Latest news with #20thCentury
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Litter, shoplifting, private security guards: Britain is turning into a Third World country
It was little things that made me fall in love with Britain. You didn't have to count your change in shops. You almost never saw private security guards. You could drink from the tap. You could flick a switch and the light would actually come on. You could get into a taxi, confident, not only that you wouldn't be mugged, but that you'd be driven by the shortest route and charged the correct fare. If you stopped at a red light, you would not have every car behind you hooting in fury. You could send valuables by post. Arriving as a seven-year-old from Peru, I felt a glow of wonder at these things that, even now, has not entirely left me. I thought then, and I still think, that people who have grown up in this country are unconscionably blasé about what made it special. Only much later did I find a phrase to explain what differentiated Britain, not just from Peru, but from most places. That phrase was 'social capital'. Because Britain was a high-trust society, everyday transactions were frictionless. The cost of doing business was low, because neither side had to take expensive precautions against fraud. Social capital gave Brits a sense of patriotism and responsibility. They accepted election results when their party lost, obeyed laws with which they disagreed, paid their taxes grumblingly but honestly. That, at least, was how it used to work – to the wonder of foreign visitors throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. But our social capital is flooding away. We see it in lots of ways. Take the epidemic of shoplifting. Last year, retailers logged 20.4 million incidents of theft, an increase of 3.7 million on 2023. Or look at our filthy streets. The touristy parts of central London manage to pick up most of the debris, but every other part of the capital is grubbier than before lockdown, with fast-food wrappings and cartons blowing about forlornly. The Government's response is to ban single-use vapes. Now vapes do contribute to the detritus, but that reaction is a classic example of politicians tackling a side-issue because they can't bring themselves to face the main one – rather as they responded to the Manchester Arena bombing, not by cracking down on the immigration loopholes that had let the Abedis into Britain, but by requiring staff at small venues to do anti-terrorism training. The problem is not that vapes are messy, it is that people no longer care how their streets look. Why this has happened – largely over the past five years – is an underexplored question. Have we imported a new population from countries where dropping litter is normal? Is it a consequence of fewer people being in offices, either because they have discovered invalidity benefits or because they are pretending to work from home? Or was it the lockdown itself? Did being cut off from human contact, raptly scrolling through online conspiracy theories, push a generation into anomie? We should be asking the same questions about stealing from shops, which now costs retailers (or, rather, non-shoplifting customers) £2 billion a year. The thing that used to hold most people back from shoplifting was not fear of criminal sanction – few are caught, fewer detained and almost none prosecuted – so much as a feeling that it was unacceptable. That feeling, like so many things, was vitiated by the pandemic. At the same time, mass immigration dilutes the homogeneity on which high-trust societies depend. When a nation's character alters, the enforcement of its laws shifts before the laws themselves. In theory, we still have statutes against theft. In practice, the police are less interested in enforcing them than in going after people with unfashionable views. It is unthinkable that someone like Lucy Connolly, jailed for an intemperate post, would be in prison had she nicked stuff from M&S – not even had she been caught a dozen times before. Coppers are ceasing to be citizens in uniform and becoming enforcers of state ideology. The task of protecting property thus falls to everyone else. It is in this way that we are most visibly becoming a low-trust society, reminiscent of the poorer parts of Latin America or Africa. The rich are retreating into gated communities, hiring security firms, posting sentries (these are especially obvious outside synagogues, which have felt unprotected since anti-Israel protesters were allowed to behave menacingly at their doors while the police looked on). Walls are springing up – including a hideous new fence around Parliament. In my native Lima, big houses had uniformed watchmen (Latin American Spanish is full of delicious English loanwords, and a security guard is known as a 'guachimán'). How long before London goes the same way? For those who cannot afford their own guachimanes, there is always do-it-yourself enforcement. A news item about a couple who traced their stolen Jaguar through its airtag and stole it back has unleashed an online flood of similar recollections. Always the same story: a car stolen, owners calling police to beg them to intercept it before the thieves found the airtag, the police sitting on their hands, the owners acting themselves. Private citizens are plugging the gaps left by our crumbling state apparatus. A group of volunteers has been washing graffiti from Tube trains – prompting the