difficult to repeat.

9. Another issue is the “Clever Hans” effect, named after a horse who, in the early 1900s, was seemingly taught by his trainer to answer simple arithmetical questions by tapping his hooves. Alas, it turned out that, when Hans couldn’t see the person asking the questions, he no longer knew the answers. He had learned to pick up on human body language that the questioners didn’t even know they were expressing, which, to be fair, seems pretty clever in itself.

10. One animal whose facility with human speech seems to have been genuine was a parrot whose name was short for “avian language experiment”. Over 30 years, Alex the African grey learned colours, shapes, and concepts like “bigger” and “smaller”, “different” and “same”. Presented with an apple, a fruit he’d never seen before, he described it as a “banerry”, apparently a portmanteau of two more familiar fruits.

11. Alex died suddenly in 2007, at the tender age of 31. He is the only animal known to have posed an existential question, when he looked in the mirror, and asked his trainer what colour he was.

Six
Number up to which Alex the African grey could count

34
Number of whistles Phoenix the bottlenose dolphin is believed to have understood

89
Average number of words dogs can understand

1,022
Number of items Chaser the border collie could identify by name

20,000
Average human vocabulary of a native speaker. But don’t be smug, I doubt you could speak a single word of dog, parrot or dolphin

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By Francis Beckett

The anti-racism campaigner Gerry Gable died on January 3, but the evils he fought are more mainstream now than at any time since the war.

The first time I spoke to him, Gerry was doing something he did very seldom: apologising. It was 2015, and I was working on my biography of my father, an infamous inter-war fascist called John Beckett. My research took me to a dinner in a central London hotel, held by the Friends of Oswald Mosley. I wrote a long colour piece about it for the Independent on Sunday.

Gable’s anti-fascist paper Searchlight was also there, but undercover, and his reporter wrote a furious piece about my betrayal in reporting on fascists openly and with their knowledge. I felt I ought to have been asked for comment, and he agreed. He showed up to my book launch a few months later.

That conviction, that you spy on fascists, that you harass them, that you never just chat politely to them, ran through his whole life and work. Born in the East End of London in 1937 to a Jewish mother and an Anglican father, as a child he admired the 43 Group – a group of Jewish ex-servicemen set up in 1946 to stifle a resurgence of fascism and antisemitism, largely by breaking up meetings.

As a young man, he joined the Communist Party, eventually leaving it because it opposed Israel, though he remained on the left all his life. Those were the days when support for Israel came largely from the left, which viewed the country as a model of social democracy. The far right’s fervent embrace of Israel is more recent.

As a new wave of racism hit the streets in the 1960s, Gable helped found the 62 Group, largely modelled on the 43 Group, to prevent fascists and racists from organising. He gathered information for the group, and this led to the formation of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, with which Gable’s name will always be associated. It had a brief life in the mid-60s, but was relaunched in 1975, and is with us still.

It was, he wrote in his last article in March last year, “a response to the worrying growth of the National Front and a desire to put the intelligence-gathering expertise of the 62 Group at the service of the local anti-fascist groups which were springing up all over the country.”

The National Front was doing alarmingly well in local elections, and, wrote playwright David Edgar, Searchlight exposed “the openly Nazi (and criminal) pasts of the NF leaders, their links to more overt organisations, and – buoyed in confidence by their electoral successes – the Front’s increasingly open espousal of overtly Nazi ideas.”

Gable believed he could not afford to be squeamish about his methods. Infiltrators and spies were on his books, and a little light burglary was all in a day’s work.

He was often right, but not always. He lost a libel case to Neil Hamilton and Gerald Howarth, costing the BBC £40,000, and Private Eye’s false allegation that a member of the military police had plotted to murder Gable cost the magazine “substantial” damages.

Few people would deny his courage, his determination, and his genuine loathing of racism. His methods, he would argue, were unlovely but necessary. As he wrote last year:

“The battle against right wing extremism must be fought on all fronts. Campaigning and demonstrating against them is vital but not sufficient. We also need to wage an intelligence war which informs us about their plans and crimes which we can use to disrupt their activities.”

But the world has changed. Today Tommy Robinson’s protection comes, not from a few like-minded thugs, but from the world’s richest man. Baseless claims that foreign migrants are eating the King’s swans come not from fanatics on street corners, but from a man who might be our next prime minister. The president of the United States routinely uses racist taunts.

Gerry Gable never confronted a world where fascism and racism were mainstream. I wonder what he would have made of it.

Francis Beckett is a playwright and biographer. His most recent play is Make England Great Again

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By Nigel Warburton

We’re drowning in AI slop online. According to a recent Guardian article, as many as a fifth of the videos generated by algorithm for new users of YouTube are low-grade drivel placed there to garner more views.

Have you noticed how bad Google searches have become? I’m wondering if I fantasised a Golden Age when most of what I was looking for was on the first page of search results. Something very bad is happening, and AI is the driver.

“Brain rot” was the Oxford word of the year in 2024, “rage bait” in 2025. My money’s on “AI slop” this year. Too much time swilling around in this sort of polluted gush of semi-meaningful material is taking its toll on many of us, and we’re suffering. There are signs of decay.

In philosophy it’s not just unreliable LLM-delivered summaries that are causing problems, there are self-declared philosophy influencers out there giving ever simpler introductions to key ideas of great thinkers. Some of them seem to be using AI to write their scripts. How else could they be so bad?

They don’t seem to realise what a travesty this is, or how many misreadings they are engendering. I suspect they’re just there for the clicks. And, sadly, they’re getting millions.

Cory Doctorow, the sci-fi novelist and commentator on all things tech, has coined the word “enshittification” to describe what’s happening more generally. Good term; nasty phenomenon. He sees a three-stage process at work with online platforms.

In Stage One a platform (and his favourite example is Facebook) is good to its users, but at the same time draws them in. The platform becomes indispensable to them, and there are no obvious alternatives.

In Stage Two, things get better for business customers, but much worse for ordinary users, who are mostly too committed to leave.

In Stage Three, the owners make things bad for everyone, business customers and ordinary people alike, as they extract value from these two groups of locked-in users.

Doctorow is not a fatalist about this: he does think we can escape this sort of decline – one way is via anti-trust/anti-monopoly legislation. But much of the internet, like our rivers, is heavily polluted with, well, shit. And it’s affecting our minds. Tech innovations were good, and now many of them aren’t.

