Georgie Newson is a writer living in Oxford.
On 23 May, the day after he called a general election, Rishi Sunak said in a radio interview that his government’s flagship Rwanda deportation scheme will only go ahead if the Tories are re-elected on 4 July. This admission came as a surprise: many had assumed that part of the rationale for calling an early election was to get a campaign boost as the flights got underway. For anyone...
One of the shiniest new initiatives at COP28 in Dubai last December was the world’s first ‘Voluntary Recycling Credit’ scheme, which will allow companies to ‘offset’ their waste products by purchasing credits from recyclers. The marketplace for these credits will be blockchain-based, so that transactions can be tracked. Building on the dubious success of...
On 11 November, Armistice Day, some 800,000 people, a crowd larger than the population of Manchester, congregated in Central London to march in solidarity with Palestine. Measuring the exact size of demonstrations on this scale is difficult. In 2019, the Met said that it didn’t ‘have the expertise’ to make accurate calculations and would no longer release estimates. That...
The Public Order Act received royal assent on 2 May, just in time for the coronation. Its explicit aim is to combat the civil resistance tactics adopted by climate activists, with new offences including ‘locking on’, ‘being equipped for locking on’, ‘tunnelling’ and ‘obstruction etc of major transport works disruption’. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights criticised the legislation as ‘neither necessary nor proportionate’. Meanwhile, the government is processing the 115 bids for North Sea fossil fuel licences that have been made since applications were reopened at the end of last year. The amount of carbon dioxide produced by just one of the unexploited oil fields, Rosebank, will be greater than the combined annual emissions of the 28 lowest-income countries.
‘We’ve made this programme for Black parents,’ Mike Phillips said, introducing ‘Black Teachers’ on BBC2 in 1973. ‘We’ve got no intention of wasting our time on proving things that we all know.’ ‘Black Teachers’ was an episode of Open Door, a product of the BBC’s Community Programme Unit, founded a year earlier to profile groups and causes that had been ‘unheard or neglected’ by the media establishment. Its archive has been inaccessible for decades, but People Make Television, an exhibition at Raven Row in Spitalfields until 25 March, aims to change that, presenting a tightly curated – but still vast – selection of the material produced by the unit and its offshoots.
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