Category: Academic Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nima Shokri, Professor, Applied Engineering, United Nations University

Iran’s current wave of protests is often interpreted as having been sparked by inflation, currency collapse, corruption and repression. These explanations are not wrong, but they are incomplete.

Beneath the country’s political and economic crisis lies a more destabilising force that is still largely missing from international analysis: environmental breakdown.

Iran is experiencing not one environmental crisis but the convergence of several: water shortages, land subsidence, air pollution and energy failure. All added together, life is a struggle for survival.

So when citizens protest today, they are not only resisting authoritarian governance. They are responding to a state that can no longer reliably provide the most basic forms of security: water to drink, air to breathe, land to stand on, and electricity to carry on their daily lives.

From 2003-2019, Iran lost an estimated 211 cubic kilometres of groundwater, or twice its annual water consumption, leaving the country facing water bankruptcy. Excessive pumping – driven by agricultural expansion, energy subsidies and weak regulation – has caused land subsidence rates of up to 30cm per year, affecting areas where around 14 million people, more than one-fifth of the population, live.

Provinces such as Kerman, Alborz, Khorasan Razavi, Isfahan and the capital Tehran now have more than a quarter of their population living with the risk of subsidence. In all, large sections of the country – particularly around the capital Tehran, the agricultural centre Rafsanjan, and the city of Mashhad – are subsiding at alarming rates of close to 10cm per year.

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Read more:
Iran’s record drought and cheap fuel have sparked an air pollution crisis – but the real causes run much deeper

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Subsidence has cracked homes, damaged railways, destabilised highways, and threatened airports as well as Unesco-listed heritage sites.

Iran’s lack of water has become politically explosive. When reservoirs fall to extremely low levels, when taps run dry at night in major cities, or when farmers watch rivers and lakes disappear, grievances turn into protest.

As wetlands, lakes and riverbeds dry up, their exposed surfaces generate dust and salt storms that can blanket cities hundreds of kilometres away.

At the same time, chronic electricity shortages – caused by underinvestment, inefficiency and poor infrastructure – have forced power plants and industries to burn heavy fuels. The result is extreme concentrations of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and fine particulate matter.

Ignoring environmental problems

The World Health Organization notes that Iran is facing severe problems in terms of its air quality. Around 11% of deaths and 52% of the burden of diseases across the country are attributable to environmental risk factors.

In recent months, major cities have repeatedly closed schools and offices due to hazardous air quality, while hospitals report surges in respiratory and cardiovascular emergencies.

These environmental failures do not exist in isolation. They are the predictable outcome of decades of distorted national priorities.

Since the 1980s, Iran has channelled vast financial, institutional and political resources into ideological expansion and regional disputes — supporting groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen – while systematically underinvesting in domestic environmental governance, infrastructure renewal and job creation.

Meanwhile, Iran’s political economy has been structured around energy subsidies and megaprojects that reward short-term extraction over long-term sustainability. Cheap fuel has encouraged water-intensive agriculture and inefficient industry.

Environmental agencies have remained fragmented and politically weak, unable to restrain more powerful ministries or governmentally linked economic actors. International isolation has compounded these failures.

Sanctions deepened the environmental crisis by restricting access to modern monitoring technologies, clean-energy systems, efficient irrigation and external finance.

While much of the world invested in technology and regulation to curb pollution and stabilise water systems, Iran doubled down on emergency fixes that deepened ecological damage rather than containing it. Sanctions and climate stress amplified the problems, but the root cause lay in state priorities that have consistently ignored environmental security.

The political consequences are now unmistakable. Environmental stress reshapes not only why people protest, but where and how. Maps of unrest in 92 Iranian cities reveal a clear pattern. Protests increasingly erupt in areas where there is groundwater collapse, land subsidence and water rationing.

Water shortages and protest

In provinces such as Tehran, Khuzestan in the south-west and Isfahan in central Iran – all areas with high levels of protest – there are acute water shortages, subsidence causing damage to roads and pipelines, and disputes over access to water.

In other cities such as Kermanshah and Ilam, intensifying unrest reflects the interaction of major environmental problems of drought, rainfall decline and groundwater depletion with severe economic problems and poverty.