Is this fearmongering, or is it really happening? Is it going to get even worse? Will we drown in this slop?

There are analogies with the great horse manure crisis of 1894. In the Victorian era there were a lot of horses in London, and they defecated in the streets – they had no choice. According to many internet sources, the Times of London included the estimate that every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure within 50 years.

A startling claim, except that no one has been able to find that article in that newspaper, not even the paper’s archivist. The claim that it was there (a claim that pops up repeatedly if you search “horse manure crisis of 1894”) was itself a piece of horseshit, one produced before the advent of LLMs – real fake news.

Some people in the late 19th century were indeed genuinely worried about the amount of manure on the streets, though. Horse manure did cause health problems. But the widespread use of motorised trams, buses, and cars soon changed things completely. Manure was no longer the threat – it was superseded by exhaust pollution.

Today the horse manure crisis of 1894 is taken as a moral tale – a supposedly reassuring one. In 1894 few people foresaw the solution to the problem, but there was a tech-driven one coming down the line. Henry Ford et al solved it. London was never buried. The moral is supposed to be that we shouldn’t despair about apparently insurmountable difficulties because some clever inventor will get us out of the pickle.

Perhaps this will happen with AI-generated slop. No doubt someone is hard at work writing code for a killer anti-slop device. Perhaps a Cat in the (White) Hat is out there developing a wonderful app that will clean up the mess before we go under. I’d download it in a shot.

But perhaps this won’t happen. If Doctorow is right, the tech companies have strong incentives to move in the opposite direction. They’ve got us trapped and they don’t care that we’ve only just got our heads above the rivers of shit they’re flooding our lives with.

That’s our problem, not theirs. Welcome to 2026.

By Roger Domeneghetti

It was supposed to be a routine, albeit clandestine, flight. On January 21, 1968, a US B-52 bomber, call sign HOBO-28, laden with four nuclear warheads, was in a holding pattern over the Thule airbase in northwest Greenland, deep in the Arctic Circle, when one of the crew members smelled burning rubber.

Foam cushions placed over a heating vent had caught fire. The crew desperately tried to extinguish the blaze, but it quickly became uncontrollable. They radioed down to the Thule airbase, the US’s most northerly military installation, for permission to make an emergency landing. But it was too late. The cockpit filled with smoke. The plane lost electrical power.

Six of the crew were able to parachute to safety; the seventh sustained fatal head injuries as he attempted to bail out. The pilotless bomber careened into the sea ice of Wolstenholme Fjord at 900km/h. When the bombs hit the ground, the conventional explosives detonated on impact, but there was no nuclear explosion. Even so, radioactive material was scattered across 30 square miles, and there was heavy plutonium contamination.

The crash left a scar gauged into the ice 700 metres long and 160 metres wide. It is a wound that is yet to fully heal, and that has ramifications for the complex three-way relationship between America, Denmark and Greenland that exists to this day. Donald Trump has made clear, once again, that he has ambitions to absorb Greenland. Speaking in the first week of January, Trump told reporters: “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security”. After the strike against Venezuela to the south, the chances that the US will make a move in the north now look all the more plausible.

The US first established a military presence in Greenland during the Second
World War, when the Danish ambassador to the US, Henrik Kauffmann, asked Washington to protect its colonies following the Nazi invasion of Denmark 1940.

Greenland, effectively a midpoint between the northern US and northern Russia, became even more strategically important for the US during the cold war. “It was the place that you could get closest to the Soviet Union with a nuclear bomber,” says Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute of International Studies. By permitting the base, Denmark “proved its value as an ally to the US”.

In 1951, the two countries signed a treaty allowing the US to build the Thule Air Base. Completed two years later, it is 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in northwest Greenland. Ice-locked for nine months of the year, when it is only accessible by air, the base once housed 10,000 military personnel.

Renamed Pituffik in 2023, it is now home to less than 1,000 servicepeople, but its “top-of-the-world” location makes it an ideal place to situate an early warning radar weapon system.

The agreement to establish the base was made exclusively between Washington and Copenhagen. No politicians from Greenland were involved and there was no consideration given to the local Inughuit peoples, who were most directly affected. The base interfered with their hunting grounds and to make room for it, 26 households totalling 166 people were forcibly resettled around 65 miles north in Qaanaaq.

This took place less than two weeks before Greenland won autonomy from Denmark. At any point after that, a forced population move of this kind would no longer have been possible.

The HOBO-28 mission was part of Chrome Dome, a secret US military operation in which B-52 bombers with nuclear payloads stayed continuously airborne and on alert. There were various routes, one over north America, one over Europe. The Chrome Dome flights followed a figure-of-eight pattern over Thule, which meant the US could launch a retaliatory strike even if the base was destroyed.

The B-52 crash site was around seven miles from the base. First on the scene was a small group of Inughuit hunters. Then came hundreds of US military personnel and Danish support staff from the base. In the permanent darkness of the arctic winter, and in temperatures as low as -60C, they set about retrieving fragments of the destroyed aircraft plus tonnes of contaminated snow and ice.

The revelation that the US had been routinely flying nuclear-armed planes over Greenland severely strained its relationship with Denmark, which had declared itself a nuclear-free zone in 1957. This meant Danish law effectively prohibited the presence of any such weapons on any of its territories.

However, in 1995, it was revealed that the prime minister at the time, HC Hansen, had sent an ambiguously worded, handwritten note to the US ambassador that gave tacit approval for this to happen.

As one State Department official put it, this meant the US could do “almost anything, literally, that we want to in Greenland.” From 1958-65, the US housed at least 48 nuclear warheads at Thule.

Knowledge of the base and its nuclear function became an open secret. “Everybody with some specialism in academia, or military affairs or international relations knew,” said Gad. “Also, there were thousands of Danish workers at the base, and it was clear to them that it housed nukes. It was more a case that it was a very secluded place that was mentally not a part of Denmark, and in a sense not even a part of Greenland.”

It was one of a string of revelations that emerged after the crash. Danes and Greenlanders involved in the clean-up also claimed that exposure to radiation led to problems including premature ageing, extreme fatigue, undiagnosed skin diseases, and immune system deficiencies. Official investigations found no link, and even concluded that the problems were caused by the men’s lifestyles.