extraordinary response that they should have left it to the experts as they might be using the wrong cleaning fluids. Robert Jenrick, the tireless shadow justice secretary, spent a morning personally confronting fare dodgers, asking them on camera why they felt they should not pay like everyone else. The numpties at Transport for London, sensing that they were being shown up, complained that he had not sought their permission to film on their property. I happen to believe that lots of things that are badly done by the state could be better done by private individuals. I don't understand why the Government needs to own and operate London Underground, and there is a strand of libertarian thought that holds that most of the functions of the police should indeed be hived off to private firms. But we are a million miles away from libertarianism. We have the highest taxes since the 1940s, we have more than tripled the national debt since the turn of the century and we are passing pettifogging laws on everything from the regulation of football to what employers must do to prevent their staff from overhearing the wrong things in the workplace. It is in this sense that we are most authentically becoming like a developing nation. A Government that aspires to do things that are none of its business simultaneously fails in its core responsibilities – above all, in its duty to provide a functioning justice system that protects property. How long before we move from confronting people who push through ticket barriers to actual vigilantism? A friend in Islington tells me that his local Co-op recently removed some items from its shelves and put everything else – even food – behind anti-theft locks. It was responding to a spate of aggressive shoplifting that had seen its guachimán beaten up twice. As word spread, local residents decided to organise a rota of cricket-bat-wielding volunteers to protect the shop. But, Islington being Islington, there were enough lawyers on the local WhatsApp group to point out that the volunteers would end up being arrested. What a sad decline. Lee Kuan Yew once recalled how, when he was studying law at Cambridge, he had taken the Tube to Piccadilly Circus and had been astonished to see people buying newspapers and leaving the correct price in an honesty box, open to any passer-by. Such behaviour is now unthinkable in Piccadilly Circus. It might be found in Singapore, which has successfully inculcated in its huge immigrant population a sense of national cohesion. But in Britain, partly because of what Eric Kaufmann calls asymmetric multiculturalism – that is, celebrating minorities while denigrating the majority – any such sense of trust is evaporating. We are sliding into what used to be called the Third World. And the worst of it is that we don't seem to care. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Litter, shoplifting, private security guards: Britain is turning into a Third World country
It was little things that made me fall in love with Britain. You didn't have to count your change in shops. You almost never saw private security guards. You could drink from the tap. You could flick a switch and the light would actually come on. You could get into a taxi, confident, not only that you wouldn't be mugged, but that you'd be driven by the shortest route and charged the correct fare. If you stopped at a red light, you would not have every car behind you hooting in fury. You could send valuables by post. Arriving as a seven-year-old from Peru, I felt a glow of wonder at these things that, even now, has not entirely left me. I thought then, and I still think, that people who have grown up in this country are unconscionably blasé about what made it special. Only much later did I find a phrase to explain what differentiated Britain, not just from Peru, but from most places. That phrase was 'social capital'. Because Britain was a high-trust society, everyday transactions were frictionless. The cost of doing business was low, because neither side had to take expensive precautions against fraud. Social capital gave Brits a sense of patriotism and responsibility. They accepted election results when their party lost, obeyed laws with which they disagreed, paid their taxes grumblingly but honestly. That, at least, was how it used to work – to the wonder of foreign visitors throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. But our social capital is flooding away. We see it in lots of ways. Take the epidemic of shoplifting. Last year, retailers logged 20.4 million incidents of theft, an increase of 3.7 million on 2023. Or look at our filthy streets. The touristy parts of central London manage to pick up most of the debris, but every other part of the capital is grubbier than before lockdown, with fast-food wrappings and cartons blowing about forlornly. The Government's response is to ban single-use vapes. Now vapes do contribute to the detritus, but that reaction is a classic example of politicians tackling a side-issue because they can't bring themselves to face the main one – rather as they responded to the Manchester Arena bombing, not by cracking down on the immigration loopholes that had let the Abedis into Britain, but by requiring staff at small venues to do anti-terrorism training. The problem is not that vapes are messy, it is that people no longer care how their streets look. Why this has happened – largely over the past five years – is an underexplored question. Have we