But Iran is not unique in this regard. Similar conflicts over water and economic issues have played a destabilising role in neighbouring Syria. Prolonged drought, conflicts over water and access to it, and limited rainfall have affected crop yields and animals there. Hundreds of thousands of people living in agricultural communities have been driven to cities and camps nearby in a desperate attempt to survive.

Water mismanagement and access to decent drinking water have also fuelled unrest in Basra in the south of Iraq.

Iran is not facing a cyclical protest problem that can be stabilised through repression, subsidies or tactical concessions. It is confronting a structural collapse of the systems that make governance possible, and are at the heart of human survival.

When there’s no water and the air becomes unbreathable, the social contract fractures. Citizens no longer debate ideology or reform timelines, they question the state’s right to rule at all.

What Iran sees today is not simply environmental stress but irreversible simultaneous failures across water, land, air and energy. These are not shocks that fade with rainfall or budget injections. They permanently shrink the state’s capacity to deliver security and economic opportunity.

Coercion can disperse crowds but it cannot reverse subsidence, restore collapsed aquifers or neutralise airborne toxins. A state cannot govern indefinitely where the ecological foundations of life, agriculture and public health are failing all at once.

Nima Shokri is affiliated with Hamburg University of Technology.

– ref. Iran’s biggest centres of protest are also experiencing extreme pollution and water shortages – https://theconversation.com/irans-biggest-centres-of-protest-are-also-experiencing-extreme-pollution-and-water-shortages-274217

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Seamus Higgins, Associate Professor Food Process Engineering, Chemical & Environmental Engineering, University of Nottingham

A few thousand years ago, sugar was unknown in the western world. Sugarcane, a tall grass first domesticated in New Guinea around 6000BC, was initially chewed for its sweet juice rather than crystallised. By around 500BC, methods to boil sugarcane juice into crystals was first developed in India.

One of the earliest references to sugar we have dates to 510BC, when Emperor Darius I of what was then Persia invaded India. There he found “the reed which gives honey without bees”.

Knowledge of sugar-making spread west to Persia, then across the Islamic world after the 7th century AD. Sugar reached medieval Europe only via trade routes. It was extremely expensive and used more like a spice. Indeed, in the 11th century Crusaders returning home talked of how pleasant this “new spice” was.

It was the supply potential of this “new spice” in the early 16th century that encouraged Portuguese entrepreneurs to export enslaved people to newly discovered Brazil. There, they rapidly started growing highly profitable sugar cane crops. By the 1680s, the Dutch, English and French all had their own sugar plantations with enslaved colonies in the Caribbean.

In the 18th century, the increasing popularity of tea and coffee led to the widespread adoption of sugar as a sweetener. In 1874, prime-minister William Gladstone abolished a 34% tax on sugar to ease the costs of basic food for workers. Cheap jam (one-third fruit pulp to two-thirds sugar) began to appear on the table of every working-class household. The growing demand for sugar in Britain and Europe encouraged further growth and profit, earning the name “white gold”.

Britain’s per capita sugar consumption skyrocketed from four pounds in 1704 to 90 pounds by 1901. While slavery was eventually abolished, the supply of cheap labour was sustained by new flows of indentured workers from India, Africa and China.

Britain’s naval blockade of Napoleonic France at the start of the 19th century prodded the French to seek an alternative to Caribbean sugar supplies. It gave birth to the European sugar beet industry.

Sugar beet is a biennial root crop grown for its high sucrose content, which is extracted to produce table sugar. The 20th century has seen this traditionally heavily subsidised and tariff-protected industry grow to produce approximately 50% of Europe’s sugar. This includes the UK’s consumption, which is now around 2 million tons of beet (60%) and cane sugar (40%) annually.

Delights and dangers

In 1886, Atlanta’s prohibition laws forced the businessman and chemist John Pemberton to reformulate his popular drink, Pemberton’s Tonic French Wine Coca. He replaced the alcohol with a 15% sugar syrup and added citric acid. His bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, chose a new name for the drink after its main ingredients – cocaine leaves and kola nuts – and created the Coca-Cola trademark in the flowing script we know today.