Despite the clean-up operation, a BBC report in 2008 claimed that one of the bombs had broken through the ice and sank to the sea bed, and that a submarine rescue operation failed to recover it. When US analysts examined the retrieved bomb parts, they found one of the secondary charges was missing. Experts believe the lost bomb poses no threat to inhabitants or the environment. Even so, there is a high likelihood that a substantial amount of US weapons-grade nuclear material remains lost somewhere on the seabed under the ice off North Star Bay, in northwest Greenland.

The most enduring controversy stems from the eviction of the Inughuit people, which only became public knowledge in the 1980s. In 2003, a small amount of compensation and an apology were issued by the Danish prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen.

“There are people alive today who cannot go back to where their ancestors came from,” says Gad. “Also, it’s a nomadic hunting community and the base dissects their hunting grounds, and they have to be afraid that it’s radioactive.”

Over the subsequent decades, the forced resettlement has become a central component in debates over Greenlandic autonomy, as it casts Denmark as callous imperialists.

It is also seen by Greenlanders as indicative of their wider maltreatment by Danish colonisers, an issue that continues to cast a long, dark shadow over relations between the two countries. “Parenting competence” tests on people with Greenlandic backgrounds were only banned in May 2025 after a years-long fight by campaigners and human rights bodies who argued that they were racist.

In September, the Danish PM Mette Frederiksen formally apologised for historic injustices against Greenlanders and proposed a reconciliation fund to compensate those affected. It includes approximately 4,500 women, some as young as 12 at the time, who were fitted with intrauterine devices without their knowledge or consent in the 1960s by Danish doctors in an attempt to reduce the population of Greenland. The island’s former prime minister Múte B Egede condemned the policy as “genocide”.

With recent polls suggesting almost 80% of Greenlanders back independence from Denmark, some see Frederiksen’s efforts as a cynical attempt to strengthen relationships between the two countries, but Gad believes they are genuine. “She’s been the prime minister who’s been most open to historical reconciliation and constitutional reforms giving Greenland more independence.

“I think she would have liked to move on earlier, but Covid came in the way, Ukraine came in the way; it’s only been pushed to the top of the agenda by Donald Trump. All the goodwill she was trying to show seems a bit too little, too late, so it’s difficult for Greenlanders to accept it with the goodwill they would have done a couple of years ago.”

The base returned to headlines in 2025, when the Thule base welcomed the US vice president JD Vance. The controversial visit underscored the strategic importance of both the base and Greenland. It was of importance in the fight against the Nazis, then the Soviet Union. But will Greenland now have to fend off another aggressor state, one that already has a military presence on its territory, one that, until recently, it regarded as a friend?

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By Nigel Warburton

Who’s your favourite philosopher? That seems like an innocuous question. It’s one I get asked a lot. But I always struggle to answer it. I usually have a go.

I might respond that I like Diogenes the Cynic for his refusal to be bound by convention, and for the way he enacted his philosophy like some kind of performance artist. He lived in a barrel (or more probably a large earthenware jar) and refused to kowtow to Alexander the Great, the most powerful person in the world, when he visited him, asking him to move his shadow.

I like Diogenes’ cosmopolitanism, too, his declaration that he was a citizen of the world. But I’m not going to follow him; I’m not going to masturbate and defecate in public (as he allegedly did) and get rid of all my possessions.

I’m also a deep admirer of the 18th-century Scot David Hume, for his acute intelligence and wit, and particularly for his posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, where he lacerated the main philosophical arguments used for the existence of God.

But it turns out Hume was a racist, so I can’t give him an unconditional endorsement.

I have a special affection for John Stuart Mill, particularly On Liberty, his “philosophic textbook of a single truth”. I love chapter two, which is about the value of free expression.

There, he distinguished dead dogma from living ideas, declaring, “Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post as soon as there is no enemy in the field”.

Mill’s point was that extensive freedom of expression is a condition of having your thoughts challenged, and that unless that is done, preferably by someone who genuinely disagrees with them rather than is playing devil’s advocate, they remain prejudices.

It matters not just what you believe, but why you believe it. Far better to be able to defend your views against opposing ones than simply to inherit them.

He championed free expression up to the point where someone encourages violence through their pronouncements and maintained that offence is distinguishable from harm. But Mill, like Hume, had some patronising views about non-Europeans, and only wanted to reserve the extensive individual liberty he championed in “experiments of living” and in speech and writing for the “civilised”, and not for races “in their nonage” (ie those in a state resembling childhood).

Jean-Paul Sartre was a very influential figure for me. I first read his novel Nausea as a young teenager after learning about it from Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider.

There are passages in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness that are quite brilliant. His descriptions of Bad Faith, that special kind of fear of one’s own freedom that leads people to pretend that they’re constrained in what they can do, have stayed with me, as has his account of how absences are as much a part of our experience of the world as the things and people who are present.

I admire his immense creative energy and his willingness to write on almost any topic or in any genre, including novels, plays, film scripts, and biographies. He seemed to have enjoyed life much more than most philosophers do, too.

But much of his later philosophical writing is convoluted and barely intelligible (partly the result of using amphetamines). And his political instincts were appalling.

Sartre was an apologist for the Soviet Union and for Mao Zedong (he did, though, oppose the Vietnam war and was a staunch opponent of French colonialism). I feel I ought to prefer Simone de Beauvoir, who was a better philosopher in many ways, but my early love for Sartre’s existentialism is hard to shake, even though I now believe his existentialism rests on extravagant wishful thinking about the degree to which individuals have choice over their lives.

So, these are the candidates that spring to mind for my favourite philosopher, and I can’t endorse any one of them without reservation. I might on another day have included Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer. They all had feet of clay, too. Sadly. And I only admire some aspects of what any of them wrote.

But what I have noticed in writing this column, is that no thinker on my shortlist (with the exception of Nietzsche, and then only very briefly) was ever a university professor. That might be a coincidence, but I doubt it.

I believe it gave them greater freedom to be original, authentic, and interesting. It allowed them to become who they were.

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By Henry Morris

It’s been quite a year in Blighty, the blighted former east Atlantic fishery where regional GDP is Balkan, taxpayers subsidise corporate profit, and the fourth estate are third-rate fifth columnists. This is the first country to privatise its own water supply and impose economic sanctions upon itself.