imported a new population from countries where dropping litter is normal? Is it a consequence of fewer people being in offices, either because they have discovered invalidity benefits or because they are pretending to work from home? Or was it the lockdown itself? Did being cut off from human contact, raptly scrolling through online conspiracy theories, push a generation into anomie? We should be asking the same questions about stealing from shops, which now costs retailers (or, rather, non-shoplifting customers) £2 billion a year. The thing that used to hold most people back from shoplifting was not fear of criminal sanction – few are caught, fewer detained and almost none prosecuted – so much as a feeling that it was unacceptable. That feeling, like so many things, was vitiated by the pandemic. At the same time, mass immigration dilutes the homogeneity on which high-trust societies depend. When a nation's character alters, the enforcement of its laws shifts before the laws themselves. In theory, we still have statutes against theft. In practice, the police are less interested in enforcing them than in going after people with unfashionable views. It is unthinkable that someone like Lucy Connolly, jailed for an intemperate post, would be in prison had she nicked stuff from M&S – not even had she been caught a dozen times before. Coppers are ceasing to be citizens in uniform and becoming enforcers of state ideology. The task of protecting property thus falls to everyone else. It is in this way that we are most visibly becoming a low-trust society, reminiscent of the poorer parts of Latin America or Africa. The rich are retreating into gated communities, hiring security firms, posting sentries (these are especially obvious outside synagogues, which have felt unprotected since anti-Israel protesters were allowed to behave menacingly at their doors while the police looked on). Walls are springing up – including a hideous new fence around Parliament. In my native Lima, big houses had uniformed watchmen (Latin American Spanish is full of delicious English loanwords, and a security guard is known as a 'guachimán'). How long before London goes the same way? For those who cannot afford their own guachimanes, there is always do-it-yourself enforcement. A news item about a couple who traced their stolen Jaguar through its airtag and stole it back has unleashed an online flood of similar recollections. Always the same story: a car stolen, owners calling police to beg them to intercept it before the thieves found the airtag, the police sitting on their hands, the owners acting themselves. Private citizens are plugging the gaps left by our crumbling state apparatus. A group of volunteers has been washing graffiti from Tube trains – prompting the extraordinary response that they should have left it to the experts as they might be using the wrong cleaning fluids. Robert Jenrick, the tireless shadow justice secretary, spent a morning personally confronting fare dodgers, asking them on camera why they felt they should not pay like everyone else. The numpties at Transport for London, sensing that they were being shown up, complained that he had not sought their permission to film on their property. I happen to believe that lots of things that are badly done by the state could be better done by private individuals. I don't understand why the Government needs to own and operate London Underground, and there is a strand of libertarian thought that holds that most of the functions of the police should indeed be hived off to private firms. But we are a million miles away from libertarianism. We have the highest taxes since the 1940s, we have more than tripled the national debt since the turn of the century and we are passing pettifogging laws on everything from the regulation of football to what employers must do to prevent their staff from overhearing the wrong things in the workplace. It is in this sense that we are most authentically becoming like a developing nation. A Government that aspires to do things that are none of its business simultaneously fails in its core responsibilities – above all, in its duty to provide a functioning justice system that protects property. How long before we move from confronting people who push through ticket barriers to actual vigilantism? A friend in Islington tells me that his local Co-op recently removed some items from its shelves and put everything else – even food – behind anti-theft locks. It was responding to a spate of aggressive shoplifting that had seen its guachimán beaten up twice. As word spread, local residents decided to organise a rota of cricket-bat-wielding volunteers to protect the shop. But, Islington being Islington, there were enough lawyers on the local WhatsApp group to point out that the volunteers would end up being arrested. What a sad decline. Lee Kuan Yew once recalled how, when he was studying law at Cambridge, he had taken the Tube to Piccadilly Circus and had been astonished to see people buying newspapers and leaving the correct price in an honesty box, open to any passer-by. Such behaviour is now unthinkable in Piccadilly Circus. It might be found in Singapore, which has successfully inculcated in its huge immigrant population a sense of national cohesion. But in Britain, partly because of what Eric Kaufmann calls asymmetric multiculturalism – that is, celebrating minorities while denigrating the majority – any such sense of trust is evaporating.