In 1879, Swiss chocolatier Daniel Peter invented the world’s first commercial milk chocolate using sweetened condensed milk developed by his neighbour, Henri Nestlé. Milk chocolate, which contains about 50-52 grams of sugar per 100 grams, has now become a global favourite for its sweet taste and creamy texture.

Chocolate and cola have since solidified their status as global staples in the realm of fizzy drinks and sweet treats and have become essential indulgences for people worldwide.

In 1961, an American epidemiologist Ancel Keys appeared on the cover of Time magazine for his “diet-heart hypothesis”. Through his “seven countries” study, he found an association between saturated fat intake, blood cholesterol and heart disease. Keys remarked: “People should know the facts. Then, if they want to eat themselves to death, let them.”

With competing scientific advice John Yudkin, founder of the nutrition department at Queen’s College, published an article in the Lancet. He argued that international comparisons do not support the claim that total or animal fat is the main cause of coronary thrombosis, highlighting that sugar intake has a stronger correlation with heart disease.

He published his book, Pure, White and Deadly, in 1972. It highlighted the evidence linking sugar consumption to increased coronary thrombosis and its involvement in dental caries, obesity, diabetes and liver disease. He ominously noted: “If only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed about any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned.”

The British Sugar Bureau dismissed Yudkin’s claims about sugar as “emotional assertions”, and the World Sugar Research Organisation called his book “science fiction”. In the 1960s and 1970s, the sugar industry promoted sugar as an appetite suppressant and funded research that downplayed the risks of sucrose, while emphasising dietary fat as the primary driver of coronary heart disease.

Scientific debate over the relative health effects of sugar and fat continued for decades. In the meantime, governments began publishing dietary guidelines advising people to eat less saturated fats and high-cholesterol foods. An unavoidable consequence of this was that people began eating more carbohydrates and sugar instead.

Official dietary guidelines did not begin to clearly acknowledge the health risks of excessive sugar consumption until much later, as evidence accumulated toward the end of the 20th century.

In my new book, Food and Us: the Incredible Story of How Food Shapes Humanity I explore the fact that sugar is a relatively new addition to our diet. In just a short period of 300 years, or 0.0001% of our food evolution, sugar has become ubiquitous in our food supply. It has even evolved its own terms of endearment and affection for people, such as sugar, honey and sweetheart.

However, the global addiction to sugar poses significant and interconnected challenges for public health, the economy, society and the environment. The pervasive nature of sugar in processed foods, combined with its effects on the brain’s reward system, creates a cycle of dependency that is driving a worldwide crisis of diet-related diseases and straining health systems.

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This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Seamus Higgins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. A brief history of sugar – https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-sugar-266189

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Pankhuri Agarwal, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, University of Bath; King’s College London

A new trade agreement between India and the UK is due to come into force this year.
The deal is expected to completely remove tariffs from nearly 99% of Indian goods, including clothing and footwear, that are headed for the UK.

In both countries, this has been widely celebrated as a win for economic growth and competitiveness. And for Indian garment workers in particular, the trade agreement carries real promise.

This is because in recent years, clothing exports from India have declined sharply as well-known fashion brands moved production to places like Morocco and Turkey, which were cheaper.

India’s internal migrant workers (those who move from one region of the country to another looking for work) have been hit hardest, often waiting outside factories for days for the chance of a single shift of insecure work.

Against this backdrop, more opportunities for steadier employment and a more competitive sector under the new trade agreement looks like a positive outcome. But free trade agreements are not merely economic instruments – they shape labour markets and working conditions along global supply chains.

So, the critical question about this trade deal is not whether it will generate employment in India – it almost certainly will – but what kind of employment it will create.

Few sectors illustrate this tension more clearly than the manufacture of clothing. As one of India’s biggest exports, its garments sector is expected to be one of the primary beneficiaries of the trade deal.

But it is also among the country’s most labour-intensive and exploitative industries. From denim mills in Karnataka to knitwear and spinning hubs in Tamil Nadu, millions of Indian workers receive low wages and limited job security.