If 2024 was the year of the Great Tory Reckoning, 2025 was the year Labour burned through political goodwill like it was crack. Their calculation that the electorate would prefer feigned racism to Reform’s real stuff hangs in everyone’s throat like pipe rash.

It’s been a wild 12 months. The year began with Keir Starmer accused by Elon Musk, the Adrian Mole of oligarchs, of complicity in the “rape of Britain.” Musk, who then was “first buddy” to an actual adjudicated rapist, was pondering whether to fund Reform UK. We found out that one of their MPs, like one of his Teslas, had been charged with battery.

In February, as a token of Sir Keir’s ambition to become the interlocutor between the States and Europe, lacquered friend of nonces Peter Mandelson was installed as UK ambassador to the US, perhaps because it was likely that he and President Trump might have shared interests.

We learned that when Jeffrey Epstein faced charges for soliciting sex from underage girls, Mandy had counselled “strategy strategy strategy” – guidance he’d clearly not shared with the prime minister, who then slashed the international aid budget to bring defence spending up to a Trump-friendly 2.5% of GDP. Nothing says “global Britain” like giving fewer vaccines to African children so you can park slightly larger boats in the South China Sea.

In March, hours after an extraordinary White House meeting in which JD Vance scolded Ukraine’s president for showing insufficient reverence towards America’s draft-dodging one, Volodymyr Zelensky was warmly welcomed to No 10, prompting JD to describe the UK as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 40 years.” This insult to the sons and daughters who died in Afghanistan and Iraq was mitigated by a leaked civil service memo which referred to Vance as “The Bikini Line” – on the grounds that his new ’tache represented a modest amount of bumfluff on a twat.

The month also saw Rachel Reeves declare war on bats and newts that were preventing construction of 1.5 million new homes before the next general election/collapse of the Gulf Stream, whichever arrives sooner. Cleansed of nature’s vetoes, Reeves hoped the country would at last achieve the frictionless landscape investors have long prayed for, where the only song at twilight is the gentle beep-beep-beep of reversing delivery vans.

April saw a big win in local elections – 677 out of 1,200 seats, 12 councils – for Nigel Farage’s merry band of sociopaths, inadequates and narcissists. One of the few consolations was the news that cases of impostor syndrome had been effectively eliminated by the elevation of Darren Grimes to deputy leader of Durham County Council. Much analysis was also devoted to the accelerating demise of the erstwhile horse-heating, tractor-wanking, “I’m trapped in a room with some bad people” natural stewards of power, the Conservative Party. Answer: Kemi Badenoch.

Then, with one hand on the levers of power, Reform promptly began to shit the bed. In June its chair Zia Yusuf quit for 48 hours after noticing the party was chronically Islamophobic, Warwickshire’s council leader resigned for “health reasons”, leaving an 18-year-old deputy in charge, convicted domestic abuser James McMurdock was suspended for something else, bleachy-toothed gust David Bull replaced Yusuf, who returned anyway, and splinter groups Advance UK and Restore Britain erupted like a pair of Farage’s gin-accelerated haemorrhoids.

Labour looked for new ways to alienate its base in July, when the party born of struggle proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation for waging asymmetric warfare on the military-industrial complex with Waitrose soup and Loctite.

Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper, unwavering supporters of Ukraine’s right to defend itself against a foreign aggressor, and Israel’s to defend itself against the humanitarian crisis it was busily authoring, had had enough. The systematic discharge of IDF sniper rounds into the skulls of Palestinian children queuing for “the most generous humanitarian aid” was one thing, but naive moralisers redecorating RAF Voyagers “Guilty Conscience Red” were an affront to the international rules-based order.

August saw the round-up of thousands of sympathetic sign-waving pensioners. With the media otherwise preoccupied by whether or not gastronome Gregg Wallace had his trousers around his ankles while observing a female contestant filleting a hake, the coast was clear for the staunchest defenders of British values – Everlast-clad men in maintenance arrears – to commence Operation Raise the Colours.

This was an operation to arrest the decline of British culture by turning mini-roundabouts into Crusader shrines and hanging union flags upside down outside mosques. If ever there were a metaphor for the gulf between this country’s residual self-image and its lived reality, then aggrieved divorcees vandalising traffic furniture in the name of their inalienable right not to have a continuity announcer warn people about the name of Guy Gibson’s dog during The Dam Busters was surely it.

September arrived, and after six months of Trump and Mandelson struggling to place each other, the emergence of the latest tranche of Epstein correspondence revealed that Starmer’s top pick had referred to the sex-trafficker as “my best pal”. Unlike all the other widely available information, this was slavish support for a conveniently asphyxiated sex pest too far, and resulted in the confiscation of Mandy’s Ferrero Rocher. The UK then rolled out a Windsor Castle banquet and Red Arrows flypast for the second state visit of adjudicated sex pest Donald Trump.

Revelations of further lies from Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor coincided with the publication in October of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, in which it was claimed she was forced to have sex with him on three occasions. Despite the prince’s claim never to have met her other than in photos, his elder brother moved decisively to strip him of his titles a mere 18 years after his friendship with the paedophile first became public.

In November, we learned that Boris Johnson’s response to Covid, which killed more people than the second world war blitz, had been “toxic, chaotic” and probably resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths. The story didn’t really cut through, because Poppymas had begun.

Evolved from an earlier tradition in which widows with paper poppies and bereft mothers said ‘“never again”, this has become a month-long carnival of mawkishness in which postboxes are decked in Spitfire tea cosies and public figures who don’t wear poppies are publicly humiliated in tribute to veterans whose mental health was shattered in Goose Green.

Against this backdrop of hyperjingoism and fetishised conflict, Shabana Mahmood (Yvette Cooper’s replacement as home secretary in the reshuffle caused by Angela Rayner’s resignation for being too working class) upped the War On Refugees by announcing that Labour would make refugee status temporary, extend the wait for permanent settlement to 20 years, confiscate assets and check to see if children arriving on small boats were concealing things in their mouths. Do those last two proposals remind you of anything?

Things went from bad to worse for the BBC. Already threatened with a billion-dollar lawsuit from Trump for having the temerity to edit his rambling January 6, 2021 incitement into something coherent, the corporation was boycotted once more by Nigel Farage, who was upset that they’d latched on to a lengthy supply of stories about his behaviour at school – like mimicking the hiss of gas next to Jewish pupils, or turning up in the junior playground to tell nine-year-olds “that’s the way back to Africa.” The fact the last one is also Reform policy was of no consequence to a media preoccupied with gotchas over scrutiny.