BBC News
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Adam Curtis takes us into a world gone Shifty
The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis gives a guide to some of the key moments from his new series his documentaries, Adam Curtis has taken us everywhere from Russia during the breakdown of the Soviet Union, in TraumaZone, to the war in Afghanistan, in Bitter Curtis, whose work has been called "dazzling" and "terrifying" by critics, has set his sights on Britain at the end of the 20th century for the five-part BBC series time Curtis's signature style sees him use a bizarre array of archive clips to explore, he says, how "life in Britain today has become strange - a hazy dream-like flux in which no-one can predict what is coming next".In Shifty, clips of the major players of the era – Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair – exist alongside surreal moments sourced from the BBC's extensive archives, like avant-garde hairdressing competitions, suburban line dancing parties and children hot-wiring a the uninitiated, his documentaries can feel impenetrable, so we spoke to Curtis to curate and explain some of the key clips from the new also suggested a title for each clip that perfectly places viewers into the strange and murky world of Shifty. 'One of the few moments of honesty' One section details the rise of the musical remixes in the 1980s, and its societal implications – how, in Curtis's words, "we are trapped by a cascade of endlessly replayed images, songs, dreams from the past".However, he admits, "that's the way this series was made, so I'm just as bad. If it's become a prison, I may be one of the jailers."One way Curtis remixes the past is by reusing an interview with Sir Alan Budd that Curtis filmed for the 1992 documentary Pandora's a remarkably honest interview, the one-time chief economic adviser to the Treasury during Thatcher's tenure worries that "the people making the policy decisions… never believed for a moment this was the correct way to bring down inflation."They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working class.""I've always been fascinated by that interview that Budd gave," says Curtis. "It's one of the few moments of honesty I've ever had from someone in power like that being interviewed." 'A past that was about to go' As a young BBC employee, Curtis worked on That's Life. The show combined consumer affairs with lighter stories – most famously, a dog that could 'say' the word credits his ability to juggle tragic and comic tones to this early role: "It showed me that you could go from a badly-built housing estate built on poisonous waste ground to a talking dog."In Shifty, clips of societal unrest exist alongside Bruno, a dog who is, according to his vet, "changing his sex" – their male organs disappearing and their female ones says that it was Bruno's owner that drew him to the clip: "The way she's sitting and her hair," he says, "it felt like a past that was about to go."Animals in his work can often represent our secret lives, he says – "they are these creatures who live with us who probably have a lot of hidden knowledge about us."For Curtis, animals also counterpoint what he calls the "highly pretentious" elements of his work: "They just entertain people." 'A tragic figure' In this clip, an archivist at Cambridge University takes one of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's handbags out of a box, noting how the bag still smells strongly of her Thatcher's presence can be felt in much of the series, as we see the effects of her policies in the 1980s and 90s. Before Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, Curtis argues there was "a collective model of society, where people came together in factories, were exploited, then realised they had power as a collective group."He feels, however, that the closure of industries like mining led to "a society full of fragmented individuals who were powerful in the way they thought about their own desires, but actually on their own were powerless."Despite this, Curtis sees Thatcher as a "tragic figure", who unleashed forces she could not control."She was the last politician who had an idea of how to change the country," he explains. "She wanted to create a society in which politics doesn't have as much effect as it did, and should allow individuals to be loose and free." 'Ever more irrational assumptions' Another recurring character in Shifty is scientist Stephen Hawking, whose theories about multiple universes destabilised how we think about putting together the series, Curtis began to think of Hawking in parallel to Thatcher, he explains."She believed that rationality applied through money would regenerate the country. He believed that the rational power of mathematics will lead you to a unified theory that will explain the whole world."What fascinated Curtis about Hawking was how his seemingly rational theories led him to "ever more irrational assumptions"."When he says that matter is eaten by black holes, other scientists say that cannot be true. So he says there must be other universes where they don't eat the matter, so it balances out. To me, that's absurd."However, Curtis began to be touched by Hawking's humanity, like in a clip when we see him saying goodnight to his child. 'Very good trashy music' One of the threads of Shifty is what Curtis calls "the rise in confidence among people to talk about your own feelings, your own experience".This is shown in one of the documentarian's favourite clips, which sees two boys in Swindon discussing the banning of the song Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood due to its sexual imagery. The clip, from one of a series of public access shows which allowed members of the public air time on the BBC in the 1980s, ends with one of the boys out of nowhere adding that the government should legalise their willingness to criticise the BBC while appearing on it, we see a lack of deference to authority that Curtis thinks would have been unimaginable two decades also gave the filmmaker the chance to use the song Relax, one of a number of pop songs that feature in the song is central to the series's idea that the late 20th century in Britain was "wild and extraordinary, and had some very good trashy music in it, but it also unleashed a corrosive force".Shifty is available on BBC iPlayer on Saturday 14 June.