Research also shows that gender and caste-based exploitation is widespread.

So, if the trade deal goes ahead without addressing these issues, it risks perpetuating a familiar cycle where we see more orders and more jobs, but the same patterns of unfair wages, insecurity and – in some cases – forced labour.

Marginalised

For women workers, who form the backbone of garment production in India, these vulnerabilities are even sharper.

Gender-based violence, harassment and unsafe working conditions have been documented repeatedly across India’s export-oriented factories. Regimes which bound young women to factories under the promise of future benefits that often never materialised show how caste- and gender-based discrimination have long been embedded within the sector.

Even in factories that formally comply with labour laws, wages that meet basic living costs remain rare. Many workers earn wages which are not enough to pay for housing, food, healthcare and education, pushing families into debt as suppliers absorb price pressures imposed by global brands.

On the plus side, the India-UK agreement does not entirely sidestep these issues. There is a chapter which outlines commitments to the elimination of forced labour and discrimination.

But these provisions are mostly framed as guidance rather than enforceable obligation. They rely on cooperation and voluntary commitments, instead of binding standards.

While this approach is common in trade agreements, it limits this deal’s capacity to drive meaningful change. But perhaps even more striking is what has been left out.

Despite the role India’s social stratification system, known as caste, plays in shaping labour markets in India, it is entirely absent from the text of the agreement.

Yet caste determines who enters garment work and who performs the most hazardous and lowest-paid tasks. A significant proportion of India’s garment workforce comes from marginalised caste communities with limited bargaining power and few alternatives.

By addressing labour standards without acknowledging caste, the free trade agreement falls short. It could have required the monitoring of issues concerning caste and gender, and demanded grievance mechanisms and transparency measures that account for social hierarchies.

Instead, a familiar gap remains between commitments to “decent work” on paper and the reality which exists on factory floors.

Missed opportunity

If the India-UK deal is to be more than a tariff-cutting exercise, protections around caste and gender must be central to its implementation.

The deal is rightly being celebrated in both countries as an economic milestone. For the UK, it promises more resilient supply chains and cheaper imports. For India, it offers renewed export growth and the prospect of some more stable employment.

But the agreement’s long-term legitimacy will rest on whether it also delivers social justice.

India can use the deal to strengthen labour protections and ensure growth does not come at the cost of dignity and safety. The UK, as a major consumer market, can use its leverage to insist on enforceable standards for fair wages and decent work.

For trade deals do not simply move goods across borders – they shape the conditions under which those goods are produced.

Pankhuri Agarwal receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust as an Early Career Research Fellow.

– ref. The India-UK trade deal is a prime opportunity to protect to some of the world’s most vulnerable workers – https://theconversation.com/the-india-uk-trade-deal-is-a-prime-opportunity-to-protect-to-some-of-the-worlds-most-vulnerable-workers-274055

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Domenico Vicinanza, Associate Professor of Intelligent Systems and Data Science, Anglia Ruskin University

For half a century, computing advanced in a reassuring, predictable way. Transistors – devices used to switch electrical signals on a computer chip – became smaller. Consequently, computer chips became faster, and society quietly assimilated the gains almost without noticing.

These faster chips enable greater computing power by allowing devices to perform tasks more efficiently. As a result, we saw scientific simulations improving, weather forecasts becoming more accurate, graphics more realistic, and later, machine learning systems being developed and flourishing. It looked as if computing power itself obeyed a natural law.

This phenomenon became known as Moore’s Law, after the businessman and scientist Gordon Moore. Moore’s Law summarised the empirical observation that the number of transistors on a chip approximately doubled every couple of years. This also allows the size of devices to shrink, so it drives miniaturisation.

That sense of certainty and predictability has now gone, and not because innovation has stopped, but because the physical assumptions that once underpinned it no longer hold.

So what replaces the old model of automatic speed increases? The answer is not a single breakthrough, but several overlapping strategies.

One involves new materials and transistor designs. Engineers are refining how transistors are built to reduce wasted energy and unwanted electrical leakage. These changes deliver smaller, more incremental improvements than in the past, but they help keep power use under control.