Was there ever a greater opportunity or need for a progressive party? Step forward Your Party. Zara Sultana’s resignation from Labour blindsided Jeremy Corbyn into launching the new party against his own wishes. Following leaked WhatsApp messages that threatened mass walkouts, the launch and closure of a rogue membership portal after the other five male MPs told members to cancel any direct debits, Adnan Hussain quitting and Sultana boycotting their inaugural conference, the ensuing comic disbelief was the closest Albion had come to unity since Angela Rippon’s appearance in the 1976 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special.

It’s hope that kills them. That and the 18-month waiting lists. Regardless, the Greens offered a glimmer in the shape of the straight-talking northerner, Zack Polanski, but the optimism was offset by the nagging sense that here is Hereward the Woke fighting a valiant yet rearguard action against an enemy that may already have prevailed.

December and it’s nearly Christmas. In the presence of flood, fire, and environmental collapse, expect to hear carol service readings from Genesis relating to UK permissions for tie-back oil/gas extraction in the North Sea.

In the nativity, meanwhile, the Holy Family will travel to Dover, where the shepherds wave “No Room At The Premier Inn” placards; the gold, frankincense and myrrh are confiscated to offset “administrative costs”; Joseph is separated for an age assessment interview; and a postpartum Mary misses a maternity appointment 40 miles from Yarl’s Wood, because SERCO are searching Jesus’s mouth for sim cards. Merry Christmas.

Henry Morris is the satirist behind The Secret Diary of a Tory MP. His Substack is Henry Morris’s World Exclusives

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By Jamie Klingler

For the last month or so, a petition arguing for women-only carriages on London’s underground, started by 21-year-old student Camille Brown has been gaining momentum, press coverage and, at the time of writing, 14,000-plus signatures. But however well-meaning, spaces designated for women only can not and will never be the solution to male-perpetrated violence against women and girls.

If women could solve male violence against us, it would have been solved a long time ago. The answer is not making our lives smaller and segregating women from public shared spaces.

Let’s play this scenario out logistically. If there is one designated tube carriage per train that is women-only, how exactly do you know which carriage it is? How do you get down a busy platform at rush hour to find said carriage?

How long do you have to wait for one with room in it? Who will have to add precious morning minutes to their commute to wrestle down the platform to get to the designated carriage?

How do we stop harassment and inappropriate touching or approaches on the platforms and escalators? And once I find the designated carriage, how do I prove that I am a woman? Who gets to check?

Who is allowed to police who is permitted on the women-only carriage? And in the event of an intended femicide, is that placing a massive target on that specified carriage?

Let’s say a woman then gets attacked on a tube in a non gender specified carriage, is it her fault as she didn’t take the necessary precautions to seek out the female only space?

Funding to have more staff on the platforms, tubes and indeed at overground stations has been drastically reduced. Unmanned stations, Transport for London and British Transport Police staffing cuts play a bigger role in putting commuters’ lives in jeopardy than any kettling of potential victims could help with peace of mind.

Whenever “solutions” are presented to male-perpetrated violence against women that don’t address the men committing the violence, I push back. Who would be inconvenienced most by the proposal? If the answer is the women who are keen to keep themselves safe, we are not addressing the right sector of the population.

It sounds very similar to when the head of British Telecom proposed a new 888 service because 999 was not fit for purpose when it came to reacting quickly to protect women under direct threat of violence. The solution of a new phone service that gave more people access to your route or handed them the ability to locate you was quickly discredited as a waste of money that could be used against the very women it was trying to help.

Or like when the Met Police (yes, THAT Met Police) created a “Safer Space” for women on New Year’s Eve, during the fireworks. This consisted of a gazebo manned by Met officers, down a side street.

Play that one out. I’m among the million or so people near Trafalgar Square to watch the display and feel intimidated – or I have been groped or harassed by someone. What I’m supposed to do is leave the people I am with to try to find a gazebo near the police station, where I will be protected by Met officers from Charing Cross station, home of the misogynistic police that were exposed in the IOPC investigation of WhatsApp groups three years ago and by a recent Panorama expose a month ago?

At the advertising conference Cannes Lions in June, the Croisette had similar safe zone gazebos, manned by professionals. For next year, I would like to propose that they should have four gazebos for designated sexual predators and the rest of the festival should be a safe space for women.

Instead of women having to exit conversations or negotiations or events that could benefit their future careers and upward mobility, “the Creep Cabanas” could act as a sin bin for the men behaving inappropriately. Bouncers or other men could flag inappropriate or aggressive male behaviour, and men making women uncomfortable or unsafe would have an hour on a public naughty step before being able to continue their evenings.

As Gisele Pelicot said, “shame must switch sides”. So let’s shame and kettle those violent and badly behaved men who are committing the offences, not the women trying to protect themselves.

How small and contained do our lives have to become to make the violence against us not our fault or responsibility? If only staying in our own private spaces and homes was enough to keep us alive and well – yet every day 137 women and girls are killed by their intimate partners or family members.

The UN Women’s UNITE campaign to end violence against women and girls runs until December 10. Please join in efforts that recognise that male-perpetrated violence against women is a male issue, and that isolating women and making our lives smaller is not our route to safer lives.

Jamie Klingler is co-founder of Reclaim These Streets

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By Hannah Fearn

Nicola Ratcliffe found herself pushed out of a successful sales career after she had children. Her response to this setback was to put her bad experience to good use. She set up a consultancy that trained workers who also had caring responsibilities and were trying to hold onto their careers while suffering from, among other things, sleep deprivation. Ratcliffe thrived. But as a female entrepreneur, she also became exposed to the constant, unsolicited attention of abusive men.

The most egregious example came when a prospective client booked an unexpected meeting in her diary. “I remember thinking I wasn’t sure who it was, as it wasn’t a brand I recognised, but then when you’re new to an industry you’re not really sure,” she says.

So Ratcliffe joined the video conference call, and found herself presented with a man’s genitals on screen. “I wasn’t sure what to do,” she says. “I just shut the screen down, but I wish I’d kept it open and said something or recorded it. I considered ringing the police but then thought, what will they do?”