Washington Post
11-06-2025
- Science
- Washington Post
Uncovering the Pacific Northwest's violent history and toxic legacy
'Murderland' is, by design, an extremely disturbing book. To begin with, there are the blunt descriptions of multiple horrific crimes perpetrated by serial killers prowling America, mainly around the Pacific Northwest, in the second half of the 20th century. Next, the scathing parade of statistics detailing the amounts of lead, arsenic and other toxic chemicals spewed into the atmosphere by smelting companies across the country. Then, there are the references to numerous scientific studies, dating back to the 1920s, linking high blood lead levels in children to behavioral problems including cruelty and aggression.
Yahoo
08-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
7Up's Original Formula Contained A Substance That Really Put The 'Up' In The Drink
Back at the turn of the 19th and early 20th century, when soft drinks like Coca-Cola and Pepsi were first created, it was mainly pharmacists who came up with these beloved (and demonized) drinks with the idea of creating health tonics. As an example, Pepsi was named after the medical term for indigestion, that is, dyspepsia. But back then, what was considered healthy was a bit different from today. While Coke actually contained small amounts of cocaine, 7Up contained lithium, a mood-stabilizer that today is used to treat bipolar disorder and some forms of depression. 7Up's inventor -- Charles Leiper Grigg, who wasn't a pharmacist -- highlighted the use of lithium citrate, a naturally occurring alkali metal with psychotropic (or mood altering) effects, in his soda. He allegedly named it Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon Lime Soda, but it was more likely simply called 7Up from the beginning. The meaning of this mysterious moniker has been lost to time, but the "up" part may be related to lithium's enhancing effects. A the time Grigg created his new drink, lithium was a bit of a mystery and didn't come into use as a psychiatric drug until around 20 years later. Read more: 11 Ginger Ale Brands, Ranked From Worst To Best Charles Lieper Grigg, who had started the Howdy Corporation in 1920, began working on the formula for a new lemon-flavored soda. In a crowded field of around 600 competitors, he needed to find a way to stand out. By 1929, just weeks before the stock market crash that helped lead to the Great Depression, Grigg had perfected his new soda. There were a few key differences between his new concoction and the competition. It was a lemon-lime soda with a bit less sugar and more fizz. And, of course, there was the lithium. Among the supposed curative effects of 7Up, Grigg successfully promoted it as a hangover cure, which is funny considering that a few decades later someone came up with the idea of combining Seagram's 7 and 7Up, a hugely popular highball in the 1970s and (likely) the cause of more than a few hangovers. Also like Coke, which had removed any cocaine from its soda by 1929, 7Up removed lithium in 1948, after studies determined the possibility of serious side effects from its overuse. Even without the lithium, 7Up continued to grow in popularity, knocking out the competition, such as the now-discontinued Sierra Mist. The days of drug-laden soft drinks are over, but their descendants live on. Read the original article on Chowhound.