Another approach is changing how chips are physically organised. Rather than placing all components on a single flat surface, modern chips increasingly stack parts on top of each other or arrange them more closely. This reduces the distance that data has to travel, saving both time and energy.

Perhaps the most important shift is specialisation. Instead of one general-purpose processor trying to do everything, modern systems combine different kinds of processors. Traditional processing units or CPUs handle control and decision-making. Graphics processors, are powerful processing units that were originally designed to handle the demands of graphics for computer games and other tasks. AI accelerators (specialised hardware that speeds up AI tasks) focus on large numbers of simple calculations carried out in parallel. Performance now depends on how well these components work together, rather than on how fast any one of them is.

Alongside these developments, researchers are exploring more experimental technologies, including quantum processors (which harness the power of quantum science) and photonic processors, which use light instead of electricity.

These are not general-purpose computers, and they are unlikely to replace conventional machines. Their potential lies in very specific areas, such as certain optimisation or simulation problems where classical computers can struggle to explore large numbers of possible solutions efficiently. In practice, these technologies are best understood as specialised co-processors, used selectively and in combination with traditional systems.

For most everyday computing tasks, improvements in conventional processors, memory systems and software design will continue to matter far more than these experimental approaches.

For users, life after Moore’s Law does not mean that computers stop improving. It means that improvements arrive in more uneven and task-specific ways. Some applications, such as AI-powered tools, diagnostics, navigation, complex modelling, may see noticeable gains, while general-purpose performance increases more slowly.

New technologies

At the Supercomputing SC25 conference in St Louis, hybrid systems that mix CPUs (processors) and GPUs (graphics processing units) with emerging technologies such as quantum or photonic processors were increasingly presented and discussed as practical extensions of classical computing. For most everyday tasks, improvements in classical processors, memories and software will continue to deliver the biggest gains.

But there is growing interest in using quantum and photonic devices as co-
processors, not replacements. Their appeal lies in tackling specific classes of
problems, such as complex optimisation or routing tasks, where finding low-energy
or near-optimal solutions can be exponentially expensive for classical machines
alone.

In this supporting role, they offer a credible way to combine the reliability of
classical computing with new computational techniques that expand what these
systems can do.

Life after Moore’s Law is not a story of decline, but one that requires constant
transformation and evolution. Computing progress now depends on architectural
specialisation, careful energy management, and software that is deeply aware of
hardware constraints. The danger lies in confusing complexity with inevitability, or marketing narratives with solved problems.

The post-Moore era forces a more honest relationship with computation where performance is not anymore something we inherit automatically from smaller transistors, but it is something we must design, justify, and pay for, in energy, in complexity, and in trade-offs.

Domenico Vicinanza does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Moore’s law: the famous rule of computing has reached the end of the road, so what comes next? – https://theconversation.com/moores-law-the-famous-rule-of-computing-has-reached-the-end-of-the-road-so-what-comes-next-273052

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Justin Roberts, Professor of Nutritional Physiology, Anglia Ruskin University

Creatine is one of the most popular sports supplements out there. It’s shown to help build muscle and improve strength, boost speed and power in athletes and benefit sports performance all round.

Research also suggests this superstar nutrient may have other health benefits, including for brain function, memory, bone health and even mood.

While creatine has been a mainstay supplement for gym enthusiasts, most of the research on this supplement’s benefits has been conducted on men. With recent increased advertising specifically promoting creatine for women, there is growing interest in whether this nutrient can also be equally beneficial for them.

It’s already clear from the research that creatine could benefit women by reducing fatigue during exercise. It may also be particularly beneficial for maintaining muscle as women get older.

Creatine is a natural compound produced in the body from several amino acids (the building blocks from protein). We can also get it from protein-rich foods, such as meat and seafood.

Creatine plays a role in short-term energy, particularly during intense exercise, helping us to recover quicker between exercises. This makes it possible to do more work each time we train, leading to around 20% greater performance gains when regularly taking the supplement.

We naturally use around 2g-4g of creatine per day. But as our bodies don’t store much creatine, this is why we need to consume it in our diet or get it from supplements. Think of it like a short-term energy store that needs topping up.