“It knocked me. You’ve got to have a certain amount of resilience to bounce back from things like that, because it’s degrading. It’s an intrusion.”

The experience changed the way Ratcliffe does business. “I just make sure I put things in place where I’m in complete control. I can’t leave a meeting open, or ask a group online to meet me in a room,” she says. “I lost a good potential client off the back of that: a man had booked a meeting and I couldn’t work out exactly where he was from [from his online profile] and I just didn’t turn up to it. It turned out he was legitimate and it made me look flighty. But I refuse to get myself into that situation again.”

The barriers to women entering the world of entrepreneurship are well understood. Only 2-4% of venture capital funding goes to female applicants. This pattern is deeply entrenched. Research shows that even when investors are female, women are more likely to be asked about the risk of failure, while men are asked to expand on the potential for success. When women take big risks they are labelled irresponsible or unrealistic, yet when men do the same they are described as brave or ambitious.

This sexist dynamic has a more sinister side. A lobby group of British tech founders reported to the UK government’s inquiry into sexism in business that the overwhelming majority of women – 89% – had experienced sexual harassment or assault during fundraising. Reports of physical abuse, right up to rape, are common.

A 2024 poll by Code First Girls reported that 40% of female entrepreneurs encountered discrimination when they took on leadership roles. This included lewd comments, requests for sexual favours and online abuse.

This isn’t just a UK phenomenon. Research focusing on Japan, published this summer in the Journal of Business Venturing Insights, showed that “sexual harassment continues to hinder both individual success and broader economic innovation”. More than half (52%) of the female entrepreneurs involved in that study reported being victims of sexual harassment by everyone from investors (the primary perpetrators, making up 43% of cases) and mentors to customers and even members of business support groups.

Ute Stephan, professor of entrepreneurship at Kings College London, has interviewed hundreds of women for her research. “We hear very similar stories, and even worse, including up to rape,” she says. “It’s harrowing. A lot of us thought that in the 21st century these things wouldn’t happen any longer.”

“The people who talk to us are going to be selective,” she explains. “If you really struggle with trauma about this, you won’t be sharing it. There is a lot more sexual harassment going on, but people are just not talking about it for fear of retribution.”

Lea Turner, founder of the HoLT small business community, first became visible on LinkedIn when she launched a marketing company. In six months she went from claiming benefits to a six-figure income.

At first the abuse was an irritant. “On my first viral post, a man asked me what my favourite position was. I responded ‘CEO’, and blocked him,” she laughs. But it got worse. Men were posting from their business accounts, asking whether she was a sex worker and if she would accept gifts in return for sex.

Then came the outright aggression. In response to her success, a group of men in the same sector set up a group chat which they shared with her clients. “It was abusive, critical and demeaning,” she said, “saying things like ‘she’s only popular because of her tits’.” One man, based in New York, began sending drunken abusive messages and voicemails, including death threats. “He said, ‘I know you live on your own and I know where you live’, and sent me a picture of a woman screaming.” Police in the UK and the US located the man and he was found not to have been a serious threat. But this behaviour leaves its mark – on women, and on the economy.

Women know how exposed they are. They know they are unable to build their businesses freely. They are self-censoring their marketing and refusing meetings they feel may be dangerous. Many abandon attempts at entrepreneurship altogether. As Turner puts it: “You spend your whole life trying to be more confident, because we’ve always been told ‘be less’, but every time you get one of those messages it sets you back a few steps and it takes a while to get back on track.”

For women running their own business, the problem is that they must be visible, and that visibility leaves them relatively unprotected from abuse. Without the support of a corporate structure, there is no system of complaint. Most cases of abuse and harassment will be too minor to involve the police – but they are exhausting, relentless and personally damaging.

There is no evidence to suggest that male entrepreneurs are more likely to be abusers. And yet, it is worth noting that there is clear evidence connecting the narcissistic personality type to entrepreneurial success. This brings traits including an affinity for risk taking and illicit behaviour – the kind of men willing to risk their professional reputations.

Much of the harassment women face is digital, and the disinhibition effect of online spaces no doubt plays a part, making attacks or approaches that would be unthinkable in a face-to-face environment seem meaningless. In that sense, the problem is not unique; it is one every woman faces at some point in their working lives.

Given female entrepreneurs also exhibit that risk-taking behaviour, it’s more likely that they are willing to speak up about what is happening – to journalists, to university researchers, and to one another – despite knowing the potential impact on their careers. They have an appetite for that risk; the benefit of being open about what others continue to ignore is worth it for them.

So could anything fix this situation? Sexual harassment and abuse is endemic. Here in the UK, the government has set up a large dedicated unit to focus specifically on the problem of violence against women and girls, but many policy levers seem weak against growing culture of misogyny and pure rage at women living visibly in public and online – as a successful entrepreneur must – makes daily life so intolerable.

On an international scale, the abuse of women in business has huge implications for productivity and for growth. In an economy like ours, which is desperate for green shoots, repressing or discouraging half of the workforce is highly counterproductive. “We are not getting the growth we want, and it’s also making the business world less inclusive,” says professor Stephan of KCL.

“These lost opportunities mean that we’re certainly leaving billions in economic value on the table – ideas that were never realised, companies that were never launched, potential that was left unfulfilled – all because of gender,” says Josie Cox, author of Women Money Power. “That’s a cost that we’re all carrying; not just women. When women thrive economically, everyone thrives economically.”

So could anything fix this situation? Here in the UK, the government has set up a unit to focus on the problem, but policy levers seem weak against the growing culture of misogyny and rage directed at successful, visible women.

Cox hopes that support can help. “Many women have told me about the power of mentorship and creating support networks of people they can trust and who are prepared to champion and advocate for them. Having a powerful mentor, male or female, can be invaluable,” she says.

Each woman who succeeds, despite the risk of abuse, is breaking down the stereotype that women are not entrepreneurs. “Every one of those female founders is helping to create a new norm,” says Cox. “With time, it will dismantle the ludicrous barriers that so many women still face.”

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By Jonn Elledge

1. St Nicholas was purportedly the bishop of Myra, in what is now Turkey but was, in the fourth century, a Greek-speaking bit of the Roman empire. One day, so the story goes, he learned of three sisters who couldn’t afford dowries, and – to spare them from a life of prostitution, and their father from some mild embarrassment, which is just as bad – started secretly leaving them gold. This, following a fair bit of cleaning up, became a story about a nice old man who brings toys for children.

2. “Santa Claus” is a variant of the Dutch name for St Nick, Sinterklaas. The original Sinterklaas isn’t actually much like Santa – he arrives by boat from Spain in mid-November, accompanied by Zwarte Piet (“Black Pete”), a helper dressed in what is euphemistically described as “Moorish attire” and (there’s no easy way of saying this) blackface, before distributing presents on December 5. His name, though, was brought to the Americas by Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam and anglicised after the British showed up and turned it into New York.

3. St Nick’s work was popularised in North America by the 1823 poem A Visit from St Nicholas, probably written by Clement Clarke Moore but possibly not (I’m not going there). Its portrayal of a jolly, fur-clad fat man, travelling on a flying sleigh pulled by reindeer, became – via Hollywood, Coca-Cola adverts etc – the most popular image of the Christmas gift-giver throughout the world.

4. Not just in America, either. Today, Rovaniemi airport in Finland styles itself as the “official airport of Santa Claus”, even though, as we’ll see, the Finns have entirely different ideas of Christmas tradition.

5. Santa Claus was not, originally, the same as Father Christmas. The traditional personification of Christmas in England was bearded and robed, but started out as a symbol of adult feasting and merry-making and came dressed in a crown of holly. As the 19th century wore on and Christmas became more focused on children, though, he became increasingly identified with Santa, until today they’re synonymous.

6. It’s a reminder that Britain is closer to Europe than America that French children get their prezzies from Père Noël or, sometimes, Papa Noël. They leave their shoes by the fireplace stuffed with carrots and other treats for his donkey, Gui (“Mistletoe”); when they wake up, if they’ve been good, said carrots have been replaced by presents. Gifts must thus be small enough to fit into a shoe, which obviously places a limit on the chances that Père Noël will bring you La PlayStation.

7. Chilean children get their presents from Viejito Pascuero. He’s really just Santa again, but worth noting because, while the name is generally translated as “Father Christmas”, it literally means “Old Man Easter”.

8. Not every tradition relies on a Santa variant. Martin Luther, the German theologian who kicked off the Reformation in 1517, promoted the idea that gifts were brought by baby Jesus himself, in a transparent attempt to ensure that no one forgot what Christmas was really meant to be about. The generous holy tyke is known as Christkind in German, but Gesù Bambino in Italian, Ježíšek (”Little Jesus”) in Czech, Niño Dios (”God child”) in Latin America and so on.

9. In Iceland, meanwhile, presents are brought by the Jólasveinar, or “Yule Lads”: the 13 prank-loving sons of a pair of child-eating giants who visit one by one over the 13 nights before Christmas and leave presents in shoes left on windowsills. If the child has been naughty, they leave a potato instead, which one can only assume must symbolise the vegetables the child can expect to be cooked with.

10. The Russian equivalent of Santa Claus, Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost), has his roots in pagan Slavic mythology. He dresses in a long fur coat, carries a magic staff, and unlike most equivalent figures is accompanied by a woman, his granddaughter the Snow Maiden. They bring presents on the New Year’s holiday, which replaced Christmas during the anti-religious Soviet era.

11. The nisse is a diminutive, white-bearded household spirit, who wears a red cap and looks a lot like a garden gnome. Since the mid-19th century, as Santa Claus became more popular worldwide, such gnomes increasingly brought presents to the people of Scandinavia, displacing…

12 …Julbocken/Joulupukki, the “Yule Goat”, whose beat is Sweden and Finland, and which seems to have its origins in the pagan tradition that thunder god Thor’s chariot was drawn across the sky by a pair of goats. Once upon a time, the goat was scary and demanded you give it presents; then it was nice and gave them out; now it’s basically just Santa, but mystifyingly named after a goat.

13. Possibly the weirdest Christmas tradition of all is the Catalan Tió de Nadal, or “Christmas log”: a grinning bit of wood that children are expected to care for and feed in the run-up to Christmas, before beating it on Christmas day until it, er, poos presents. Only small ones, though – sweets and the like – as big ones will be brought by the three wise men on January 6. So don’t go blaming your poor log care for the fact you never got that Scalextric you asked for.

Demre
Modern Turkish name of Myra, the Lycian town where St Nicholas was bishop

1823
First publication of the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, also known as ’Twas the Night Before Christmas

1863
Harper’s Weekly prints a cartoon by Thomas Nast showing Santa distributing presents to soldiers fighting in the union army

1930
Fred Mizen paints Santa in Coca-Cola corporate colours to promote a popular brand of soda. They stick

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By Nigel Warburton

Sigmund Freud identified three revolutions in human thought. First was the Copernican revolution, the recognition that our planet is not the centre of the universe, but rather that it revolves around the sun. The second paradigm shift came with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection: that made it harder to maintain that human beings are fundamentally different from the rest of the animal kingdom. Freud believed that his own contribution, the idea that our deepest desires are unconscious, would bring about a third revolution.

Each of these takes on the world has had far-reaching consequences. Each undermined a different kind of human hubris: the belief that celestial bodies move around us, the belief that human beings are special, the belief that the decisive factors in how we behave are transparent to us.

Of these, the Darwinian revolution is probably the most profound in its implications. The philosopher and scientist Daniel Dennett described it as a “universal acid” that ate into almost everything we had previously believed about ourselves. It provided, for example, a plausible mechanism by which natural processes could have led to the adaptation of species to their environment without any need for a divine creator. Prior to the publication of On the Origin of Species on November 29, 1859, the benevolent God hypothesis provided the best explanation for how animals and plants were so well-suited to their environments.

The apparent design of, for example, the human eye, was best explained by attributing its seeming purposeful construction to the existence of a benevolent, extremely powerful Divine Watchmaker, a view defended by the theologian-philosopher William Paley (1743–1805). After Darwin there was no need for such an extravagant hypothesis to explain this.

There’s a fourth revolution, however, that Freud neglected to mention, one that occurred in the second half of the 18th century. A thinker who pre-dated Darwin smoothed the way for his theory and shifted humanity’s self-understanding in a different way. Our view of our place in the universe was shaken to the core by a Scot whose name is rarely mentioned, and certainly not in the same breath as Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud.