Around 1kg of raw beef or seafood would supply around 3g-5g of creatine. However, cooking can reduce creatine content. This makes it challenging to consistently get enough from the diet alone, which is where supplements can be useful.

Research also shows that vegans, vegetarians and women tend to have diets lower in creatine – meaning lower overall body stores. However, women do appear to store a bit more creatine in their muscles than men, suggesting they may respond to it slower or differently than men.

The most studied form of creatine is creatine monohydrate. This can be taken as a powder, capsule or gummy. If women consume around 3g-5g of creatine a day as a supplement, it will help gradually increase muscle creatine stores over a period of two to four weeks.

But if you’re looking to boost muscle stores faster, research shows taking around 20g of creatine a day for seven days (before dropping down to 3g-5g daily) can safely boost stores.

Creatine benefits for women

There are many factors which influence a women’s health over their lifetime. This includes hormonal changes, the gradual loss of muscle that comes with ageing, loss of bone density and slower metabolism post-menopause – as well as fluctuating energy levels and poor concentration or focus.

Resistance exercise may be beneficial in mitigating some of these changes, particularly in supporting muscle mass and function, bone health and energy levels.

This is where creatine comes in. Doing resistance training for several weeks while taking around 3g-5g of additional creatine per day can enable you to maintain the quality and consistency of your training. This combination can be particularly beneficial for strength in mid to later life.

Women who take creatine consistently are shown to have improved muscle function, which ultimately can impact quality of life. There’s also some evidence that taking it alongside resistance training may support bone health in postmenopausal women – although not all studies agree on this.

It’s worth noting as well that creatine does not appear to lead to weight gain or cause a bulky, muscular appearance, which are often concerns for women thinking about taking the supplement.

More recently, research has been exploring whether creatine can affect brain health, cognitive function and possibly even mood in older women. Evidence also shows that in younger women, it can improve mood and cognitive function after a bad nights’ sleep.

There’s emerging evidence as well that taking 5g of creatine daily can help younger women sleep longer (particularly on days they’ve done a workout). The same dose may also improve sleep quality in perimenopausal women – possibly by supporting the energy required by the brain.

Another study also reported greater reductions in depressive symptoms in women taking 5g of creatine daily alongside antidepressants, compared to those just taking antidepressants.

Given many women report experiencing symptoms such as “brain fog”, poor concentration, stress, low energy and poor sleep during their menstrual cycle and throughout the menopause, this could make creatine a low-cost solution for many of these symptoms. However, a higher dose of creatine may be needed daily (around 5g-10g) to increase the brain’s creatine stores.

Creatine is by no means a cure-all supplement, and clearly more research on women is needed. But the research so far shows that even just a small amount of creatine daily – when paired with a healthy lifestyle and resistance training – holds promise in supporting many aspects of women’s health.

Professor Justin Roberts is employed by Anglia Ruskin University and Danone Research & Innovation, and has previously received external research funding unrelated to this article.

– ref. Creatine for women: should you add this supplement into your diet? – https://theconversation.com/creatine-for-women-should-you-add-this-supplement-into-your-diet-272773

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Alex Nurse, Reader in Urban Planning, University of Liverpool

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has been blocked from standing for parliament – a step that would have been essential to mount a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer.

Andrew Gwynne, who has been suspended for some time, has stepped down as MP for Gorton and Denton, citing ill health. A byelection will now be held in the seat, which is in the greater Manchester area – Burnham’s home turf. But the party’s National Executive Committee has voted eight to one to prevent Burnham from standing in the byelection, citing the expense of running a mayoral election to replace him as the main reason.

However, their ruling has been taken as a signal that Starmer is too worried about the threat Burnham would pose from the backbenches to allow him to return to Westminster.

Starmer is right to be worried. Burnham has been following a long history by hovering around in the background as a party leader struggles.

Margaret Thatcher spent the second half of her premiership heading off the threat from Michael Heseltine. He didn’t replace her but she was toppled and John Major assumed power as a consequence of those tussles.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s rivalry was infamous and at times all-consuming. Both David Cameron and Theresa May had to deal with Boris Johnson’s ambition to occupy their job. And we know how that ended.