I’m referring to the great geologist James Hutton (1726–97). A significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, friend of David Hume and Adam Smith, Hutton doesn’t get the press he deserves. I only know about him because I’m reading Jamie Woodward’s recently published A Little History of the Earth (Yale University Press), a book that in 40 short chapters brings 4.54 billion years of Earth’s history alive, and which pays tribute to the scientists and other thinkers who, driven by a passionate curiosity, have helped us understand more about our planet, its past, and our place in that history.

Woodward credits Hutton with overturning the mainstream theories of the Irish theologian James Ussher (1581–1656). In his Annals of the Old Testament (published in Latin in 1650), Ussher had declared with implausible precision that creation happened on October 23, 4004BC.

For 200 years Ussher’s timeline dominated. It was even printed in some editions of the King James Bible. There were sceptics, including Edmond Halley and the Comte de Buffon, who provided evidence to the contrary, but Hutton proposed a far longer timeline, based on his detailed observations of rocks and erosion, which he maintained could only have come to be as they are if Earth had a far longer history than thought.

Earth, on this new view, was not a recent creation, but rather must be an ancient planet. That was the only plausible explanation for the geological traces. This was how Hutton read the rocks. And he was right, though he was unable to determine precisely how far back Earth’s history stretched.

With Hutton’s systematic analysis of the strata the idea of deep time was born. According to Woodward, Hutton was “the first geologist to make convincing arguments about the reality of deep time in Earth History”. The geological evidence provided a powerful case for the view that the Earth had existed for far longer than Ussher and co believed. Eventually Hutton’s views became mainstream. Earth’s creation is now estimated to have occurred some 4.54 billion years ago. That extent of deep time is almost impossible to imagine.

There are clear messages here. We’re a minuscule blip on the timeline of our planet’s history. For billions of years, it would have been uninhabitable for us. There are no guarantees it will remain habitable, and there are signs it might not. The planet doesn’t care. We, however, should.

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By Jonn Elledge

1. Copenhagen, the capital and largest city of the kingdom of Denmark, lies mainly on the island of Zealand, although some of the eastern suburbs are on the much smaller island of Amager. Both are separated from Sweden by the narrow Øresund strait, which links the North Sea to the Baltic, and lie a good 120 miles away from the sticky-out peninsula one may be most minded to associate with Denmark, the aptly named Jutland.

2. The foundation of Copenhagen, like much of Denmark’s early history, is lost to the mists of time. (Honestly, there clearly were Danish kings before the accession of the historically verifiable Gorm the Old around 936, but most of the records get a bit Beowulf-y.) But archaeology suggests that fishermen and merchants seem to have realised the natural harbour would make it a good place for herring fishing some time before the earliest written references to the Portus Mercatorum – “Merchants’ Harbour” or, in medieval Danish, Købmannahavn – some time in the 12th century.

3. If you’ve ever wondered why Denmark put its capital so far to the east that it almost falls out of Denmark altogether, that’s because at its medieval territorial height the kingdom was significantly bigger. At various points, it included Norway, Schleswig and Holstein (now in Germany), large chunks of Sweden and even, for a few decades of the 11th century before the Normans showed up, England. Alas for the Danes, Scania, the region that lies directly across the Øresund, was ceded to Sweden in the Treaty of Roskilde of 1658.

4. For much of its history, Copenhagen was surrounded by a ring of defensive ramparts. These are long gone – except for a brief stretch of raised earth in the eastern suburb of Christianshavn, and the capital at Kastellet – but their path did provide the city with sites for a series of parks, museums and the City Hall when they came down in the 19th century.

5. The ramparts had, in any case, done little to prevent the Royal Navy from bombarding the shit out of the place in both 1801 and 1807, so as to make it clear to the Danes that they really did not want to ally with Napoleon.

6. Among the things visitors without cannons may wish to check out is the Tivoli Gardens, one of the world’s oldest amusement parks, which opened in 1843. Today its attractions include four rollercoasters (including one dating, a touch unnervingly, from 1914), a dozen other rides, concert halls, theatres, a pagoda, and extensively landscaped and beautifully lit gardens.

7. Those who attend in summer may also wish to check out the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, one of Europe’s largest. By the time of the creation of the formal festival in 1979, the city’s popularity with US jazz musicians had already created an extensive jazz scene, and inspired the name of pianist Duke Jordan’s 1974 album Flight to Denmark.

8. Since 1947, the city’s urban development has followed the Fingerplanen (“Finger plan”), with development to meet demand for homes and offices following five “fingers” along S-train commuter rail lines extending from the “palm” of the city proper. In between lie green “wedges” (the hand metaphor rather breaks down here). This is Copenhagen’s answer to the green belt, land intended to provide space for agriculture and recreation, and to ensure residents have access to the countryside.

9. The pleasing five-finger pattern has also been disrupted by the addition of a sixth finger, along the line to the Øresund Link to Sweden’s third city, Malmö. Since 2000, as fans of the hit crime drama The Bridge (Bron/Broen) will know, the combination of a fixed link shared by a motorway and frequent commuter trains, and the fact that the two countries speak closely related languages, has allowed the two to function largely as a single metropolitan area.

10. The bridge, incidentally, is not just a bridge. The 4km of the link closest to Copenhagen is actually a tunnel, connecting to an 8km bridge. The two meet at the artificial island of Peberholm, named to be a pair with the naturally occurring Saltholm.

11. In 1971, artists and activists broke into an abandoned military barracks on an island to the east of the city centre – right next to those surviving ramparts, actually – and declared the area independent of all Danish government laws and regulations. The resulting anarchist commune, Freetown Christiania, still occupies the site half a century later, as a land of colourful streets and informal architecture – although residents worked with the authorities to clear the drug dealers out of the thoroughfare known as Pusher Street in 2024.

12. And finally, should you fancy a taste of the traditional Danish cuisine Smørrebrød – a sort of open-faced sandwich on dark rye bread, whose name translates as “butter bread” – you could do worse than go to the excellent all-you-can-eat buffet under the Workers Museum. The two sides of Danish life in harmony, there.

1416
Date around which Copenhagen became capital of the Kalmar Union, which at the time united Denmark with Sweden and Norway

667k
Population of the city proper

1.4m
Population of Copenhagen’s urban area

1 in 9
Proportion of Danes based in the city

35 mins
Travel time to Sweden, by train every 20 minutes

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