In some ways, Burnham is trudging a similar path to Johnson: a former MP who left parliament to take up office as the mayor of a large city, and who enjoys a national profile that perhaps exceeds that of his office. However, the similarities end there.

Burnham served in Blair’s government, before holding multiple roles within Brown’s cabinet, including as health secretary. Burnham also tested his leadership credentials on the Labour membership on two occasions – losing to Ed Miliband in 2010 and Jeremy Corbyn in 2015.

Burnham has often spoken of his disdain for the Westminster model and has done very well for himself out of being a mayor rather than an MP. It’s true that he was taking what many saw as a convenient off ramp out of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet when he initially ran for the position, but he won the 2017 election with 63% of the vote. He increased his majority upon re-election in 2021 and has become the figurehead of the English mayors.

His most impressive credentials lie in his approach to transport. He has taken the lead on bringing buses back into public ownership – a move that has been popular among people frustrated by spiralling fare prices. His was the first city outside London to appoint a walking and cycling commissioner – something that was then copied by every other mayor. He has ultimately formulated what has become known as “the Bee network” – a fully integrated system of tram and bus lines and cycle routes.

Of course, not all of Burnham’s actions have seen successes. For example, the ten-year plan for Greater Manchester, which is overseen by his office, has become increasingly fractured as local authorities break away from it – particularly over concerns that its housing targets aren’t achievable.

However, it was during the COVID-19 pandemic that he really burnished his credentials as the so-called “King in the North” – a title that has endured in popularity longer than the TV show from which it was derived. Amid confusing advice over lockdowns and inconsistent support from national government, Burnham took to giving live press conferences on the steps of Manchester town hall railing against Westminster.

He eventually won some concessions from the Johnson government over lockdown restrictions in his region. This, perhaps for the first time, really showcased the value of a talismanic mayor who could argue for their city, and certainly reaffirmed Burnham’s position as a national player.

A king on the march?

Given his two previous tilts at the role, Burnham’s leadership ambitions have rarely been in doubt. Indeed they have always bubbled beneath the surface. Although he has little choice but to lick his wounds for now, Burnham’s status as a potential replacement for Starmer remains undiminished.

There will also, undoubtedly, be others in the Labour party who have their own leadership ambitions, and who will have mixed emotions that the main stalking horse liable to topple Starmer and instigate a leadership race has been stabled.

Perhaps in a case of life imitating art, we should remember that in Game of Thrones the King in the North is fatally undone by poor tactical decisions. The most successful example of returning to parliament and obtaining power remains Johnson.

Even so, this took nearly four years and a party that largely wanted him back. With his path to Westminster currently blocked, that timeline might leave Burnham questioning his long-term strategy.

Alex Nurse does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Andy Burnham: what now for the King in the North? – https://theconversation.com/andy-burnham-what-now-for-the-king-in-the-north-266455

Source: The Conversation – UK – By George Lewis, Professor of American History, University of Leicester

The first year of Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by increasing authoritarianism at the heart of the US federal government. He has openly defied court orders, worked beyond the established remit of executive power and is making no secret of his strongman ambitions. History tells us that such an authoritarian presence is not new and offers a blueprint for how it might be overcome.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, a congressional committee called the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac) operated with near impunity. Granted extraordinary powers to investigate subversion and subversive propaganda, Huac sidelined political opponents, ruined careers and crushed organisations.

In popular memory, Huac remains inexorably tied to the “red scare” politics of the 1950s when cold war tensions led to intense anti-communist paranoia in the US. But in reality, it operated across five decades and its demise only came with the careful plotting of a concerted and organised campaign.

Huac derived much of its power from the vagueness of its mandate, with no objective definition of un-Americanism ever being universally agreed. Earl Warren, the chief justice of the US supreme court at the time, even openly questioned in 1957 whether un-Americanism could be defined and, thus, whether it ought to be investigated.

But the committee was not cowed by that lack of definition. For decades, Huac sought to be seen as the sole arbiter of the meaning of un-Americanism. That way, the committee could target its own enemies at will under the guise of investigating un-Americanism for the public good.

Curbing Huac’s authoritarianism was a delicate business. It had extraordinary powers, ill-defined parameters and vituperative members. The committee had also been a fixture of American life for so long that its existence seemed inevitable. The answer to overcoming its authoritarianism came in two separate stages.

Fighting against authoritarianism

First was the building of a broad coalition. Huac had many opponents both in politics and culture, the issue was uniting them behind a single cause.

Individuals, groups and protest movements that had been operating separately had to be encouraged to put their specific concerns aside and coalesce instead around an overall concern for democratic values. It was here that civil liberties protesters first forged an alliance with their civil rights counterparts at the turn of the 1960s.

Civil liberties organisations were primarily concerned with the free speech provision of the US constitution’s first amendment. Civil rights groups, on the other hand, were most concerned with the 14th and 15th amendments’ equal rights provisions. Huac’s assault on American principles was a reminder that these were amendments to the same document and it was the constitution as a whole that needed protection.

Momentum was key. A Huac memo from around that time recorded American civil rights leader John Lewis stating that “civil rights and liberties are the same”. Lewis worked across generational and geographical divides to unite sit-in students at segregated public spaces in the southern states with students who stormed Huac hearings in the west.

Gender divides also allowed women’s activists to humiliate the masculine conservatism of Huac committeemen. Poems described the committee shivering in its own manure, vinyl records captured anti-Huac protests and singers satirised its proceedings. The supreme court confronted Huac’s overreach, which activists and public intellectuals translated into popular broadsides.

However, this activism alone was insufficient. The second stage in bringing Huac’s authoritarianism to heel saw the carefully planned intervention of national mainstream politicians. Here, Congressman Jimmy Roosevelt provided bold but also tactically astute leadership. He delivered a speech from the floor of the US Capitol in 1960 that changed the movement from one designed to protest Huac’s authoritarianism to one demanding the committee’s outright abolition.

Roosevelt used the committee’s own actions against it. As he recognised, Huac’s meticulous record keeping also detailed its own failings. It spent public money on propaganda and its members, including staff director Richard Arens, were found to have been in the pay of scientific racists even as they investigated the civil rights movement. They also used designated wartime powers in peacetime.

Roosevelt stepped back, though, and concentrated on questions of principle at the heart of American democracy and the nation’s founding ideals. In his speech, Roosevelt told the House that Huac was “at war with our profoundest principles”. The un-American committee had used its powers in un-American ways.

By appealing to matters of principle, Roosevelt was also able to appeal to principled members of the new congressional intake following elections that year which saw Democrat John F. Kennedy enter the White House.

Liberal House members had long given Huac a wide berth on account of its reputation. But riding a wave of liberalism, and encouraged by Roosevelt’s political leadership, some of that new intake now actively sought appointment to Huac so they could oppose its authoritarianism head on.

For the first time, the committee shifted from trying to frame civil rights activists as un-American to investigating the un-Americanism of the Ku Klux Klan. Its reformed membership also began opposing the scale of the congressional appropriations that had underwritten its investigations.

Its remaining conservative members were drawn into making increasingly desperate claims to maintain their national profile, but succeeded only in drawing the committee towards ridicule and irrelevance. Huac limped towards the end of the decade and was finally dissolved in 1975.

History tells those in Washington today that democratic pressures can be brought to bear on an authoritarian presence, however entrenched it may appear. Building a broad coalition is vital, as is labelling authoritarian behaviour appropriately. Denying any one individual ownership of what constitutes un-Americanism is equally important.

The record also shows that disparate groups can apply pressure most effectively when they are bound to a single issue. Here, as in the campaign against Huac, that issue is the principle of American democracy.

Roosevelt left three lessons for US citizens. First, that the momentum generated by a growing popular coalition can be harnessed in national politics. Second, that bold and principled leadership brings reward. And third, that elections can be the harbinger of significant and substantive change.

George Lewis has received funding from the British Academy for his research into un-Americanism.

– ref. Americans have fought back against authoritarianism at home before – https://theconversation.com/americans-have-fought-back-against-authoritarianism-at-home-before-273638